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The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père, narrated by John Lee, Blackstone Audiobooks, 2008

So let's say you are stuck without electricity and you discover that it really is not possible to knit by battery lantern light. Well, thank goodness you charged up your mp3 player beforehand and have this classic tale of intrigue and revenge to listen to.

I had NO idea that this audiobook was read by John Lee but at the first sound of his voice intoning his name I did a mental happy dance. This was going to be good, I thought.

I was correct.

Earlier this year, I thoroughly enjoyed Lee's reading of Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. His voicing and characterization are always on the mark and very engaging. For this story he has created a wide range of accents and voices for characters who seemed to appear effortlessly in my imagination. His French accent is perfection.

I confess, I had never read this classic before and when I shared my delight in this recording with the entlings, they responded, "we know that story, we saw it on Wishbone."

Ah Wishbone, I have much to thank that little Jack Russell Terrier for. That really was a terrific program.

The Count of Monte Cristo is about justice, reward, revenge, retribution and forgiveness.

Just promoted to ship's captain and on the eve of his marriage, Edmond Dantes finds himself overtaken by events that have nothing to do with him. The political intrigues of others result in his unjust imprisonment in the Chateau d'If for fourteen years. During that time, he makes friends with the Abbé Faria who gives him directions to a fabulous treasure, if Edmond can have if he ever escapes. Edmond does escape, just not in the manner Wishbone did.

When the wealthy and pale-skinned Count of Monte Cristo appears on the Paris social scene, disasters begin to befall the villains who caused Edmond Dantes's misery.

I found it hard to believe this story was written over 150 years ago. Drugs, sex, stock market manipulation, specious banking schemes, and political machinations--as the old saying goes, "Ripped from today's headlines..." This is a totally enthralling story and a perfect audiobook listen.

As children, we played freely with sound and expression. But somewhere along the way we began editing what came naturally to us. We heard others tell their stories differently; we noticed the praise they got. Or we watched stories played out on television and concluded that they were more exciting than what we had made up on our own. Gradually, subtly, we began to hold things in, instead of turning them loose into the world. And our precious energy went the way of the kingdoms, and the angels. The trolls stayed on; they just changed form -- appearing as anger, sadness, guilt, frustration, fear. These trolls went into our bodies to hide; and all the criticisms we heard and believed about ourselves marched in right behind them.

We want to become as free to create as we were in childhood. We know that what we have to tell is unique, unike what anyone else would reveal. To do this, we must be willing to give voice to the dusty collection of disappointments and anxieties that crowd our inner territory.

So much of creativity is an attempt to retranslate the most closely guarded stories of our lives. The insistent archaeologist within us demands that we detect our own tension, stress, and distress and trace them back to their origins. As Marion Woodman observes, "Powerful energies are locked in our bodies." If we do not discharge the pressures stored in our muscles and tissues, in our backs, our faces, throats, and bellies, in our arms and legs, then the energy gets stuck. When we don't release these tensions, we often end up in a breathless effort to talk them out or write them out, when it would have been easier to stretch, sigh, shout, pound, punch, or dance them out in the beginning.

                      ~ John Lee, Writing from the Body (St. Martin's Press, 1994) 



   

When I started to write Hungry and Alicia let me know she wanted to be in the novel, I didn’t want to give her that name as it’s so close to mine. She insisted that was her name, though, so I thought, “Okay.” As I wrote, I pronounced the name the English way, A-lee-sha. I have a new identity now at St. Margaret’s. You guessed it. I am now A- lee-see-a because the “th” sound is difficult for many native Spanish speakers to say. Actually, I’m “Miss Alicia.” Or I’m “Miss Ali,” because that seems to be the other nickname that I’ve been given.

There are about a hundred teachers at the school. I’ve put about a dozen or so names with faces so far. There are three teachers from England (I think, I’ve got a solid grounding on who two of them are), and the rest are from Chile. Though the school is a “British school,” all meetings are conducted in Spanish except for the ones conducted in the English department. I’m sometimes getting the “gist” of things, but it is only a rough approximation. We had an in-service about bullying today, and because the main ideas were projected with an LCD player I was at least able to follow along with my electronic dictionary. What I’m excited about is that at times I’m finally catching whole phrases (not often, but at least it’s a beginning) and I’m getting the object pronouns in the right places. Sort of.

I’m also learning a lot of new jargon for the British structure. Forms are used instead of grades, or the word is used interchangeably. Once the girls pass eighth grade, they have IB levels. I’m teaching 3rd level A2, the highest group of what would be juniors in high school for us. Infant school is kindergarten. The juniors are grades one through four. The middles are grades five through eight.

Some things seem to be universal. As I mentioned, the talk today was about bullying, which the teachers perceive as a problem. The girls seem to have the same issues as the kids did at the two schools I’ve taught at in California: neglect, emotional issues, tardiness, not being respectful. Avril, the wonderful headmistress of the school, says she insists the girls stand up when a teacher enters the classroom—something I might get used to J.

I’ll teach the English IB curriculum. The idea is to connect social and cultural issues to a text that is explored slowly and in depth. The girls will do most of the research. There will be a lot of writing, creative work, debates, etc. I will only grade a few papers per report card period! I’m sure I’ll look most of them over though and ask for revisions when it’s appropriate. I’ve decided to start with The Crucible. I want them to begin by researching how women in Europe were persecuted as witches. If I remember my history correctly at this point, there were a few men who were executed in Salem as well, but I want to discuss how the values and beliefs influenced what happened. I hope another group will be interested in exploring what happened during the McCarthy era. I wish I could show Good Night and Good Luck, but finding a copy seems a bit overwhelming at this point. Then we’ll launch into the play. I read the introduction to Act 1 last night and wondered when I read the play. I assume college. The vocabulary is intensive, but these girls supposedly like to be challenged.

The other books we’ll read are The Handmaid’s Tale, To Kill a Mockingbird and I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings. With the last of these, I hope to have the girls explore issues about the Mapuche, the indigenous people of Chile who mainly live in the southern part of the country. There are other groups, but the Mapuche fought back against the Incas (their empire stopped at the Mapuche borders), the Spanish, and are still fighting against assimilation and to take back control of land they believe still belongs to them.

The rest of my time I’ll spend doing “literacy” with the juniors. I wish, wish, wish that I brought more teaching material with me. I decided to go for survival stuff like a few more clothes, and thought I’d bring the extra things back with me next time I go to the U.S., as I wasn’t sure what my school day was going to consist of. Tomorrow I’ll meet with the head teacher of junior school and know more specifically what they would like from me. Their reading program in English seem to consist of copies of books a la the Wright Group and Rigby back in the whole language days. I’m told all most all of the girls don’t have problems decoding. I think doing Lindamood LIPS (without mouth pictures?) to help pronunciation will happen. I keep thinking of the Houghton Mifflin frontloading materials I copied over that have sentence frames for different levels of English language learners . . . they’ll be here in time.

I need to find out if there are more books. I’d love to do some novel reading and exploration with the third and fourth graders. I don’t think they’re there. The school is very beautiful and new and not paid for all the way, and from what I’m picking up, there isn’t money to buy this sort of thing.

One of the biggest challenges for me is that I’m used to coming into work at least a half hour early. More often, though, I work until four, four thirty, and sometimes later, getting things prepped. I’ll be taking the bus with the students and other teachers, which is fabulous, but the bus will arrive just in time for school to begin. There are few computers, so if I want to do research I’m not sure how this will work, as I don’t have Internet at home right now. The Internet place around the block has its challenges, as there’s the Spanish keyboard. I don’t know how to do the @ sign for writing in email addresses. Often there is fairly slow download time, and then the web pages disappear and I have to get back on. The teachers have left this week right at two o’clock, the end of the workday until students arrive next Tuesday.

Another change: the school provides a lunch! Salad bar, main course, dessert . . . but 2:00 is considered lunch hour. I probably will be able to eat with the juniors (at noon . . . closer to our 11:10 lunch at Minnie Cannon) or the middles (1:00 ish) four days a week. BUT Thursdays, I don’t get it until two! There has been a snack period this week about 10:15 where the NesCafe, tea, and some cookies come out. I’ve brought cereal bars and fruit to keep me going, but I’m starving when I get home.

I think I may have made a faux pas on my first day. There were some supplies being passed out to the junior teachers, and I asked if I could have some. I was told yes, so I picked up a box of pencils. It turned out I could only have one. I have one dry erase pen, and a red, blue, and green marker, and some tape, correcting fluid. I really need to find chart paper somewhere as I use a lot of it. At Minnie Cannon, I taught so many different levels, I didn’t have board space, so I often prepared what I needed the day before (or a few days before if I was lucky) and didn’t have to spend time writing stuff on my board or the ones in the classrooms I worked in.

Now for the wonderful part! Chileans (woman to woman, often woman to man and visa versa) greet and say goodbye with a cheek-to-cheek “kiss.” You touch cheeks and make a kissing sound. It’s lovely. I hope when my Puritan work ethic kicks in and I’m feeling stressed for not having the space I usually need to think about my day and look over my lessons, I’ll remember that starting one’s day like this is probably much healthier. My teaching will get done anyway.

On the second day of work, we got on these great cushy buses and toured Valparaiso, a town that Chileanos think of as their San Francisco (I had compared Concon to Santa Barbara before I knew better. It’s more like Sausalito. The weather has been cool, foggy and misty like summer around the SF bay.) Valpo is hilly like San Francisco and has a historical, yet Bohemian air. If you read Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende, the book started here. We went to an “ascensor,” first walking through a very long tunnel and then riding up an elevator to an observatory platform where we could see the whole city and far out into the ocean. The set up also allows for the local people who live on the hill a way to get up and down with more ease.

We went to a monument to Bernardo O’Higgens, who is roughly equivalent to George Washington, and is a father, if not THE father, of Chile. He led the revolution against Spain. We then went to what might have been the home of the British Lord Cochran who helped in the fight. We walked through the oldest part of the town where many of the buildings are being torn down for infrastructure and lack of resources to preserve them. Natural gas is coming to Chile.

The next stop was at a monument for los heroes, the men who went down in a ship in a fight against Peru (1850ish? Can’t remember exactly.) Vente-uno de Mayo is a national holiday (and my birthday!) that honors their loss of life. Chile lost the battle, but won the war, by the way, thanks to the British.

Finally, we were treated to a lovely lunch at the restaurante Bernardo O’Higgens, starting with our choice of soft drinks or alcohol, either a pisco sour, the national drink, or a vai’in— which I probably am spelling wrong. I went with the vai’in, a vanilla flavored liquor. I had to. I never had a drink on teacher time before! All I can say is, “Yum.”
So, to sum things up, estoy nerviosa. But I always am at the beginning of a school year, and somehow I survive. At home, by the mid of October I felt I had my life back. April is the new October for me, and I hope I feel more settled and secure by then.