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"I conjure and command you, O Demons, all and so many as ye are, to accept this Book with good grace, so that whensoever we may read it, the same being approved and recognized as in proper form and valid, you shall be constrained to appear in comely human form when you are called, accordingly as the reader shall judge. In no circumstances shall you make any attempt upon the body, soul, or spirit of the reader, nor inflict any harm on those who may accompany him, either by mutterings, tempests, noise, scandals, nor yet by lesion or by hindrance in the execution of the commands of this Book. I conjure you to appear immediately when the conjuration is made, to execute without dallying all that is written and enumerated in its proper place in the said Book."
-- Conjuration from the Grimoire of Honorius
This is an awesome quote to start any book with. It can be found, appropriately enough, at the beginning of Raising Demons, by Shirley Jackson. Jackson is better known as the author of The Lottery and other stories and The Haunting of Hill House, which are about the only books of hers that are consistently in print these days. Raising Demons is firmly out of print, and I put off searching for it when I first fell in love with Jackson's work for the extremely stupid reason that I'd heard it was nonfiction. Given her interest in the supernatural, I figured it must be some arcane instruction book, or perhaps a history of demonology. The only magic I wanted was that of her voice as a writer of the strongest, most relentlessly absorbing fiction I'd ever read. So until a better-informed reader set me straight, I was self-denied the rare pleasure of laughing at Jackson riffing on her four children, the demons of the title.
Jackson's younger son was startled and then grimly amused as an adult to hear his mother compared to Erma Bombeck by members of a Midwest women's club who had read Demons and Jackson's other fictionalized family memoir, Life Among the Savages (originally subtitled An Uneasy Chronicle). Those ladies who lunched must have skipped everything else Jackson ever wrote, which could more aptly have been compared to Kafka, or better yet to Jane Austen if she'd smoked some really strong tea. They must also have skipped the above quote. That wouldn't have been too difficult. The book wasn't in print very long, and when it was revived in the posthumous anthology The Magic of Shirley Jackson (now also out of print), the conjuration had somehow dropped by the wayside. Which is even odder than its having been present in the first place, since the collection was edited by Jackson's husband, who once described her as "the only contemporary writer who is a practicing amateur witch."
That idea, that image of Shirley Jackson -- the witch-writer-lady with her cats and her Tarot deck -- originated while she was still young and newly successful, and has outlived her by several decades now. W. G. Rogers, an AP reporter, proclaimed famously and foolishly in 1949 that "Miss Jackson writes not with a pen but with a broomstick." (Later, the first mass-market edition of The Lottery specified that her broom was dipped "in adders' blood.") In the first full-length study of Jackson's work, Lenemaja Friedman sadly noted that "because people insist upon associating [Jackson] with witches and demons, her true literary worth becomes obscured."
Jackson herself made a few public comments about her interest in magic early in her career, lived to regret them, and closemouthedly continued to write work steeped in the supernatural. People will talk, as Sappho wisely noted, and Jackson decided to let them say what they wanted to -- they would anyway -- and let her writing speak for itself. Which doesn't make it easy for those interested in the matter to answer with both plausibility and certainty a reasonable and compelling question: just what was the true nature of Shirley Jackson's relationship with witchcraft?
Whatever she thought of it in her personal life, she kept a level head when it came to her writing. Her one assay at pure nonfiction (her family "memoirs" must be called fictionalized) was a book not about witchcraft itself, but about the people involved in hysterical accusations of it. Aimed at the younger set but fascinating reading for any age, The Witchcraft of Salem Village is underread, underrated, and brilliant. Jackson's biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, dismissed it as "definitely a lesser work... with an air of having been written on automatic pilot." Perhaps she was irked by the fact that Jackson could write so calmly and simply about the human side of witchcraft: the fear and fascination it engendered.
Or perhaps Oppenheimer didn't recognize that the "straightforward, unadorned" writing Jackson employs in this work was far more effective than any attempt at pathos or sensationalism. The bare fact that Dorcas Goode, who spent months in prison after being accused of witchcraft, was not quite five years old when the allegedly tormented cried out on her is quite horrifying enough not to need embellishment. So is the fact that her mother was accused on a whim, as an afterthought, and lost her life as a result of this dangerous gameplaying by adolescents. Shirley Jackson was a wise enough storyteller to simply present the facts and let the story tell itself.
She was also occasionally, irresistibly amused by the antics of the players, and writer enough to see the germ of a good story where someone else might see only anecdote. In the afterword to The Witchcraft, she mentions that "There are... many specimens of demonic handwriting. One of them, signed by the demon Asmodeus, is so badly misspelled that it is almost unreadable. This was explained by pointing out that it was not necessary for a demon to learn to spell. His job was to torment mankind." Funny enough, but Jackson took it one step funnier in a story called "The Smoking Room." A young college student working on a paper late one night is propositioned by the devil, "a charming young man." The student, apparently Jackson herself, sneers at the bare, boring contract for her soul he offers; types up a snappier, more legalistic one on the spot; and tricks him into signing his own soul over to her -- with an X, as he never learned to write. Just as things might have gotten ugly (it's not nice to fool the devil), the housemother storms into the room, demanding to know what a man is doing there, and the devil slinks defeated back to Hell. One of the few genuinely funny stories out there, and all thanks to a demonic factoid Jackson dredged up in the course of some decidedly unfunny research.
This detached ability to turn facts into a ripping good read supports her brother's opinion that Jackson's interest in witchcraft was, as he told Oppenheimer, "purely intellectual." "She studied it like you'd study history," he said. "I always thought it was a little tongue-in-cheek."
It was certainly serious enough -- intellectual enough -- to push her through a great deal of reading that would have been tough going for someone less fiercely committed to amassing information on the subject. I haven't been able to ascertain whether she read all of Joseph Glanvill's 1689 tome Saducismus Triumphatus: Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions or merely a great deal of it, but my own defeated efforts to plow straight through stand as exhausted testimony to the strength of her dedication.
This six-hundred page work, available only in a facsimile of the original seventeenth-century typeface in which the letter "s" looks like an "f", peppered with passages of untransliterated and untranslated Hebrew and Greek, and staggering under the weight of its own self-importance, would be suicide-inducing as a homework assignment, even given that half of it is testimony from witch trials and witnesses of ghosts. But Shirley Jackson clearly relished it. She read it for her own pleasure, and sprinkled her short story collection The Lottery with excerpts from it.
Opinions have differed on her use of quotations from Saducismus to open each section in The Lottery: both the wisdom of it and whether or not it had really been her idea in the first place. Friedman thinks not in the case of the latter. The passages were, she insisted, "an attempt by the publicity staff to make the book appear mysterious and, therefore, more salable." She mentions reviewers criticizing the inclusion of these strange little quotes as having "no real bearing on the stories," and seems to be of the same opinion herself.
Joan Wylie Hall corrects Friedman on both counts in a later book on Jackson's short fiction, noting that "the Shirley Jackson Papers contains a folder (Box 20) with two pages of material typed by Jackson from the Glanvill book, including the first of the four passages cited in The Lottery." She also points out that this very passage is omitted in later editions of the book, though she believes that the excerpts as they originally stood marked important divisions in the stories.
I find the excluded passage interesting for two reasons. First, it bears a striking similarity to Jackson's own writing -- not in tone but in content. The quote is from the testimony of an accused witch, describing the goings-on in which she's been involved:
"She saith, That after their Meetings, they all make very low Obeysances to the Devil, who appears in black Cloaths, and a little Band. He bids them Welcome at their coming, and brings Wine or Beer, Cakes, Meat, or the like. He sits at the higher end.... They Eat, Drink, Dance and have Musick. At their parting they use to say, Merry meet, merry part."
That's Jackson all over. Food, drink, and the company of witches. Homey and eerie all at once. Very like the first story in the Lottery collection, "The Intoxicated": drink and conversation at a party where the talk turns briefly extraordinary. Preceded by that passage, as it was intended to be, the piece rings a little differently.
The Saducismus passage is also of interest in that the alleged witch it concerns was one Elizabeth Style, widow, accused by Richard Hill on behalf of his daughter Elizabeth Hill, an adolescent girl supposedly tormented by the widow. These names will sound familiar to readers of "Elizabeth," the longest story in The Lottery and a piece that Jackson had once hoped to expand to a novel-length work.
The main character in "Elizabeth" is a familiar Jackson type: a once-ambitious woman who has not only settled for far less than she'd once dreamed of but is grateful for even so much; vaguely bitter, apt to look down on those around her; single, with little in the way of family and no close friends. This particular character is a sleazy literary agent who makes her money not by selling others' writing but by charging naïve would-be authors for worthless editing and rewriting. Jackson gave her the name Elizabeth Style.
Style works for Robert Shax, a man whose surname is also the name of one of Jackson's favorite demons (and one of her favorite cats). Jackson names the young floozy Shax hires as a new secretary Daphne Hill rather than sticking slavishly to the source material and crowding the story with too many Elizabeths. The name of the judge in the real Elizabeth Style's trial -- Robert Hunt -- is given to Style's old uncle visiting from out of town and hoping pathetically to see his dear niece.
The choice of names for the two women is significant, but it's not immediately obvious just how subtle that significance is. Hall takes names and roles at face value: "The physical torments to which Elizabeth Style subjects the teenage Elizabeth Hill... parallel Miss Style's sarcastic jibes at Daphne Hill, an awkward young secretary." There's more to it than that, though. Daphne Hill isn't a mere tender youth, helpless before a ruthless older woman. She's attractive to, and attracted to, Shax, who is Style's rather lifeless and embarrassed lover. And though Hall mentions Style tormenting Hill, Hill isn't exactly all sweetness and light to Style. What's more, Hill's presence at the tiny agency is a threat to Style, since Style's position there is entirely dependent on Shax's good will. A decade or so earlier, "there was no one around to tell Elizabeth Style... that if she got the job it wasn't worth getting." So now with Daphne Hill. But being the new girl coming in is still better than being the old one on the way out.
In the original trial, Hill was a thirteen-year-old girl who, for reasons we can only guess at this late date, leveled accusations at the older Elizabeth Style. By virtue of being female in the seventeenth century, neither of them had much power, but Hill had a little more clout than Style. She was young, and she had a man willing to go to bat for her. Style, a widow, was an easy target.
It's clear whom Jackson's sympathies lie with, especially for any reader of The Witchcraft of Salem Village. Jackson's portrayal of accusers and accused in Witchcraft is sensitive to all involved; but the bulk of her compassion is reserved not for the little girls who got caught up in the lying game, but for the accused, many of whom were executed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whether or not Jackson believed in real magic, she certainly understood who were the tormented and who the tormenters when it came to witches on trial.
It's a pity Jackson wasn't, for whatever reason, able to write the novel she had planned about Elizabeth Style. She did leave an outline behind, and so we can see that she would have expanded not only the length but also the witchy elements in the story. One day in Style's life was to be analogous to a witch trial. It isn't clear just how obvious Jackson would have made this in the book, but she's quite thorough in drawing the comparisons. Some are rather amusing, as in "Chapter 7: The torture begins," a section in which Style, a city girl originally from a small town, spends an evening with old friends, trying unsuccessfully to present herself as "a successful and happy business woman." Sounds like everyone's twenty-year reunion.
Jackson also includes a chapter about the "discovery of the witch's mark", having a friend of a friend noticing the "entwined initials" inside Style's ring. Presumably, these initials are those of Style and her employer, not merely a demon but the devil himself in this work, and married to someone else while stringing Style along. But the most striking chapter headings and summaries are the last two, which bear reprinting in full.
CHAPTER 14: CONFESSION AND SENTENCE: She admits total failure, and tells her friends she will go back and keep house for her father.
CHAPTER 15: DEATH IN PRISON: She knows it is for good.
The storyline itself isn't particularly original. From Moll Flanders to Sister Carrie and all between, female literary characters seem legally required to be miserable -- or worse, ruined in some way -- should they dare to leave home and try to make a life in the big bad city. Leave it to Shirley Jackson to see such a character as a thwarted witch. And leave it to her, too, to have more than a smidgen of sympathy for the witch forsaken by her devil.
It should be obvious by now that witchcraft held more than a passing interest for Jackson; what may not be is how permeated, how soaked her work is in witchery. Take, for example, her first two novels. They were typical early-career books, and Jackson saw them as such. "The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books," she once told her daughter, though she herself took not one but two books to get her childhood out of her system. Both The Road Through the Wall and Hangsaman read as books an adolescent would fantasize about publishing for the pleasure of having her parents die of embarrassment. Potshots are taken left and right at whitebread suburbia and inept, wannabe-all-knowing parents.
And yet even here there be witches.
Natalie in Hangsaman is an unusual and sensitive teenager who, always careful to go through the motions of ordinary existence, dwells "fascinated" in an inner world of her own making. The beginning of the book finds her engaged in a dialogue with "the secret voice which followed her," that of an invisible police detective accusing Natalie of murder, though we don't yet know of whom. Natalie, pleasurably frightened, can't answer his questions satisfactorily and doesn't seem to be particularly trying to -- she either knows she is guilty or has reason to think her innocence can never be proven. Backed into a corner, she tells herself, "Confess... if I confess I might go free."
This makes no sense in the context of twentieth-century law, where confession by a suspect generally guarantees anything but freedom. If we look at the witch trials Jackson made a study of, though, we see that once a witch was accused, confession was her only chance to save her own life. Pleading innocence was tantamount to suicide.
This is subtle; Road Through the Wall is less so in the witching respect. On a closed-off little street in a narrow-minded suburb lives Mrs. Mack. "The children called her a witch, and the parents called her an unfortunate old woman, and she looked like either one, with her hair in strings and her shoulders bent, and her perpetual whimpering mutter." One child has a brief, reluctant conversation with her, and is vastly relieved to be called by the wrong name, for "neighborhood lore" has it that "a witch could not put spells on anyone if she didn't know their name." And so little Mary Byrne is polite to old Mrs. Mack, "comfortable in the knowledge that some unfamiliar Sally would get her spell."
Very nice. And very interesting that suburban neighborhood lore should be so well-informed in matters arcane. In, for example, the testimony of Elizabeth Style, accused witch, it is made clear that names are very important indeed to witches. When Style takes to tormenting young Miss Hill, she is able to do so with the help of the devil himself, who holds a mock baptism of a "Picture in Wax, which was for [i.e. meant to represent] Elizabeth Hill." In another case from the same book, a witch is able to sicken a woman he has never even met "from a Town some miles off" because he knows her name. And so on.
No author becomes so married to a subject, weaving it so relentlessly through her work, for reasons purely intellectual. There was an emotional drive at work when it came to witchcraft and Shirley Jackson, perhaps like the attraction Houdini had to the supernatural. "She wanted very much to find provable magic," Jackson's younger daughter told Jackson's biographer. Which supports Jackson's plundering the supernatural as a treasure trove of ideas; but what about the aura of menace in so many of Jackson's witchy works?
Take "The Tooth," an oft-anthologized story from the Lottery collection. On the surface, this is a tale of madness. A young wife -- Clara Spencer -- embarks on a seemingly mundane bus journey, travelling to the big city to see a dentist. She meets a strange man and, soon after, loses her mind. In fact, her having met the man -- being able to perceive him, at any rate -- seems to be proof positive that she's already mad, since he is a magical being, and therefore must be imaginary. Except he isn't; and though Clara's sanity may be questioned, the real question is whether she was mad to throw her lot in with the demonic being she meets or whether she was nuts to stay in her previous passive existence for as long as she did.
Clara is a pale, worrying woman who seems to believe, like the good fifties housewife she is, that others' needs are to be seen to and her own are to be ignored or apologized for. When the story opens, she's in extreme pain because of a tooth that's been troubling her for years. Why hasn't she had it taken care of before?
Well, fear, for one. But beyond squeamishness, she seems to have neglected herself in favor of her husband and children, and they seem happy to let her do just that until she is in debilitating pain. Her husband grudgingly sees her off at the bus station, though she's barely able to stand up, and instead of showing concern, expresses his annoyance that she hasn't taken care of the problem sooner. "You had a toothache on our honeymoon," he says "accusingly."
Two things come to mind here. The first is that in Jackson's fiction, marriage is generally a lure for by the single and a trap for the married. Second, being hustled off with a huge swelling and pain that comes and goes bears a striking resemblance to many women's childbirth experiences. This is especially pointed given that Jackson wrote a rather bitterly humorous piece -- "The Third Baby's the Easiest," later reprinted in Life Among the Savages -- about giving birth to her third daughter.
In "The Third Baby," Jackson mentions taking a taxi alone to the hospital after fretting and making sure that her family will be all right while she's gone. Between contractions, she struggles to organize and communicate the myriad of household details that her family usually gets to take for granted:
"You'll have to take care of the children," I told my husband. "See that..." I stopped. I remember thinking with incredible clarity and speed. "See that they finish their breakfast," I said. Pajamas on the line, I thought, school, cats, toothbrushes. Milkman. Overalls to be mended, laundry. "I ought to make a list," I said vaguely. "Leave a note for the milkman tomorrow night. Soap, too. We need soap."
Compare this to Clara in The Tooth:
"Mrs. Lang," she said, checking on her fingers. "I called Mrs. Lang, I left the grocery order on the kitchen table, you can have the cold tongue for lunch and in case I don't get back Mrs. Lang will give you dinner. The cleaner ought to come about four o'clock, I won't be back so give him your brown suit and it doesn't matter if you forget but be sure to empty the pockets."
Just the usual housewife's fretting. But it's more than that: both women are hustled off, alone, in pain and apprehensive, to medical professionals who will greet them with condescension and neglect.
Outwardly, Clara is passive and obedient as, having reached the dentist's office, she is shuttled from office to office and room to room, and referred to as "lower molar" rather than by name. Her identity, her selfhood is taken from her, as Jackson's is, more humorously, when she is checking into the hospital:
"Writer," I said.
"Housewife," she said.
"Writer," I said.
"I'll just put down housewife," she said.
Infuriating, but funny. But there is nothing funny about Clara Spencer's treatment. Her own experience of her pain is stolen by being denied, just as her name is. The prospect of more pain at the hands of those supposedly there to help her is denied: "You know it won't hurt, don't you?" one smiling nurse asks, as "great machinery" is wheeled into the room. And then Clara is put under. But not before she has time to remind herself to "remember the metallic sound and taste of all of it. And the outrage." After the extraction is over, she asks where her tooth is, and on being told it's been taken out, lies down and cries. All very strange emotions in connection with a dental experience. But very analogous for giving birth. Although in this case the person being born -- reborn, rather -- seems to be Clara herself.
Which brings us back to witchcraft. Clara keeps thinking about the strange man she met on the bus. Readers who know about Jackson's running character James Harris know that this is he, the "daemon lover" she was fond of working into odd corners of stories when she wasn't giving him the center stage. In "The Tooth," he takes care of Clara -- which is a good thing since no one else can be bothered to -- but his caretaking is tinged with magic surrealism. He tells her strange fragments of stories about a beautiful place "even farther than Samarkand." He asks, in a restaurant the bus stops at, if she wants coffee, and when she nods he points "to the counter in front of her where a cup of coffee sat steaming. 'Drink it quickly,' he said." Later he buys her food, holds her arm to steady her on the way back to the bus, insists that she lean on him so that her head won't rattle against the window as it did before. Later, after they've left the bus, he finds her again. "'Look,' he said as he passed, and he held out a handful of pearls."
Consider all of this, and then consider the devil we meet in Saducismus Triumphatus. He dresses in black, always; James Harris is always in a blue suit, and can be identified in many of the stories he pops up in by this if by little else. The devil in Saducismus appears, at night, to women who are alone and vulnerable: usually widows, usually older, usually poor; always socially undesirable, even outcasts. His overtures are vaguely sexual: one of the things he requires from his witches is that they "suffer him to suck their Blood." He offers them his protection and undreamt riches, though that protection is little more than the ability to harm and the occasional catered party, and the riches are often merely a sixpence. Which is still more than anyone else is offering these women. Which is pretty tragic.
Which brings us back to the definitely if vaguely sexual daemon lover, and to Clara, offered imaginary pearls and real coffee. And a chance at a new life. A new self.
On leaving the dentist's office, Clara steps into a restroom and is startled, on looking at a mirror full of women's faces, not to know which is hers. Then, finding it, she is angry and disappointed. She removes the engraved barrette holding her hair back and she is indignant to see that she's saddled with a tame name like Clara. She throws away the barrette, along with an initial pin she'd been wearing.
The importance of names to witches has already been mentioned. Clara is throwing hers away; now no one can control her.
The devil in Saducismus often anoints his new recruits with oil, in a mockery of the baptism ceremony. He doesn't rename them, but his welcoming parties are very like the parties thrown in honor of the newly born. Which Clara is.
Nameless and memoryless, Clara runs off hand in hand with her demon-protector, seeing not the city surrounding her but only hot sand under her bare feet. Perhaps not completely tragic, if one favors casting off the conventional life in exchange for freedom; but not exactly a reassuring ending, either.
It could not have seemed a happy one for Shirley Jackson. The biggest problem with deals with the devil is that the devil cheats. Riches dwindle into sixpence. Persecuting those who persecute you, as the witches of Saducismus sometimes confessed they had, often means being hauled into court or hanged. Clara Spencer sought a caretaker and ended up losing her mind.
Insanity was something Jackson feared greatly, and toward the end of her life her own crippling fears of ordinary things gave her good reason to believe she was indeed going mad. Perhaps in this early story she was seeking reassurance that the journey might not be all bad, might be a bizarre strike for freedom: not a housewife kidnapped by madness, but a witch who's willingly thrown herself into league with the devil -- the daemon lover.
If that seems like a stretch, consider this: In The Witchcraft of Salem Village, Jackson describes Nathaniel Hawthorne's own retelling of the witch trials in his novel The House of the Seven Gables. For no obvious reason, Jackson mentions Hawthorne having an accused witch shout at her judges, "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink!" In "The Tooth," Clara's mouth is full of blood after her surgery, and she says -- you guessed it -- "God has given me blood to drink."
This element of fear in many of Jackson's witchy works supports her son's feeling that her relationship with the supernatural was uneasy at best. "I always believed she believed that she was in touch with a whole ungodly assortment of demons and characters," he told her biographer. "I don't think it was very pleasant for her."
Enigmatic always, Jackson leaves us with no easy answers to the question of her real relationship with what was probably, next to writing, the most passionate concern of her life. Did she love magic or fear it? Was witchcraft merely historically interesting for her, or was she hoping all the time to find a spell that would work?
Hazarding a guess, based on her own words and works and what everyone else has said about her, I would say: none of the above. No simple or clearcut answer will suffice, because she wasn't a simple clearcut person, even to herself. She could very well have had a joyful or fearful relationship with witchcraft without ever once believing it really existed, because she was not stuck in the idea that something had to be empirically real in order to be emotionally relevant.
"I tell myself stories all day long," she wrote in a draft for a writers' conference lecture:
I have managed to weave a fairy-tale of infinite complexity around the inanimate objects in my house, so much so that no one in my family is surprised to find me putting the waffle iron away on a different shelf because in my story it has quarreled with the toaster.... It looks kind of crazy, of course. But it does take the edge off cold reality. And sometimes it turns into real stories.
Those stories were a fictional aspect of her life that she took perfectly seriously. There's no contradiction there. Every fiction writer has to be willing to commit a great deal of time and attention to, and invest a huge amount of faith in, what is essentially nothing more than an exercise in make-believe -- no matter how "realistic" the story might be. Clearly make-believe won out over "cold reality" in Jackson's book any day of the week.
And just as clearly no one will ever know what witchcraft really was for Shirley Jackson. If it were somehow possible to ask her and hope for a true answer (and she valued a good story far more than she did the truth -- her lecture "Experience and Fiction," reprinted in Come Along With Me, is ample and entertaining proof of that), her reply might well depend on when you asked her and how she was feeling that day. Just as her writing depended on that. We have her writing (if only more of it were in print!), and we shouldn't ask for more. Anyone seeking safe certainty shouldn't be reading so enigmatic a writer anyway.
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When I announced the piloting of the AugmentED MOOC earlier this month, I tried to frame any future hiccups as learning experiences. I'm not backing away from that, but speaking hypothetically about screw-ups and actually screwing up in public are two different things (at least they feel very different when you are the one who is actually screwing up). I guess you could say that this post is my attempt to deal with my mistakes gracefully.
Module 2 was designed to ease participants into social media, taking a presentation platform with which they would most likely be familiar (PowerPoint), adding narration and multimedia design guidelines, and then sharing the finished products online. The content of their presentations would come from the self-guided inquiry into teaching in the 21st century that we did earlier in the week.
I made a conscious decision to switch platforms for this project from one that I have used most recently given the many problems that students had getting their PowerPoint narration to transfer to the AuthorStream platform (the problem was not AuthorStream, but the many versions of PowerPoint out there and the difficulty of guiding technological neophytes step-by-step through what was designed to be a simple operation).
I had used Slideshare in the past and thought that it might be a better option, given its easy-to-use audio syncing tool. Indeed, the problems from students were almost non-existent and everyone managed to post a narrated slidecast. Great, right? Well not so much, since not until we posted our Slideshare slidecasts were were informed (through a little pop-up window) that Slideshare was discontinuing the audio and automatic advance features of slidecasting, so any existing slidecasts would revert to static presentations at the end of April. Definitely NOT great. The project that was supposed to show students how easy and cool creating and sharing multimedia could be had suddenly turned into a frustration.
I really don't know how I could have anticipated this, and I suppose that my take away as an instructional designer is that in the future I should probably Google any platforms I intend to use for teaching.
It won't make the frustration of this new wrinkle go away, nor does it complement my original affective objective for this assignment, which was, as I said, to ease folks into Web 2.0, but I have devised a solution. This blog post on Slideshare offers some ways to archive slides (be sure to check out the comments, too), and I have offered below what I think is the easiest way to preserve the slidecast along with quality audio.
Use this tutorial to create a narrated slideshow in PowerPoint and upload it to AuthorStream. Notice that the directions pertain to an older version PowerPoint for Mac. If you are using a different version, you may want to do a Google Search for your version of PowerPoint and "sync sound" to see visuals specific to your version.
NOTE: You must view the presentation on AuthorStream to view it as a slidecast with audio.]]>
In semesters past, I have used AuthorStream for this project, but students consistently had trouble with adding the narration. This semester it's somewhat easier with Slideshare (I do love their audio syncing tool), but I had no idea how much time this would take! Here is my narrated slideshow on reaching and teaching the digital generation. Enjoy!
In recent semesters, the list of required books in my graduate and undergraduate Edtech for Educators courses have become smaller and smaller, given all the free resources available on the Web. But until this semester (when I'm trying no purchased texts at all), Understanding the Digital Generation: Teaching and Learning in the New Digital Landscape has consistently remained on my list. In this book, Ian Jukes, Ted McCain and Lee Crockett focus on re-imagining education in a way that's essential to helping prepare today's youth to thrive in the 21st century. If you haven't read it and care about kids and their futures, I highly suggest that you do.
An online preview of some of the book's key concepts can be found in Jukes, McCain, and this time Frank S. Kelly's "No More Cookie Cutter High Schools." Their list of "Guiding Principles for Creating a New Vision of Schooling" is, in my humble opinion, simultaneously spot-on and daunting:
*Indicates that which is not currently being realized in most schools today
As you will notice, I have asterisked those items that are not currently being realized in most schools today. And while some of the list items (such as the flexibility of spatial configurations in schools and providing students with personal workspaces) might seem a bit pie-in-the-sky, most others seem rather urgent. And yet, every single item is asterisked.
Of course, there may be a few teachers in schools here and there – the outliers and innovators — who are doing some of these things. And you will definitely see more of this in the more affluent schools. But we all know that in order for educators to help prepare today's youth to thrive in the 21st century, a lot of these things need to happen — soon and on a wide scale.
One key obstacle to these changes seems to be school culture common to many U.S. public schools today. In NY State at least, all of our resources, attention, and "innovation" efforts currently seem to be focused on the new Common Core state assessments (and of course, associated teacher and school accountability measures). Despite the few innovators who may be on the team, this focus on outcomes and accountability sends a message that undermines the spirit of innovation that today's kids desperately need to have guide their learning.
Educators know this, of course. But at the end of the day, there is simply no time or energy or money left.
What to do? While I don't have the answer to this million-dollar question, I can offer the observation that the schools that make me most hopeful for some kind of light at the end of this assessment tunnel are those where administrators have empowered teachers as professionals. Schools where teachers have been given the authority to serve as curriculum leaders, where teams of teachers collaborate to make decisions about the curriculum in light of new state and federal mandates (instead of taking direction from the top down) — these are the schools where I see the most creativity and energy among teachers, and not surprisingly, among their students, too.
When administrators treat teachers as experts, trusting teachers to solve the current dilemma given their knowledge of kids, subject matter, and pedagogy, teachers are called upon to utilize some of same types of creativity and problem-solving skills that we are looking for them to foster in children.
This has nothing to do with technology or 21st century skills, of course. I focus on this necessary shift in school culture because I think that the order is taller than even Jukes, McCain, Crockett and Kelly make it out to be. Only when teachers' own learning communities look more like the those we want to see in 21st-century "classrooms" will teachers be able to help schools manifest a new vision of schooling for the 21st century. Only then will they be able to find creative ways to integrate the many digital resources and experts currently in their midst as resources for realizing the solution.]]>
I began this blog a little over three years ago, and though I've been away for some time now, it has always been a place to which I've longed to return.
I've been busy, you see. Because the MOOC that got me started on all of this – and got me started on this blog — literally changed my life.
The MOOC I'm talking about is ds106, or Digital Storytelling 106 at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), a course conceptualized and taught in Spring 2011 by Edupunk author and digital pedagogy maverick, Jim Groom. That semester, the course was being offered for the first time ever to both UWM students and anyone anywhere, as long as they had an Internet device and the desire to engage.
When I first heard about the course on Twitter, I had no idea what a MOOC even was. I remember thinking initially that it something like a MOO — those '90s text-based renditions of Second Life. Intrigued, I dipped into the #ds106 Twitter stream and soon found myself part of a huge globally networked learning community composed of people of all ages, nationalities, and experience levels who had assembled to tell stories using digital tools.
I think everyone onboard that semester would agree that the energy in the course was electric. We were a bunch of idealists and dreamers and artists and musicians and students and teachers — all coming together to "make art, dammit!," as Groom so frequently admonished us. It was fun to create and see how Web 2.0 tools could make it so easy; gratifying to share work that made you proud; encouraging to bask in the community's generous feedback and support; and awe-inspiring to witness other coursemembers' frequently brilliant creations. It was a blast.
But to be a learner who was also teacher in an environment where learning happened publicly – learning in all of its messiness and proof-that-you-don't-know-something-ness that often makes us teachers squirm – was also terrifying. Getting comfortable with occupying that position, with being less of a "master teacher" and more of what Will Richardson calls a "master learner," that was perhaps one of the most valuable experiences I took from ds106. I truly believe that we could fix a lot of what is wrong with education today if someone in the Department of Ed would enlist Jim Groom as a consultant.
Since ds106, or rather because of it, I started and recently finished a Master's program in educational technology. In my final semester, I designed a MOOC, which just launched earlier this week. It's small potatoes compared to ds106 and very different. It's designed for educators and focuses on educational topics. But we will be making things with digital tools and sharing them in community. And we will be doing it publicly. I'm hoping to be able to channel just a bit of the ds106-ness that I found so personally transformative into this course.
Sometimes I'm terrified it will all fail miserably. And it very well may. But whatever happens, it will be a learning experience. And isn't that what education is all about?
Thanks, Jim.]]>
The tool needs to fit the task. This is my mantra, but still — smitten with the novelty of the array of cool new tech tools before them — the teacher candidates in my technology courses are frequently seduced into planning their lessons around these tools. Thus "technology integration" can give rise to the same problems as "activity-based" curriculum planning that is found in brick and mortar classrooms and to which Jay Wiggins and Grant McTighe offer an alternative in Understanding by Design. My response to both groups of well-intentioned teachers is identical: it may be a "fun" activity (or a cool tool), but what learning does it facilitate?
Integrating technology into face-to-face classes can help teachers better obtain their learning objectives by allowing them to extend and augment their instruction and students' skills. But learning objectives should not be altered just because (or any time) technology is added to the mix. On the contrary: learning objectives should remain the same.
This is an important point for educational technologists to stress in their discussions with faculty learning to integrate ICTs into their courses. But therein lies the problem: as the Technology Integration Matrices developed by the University of South Florida and Northern Arizona University help us see, emergent ICT users are often so focused upon learning new technologies that asking them simultaneously to think through the technology — or to analyze the types of thinking, activity, or interaction it promotes — is quite a tall order indeed.
This is one of the problems with courses like mine: stand-alone "tech courses" reinforce this imbalanced perspective of technologies and the types of learning they promote. Ideally, technology is best integrated across the curriculum. However, the problem then becomes one of ensuring that course instructors across the content areas are well-versed enough in curriculum design and theories of technology integration to collectively absorb responsibility for presenting tech integration in this more integrated and balanced way. Given where most of the contemporary generation of teaching faculty find themselves along the ICT learning curve, however, this is an imbalance we will need to live with for at least one generation, or until teaching faculty are savvy ICT users.
For the time being, then, learning how to integrate new media into one's teaching — be it in a stand-alone course or across the curriculum — should focus less upon the technologies in question than on the learning that they support and enable. In teacher education or professional development situations where learners are also emergent ICT users, a constant tension must be maintained between learners' dual learning trajectories: between learning new tech tools and how precisely to integrate these tools into their curricula. Carefully scaffolding emergent users' thinking through technology may help teacher educators and deliverers of professional development maintain this tension. The flow chart for evaluating classroom technology tools presented by Lisa Dawley in The Tools for Successful Online Teaching (2007) provides a useful framework for scaffolding emergent ICT user's users' understanding of how to integrate technology into their curricula:
Oddly, in fully online courses, the task seems somehow simpler. What are the learning goals of the face-to-face classroom and how can I best facilitate them in an online environment? the K-16 online course designer asks herself. Even though such courses frequently end up quite different from their brick and mortar counterparts — largely due to ICT's affordances for more creatively or engagingly achieving those same pedagogical goals — one significant factor in this apparent difference may be that faculty designing online courses usually have a passing familiarity with ICTs.
This difference between the affordances of traditional classrooms and virtual ones is clearly demonstrated if one considers the way that ICTs can help support small group processes and learning in physical and virtual classes alike. Group members can discuss, share resources, distribute labor, manage their projects, and more — all from anywhere in the world, at any time of the day or night. This presentation on "Web 2.0 for Coordinating Small Groups" emphasizes both the plusses and minuses of using free and widely available collaborative software to coordinate small groups in virtual or hybrid learning environments. Please view the presentation and comment or add, if you like!]]>
The Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship was the topic of discussion in my new media class yesterday. But one of the things that seems missing from this list is digital advocacy, which is the way I would describe the responsibility of educated users of digital media to keep abreast of and advocate against commercial and federal interests' attempts to limit free speech, creativity, and (our remaining modicum of) privacy on the internet.
Some might say that digital advocacy falls under the domain of media literacy, but it seems also to fit naturally in any discussion of what it means to be a citizen of the ether. Just as citizens of FTF communities are obligated to maintain regional freedom, justice, and privacy with their vote and political engagement, digital citizens are obligated to use their voices to maintain the same in our virtual or "second" lives.
This is easy enough to do through the proliferation of online organizations that serve as watchdogs and advocacy centers. Last year, such digital advocacy groups groups successfully opposed, through massive social networking campaigns, SOPA and PIPA legislation that would have permitted censorship and government and corporate control of the internet.
Currently new legislation, CISPA (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011, HR 3523), is the latest effort of this ilk. Section 2.1 of the bill describes its purpose plainly:
IN GENERAL- The Director of National Intelligence shall establish procedures to allow elements of the intelligence community to share cyber threat intelligence with private-sector entities and to encourage the sharing of such intelligence.
Yes, imagine Facebook and the CIA working in unison, not such a far cry iif one considers that Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has recently thrown in with the CISPA camp. This spoof by the Onion hits a little too close to home:
The new legislation is too loosely written, permitting violations of Americans' civil liberties under the auspices of cybersecurity, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains:
Congress is considering legislation that would create backdoor wiretaps into our daily communications. These "cybersecurity" bills would give companies a free pass to monitor and collect communications, including huge amounts of personal data like your text messages and emails. Companies could ship that data wholesale to the government or anyone else provided they claim it was for "cybersecurity purposes."
Like the doublespeak used by SOPA and PIPA advocates to claim that those laws would stop internet piracy (SOPA) and protect intellectual property (PIPA), promoters of CISPA claim that the bill "respects privacy and civil liberties, is not about surveillance, is targeted at actions by foreign states, and is nothing like SOPA." Meanwhile, CISPA, like SOPA and PIPA before it, is written in such broad language that it simultaneously legalizes egregious violations of US citizens' civil liberties.
If the Occupy Wall Street movement has made one thing clear, it is the way that private interests direct the legislation and governance of our nation. Corporations will not stop lobbying lawmakers to configure the internet for the former's benefit until they have been satisfied, which means if not SOPA or PIPA or CISPA, other legislation will soon follow. Therefore, digital citizens need to find a way to keep their finger always on the pulse of what is happening in Washington. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a great source for keeping abreast of this news. I only wish they had a Facebook connect button on their site :) .
Write your congressperson to oppose CISPA and other similar legislation by clicking here.
*"Keeping the Internet Open Innovative and Free" is the motto of the Center for Democracy and Technology]]>
Here's a Canadian propaganda poster from WWII that I borrowed to reflect my sentiments about mainstream America's favorite pastime:
Again, I used Gimp, but I seem to be getting the hang of it. It took only a few minutes!]]>
Here's my ReCaptcha Illustrated assignment for ds106.
The project gave me another chance to play around with Gimp and, as students and I discussed in class today, I discovered for myself that one of the tangible benefits of struggling with some of these programs is that, once you do, you know them all the better the next time. Which is to say that though I didn't exactly whiz through this creation, my time on task was much reduced having already played with Gimp for a previous assignment. And though it's still not perfect, I am relatively happy with the outcome. I'm especially cognizant of the little boost to my confidence my success here has provided me with. More visual mashups: bring 'em on!
I went to Alan Levine's assignment page and pulled the virtual slot machine lever a couple of times till I came up with a ReCaptcha that captivated my imagination. Here are the others that were vying for first place:
But when I landed on "an ithingr," images of my dongle (whose name affords my students no end of amusement) and "finger" sprang to mind, and I knew that I'd hit the jackpot.
I did a quick Google Images search on iFinger (I am a firm believer that not only are there no longer original ideas, but also that, however whacky you might find a concept to be, there's usually a pretty good chance that if you Google it, you'll find something out there that at least comes close). My hunches were right. Up popped this image from a 2007 Wired magazine post about the "X-finger" for amputees:
Another quick search of the Apple Store unearthed a workable background from the iPad 2 site, whose tagline,"now with iOS 5 and iCloud, it just got harder to put down" couldn't have been more fiendishly apt.
As I write this, I'm reminded again of our conversation in ENG 307 earlier today: about how, through the all of the low stakes play with apps that ds106 assignments require of us, we are actually learning the apps and, as I have written before, learning about learning, too.
We're learning lessons such as how, when students are asked to create something meaningful that they will share with a supportive and like-minded community that truly values their contributions, motivation is high to acquire skills in order to produce high quality products. Students have reported spending "24 hours" on assignments; warned me that they will "blame [me] when they fail all of their other classes :)"; that they are "obsessed with [their] blog[s]"; and that they went outside for the first time all year and spent the "entire day" taking photos for our visual assignments. Sure, they're devoting tons of time to creating what Jim Groom and Alan Levine celebrate as "ds106 awesome," but I never asked them to. That my students — preservice teachers, mind you — are this motivated to spend time on schoolwork because they are enjoying it, are really seeing what "authentic" assignments, audience, and learning are all about, and are learning technology tools in the meanwhile (tools that they will eventually be able to apply to their own discipline-specific curriculum planning) are all invaluable lessons for these teachers-to-be. I couldn't be happier with the way our collaboration with ds106 is working out.
Today we spent time in class on independent work, partially because I wanted the opportunity to float around and help students who might still be struggling. Much to my surprise (and delight), students displayed an amazing level independence that had been completely missing just a couple of weeks ago. We joked that they didn't need me any more, that I should just "leave them alone to play with their computers." Instead of panicked cries from all corners of the room about problems as tiny as where to find the directions (the classroom tenor at the beginning of the semester), students were brandishing a new savvy about finding solutions to their own problems: asking their classmates for help, Googling their questions to see if there was help already out there, and knowing that they could ask the community, as well as me, their teacher, if they couldn't help themselves. They have become that much more competent and self-directed in only four weeks!
We reflected upon students' amazing dispositional turnaround (an explicit objective of my course, btw) and agreed that the ds106 trial by fire of setting up our own blogs and the relentless requirement to constantly engage in lots of low-stakes, "make art, dammit" assignments were to blame :). Without our actually recognizing what was happening (because we're having too much fun), the weekly work of ds106 — the daily creates, the quantity and variety of new media assignments students are regularly engaged in, and students' regular reflection upon their processes — has helped us build competence in and confidence about our abilities as learners (of new media).
I reminded students of the old "hide the peas in the macaroni" trick that teachers often take from parents. Digital storytelling and its component tasks can be a delicious distraction from the "what's good for you" part of school. I've been saying this for years (and most of these students heard it all last semester as we discussed thematic unit planning in ELA). But now we're not even one-third of the way through the semester and students are really "getting it" in ways I could only dream about last year. I can hardly wait to see what the rest of the semester brings.
Hurray for ds106!]]>
Those of you who know me from way back know that in a previous life I had a minor obsession with Gertrude Stein. Still do in many ways, since the philosophy of her poetics and her experimentation with the material and the ideal, in influencing the way I think about the representation, have influenced my view of the world and sparked my interest in Freire and education (the short version).
So, even though I really abhorred the Woody Allen interpretation of Stein in Midnight in Paris (along with so many other things about that film), I would be tickled to see Ms. Stein reincarnated in the flesh to deliver a Ted Talk. I have no doubt that she'd still rock our world today.
As for my process, I struggled mightily to produce this, though I'm sure it doesn't show. Initially, I was inspired by the "How to Get Your Vader On" tutorial on ds106 by Thomas Ella. But, I don't have Photoshop, so I figured, it should be fairly easy to find a free version. Right? Well, not so much. Finally, I found GIMP and would recommend it highly for Mac users since it is compatible and has a lot of functionality. However, the program is not self-explanatory or easy to use, so I found myself Googling questions as simple as "How to fill a selected area with color?" Perhaps if I knew how to use Photoshop, those skills would have transferred, but I don't know Photoshop (that well) either.
So as you will see, I cut out a photo of Stein from this image (by searching Google Images, of course):
Then I did a random search for Ted Talks and came up with this one given by Jill Bolt Taylor, which was curious, of course, since Stein was so interested in "the mind," too. The camera angles seem right, so I used Grab to get this still (on right). Then, several Gimp tutorials later, I managed to cut the image of Stein from the photo and paste it into the Ted Talk still.
As you will see, I also replaced what is on the screen at Ted with a corner of the famous painting that Picasso did of Stein. Like other Ted Talk speakers, Stein was a woman before her time. Author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody's Autobiography, Stein understood that all representation is self-representation well before the emergence of post-structuralism or discourse theory (though Bakhtin was a contemporary). I thought it would be apt, therefore, that her moment in the Ted limelight would not only include the most popularized and iconic images we have of her, but that the talk about something else (i.e., "Stein on Picasso") would ultimately be all about her (hence the portrait of her).
To that end, I also tried for quite some time to insert the intro to Ted Talks into iMovie and then add then audio from the UPenn archives of Stein's "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso" (a deliberately funny title, since the story about Picasso's portrait of Stein is that the face remained uncompleted for ages while the friends discussed how Picasso should finish the work). I was too ambitious, it seems: not only could I not convert the .swf video file of the Ted intro from Jing into something that my iMovie '09 would recognize, but I also don't really know how to lay in .mp3 files into iMovie (I am a "just-in-time-learner" par excellence and frankly just lack the time right now).
So if any of the ds106 tech braintrust out there can offer any insights into the errors of my ways, I'd be ever so grateful. And, speaking of ambitions, I'm wondering if I anyone knows of a way to possibly animate Stein's mouth? So it looks as if she's speaking as the audio is running? I'm thinking of Vokis here and am wondering whether there's any way to do a similar thing…with a free and relatively easy to use app, of course?! Thanks in advance for letting me know, if you know. I am hoping to resurrect this project for a future ds106 assignment.
(Project completed for the Fantasy Ted Talks assignment in the ds106 Visual Assignments collection: "Create a scene from a TED Talk being given by a fictional character. Obscure or well known, feel free to have your fictional character pontificating on their story, and their "essential truth" that has come to be known as TED Talks.").]]>
For quite some time now, Will Richardson has been saying that teachers need to use blogs, wikis, and podcasts before implementing them in their own classrooms. As a teacher, I couldn't agree more and have spent at least the past half decade trying to live up to Richardson's expectations. I've started blogs, Nings, Twitter accounts, social networks. I've joined, signed up for, played with, and filled out profiles on websites for these and numerous other new "cool tools" … only to have all of that initial enthusiasm gradually fade or be replaced by some other newest, coolest tool. But it was only when I heard Richardson recast the concept slightly — saying he was more interested in his children's teachers being "master learners" than "master teachers" — that everything really clicked for me.
Since then (and note that my hearing this was not the first time Richardson framed the problem as such), I have begun my English education and technology courses with Richardson's driving question of late: what does it mean to be a master learner? As future teachers and longtime students, the preservice teachers in my classrooms should have no problem reflecting on this question, right? (You guessed it) WRONG.
Students in my classes are typically "good students": most have done well academically all their lives and view their GPAs as evidence that they are among the top 25% of learners. So, duh, they know how to learn. Can we move on, please? I have yet to figure out whether it's just teachers and teachers to-be or most students today, but it is clear that my students' impatience with this concept indicates that they have a very different definition of learning than I.
And as a teacher educator who is well-versed in theories of learning, I just cannot accept their definition. To me, learning something is understanding it (as Jay Wiggins and Grant McTighe would have it): to be able to use or apply new knowledge in a different context, or what we education eggheads like to call "learning for transfer." Doing the reading and taking a quiz about it do little to build transferrable understandings. My students readily admit that school thus far has done little to prepare them to do that.
There are many reasons why new media should be integrated into teacher education classrooms (it enhances teaching and learning, supports multiple literacies, and in the ELA classroom expands our understanding of literacy beyond print text), but one very good reason is that it transforms the classroom into a laboratory where students (preservice teachers) are re-learning how to learn. To take chances, explore and discover, even to fail and learn from those mistakes. They are re-learning how to solve problems on their own (a 21st-century skill), and in the process, reconnecting with what it means to be a learner, not just someone who knows how to "do school" well. They are learning to be patient with themselves as learners and for some it is not so easy. But, as I always say to them, what kind of model of learning are you providing for your students? For your students who don't walk into your classroom with the "doing school" toolkit in their bookbags? And how are you helping those students who can "do school" unschool themselves and begin to take charge of their own educational pathways (which new media allows)?
When I first enrolled in ds106 a year ago, my eyes were opened to my students' experiences in a new way as I fumbled along publicly, like a amateur (and still very much so), configuring widgets, trying and failing to get my blog up and running, and learning to write real blog posts. This semester, I have my students engaged in a similar enterprise: as part of our ENG 307: New Media Literacies and the ELA Classroom course, we are collaborating in Jim Groom's ds106 course with at least 5 different linked classrooms from around the world. My students and I are spending the semester exploring Richardson's ideas about why it it is so difficult for teachers (and teachers-to-be) to be "master learners." The journey has just begun, but already some very interesting responses are emerging. Check them out on our Ning and two student posts so far (here's the other one).]]>

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra: All You Need Is Love
All You Need Is Love
Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra
We Are MTO (MOWO 3204)
Steven Bernstein (trumpet and slide trumpet),
Clark Gayton (trombone), Doug Wieselman (clarinet, tenor sax), Peter Apfelbaum (tenor and soprano saxes), Erik Lawrence (baritone sax), Matt Munisteri (guitar), Charlie Burnham (violin), Ben Allison (bass), Ben Perowsky (drums).
Composed by Lennon/McCartney; arranged by Steven Bernstein.
Recorded: Brooklyn, NY, May 23-24, 2005
Rating: 82/100 (learn more)
If the purpose of music is to bring joy and pleasure to both the players and the listeners, then Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra surely seems to have accomplished that. As a working band, they performed night after night for five years at the once-progressive downtown New York club Tonic. This recording memorializes the spirit of participative music practiced not only by these eclectic artists, but at times by their audiences. Under an umbrella of camaraderie, the MTO creates an atmosphere of inclusion with its cacophonous collection of instruments played with a passion and sense of pleasure that belies the group's professionalism. In particular, the MTO covers this Beatles song with a gusto and joy befitting a classic of '60s love, peace and hope. Good fun.
Reviewer: Ralph A. Miriello
Tags: 2000s jazz · beatles covers · big band
Comments are closed.


text:
WHAT'S HAPPENING:The University of Arizona women's basketball team (No. 23 AP/No. 19 USA Today) closes out a three-game road swing this weekend with a contest at Arizona State on Saturday, Feb. 26, at 8 p.m. The game will be broadcast live on Fox Sports Net Arizona.
GAME TIME CHANGE:Please note that the game time has changed for the contest at Arizona State this weekend. The game will tip off at 8 p.m., instead of the previously listed 2 p.m.
BUSES HEADED FOR ASU:A caravan of Wildcat "fun buses" will make its way up to Tempe this weekend for the game at Arizona State. For the cost of only $20, fans receive a reserved game ticket and transportation to and from Wells Fargo Arena in Tempe. Four buses are already full, and reservations are being taken for a fifth bus. Space is still available, so fans can obtain information by calling the Arizona women's basketball office at (520) 621-4014.
POSSIBLE STARTING LINEUP: 45 Elizabeth Pickney F 6-4 So. Houston, TX 9.9 ppg 4.4 rpg 0.9 bpg 53 Tatum Brown F 6-4 Sr. Tacoma, WA 13.3 ppg 7.9 rpg 0.7 bpg 3 Lisa Griffith G 5-6 Sr. Portland, OR 8.9 ppg 2.1 spg 3.6 apg 10 Reshea Bristol G 5-10 Jr. Omaha, NE 7.3 ppg 3.5 rpg 2.1 spg 23 Felecity Willis G 5-7 Sr. Apple Valley, CA 7.8 ppg 5.3 apg 1.5 spg OFF THE BENCH (listed alphabetically): 33 Tysell Bozeman G 5-8 So. Riverside, CA 3.0 ppg 1.1 rpg 0.6 spg 20 Julie Brase G 5-9 So. Tucson, AZ 6.8 ppg 2.7 rpg 2.0 apg 22 Monika Crank G 5-7 Sr. Page, AZ 5.2 ppg 2.5 rpg 2.1 apg 34 Angela Lackey F 6-0 Sr. Louisville, KY 12.9 ppg 4.9 rpg 1.7 spg 51 Michelle Mitchell C 6-4 So. Oregon City, OR 1.1 ppg 1.2 rpg 21 Jamie Sturdivant G 5-7 Fr. Simi Valley, CA 0.8 ppg 0.2 rpg 0.4 apg 50 LaKeisha Taylor C 6-4 So. Houston, TX 2.6 ppg 2.7 rpg 0.4 bpg 35 Krista Warren F/G 6-2 Fr. Cloverdale, CA 3.8 ppg 2.9 rpg 0.5 apg
ABOUT ARIZONA:The 23rd-ranked Wildcats stand at 20-5 overall and 9-4 in Pac-10 play after being swept in Los Angeles for the first time since 1994. The Cats fell to USC, 80-68, on Feb. 17, then were defeated by then-24th-ranked UCLA, 80-66, on Feb. 19. This marks the first back-to-back losses for Arizona since falling at Washington State and Washington on Jan. 7 and 9, 1999. The losses also ended the UA's six-game win streak and knocked the Cats back to fourth place in the Pac-10 standings.
With 13.3 points and 7.9 rebounds per game, senior forward Tatum Brown remains the UA leader in both categories. Senior forward Angela Lackey is a close second in scoring, with 12.9 ppg, and is second in rebounding, at 4.9 rpg. Sophomore forward Elizabeth Pickney stands in third in both categories, averaging 9.9 ppg and 4.4 rpg.
Guards Lisa Griffith (8.9 ppg), Felecity Willis (7.8 ppg), Reshea Bristol (7.3 ppg) and Julie Brase (6.8 ppg) follow on the scoring chart. Willis is the team's assists leader, at 5.3 per game, while Bristol has the highest steals average, at 2.14 per game.
Arizona leads the Pac-10 in four different statistical categories, including scoring (79.4 ppg), scoring margin (+12.0 ppg) and assists (18.28 apg). Individually, Tatum Brown is tops in field goal percentage (.610) and second in rebounding (7.9 rpg), while Felecity Willis is second in assists (5.32 apg).
ABOUT ARIZONA STATE:The Sun Devils also suffered a sweep in L.A. last weekend, slipping to 13-10 overall and 6-7 in Pac-10 play. ASU has lost six of its last eight games, however the Sun Devils are 10-1 on their home court this season.
Three Sun Devils are averaging in double digits in scoring, led by sophomore forward Theresa Jantzen's 12.6 points per game. Senior center Rachel Holt is second in scoring, with 11.9 ppg, and is leading the team in rebounding, at 5.3 per game. Senior forward Kristine Sand is averaging 11.1 ppg and 4.8 rpg.
Arizona State is the top team in the Pac-10 in three-point percentage defense, allowing opponents to hit only 25.9 percent from long range. The Sun Devils are also third in scoring defense (64.0 ppg). Individually, Rachel Holt is third in the Pac-10 in field goal percentage (.565), and Theresa Jantzen is second in free throw percentage (.839).
In her fourth year at Arizona State, head coach Charli Turner Thorne (Stanford, 1988) holds a 44-59 mark. She is 84-98 in seven years as a head coach.
THE SERIES vs. ARIZONA STATE:Arizona's series with in-state rival Arizona State ties as the oldest series in UA women's basketball history. ASU was the second team the Cats faced on Feb. 2, 1973, (the UA played New Mexico earlier that day) during Arizona's inaugural season of women's basketball. The contest resulted in a 50-39 win by Arizona over the Sun Devils in Las Cruces, N.M.
Arizona State holds the 31-25 lead in the series with the Wildcats, although the UA has won 13 straight games against ASU. Thirteen of the last 21 meetings between the two teams were settled by spreads of 10 points or less, and Arizona's average margin of victory over the last three games was only 6.7 points.
Earlier this year, the Wildcats scraped out a narrow 60-58 win over Arizona State in Tucson on Jan. 30. The last time these two teams met in Tempe, Arizona needed overtime to pull out a 76-67 victory on Feb. 13, 1999.
LAST MEETING WITH ASU:A 50 percent shooting performance in the second half helped the Wildcats pull out a 60-58 win over rival Arizona State at home on Jan. 30.
Arizona opened the game with an 11-2 run, then ASU proceeded to out-score the Cats, 27-16, over the remainder of the half, taking a 29-27 lead into the break.
Arizona State held onto the lead early in the second half until the UA went on an 11-4 spurt to take a two-point (38-36) lead at the 12:35 mark. From that point, there were seven lead changes and four ties until Arizona managed to push out to a six-point (58-52) lead with 1:12 left.
ASU scratched back to within the final spread of two points by hitting a three-pointer with less than a minute remaining in the contest, but Arizona held on for the victory.
Tatum Brown was the only Wildcat to reach double digits in scoring, racking up 18 points and 13 rebounds.
ARIZONA'S LAST TIME OUT:A 10-0 run midway through the second half gave 24th-ranked UCLA all the momentum it needed to defeat Arizona, 80-66, in Los Angeles on Feb. 19.
The first half featured six ties and six lead changes as the two teams played to a 36-all score at halftime. The teams traded buckets early in the second half, until UCLA put on its 10-0 run, capitalizing on seven straight Wildcat turnovers. Arizona came no closer than five points for the remainder of the game.
Monika Crank led the UA in scoring, with 13 points off the bench. Elizabeth Pickney added 10 points and a game-high six rebounds, and Angela Lackey had 10 points as well.
The Cats committed a season-high 29 turnovers in the game.
LOOKING AHEAD:Arizona will play its final home contests of the year against the Oregon schools next weekend. The Cats will take on Oregon State on Thursday, Mar. 2, at 7 p.m., then the UA faces Oregon on Saturday, Mar. 4, at 2 p.m. in a contest which will be televised live nationally on Fox Sports Net.
TRACKING THE PAC-10:With a 10-3 record in Pac-10 play, Oregon has sole possession of first place in the league standings. Stanford and UCLA are close behind with 9-3 conference records each. Arizona is in fourth place at 9-4.
GAME ADDED TO TELEVISION SCHEDULE:The Wildcats' home game against Oregon on Saturday, Mar. 4, has been selected to be televised live nationally on Fox Sports Net. The contest will tip at 2 p.m. MST. This contest brings Arizona's total up to eight televised games for the 1999-2000 season.
GRIFFITH TO PARTICIPATE IN 3-POINT CHAMPIONSHIP:UA senior guard Lisa Griffith has been selected as a participant in the Annual College Three-Point Basketball Championship on Thursday, Mar. 30, in Indianapolis, Ind. Along with the Slam Dunk Championship, the 3-point contest is one of the activities surrounding the men's Final Four and will be broadcast on ESPN on Mar. 30 from 9-11 p.m. EST.
HEAD COACH JOAN BONVICINI:In nearly a decade at the helm of the University of Arizona's women's basketball program, head coach Joan Bonvicini has collected an unparalleled list of accomplishments, both for the university and for her career.
Now in her ninth year at the UA, Bonvicini has posted a 154-103 (.599) mark and has a 479-174 (.734) record in 20 years as a collegiate head coach. She also has a 22-13 mark in NCAA tournament play and has never lost a first-round game in 13 appearances.
Prior to taking over at the UA, Bonvicini led Long Beach State to 10 consecutive NCAA appearances, including two trips to the Final Four. She registered a 325-71 mark in 12 seasons with the 49ers.
DID YOU KNOW:Since Joan Bonvicini took over the Arizona program in 1991, the Wildcats have gone 81-76 against Pac-10 teams, although they have a 47-20 league mark over the last four seasons combined.
RACKING UP THE WINS:Joan Bonvicini needs only five more victories at the UA to collect as many wins as the six previous Wildcat coaches combined (159).
THE REST OF THE STAFF:Awarded the title of associate head coach during the summer of 1998, Denise Dove Ianello (Northern Illinois, 1991) is in her eighth year at the UA, functioning as both the team's recruiting coordinator and the perimeter coach. Second-year assistant coach Karen Caires (Cal State Northridge, 1990) works with the perimeter players, assists with scouting and recruiting and directs the Joan Bonvicini Hoop Camp. In his first year at the UA, assistant coach Curtis Loyd (Southern Utah, 1994) is involved with scouting and with coaching the post players.
ARIZONA'S PRACTICE SCHEDULE:Here is the upcoming practice schedule for the Wildcats...
Tues. Feb. 22 4:30-7 p.m. McKale Wed. Feb. 23 OFF Thurs. Feb. 24 4:30-7 p.m. McKale Fri. Feb. 25 2-4:30 p.m. McKale depart for Tempe, 5 p.m. Sat. Feb. 26 at Arizona State, 8 p.m. Wells Fargo Arena Sun. Feb. 27 OFF Mon. Feb. 28 2:45-4:45 p.m. McKale lifting after Tues. Feb. 29 4:30-7 p.m. McKale
TO START OR NOT TO START:Seems that Joan Bonvicini's decision to insert Reshea Bristol into the starting lineup six games ago was a good one. In the six contests since the junior guard entered the lineup, she has averaged 10.5 points, 4.8 rebounds and 4.2 assists per game. During that stretch, she has also hit 42.6 percent from the floor, including 33.3 percent from three-point range, and has shot 81.8 percent from the free throw line.
In the 15 games earlier this year which saw Bristol coming off the bench, she averaged only 6.0 points, 2.9 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game. She shot only 33.3 percent from the floor, 31.3 percent from three-point range, and 75.6 percent from the line.
BY THE NUMBERS:Eighteen of Arizona's wins this year have been by an average of 10 points or more... Each loss has been by an average of 8.6 points per game... The Cats have hit five or more 3-pointers in 16 games this season... Arizona has 20 or more assists in 12 games this year... The Cats have had 10 or more steals in 17 games... Arizona has forced its opponent into 20 or more turnovers in 17 contests, and no opponent has committed less than 14.
GOTTA TAKE CARE OF THE BALL:Arizona has committed an average of 22.6 turnovers per game over the last 10 contests. During that stretch, the Cats have forced opponents into an average of 23.0 turnovers per game.
Arizona had its season high of 29 turnovers at UCLA on Feb. 19, also the UA's highest turnover total since committing 36 at Arizona State on Jan. 17, 1998.
LONG RANGE BOMBING:The Wildcats have hit at least one 3-pointer in 58 consecutive games, dating back to Mar. 5, 1998. Arizona is 10-1 this season when draining six or more three-pointers in a game.
SHAKING THOSE FREE THROW WOES:Arizona was wildly inconsistent from the free throw line during non-conference play this season, hitting only 66.0 percent from the line. During that time-frame, the Cats shot as well as 84 percent (vs. Tennessee Tech) and as poorly as 53.1 percent (vs. Northern Illinois).
Since entering Pac-10 play, the Cats have regained some consistency, and accuracy, from the free throw line. They are shooting 70.5 percent from the stripe against conference opponents.
CRASHING THE BOARDS:Rebounding was a major problem for the Wildcats over the last few years, but they are on an upswing in that area. The UA has out-rebounded or been equal to its opponent in 23 of this season's games. That's a great improvement over last season, when the Cats out-rebounded only seven opponents in all 29 games combined.
BENCH CONTRIBUTIONS:The UA bench has been quite productive this season, contributing an average of 29.4 points per game. The highest point total from the bench so far this year came on Dec. 10 against Texas Southern, when 47 of the UA's 96 points came from the subs.
THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME:During Joan Bonvicini's tenure at Arizona, the Wildcats have posted a 91-40 mark in McKale Center, including a 60-12 record over the last five seasons combined. Arizona has a record of 157-148 on its home court since the 1976-77 season.
STRONG SCHEDULE:Several of the UA's opponents this season are ranked in this week's polls.
UC Santa Barbara is 11th in this week's A.P. poll, while Oklahoma is 18th and UCLA is 24th. Stanford, Oregon, Kansas and Colorado State all received votes for ranking.
In this week's USA Today/ESPN Coaches' poll, UC Santa Barbara is No. 13, Oklahoma is No. 20, UCLA is No. 23 and Kansas is No. 24. Stanford, Oregon, Colorado State, Hawai'i and Oregon State all received votes for ranking.
DUALLY SUCCESSFUL:Ten schools had both their men's and women's basketball teams ranked among the A.P. Top 25 this week. They are Arizona, Duke, Tennessee, Auburn, LSU, Iowa State, Oklahoma, Purdue, Connecticut and Kansas.
80 IS THE MAGIC NUMBER:Seems that the 80-point mark almost always means adding another to the "win" column for the Wildcats. In the 28-year history of Arizona women's basketball, the Cats have posted a 121-16 record when scoring 80 points or more in a game. Under Bonvicini, the Wildcats have gone 81-9 when topping that 80-point plateau.
WE CAN HANDLE THE CLOSE ONES...:Under head coach Joan Bonvicini, the Cats have gone 24-18 in games settled by five points or less, including a 8-4 mark in games settled by one or two points.
...BUT WE REALLY PREFER THE BLOWOUTS:Over the last nine seasons, Bonvicini's Arizona teams have won 50 games by spreads of 20 points or more.
KEYS TO THE WIN:This season, Arizona is... 18-4 when out-rebounding its opponent... 17-1 when shooting better than its opponent from the floor... 18-4 when shooting 40% or better from the field... 17-1 when scoring 70 points or more... 15-2 when committing fewer turnovers than the opponent... 15-4 when three or more players reach double digits in scoring.
CAT SCRATCHES:The Cats are forcing opponents to commit an average of 2.72 more turnovers per game than the UA, the highest ratio in the Pac-10... The Arizona women's basketball program has a 313-394 (.443) all-time record, however it is 117-58 (.669) from 1994 to present... Joan Bonvicini has a 171-90 career record against Pac-10 teams.
ON LOCATION:The Wildcats are 11-2 at home this season, 6-3 in road games and 3-0 in neutral contests. Arizona posted an 11-3 mark at home, was 5-8 on the road and notched a 2-0 record in neutral contests last year.
CHECKING THE RECORD BOOK:Lisa Griffith is the Arizona and the Pac-10 career leader in both three-pointers made (268) and attempted (709). She is in the #6 spot on the UA's top-20 all-time leading scorers' list, with 1,138 career points. She needs only six more points to move into the #5 spot.
Griffith is also on the career top-10 list for games started, coming in at #3 with 103 career starts. She is second on the career steals chart, with 211, and is fifth on the career assists list, with 439.
Felecity Willis is sixth in career three-pointers attempted (183) and is seventh in three-pointers made (51). She is holding down third place on the UA all-time assists chart and is ninth all-time in the Pac-10, with 505 career dishes.
Willis also stands in the #15 spot on the UA all-time scoring list, with 915 career points. She needs 10 more points to move into the #14 spot.
Sophomore forward Elizabeth Pickney stands in fifth place on the UA all-time blocked shots list, with 58.
ARIZONA ON THE TUBE:The Wildcats are currently scheduled to make television appearances for at least two more games...
Sat. Feb. 26 at Arizona St. Fox Sports Net Ariz. 8 p.m. Sat. Mar. 4 Oregon Fox Sports Net 2 p.m.
CATS REGISTER BEST PAC-10 START EVER:Arizona's 9-2 mark through the first 11 games of Pac-10 play was its best start ever in league action. Previously, the UA had never made it through the first 11 conference games with less than three losses.
ACHIEVING 20 WINS:With its defeat of Washington State on Feb. 12, this UA squad became the fastest ever to reach the 20-win mark. No other Wildcat team has ever been able to reach 20 wins in only 23 games.
It was also the earliest in the season that any team has reached 20 wins. The earliest mark previously was set by the 1996-97 squad, which reached the 20-win plateau on Feb. 22.
FELECITY WILLIS NAMED PAC-10 PLAYER OF THE WEEK (Feb. 7):Senior guard Felecity Willis was named the Pacific-10 Conference Women's Basketball Player of the Week for Jan. 31-Feb. 6.
Willis, from Apple Valley, Calif., averaged 11.0 points, 7.5 assists and 2.5 rebounds per game while leading the Cats to their first road sweep of the Oregon schools in 10 years. She shot .455 (5-for-11) from the floor and .833 (10-for-12) from the free throw line over the two games.
In the victory at Oregon, which snapped the Ducks' 19-game home winning streak, Willis scored a season- and game-high 19 points, including 17 in the second half. She dished out a game-high eight assists, leading the Wildcats to their first win in Eugene since 1997. Willis went 7-of-8 from the free throw line over the final 1:20 to seal the 73-66 win. In the victory at Oregon State, she tallied a game-high seven assists to go with three points and three rebounds.
The Player of the Week honor is the first of Willis' career, and the 19th all-time selection for the Wildcats. It is also the first time that Arizona has had four recipients in the same year.
GRIFFITH BECOMES PAC-10 LEADER:On Jan. 30, senior guard Lisa Griffith became the Pac-10 career leader in three-pointers attempted, surpassing former Washington player Jamie Redd's total of 675. Griffith became the Pac-10 career leader in 3-pointers made during the 1998-99 season.
BONVICINI REACHES MILESTONES:With the win over Arizona State on Jan. 30, Arizona head coach Joan Bonvicini earned her 150th win at the UA and 475th win as a head coach.
PICKNEY TOPS 500:Against UCLA on Jan. 20, sophomore forward Elizabeth Pickney became the latest Wildcat to top the 500-point plateau in career scoring.
LISA GRIFFITH NAMED PAC-10 PLAYER OF THE WEEK (Jan. 17):Senior guard Lisa Griffith was named the Pacific-10 Conference Women's Basketball Player of the Week for Jan. 10-16.
Griffith averaged 20.0 points, 4.0 assists, 2.5 steals and 2.0 rebounds per game while leading the Wildcats to their first-ever road sweep of the Washington schools on Jan. 13 and 15. She shot 59.1 percent (13-of-22) from the floor, including a blazing 61.1 percent (11-of-18) from three-point range.
In the win at Washington, Arizona's first victory ever in Seattle, Griffith drained a school-record-tying seven treys en route to a career-high 26 points. She shot 7-of-10 from beyond the arc, marking the first time any Wildcat has hit seven treys in one game since Griffith herself did it twice during the 1996-97 season. In the win over Washington State, she tallied 14 points, four steals and seven assists.
The Player of the Week honor is the second of Griffith's career, and was the 18th all-time selection for Arizona.
CATS EARN FIRST ROAD SWEEP IN WASHINGTON:With wins at Washington State (83-68) on Jan. 13 and at Washington (96-85) on Jan. 15, Arizona completed its first-ever road sweep of the Washington schools. While the Cats had previously been able to defeat Washington State in Pullman, this season's win at Washington was the UA's first in 14 attempts.
A GREAT START:With their victory over California on Jan. 6, the Wildcats tied the 1995-96 team for the best start ever at 12-1.
CATS SET RECORD WITH HOME WIN STREAK:Arizona set a new school record this season with a 15-game home win streak, dating from Jan. 4, 1999, to Jan. 8, 2000. They saw their streak end with a 98-95 loss to Stanford on Jan. 8. The previous long streak was a string of 10 games midway through the 1997-98 season.
NON-CONFERENCE SUCCESS:The Cats went 11-1 in regular season non-conference play this year, their best non-conference mark since the 1995-96 team went 9-0. The 11 victories are the most regular season non-conference wins ever under Joan Bonvicini.
During the 12 non-conference games, the Cats averaged 83.1 points per game and out-scored their opponents by an average of 18 points per game. They shot 48.8 percent from the field, including a blazing 42.3 percent from three-point range. The UA out-rebounded its opponents by an average of 6.2 boards per contest. The Cats also averaged 20.0 assists and 11.0 steals per game, while forcing opponents to commit an average of 22.8 turnovers per game.
CATS TAKE SEELBACH CLASSIC TITLE:Arizona won its third regular-season tournament when it swept through the Seelbach Cardinal Classic in Louisville, Ky., on Dec. 28-29. The Cats had a solid showing in the first round with a 91-61 pounding of Marshall on Dec. 28. Although host team Louisville managed to hang with the UA most of the contest, the Cats pulled out an 80-70 victory in the championship game to take the tournament title.
After averaging 14.0 points and 13.0 rebounds per game over the two contests, Wildcat Tatum Brown was selected the Tournament MVP, her second such honor of the year. Louisville native Angela Lackey was selected to the All-Tournament Team as well, also her second such honor of the season.
GRIFFITH JOINS 1,000-POINT CLUB:With 3:04 left in the first half at Kansas on Dec. 21, senior guard Lisa Griffith knocked down her third three-pointer of the game to become the eighth Wildcat to reach the 1,000-point plateau in career scoring. The last Wildcat to join the 1,000-point club was Griffith's former teammate, Adia Barnes, who reached that mark during the 1996-97 season.
WILDCATS CLAIM TITLE OF INSIGHT.COM BOWL BASKETBALL CLASSIC:After falling in the championship game of the 1998 tournament, Arizona reclaimed the title of its ninth annual Insight.com Bowl Basketball Classic with victories over Texas Southern (96-46) and Indiana (87-70) on Dec. 10-12.
The UA's Tatum Brown was unanimously voted the Tournament Most Valuable Player after averaging 20.5 points, 11.5 rebounds and 2.5 steals over the two games. Angela Lackey was named to the All-Tournament Team, as well.
RECORDS FALLING:Tatum Brown's 11-of-12 shooting performance against Colorado State on Dec. 6 tied the UA single-game record for field goal percentage (.917). It is also a new McKale Center record, breaking the previous mark of 84.6 percent (11-13) set by former UCLA player Denise Curry on Jan. 17, 1981.
Arizona also set a new school record by hitting a sizzling 75.9 (22-29) percent in the first half against UC Santa Barbara on Nov. 30.
BROWN NAMED PAC-10 PLAYER OF THE WEEK (Dec. 6):Senior forward Tatum Brown was named the Pacific-10 Conference Women's Basketball Player of the Week for Nov. 29-Dec. 5. Brown scored a career-high 21 points and grabbed a team-high seven rebounds to lead No. 21 Arizona to an 86-76 upset over No. 15 UC Santa Barbara on Nov. 30. In just 26 minutes of action, she shot 9-for-12 (.750) from the field and 3-for-4 (.750) from the line.
The Player of the Week honor is the first of Brown's career, and the 17th all-time selection. Brown's honor followed Elizabeth Pickney's Player of the Week laurels the previous week, marking the first time in school history that the Wildcats have had back-to-back Pac-10 Players of the Week.
SHOOTING THE LIGHTS OUT:The Cats shot a school-record 75.9 percent (22-29) from the floor in the first half of the UCSB contest on Nov. 30. For the game, they shot 63 percent (34-54), the highest field goal percentage for any team since the school record was set at 64.3 percent (36-56) against Drake on Nov. 25, 1990.
PICKNEY NAMED PAC-10 PLAYER OF THE WEEK (Nov. 29):Elizabeth Pickney was named Pac-10 Player of the Week for Nov. 15-28. Pickney averaged 16.0 points, 6.8 rebounds and 2.3 blocked shots per game in the UA's four straight victories to open the season. She shot a team-high .575 (23-40) from the field and .720 (18-25) from the line during that stretch.
Pickney was named the Tournament MVP at the Hawaiian Regent Wahine Classic, leading Arizona to the team title with three wins. In the tourney, she averaged 18.0 points and 7.3 rebounds per game. The Player of the Week honor was the first of Pickney's career and the 16th all-time selection for Arizona.
SULTANS OF SWAT:The Wildcats racked up nine blocked shots in the contest against Tennessee Tech on Nov. 20. That is the highest single-game block total since the 1985 squad collected 10 at Tennessee-Chattanooga on Jan. 5, 1985. Elizabeth Pickney had five of the UA's blocked shots against Tennessee Tech, a career high for her.
As a team, Arizona collected 20 blocks over the first four game of the year, the highest block total ever over that stretch in any season.
CATS TAKE CHAMPIONSHIP AT HAWAIIAN REGENT WAHINE CLASSIC:The Wildcats swept through three games in Honolulu on Nov. 19-21 to take the title at the Hawaiian Regent Wahine Classic, hosted by the University of Hawai'i.
Arizona garnered victories over Oklahoma (75-59), Tennessee Tech (87-71) and host team Hawai'i (86-73) to open the 1999-2000 season with a perfect 3-0 mark.
Elizabeth Pickney averaged 18.0 points and 7.3 rebounds per game for the Cats and was the overwhelming favorite for tournament Most Valuable Player laurels. Felecity Willis and Tatum Brown were named to the All-Tournament Team, as well.
DOVE IANELLO AMONG TOP ASSISTANTS:In a survey of head women's coaches conducted by the Women's Basketball Journal last fall, UA associate head coach Denise Dove Ianello received votes for consideration as one of the top assistant coaches in the country.
FUTURE WILDCATS:On the first day of the early signing period (Nov. 10), Arizona inked a trio of high school recruits from the state of California. The signees were 5-10 guard Candice Allen (Ontario, CA/Ayala HS), 5-7 guard Aimee Grzyb (San Jose, CA/Archbishop Mitty HS) and 6-3 forward Veranda James (Pomona, CA/Ganesha HS).
WHAT THE COACHES THINK:Here is the predicted order of finish for the Pac-10 this season, according to the league's coaches...
1. UCLA 6. Washington 2. Oregon 7. USC 3. Stanford 8. Oregon State 4. ARIZONA 9. California 5. Arizona State 10. Washington State The Pac-10 media also picked Arizona to finish fourth in the league standings this year.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS:For the third year in a row, the Wildcats earned a preseason national ranking. The Cats were ranked 25th in the Associated Press Preseason Top 25, and they were 24th in the USA Today/ESPN Coaches' Preseason Top 25.
The Wildcats were ranked among the top 25 teams in five different "unofficial" preseason polls this fall. The UA's highest ranking in these polls was 13th by Women's Basketball magazine and the lowest was 22nd by both Street & Smith's and the Basketball News Report.
Angela Lackey earned preseason third team All-America honors from Lindy's College Basketball and honorable mention All-America laurels from Street & Smith's College Basketball.
1998-99 IN REVIEW:Despite losing the squad's only two seniors before the season ever started, the very young 1998-99 Wildcats held their own and came up with an 18-11 overall record and went 12-6 in the Pac-10 to finish in fourth place.
The Cats faced a rough non-conference schedule that featured three teams which spent most of the season among the top four in the national rankings. Arizona went 5-4 against those non-conference opponents, with quality losses to Purdue, Louisiana Tech and Colorado State and a big road win over UC Santa Barbara.
That tough early slate prepared the Cats for a season of Pac-10 play which showed more parity than it has in years. After getting off to a rocky 1-3 start in league play, the Cats rebounded to finish the season 11-3, with wins over Pac-10 co-champion Oregon and over perennial power Stanford.
The Wildcats then received their third consecutive berth in the NCAA Tournament, earning a #6 seed in the Midwest Region. In Piscataway, N.J., Arizona faced NCAA tourney veteran Florida in the first round of play and defeated the Gators, 87-84, in overtime to move on to the second round for the third straight year. The Cats then took on host Rutgers, only to end the season on a sour note, falling to the Scarlet Knights, 90-47.
For the season, Arizona had its most balanced offense in five years, with four players averaging in double digits in scoring, and ended its season by winning 12 of its final 16 contests. The Cats broke or tied 13 school records on the year, including setting new marks in single season free throws made (520) and blocked shots (88).
With 14.4 points per game, Angela Lackey led four Wildcats averaging in double digits in scoring. Felecity Willis came in second with her 12.1 ppg scoring average, followed closely by Elizabeth Pickney at 11.4 ppg. Pickney was the team's top rebounder, with 5.8 per game, while Willis was the team's assists leader, averaging 5.5 apg. Lackey was second in rebounding with 5.4 rpg, and Reshea Bristol posted 11.4 points and 4.4 rebounds per game.


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"Grey's Anatomy" season 10 episode 17 is one that fans won't want to miss. It looks like Owen and Christina are going to deal with some drama. It is obvious he still wants to be with her. On March 21, Wet Paint shared spoilers about this upcoming episode of the show.
In this episode, he will tell her that they should be together. That is obviously what he wants from her. It doesn't look like she will decide that she wants the same thing though. One image on the preview shows her with grey hair and is probably her imagining what her life would be like with or without Owen in it when she is older.
It will even go so far that Owen asks Christina to marry him again. More than likely she is going to say no to this one. It has already been revealed that actress Sandra Oh is leaving the show.
New episodes of "Grey's Anatomy" are on Thursday nights on ABC.
Please like Mandy Robinson on Facebook to stay up to date on the latest news.


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Joan Cusack plays Joan Gallagher, a Chicago high school teacher who is dating nice-guy banker Jake (Kyle Chandler).
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