Hello! Is there anyone out there?

Sorry, folks. 2120 West is still very much alive, but with AP season heating up, it’s been back-burnered for the last few months. That’s just an explanation. Not an excuse.

We’re going to work hard to bring you some new content before the school year is out, and then a few additions over the summer, but rest assured that there is a new plan in the works to make sure that the 2010-2011 school year will see a regular flow of new fiction, poetry, and art.

Stay with us. We still love you. Don’t leave. We can change.

Sunset’s Academic Decathlon team is under the gun. Their regional competition is in less than two months, and everyone on the team has to prepare a 4-minute speech on a topic of their choosing.

Here’s the thing: the speech judges have had it with all the usual stuff. No one wants to hear another “My Hero” speech or “A Time When I Was a Leader.”

We need creative ideas. In the past, Decathletes have given speeches about imaginary friends where they were regularly interrupted by their imaginary friends, and speeches in favor of global warming, because polar bears are evil and deserve to die.

We need more of that kind of gold. If you have exciting and creative ideas for speech topics, please post them in the comments below. If a Decathlete decides to prepare a speech on your topic, I’ll give you Honorable Mention credit at the end of the six weeks. If the Decathlete wins a medal at the regional competition with your speech idea, I’ll buy you a pony (or lunch).

GO!

There were some great comments on the blog last six weeks, but some stood out above the rest as particularly insightful, funny, well-considered, or otherwise interesting.

First, the Honorable Mentions:

Celinda Reyes, Tracey Chavez, Kristen Millsap, Kevin Pacheco, and Victoria Cadena all had fine things to say on the subject of MONSTERS!

Valerie Garcia and Ricky Rodriguez both had hilarious entries in the Lindsey Lit Limerick Extravaganza. And Ricky took the Gold Star award (brought to you by Carl’s Jr.) for the following limerick:

You teach but you constantly fail
Our brains you leave scrambled and frail
there are teachers quite few
that teach worse-r than you
Half your students end up in jail.

Fantastic work. Continue to check in with the blog and keep those amazing comments coming.

So I need some honest input on the direction of the blog.

2120 West began purely as an online version of Sunset High School’s literary magazine, and this year I have toyed with expanding it’s mission to include online journals and discussions for my AP Literature class. The problem is, I don’t know how valuable those discussions have been for anybody.

So, in thinking of the future of 2120 West, I’m thinking of the past. Give me your opinion. Should 2120 West return to it’s roots as a student literature and art blog, removing the discussion topic component, or should we stay the course? Removing the discussion topic component would, of course, mean removing that component from the grade in AP lit as well.

Let me know.

-Lindsey

To all of you faithful out there who are still keeping up with us here at 2120 West: you’ve undoubtedly noticed that we’ve lost a little bit steam in the past few months. There is no one to blame but myself, the dear old editor.

All of that is going to change. 2120 west is going to get the boilers boiling again very soon.

We’ll be readjusting and reorganizing a bit as we go in to the summer semi-hiatus. Expect that with a new school year, a new crop of students, and a refreshed editor, we’ll be ready to take the world by storm in September. There will be a much more steady output of new literature and art, and possibly some new features as well.

That said, summer vacation is almost upon us. In the coming months, you can expect only a few new posts, but I also intend to sweeten the deal with some classic art and literature from my tenure as faculty adviser of the Bison Bits print magazine.

Enjoy, and thanks for reading.

-Lindsey

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan

Every moment reading this book was spent wavering between abject guilt and self-righteous fervor. Neither one of those is a particularly healthy emotion, but the moments between those two extremes, feeling more or less content and moved, made this, in sum, a satisfying read.

Pollan subtitles the book An Eater’s Manifesto and it reads very much like one. If you’ve read any of his previous books, in particular The Omnivore’s Dilemma you might be expecting a work of hard-hitting food science journalism. In Defense of Food is not that. It reads like a call to action, a subversive demand for non-violent anti-nutritionist, anti-industry revolution (fought with forks and wallets). This revolution’s battle cry: “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.” The book is essentially a 200-page, persuasive unpacking of that slogan.

This is a sermon intended, I think, to preach to the choir. People who care about and are interested in food, culture, health, the environment, and all that jazz are going to be given a platform to stand on and yell from. Also, possibly, if they’ve strayed a bit in to those dreaded middle isles of the supermarket, the ones that contain all of the packaged, processed edible food-like products, this book might put them back on the path toward farmer’s market and CSA righteousness. People who eat fast food and things prepared in a microwaveable box, will likely dismiss this book as radical flim-flam, or even anti-scientific.

I’m mostly in the former camp myself, so viva la revolucion!

View all my reviews on Goodreads.com.

Welcome back to Sunset High School and 2120 West, the literature and art blog of Sunset High School.

For those of you that may be new to us, 2120 West highlights student-created literature and art, and serves as a forum for creativity in the public education setting, and now that school is back in session we want to get back at it. Feel free to look around. Stay awhile, and if you’re a creative person who wants to be a part of the blog, check out our submissions page and learn how to become a contributor.

Feel free to contact Mr. Lindsey, the faculty sponsor and blog editor, with any questions or comments.

-Lindsey

We offer our deepest sympathies to the family of Mr. Loran DeBerry and to all of those who came to know him as a teacher, mentor, and friend. He was a respected colleague and gifted instructor who will be greatly missed.