the moving castle

was this really the best they could do?

2012-01-19T21:26:00.000-08:00

I'm no longer watching Glee; it got too absurd, too annoying, too inconsistent for me to handle any longer. I'm still very fond of Chris Colfer, however, and his character Kurt, and so I was anxious when I heard that he was publishing a work of fiction for younger readers. Colfer's a talented and smart kid, but he's also very young, and whoever is bringing out his book is obviously capitalizing on his popularity on Glee. This doesn't mean it can't be a good book, or won't be, but I'm dubious (and, because I like Chris Colfer, this dubiousness brings with it a lot of concern - I want him to succeed, I'm just doubtful).

At any rate, this week the cover image and publication date were released. Little, Brown moved up the release date - originally scheduled for 7 August, the book will now be out on 17 July (incidentally, Disneyland's birthday, for those keeping track).

The moment I saw this, I felt confused, and it took my brain a moment to register that I was looking at the image of Colfer's new book. Then I went straight to google image, and looked up John Stephens's The Emerald Atlas.

Clearly, not identical, but rather similar just the same, no? Focus especially on the landscape - the castle, the backdrop of the child figures. One is green hills, the other rocky waterfalls, but again - very, very similar.

I don't think this is a rip-off, not at all, but it did make me ask: Is this really the best they could do? Little, Brown couldn't design a better - or rather, more original - cover?
Shows a decided lack of imagination. Little Brown, your designers are not working to their full potential. I hope.

John & Hank Green [should] Take Over the World; or, A Modest Proposal

2012-01-03T00:05:00.000-08:00

The final part in my three-part series on the awesome power of Nerdfighteria and its benevolent "rulers," John and Hank Green (who aren't rulers, really, since it's more of a collective community, but they are a central magnetic force drawing in the nerds). I'm sure the world has been waiting eagerly for this long-delayed final post; it's a long one, so make yourself comfy.

First, a tiny update: a few days ago, John Green tweeted that the Nerdfighter group on kiva.org has now loaned over $150,000 in microloans. I'm not sure exactly when the numbers here started to boom, but it's been in the last six months or so. Again, a reminder that the majority of Nerdfighteria are young people - say, under 21 years old.

On to the Problem: When I was in high school, in my senior year I got interested in students' rights as a result of an amazing history teacher and the appallingly thwarted efforts of some friends to form a public Gay-Straight Alliance. For a long while thereafter, I seriously considered attending law school, with an eye on either civil rights or student/young person-related law. Obviously, law school went by the wayside, but for any number of reasons - including the fact that I specialize in children's and youth culture - I'm still quite interested in the plight of young people.

In some ways, this is a First World Problem: the disenfranchisement of under-21s (or even under-25s) is not quite on par with sub-saharan starvation crises, with southeast Asian political fighting, with South American paramilitary activity. At the same time, if we judged every cause by its relation to more dire causes, we'd be stalled out with inertia. Just because something is a First World Problem doesn't make it not a problem. Perfectability of society is a thing that should belong to all people, regardless of where they live.

Young people ARE disenfranchised. They are experiencing unemployment at higher rates than the general population, sometimes by as many as 3 or 4 times .
Young people under the age of 18 pay taxes - sales tax, and if they DO have jobs, in the form of payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security. I started working at a Hallmark shop in a mall when I was 16 - I worked there for more than two years. In that time, I paid in hundreds, if not thousands, to Medicare and Social Security, yet I had absolutely NO voice in how that money was regulated, disbursed, etc. Then, as now, there was a fair amount of political chatter about making changes to both programs; chatter I followed, because I was and am a nerd, but which I was not able to participate in, despite being an American worker paying taxes. This - taxation without representation - is one of the biggest forms of disenfranchisement that under-18s face, and I think it's a significant one. After all, Taxation Without Representation was one of the central causes of the American Revolution, was it not? [debatable, but in popular mythology, still important]

Then we get to other issues: the drinking age, which weirdly supercedes the age at which one is a legal citizen. The arguments for lowering the drinking age to the age of legal citizenship (i.e., age 18) are various, but one I find especially compelling is that it could creation an altered culture around drinking, reducing things like alcohol poisoning and alcohol abuse among teenagers and college students.
The linkage of college financial aid to male enrollment in Selective Service (which is, frankly, creepy and a kind of forced enscription).

The very large, and increasingly more troubling, problems of student loan debt - partially highlighted through the work of the Occupy protesters - is another area of disenfranchisement for young people.

Then there's the fact that the United States, alone with Somalia, refused to sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Amnesty International includes this very telling explanation of Somalia's failure to sign: "Somalia currently does not have the governmental capacity to ratify an international treaty at this time."
Primary objections include fears that the Convention would reduce parental authority, lead to lots of abortions, and result in children making their own (!) choices about religion. Two other issues loom in the background of the Convention: child soldiers (yes, weirdly enough: evidently, American 17-year-olds, who are legally children in the view of the convention, can join the US military) and capital punishment for juveniles.

This leads directly to the next item on the disenfranchised list: trial, imprisonment, and sentencing of minors as adults. This is an issue I feel very, very, very strongly about; regardless of crime, I do not feel any child (even a 17-year-old) should be tried as an adult. I would completely support altering penal codes to deal with juvenile offenders; at the moment, it's an all-or-nothing system, which frees teenage criminals when they reach majority, or which treats 12-year-olds like 45-year-olds in the eyes of the law. Neither is satisfactory.

A much smaller issue, but one I think is representative in some important ways of the way the issues of younger people are simply ignored, is the Car-Rental Dilemma. Even if you're the safest driver on earth, if you're under 25, you must pay a premium (usually a very high premium) if you want to rent a car. I have never been able to understand how this isn't illegal discrimination (and I've researched it at some length, but still my brain refuses to process it).

So what is the solution? What's the Proposal?

A powerful advocacy group. A lobbying and activist group on par with the AARP - the American Association of Retired Persons. Membership in that group is essentially automatic. I would model my group broadly after the AARP. I might even borrow their acronymic principle: Why not the American Association of Young People, the AAYP?

One of the criticisms of Kids These Days is their political apathy. I don't see this; most of the younger people I come in contact with do have at least a thin thread of interest or passion about some aspect of political and social life. They're just so thoroughly disenfranchised that they don't exert themselves. In the parlance of one of my favorite podcasters (Merlin Mann), young people have no skin in the game. In fact, they're excluded from the game almost entirely. They want to play, but no one's giving them a leg up.

I dislike, very strongly, the way lobbying operates in American government. I'd love to see that changed dramatically. I don't think this will happen any time soon. Until such a time when powerful lobbies aren't needed, I think it's vital that young people have one. The AARP is strong. It is one potent group of voters. There may not be as many young people voting - I'll limit my group to, say, ages 25 and under - but there are still a lot of them.

And no one speaks for them.
No one in any position of real political efficacy gives one shake of a dead rat's tail about the needs and wants of that age group. And I think that needs to change. The way to make it change is to form a group so numerous and vocal - and let's face it, financially strong - that the media, then the politicians, must pay attention to it.

This is where John and Hank Green come in. They have a large and broad platform from which to speak. John has over a million followers on Twitter. The two have repeatedly been able to marshal the forces of Nerdfighteria to undertake any number of causes, including lending and giving literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes, this is small potatoes in the context of larger political contributions, but I would argue that it represents a much larger "sacrifice" or percentage of income given than one sees in the population at large.

I've been daydreaming about my AAYP for years - ever since high school, when our GSA was reduced to dust, when I learned about PACs, when my folks explained to me how much power the AARP had. One of my huge stumbling blocks, when I try to think how such an organization would be formed, is the need for strongly magnetic, charismatic leadership that would draw in young people. A kind of celebrity spokesperson(or persons), but ones genuinely and truly committed to the cause of increasing the power and influence and respect for young people in this country. There aren't many of these sorts of people in the pages of People magazine.
But John and Hank Green are precisely the kind of people who would work beautifully as loci for a young people's movement. Both are intelligent and very articulate; they manage to be serious and funny simultaneously. They're able to compress information into tidy short packets or nuggets; they can do soundbites and catchphrases like nobody's business. They've clearly mastered the use of the Internet for social networking, charitable work, and general community-building. Both have connections in other fields: John, of course, in the world of books - teachers, librarians, publishing, and Hank in science and entrepreneurship. Those teachers and librarians are an invaluable resource, because they're working with a good portion of the young people in question, and a great many are committed to the welfare and well-being of young people. Yes, they're nerds, but they are also able to speak across a range of nerd-groups: readers, artists, scientists, musicians, computer geeks, video-game-enthusiasts, lego nerds, sports fans (yes. John Green maintains a twitter account for his commentary on sports - @sportswithjohn). They already stage an annual con.

I don't think for one moment that they should be the driving force behind this - essentially, I would pick them as the networking hub. Young people ought to run the show - there's plenty of unemployed, or underemployed, college graduates out there who could do a great job of branding, marketing, coordinating, doing whatever it is one needs to do to set up an advocacy organization. Clearly, older people - especially those with experience in such things - would be needed as well, but I would want the heart of the organization to be younger people. The core board and directorate would be largely under term limits - say four years. Then new folks would come in. You'd have to have some unchanging people, of course, for continuity, but keeping the main players both fresh and young would ensure new ideas and relevance - if you continually recruit young people into the organization, you'll always have people on hand who are totally up-to-date with the current state of the younger world.

I just love the idea of young people being represented more thoroughly in the halls of power. Can you imagine a group tasked with advocating for young people taking on issues relating to education? or student loans? I am pretty sure there was no one at the table looking out for 22-year-old recent graduates when any and all student loan regulation was put in place.

It would be a lovely thing to give power to the young people. AAYP - or whatever you want to call it - for and by the young people of America - it would be a glorious revolution.

boys who want to dance

2011-12-31T23:30:00.000-08:00

Over the winter break, I went home where there is cable television. Somehow, my mother and I ended up watching - late at night - part of a marathon of the execrable "Toddlers & Tiaras."
The show is one I have seen once or twice before; when it first appeared, I made a point of seeing an episode or two, since it falls right within my purview as a person interested in representations of children (and sexuality, and exploitation of children, and on and on).

A kind of slack-jawed, horrified inertia kept us watching through glitz-girl tantrum after tantrum, but the remote was poised to switch it off when a new episode came on. But hold that thought! Because this upcoming show includes a previously-unseen entity in the show: a Pageant Prince.

The boy in question is 7-year-old Brock, from podunk-nowhere, and he is fabulous (in every sense of that word). Brock just loves to dance - he says he's a diva, he loves the sparkle, he has two American Girl dolls who are his friends when no real friends are around (he brings the dolls to at least this one glitz pageant). He shows off some fierce jazz hands, and informs the camera that he wants to go on Broadway.
His mom - despite the fact that she dresses up Brock's very small sister in those heinous pageant dresses and makeup - seems to be great. She says that she and his father support Brock 100% (I wish we could see the father, to be honest). This - the dancer, the pageant boy, the drama queen who loves the spotlight - is Brock, his mother tells us; it's who he is and they love him, and anyone who has a problem - well, they don't need to be around us.

Of course most of the clips of the mom's interview are defensive-seeming, especially all strung together; the show makes it pretty clear that Brock is "unusual," that we are seeing something different that needs to be explained and justified in great detail. Yet we also see Brock onstage, being introduced (he's the only boy in the entire pageant) in a suit with sparkly lapels, and then dancing - his real passion is dance, and his mom tells us his routines are partly planned, partly improvised. Watching him, in black dance pants and a red sparkly tanktop, dancing surprisingly expertly (most of the "toddlers" are rather dreadfully awkward and stilted in their own dancing), my mom said: "he's the most natural of all of them. He's probably the happiest of all those kids, too."

And I think she's right. The pageants are kind of horrifying in eight thousand ways - and the way they sexualize very little girls is just one of those ways - but for Brock, they seem to function very differently. Instead of transforming, as the girls seem to, from fairly normal, un-forced, natural little kid to tarted-up performing monkey, for Brock, the pageant seems to be the place where he gets to be not just himself, but rewarded and applauded for being himself. He wins as pageant King, of course, because he's the only boy competing for the title, but he ALSO wins in the overall pageant categories: he gets Best Personality.

I don't know how long little boys can compete in pageants. I don't know at what point Brock's love of dancing will be overpowered by social and cultural disapproval; the episode mentions that he is teased for doing dance. In another ten years, or six years, or four years, I hope Brock is still dancing and being himself, however that manifests, and that his folks are still 100% behind him. But I also know that Brock and his family appear to live in a midwestern, rural-ish town - places not known for being especially welcoming of any kind of deviation from gender norms or sexuality.

Watching Brock was a delight, and it was also a reminder of why I want to do the dissertation I'm struggling to write and complete. The world I live in is pretty well-packed with boy dancers and queer-friendly folks and lesbians and effeminate men; it can be easy for the urgency to fade from my project. And it isn't that I think my dissertation will make the world safe for little boys who want to dance (although if it did! if it could!), but my dissertation will allow me to teach ranks and ranks of undergrads that little boys who want to dance are pretty great. And that difference doesn't, and shouldn't, imply hierarchy.

I'm trying to write a conference paper proposal about my Mister Rogers' Neighborhood work, and I'm playing around with some of my ideas about representations of masculinities. And, I think because of seeing Brock, I am thinking more centrally about that episode (#1484) in which Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swann meets Mr Rogers at Swann's dance studio. Because Lynn Swann, football hero extraordinaire, also danced ballet. And had danced ballet for years and years. He arrives at the studio in his football gear, then removes it and explains the padding and protective gear; then, in black dance pants and a tshirt, begins working on a routine with the other dancers in the studio, under the watchful eye of a rather flamboyant ballet master. Meanwhile, Mister Rogers is telling us at home how wonderful it all is. And Lynn Swann is talking about how much he enjoys dancing, and how it has also helped him with his football.

This episode aired in 1981.
Thirty years later, poor Brock's mom is still having to explain her little boy's love of dance and glitz and sparkle, and his love of dress-up (he was Dorothy for halloween three years in a row, and tells us "I think I was a pretty cute Dorothy" [note: he was. there are photos]).

Mister Rogers worked very, very hard to make the world safe for little boys who want to dance. And I need to work very, very hard to make sure the world remembers that now; I need to work very, very hard to make sure that this aspect of Mister Rogers' legacy is remembered AND continued.

syllabus decision-making

2011-12-11T00:07:00.000-08:00

I finally got my spring teaching assignment confirmed, a couple of weeks ago (right before thanksgiving, I think). Two sections of Introduction to Literature, each a long night class that meets once a week. This is a gift of a schedule, and I need to work it hard and rip through my dissertation. Truly.

I've learned lessons from my efforts at teaching Intro to Lit this fall. I think I approached it from a far too meta-level for the kind of students I had (mostly hard science majors, non-readers, skeptics of literary criticism). This spring, we're just going to read a whole slew of books.
Because the class only meets once a week, I have to make my choices even more carefully than usual. The once-a-week class can go fantastically well (cf fall 2009, fall 2008) or a bit draggy (cf fall 2007).

I'd been kicking around the "travel/geography" idea for awhile, and finally mentioned it to friends on facebook, who roundly approved the idea. I'm hoping this theme will help me articulate and develop some of my geography/place ideas for the dissertation, but more than that, it's a theme that allows me to include a very broad swath of texts, including some I adore.

Books I am determined to teach:

Gulliver's Travels - at least parts 1 & 4 (Lilliput and the land of the Yahoos)
Around the World in 80 Days, which I am currently reading for the first time (and giggling periodically, because I keep being reminded that my initial introduction to the text was as a very small child watching Muppet Babies, when Phileas Frogg - aka Kermit - was making a similar trip)

Neverwhere (Gaiman)
Un Lun Dun - because I want to teach China Mieville whenever I can

Mopsa the Fairy (Ingelow)
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland...

On the Road (Kerouac! My old beloved Kerouac! I never thought I'd be teaching a Kerouac novel. Ever)

Then we reach the tentatives:
The Tempest (I really should include a play)
A Moveable Feast (not sure I can do it justice, to be frank)

some kind of science fiction - maybe a handful of short stories? - I'd like to include space travel. Bradbury's "Mars is Heaven!" could be interesting (and terrifying). I just got, from the library, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, which may end up useful. I haven't started it yet; I'm working on Around the World, which is such an odd little book. It also satisfies by desire to have something that at least briefly mentions colonialist enterprises, and since there are some significant passages in both British India and non-British-controlled India, it'll work.

some kind of excerpt from Bachelard's Poetics of Space

I ought to include some poetry, but I feel so off my game when it comes to poetry. I can't think of much poetry that works with my theme, either - Eliot's Wasteland, but I KNOW I can't teach that.

I have to remind myself not to add too much children's/YA lit, though of course that's where I'm most at home. One of the unfortunate aspects of teaching is that I'm always fighting the last war; I adapt my upcoming class based on the class I had most recently. This occasionally produces very good results, or at least interesting ones, but sometimes it backfires completely. Still, I am going forward with the assumption that my students will be skeptical of the literary merits of any book(s) written for younger readers, so I'm trying to keep a good balance.
I also need to not include Diana Wynne Jones on my syllabus, though I always want to. I've had far too many failures teaching her books (Howl's Moving Castle excepted - that almost always gets good reception), and I just can't take it anymore. A particularly nasty student comment (on course evaluations) about Jones very nearly made me cry, and I am not going to be the one to cast pearls before swine. At least not until I recover from the experience of trying to teach The Merlin Conspiracy.
[note: I am reasonably thick-skinned about my evals. I can't please everyone, and so naturally I will have some less-than-stellar comments. I don't take it especially personally. I have never been really upset by anything in my evaluations until I read the student remark about Jones. THAT was the single most upsetting thing that has ever been written in my evaluations.]

I can't quite get excited about the new semester until I've finished the old one, and that won't happen for another week or so. Grades are due on 20 December, so until then I'll be reading drafts, answering questions from students, calculating percentages, and reading finals.

Then I can start being excited about travel/geography books.

breaking through, or: the challenges of teaching literature

2011-11-14T22:58:00.000-08:00

I'm not teaching children's/YA lit classes this year, for the first time in more than two years. Of course I write my syllabi to play to my strengths, and so I include Alice and Peter Pan, which is always a delight to teach because it's just so weird.

Today was the last day of Peter Pan discussion, and, as often happens, students expressed some of the usual claims against critical interpretation. One student referred to the text as a "fairy tale," which is technically inaccurate but theoretically quite interesting; "myth" might be a better term, since Peter is a mythic character, to himself and everyone else. I tend to think somewhat strictly about the definition of a fairy tale; there's a category of story, with character types and plot structures of its own, that comprises fairy tales, and anything else must fit into some other category. But what if I expand my definition? What might we get if we play around with the idea of "fairy tale," not just as a formal designation but as a kind of reception practice? I think there's something there, though I'm not sure what.

One of the biggest challenges in teaching literature to non-lit students, to non-majors, to non-readers, is convincing them of the value of critical interpretation. Most of my students throughout my teaching have been non-majors; they've been psych majors, and biology and engineering, and political science, and business, and nursing, and a few rare history majors. I get a scattering of writing majors as well, but their approach to reading literature also tends to have its own bias; they read, in part anyway, to learn and study their craft. This can make for staggeringly good class discussion, as when one writing major pointed out a strange flaw in Sarah Dessen's Someone Like You. This book, he said, has no adjectives. He pointed to a passage that recounts the protagonist's birthday; she tells us she received "a keychain" from her best friend. The writing student said: "just a keychain? why not a keychain shaped like a pig? or a joke keychain? it's a detail - the mention of the keychain - that totally fails to tell us anything about any of the characters."
This launched us on a discussion of the Missing Adjectives in the book, and how that had a kind of flattening effect - it was great.
Other writers get wrapped up in defending the intention and prerogatives of the author no matter what; those often stem from a writer's own anxiety about her work being mis-read, misunderstood. This I can appreciate, but is also a critical and interpretive dead end.
But the overwhelming criticism - the biggest block I have to chip away at - is the idea that the texts are "just stories. just entertainment. just a kid's book."
In discussing Peter Pan in class, I asked the class something to the effect of "how do we feel about Peter's fate, his never-growing-up-ness, by the end of the novel? Is it good, bad, neutral?"
Several people responded with varying answers (and how I love when they have diverse reactions), and one said "it's not like he's a real person." She seemed to be suggesting that this unrealness made answering my initial question almost moot: how can you form an opinion, or an emotional reaction, about a person who doesn't exist?
In some ways, it's not a bad question, though for me as a reader it's both frustrating and baffling. But I think my bafflement is a mirror image of that (and other) student's frustration. My sense of why read, why books, why stories, has so many facets and many of them have to do precisely with my opinions and emotional reactions to nonexistent people. I read for plot and pleasure, of course, but my brain also runs a kind of critical background scan all the while, thinking about representations of women and children and play and reading and toys and so on. For me it makes almost NO sense - in an almost-literal way - to not do this kind of critical reading. But for today's student (and many like her who have expressed identical positions), I think her worldview, her brain, is calibrated in such a way that it makes NO sense to do that kind of critical reading.
It's a really fundamental difference in how one sees reading and story. Obviously, I'm terribly biased and think that my way is the right/best way, but this isn't a question with right or best answers. In the way that I think and see in stories and texts, other people think and see in numbers or logic patterns or mechanized forms. I'm essentially incapable of thinking in numbers, and I shook off my mathematical training as quickly as I could (after junior year of high school, I let it all slide out of my mind). For other people, including students like these, they did that with their english classes.

The difference, I think, comes in how we handle being confronted with the opposite of our way of thinking. I sulked through math classes, and repeatedly asked my parents why such a hideous thing was being inflicted upon me, since it clearly had no practical application (don't know why I was a math-only utilitarian, but there it is). My parents' answer: it's training different parts of your brain.
This is actually an excellent answer, possibly the only answer, to why am I being forced to learn/do this?
It was not satisfying to me as a 15-year-old, but even fairly early on in college, once the book-nerd part of my brain was being trained effectively for the first time ever, I began to understand and appreciate the idea of math training.
If I got plunked into a math class of some kind, I don't think I'd put up a wall of resistance. I wouldn't, though I'd be tempted, to pull a Calvin & Hobbes "math atheist" move. Being a hippie-dippy liberal-artist literature nerd has the effect of making me open to multiple interpretations, lots of possibilities, to the idea that there are no hierarchies or essential right/wrong, good/bad binaries.
But science-oriented people often function in the opposite way. They do see hierarchies and right and wrong binaries. These are the students who ask, at the end of a class, "so what DOES this book mean?" as if there was one simple answer. I always turn that question back to them, and sometimes I can see their frustration: "you're the teacher, why won't you just tell me the answer?!"
And maybe, as a corollary, their minds work in such a way that if there is no answer (no right answer), then that thing loses a lot of its meaning and value. So a text becomes "just a story," just a thing with no intrinsic value, a thing that is good or useful only for the length of time it takes to read. Once you set the book down, it's a done thing; it's used, used up, and you'd no more spend time pondering it than you would spend examining a grubby paper towel.

So the challenge then becomes how can you break through that, even for a bit, even just for a semester? How can you bring those students to a position where they are at least willing to start from the belief that there IS more than a story?

I wonder, sometimes, at the students who come in on day one, and leave on the final day, firmly believing that it's just a story. They must feel they've wasted their time terribly. But it also makes me wonder what is at stake for them; what is the fear/anxiety/resistance an expression of? What would it mean for them to accept the multiplicity of meanings, the idea that books can move people, that they can have an affect and an effect, that they can reflect and shape cultures?
Many of these "resistant" students are quite bright; they're not apathetic slackers. Very often, they're extremely smart and good at their fields - the engineers, the pre-med kids, the math majors, etc. So I can't chalk up their resistance to a lack of intellectual ability, or even a lack of curiosity.

Is it that for them to accept that their are many truths, and no fixed Truth, is as horrifying as it would be for me to accept that there is just a fixed Truth?

If this is the case, then, how do I negotiate some kind of middle way, some path that isn't horrifying to either of us?

It's a complicated question, and though my kneejerk reaction is to simply say: Well, this is a disciplinary issue; in literature, it's truths not Truth, and you'll just have to suck it up.
But then I think: how would I feel, dropped into a class where my instructor was insisting that it's Truth, not truths?

I do wonder how other instructors deal with this; how do you go about convincing those devout unbelievers that literature has value at many levels?

I Can't Stop Thinking About September

2011-08-24T19:55:00.000-07:00

This summer I read Catherynne Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making. (link to my very brief Goodreads review & Goodreads page for the novel)
I can't remember how or where I first heard of it, though I suspect it was from one of the always-on-top-of-things members of my listserv. I did hear a little bit of buzz about the book, though, so I put in a hold request at my public library and waited for the book to show up.
When I got it, I had more than a little trepidation. Whimsical fairyland stories are becoming a dime a dozen, and it's so easy to get it wrong. And a bad fairyland story is - really bad. Lots of authors think they're either playing with, or paying homage to, old-school fairyland stories when really they're just copying them over, badly. It's not a form of flattery; it's a form of cheap failure.

Valente's book started off promisingly, and got better all along. The downright weirdness of her Fairyland appeals strongly to my own sense of weirdness, as well as my familiarity with the equally weird nineteenth-century fairy stories of writers like Jean Ingelow and Juliana Ewing. Valente knows her Fairyland(s) - she's got wyverns and witches and guardians and magical folk of all kinds populating the place. She also throws in twists and wrenches that both defamiliarize Fairyland and create it anew (the polygamous witches are just the start, really).
And it is in the defamiliarizing of Fairyland that I think this book makes its magic. We all already know fairylands of many kinds: we know Wonderland, Neverland, we know Oz, we know Faerie, we know the Back of the North Wind, the back of beyond, the Almost Anywheres, the nearly-generic Fairylands that crop up all over the place. We know Narnia, and Middle Earth, and the Magic City, and Nowhere and the North Pole. Even the most carefully crafted, intricately detailed fairylands have a family resemblance to each other, and many more contemporary fantasy lands seem to be simple variations on the same family face.
But Fairyland, circumnavigated by Valente (and September), manages to take what we know and feel comfortable with, and turn it that quarter- or half-rotation to make it startlingly, or just delightfully, new. The herds of migrating velocipedes. The town made entirely of fabrics. The magical university town. The sentient lamp and shoes. The hybrid Wyverary. The weird temporal twists and turns - because time, in Fairyland (as everywhere else, really) is a strange thing. The gorgeously-named Leopard of Little Breezes.
I admit to feeling confounded by questions of audience and address - Valente has written a quasi-19th-century children's book for grownups (her narrator at least once clearly indicates an adult audience). But in great 19th century fantasy form, Valente has also managed to make these kinds of questions practically irrelevant, interesting to the scholar of children's literature or narratology, but for the casual reader, essentially immaterial.
I need to read the book again; I was tempted to keep it longer from the library, for a second reading, but the waiting list was long, and I had another pile of new titles to work through, so I took this one back. In all likelihood, I will end up teaching it, or just buying it, within the next few months. I'm desperately eager for the second installment of the Fairyland books; September's adventures are not at a close, and my interest in Fairyland is only whetted by this first book.
The more time has passed since I read it, the more I realize what an intriguing and fantastic (in every sense of the word) read it was. I find myself thinking about the book, daydreaming sections of it, at odd moments, unexpectedly - this kind of unlooked-for afterthought usually signals, to me, that a text was more interesting or awesome than I initially realized. And then, a few days after having surgery on my shoulder, I lay in bed with nothing much to do except think of Fairyland, and a thought floated through my mind that has hugely changed my thinking about this novel, and makes me feel even better about giving it five stars on Goodreads. What crossed my mind was this: Catherynne Valente's book is the fantasy novel The Wizard of Oz was trying to be. L. Frank Baum's book, for all its popularity and sequels, for all that its film adaptation is fabulous, is still a remarkably unfanciful fantasy. Valente does Baum one better, and then laps him again, with this wonderful Fairyland of her own making.

25%

2011-08-09T17:53:00.000-07:00

NPR reports today that the national teen unemployment rate is 25%. In Washington, DC, teen employment is at a staggering 50%. NPR also tells us that the last time teen unemployment topped 20% was 1981 - but that this is the third summer in a row that it's been above 20%.

The piece doesn't do a very good job of dealing with the potential fallout or implication of teen unemployment, though of course one of the two teens they interview gets it right away: ""I'm going to my senior year, so it's like, how am I supposed to help gather the extra money to go to college?" he [Jacquan Clark] says."

Instead, NPR subtly turns the focus to outcomes for the longer-term future of those kids, and, more importantly, the outcomes for present-day bosses and hiring, heavily citing Michael Saltsman, a research fellow at the Employment Policies Institute, offering this nugget: "But working a summer job as a teen is not just about earning extra spending money. Saltsman says it's also about learning skills so you can become a good worker later in your adult life."

Yes. This is true. It's great to have work on your resume straight away - it helps in hiring, in applying for all manner of things, it helps you mature and learn things and blah blah blah. All of those things are important, don't get me wrong. But the real immediate stakes are potentially even bigger, and Jacquan Clark hits it on the head: what about college?
There are a lot - a lot of teenagers who depend on their summer or year-round part-time jobs for more than just "extra spending money." I know I needed my jobs for any spending money, but also for things like buying clothes, traveling home from college, eventually buying a car and helping to pay for my semester abroad. And I was pretty well off; I had friends whose jobs paid for their college, period. With the cost of tuition rising everywhere, and student loans getting harder to get, teenagers, especially those from less privileged backgrounds (and I'm not even talking about truly poor backgrounds, though of course they are included), need every red cent they can accrue. For some, working really is the difference between going to college and not going.
It's very hard to "take a year off" between high school and college to earn money; it's hard to get back into the mode of academia. Taking standardized tests and applying along with your own class cohort streamlines the entire process, and keeps you moving along the college-bound track. The minute you step off that track, it takes you double or triple the number of steps to get back on.
Jacquan Clark, the teenager in NPR's piece, mentions the cost of college applications, which he will evidently be on the hook for. This adds up rapidly; where are those hundreds of dollars supposed to come from, if a parent can't or won't supply them?
This also ignores the fact that there are, in fact, teenagers in this country whose families depend at least partially on that teenager's income. Poor is poor is poor, and every dollar is needed. In other situations, a teenager's income goes to pay for everything he or she might need beyond the absolute basics of home and food: clothing, new shoes, adequate winter gear, school lunch, transportation, test or other school-related fees. None of that covers the other "necessaries" of teenage life, like the right kind of clothes, or an iPod, or a cellphone, or bits of cash for going for coffee or to diners or the movies or whatever it is teenagers do these days.

It's good that NPR is reporting on this - definitely good, and I applaud and appreciate that. But it is disgraceful that their focus is not so much on how this impacts teenagers qua teenagers, but on how it impacts them as future cogs in the capitalist machine.

Stravaganza: post-it note

2011-08-07T22:38:00.000-07:00

I'm reading (re-reading and continuing on) Mary Hoffman's Stravaganza books. I know I read City of Masks some years back, and at least started City of Flowers, but I have no real memory of reading them, or what I thought. So I'm working through the series now; I'm halfway into the third book, City of Flowers. It's not a bad series at all, though (more than) a little formulaic.

But what I really want - and should look for - is a good piece of critical writing about the books done by a disabilities studies scholar. Something about the way Hoffman uses illness or injury, and wellness or healing, in her books feels interesting/important/possibly very problematic.

I don't have any training or expertise in disabilities studies at all, or I'd do the thinking-work myself.

In the absence of my expertise, I'd love to read the thoughts of someone at least moderately well-versed in dis/ability studies about Hoffman's books. At least as far as this third volume, illness, health, ability features as a fairly integral sideplot, and I think one would need to read them all to speak to the way dis/ability functions here.
Anyone? Disability studies scholars, read some Stravaganza and write about it!!

You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby, or Trailing Clouds of Glory

2011-08-05T16:52:00.000-07:00

Wandering around the internet, I come across a newish hubbub over "sexualization of children!!!!!!" in the form of 10-year-old model Thylane Lena-Rose Blondeau, who has been cropping up in fashion editorials for awhile, but for some reason (which I haven't got time to figure out - quick google searches didn't reveal the why now) is drawing attention now.

The usual suspects are trotted out: Let a Child Be a Child! (whatever that even means, and frankly, why not turn that attention to the children who have to work to help feed their families).
Too Young To Be Sexy (or Sexualized)! (Because evidently there IS a right age to be sexualized and objectified)
You're A Bunch Of Stuffy, Pedestrian Squares Who Don't Get Edgy Hip Fashion! (self-explanatory).

I followed up on Thylane Blondeau at all because the very smart Debbie Reese tweeted briefly about the response from the photographer (Dani Brubaker) who shot most of the images of Blondeau. Brubaker, who clearly has never visited My Culture Is Not a Trend, states that she "grew up by the code of the Native American Indian" which "venerates children yet allows them freedom of expression."

Wow, unpacking that statement could take all night!
I'm working on being more concise, though, and I'm expecting a friend from college to arrive soon for the weekend, so - in short:
There is no single "Native American Indian" with one single "code" about anything. There are, and were, many indigenous tribes with a variety of cultures, languages, and ways of life, including attitudes toward children. Presumably also including attitudes toward freedom of expression, as well.
Staging white Thylane Blondeau (I mean, Blondeau? irony?) in hipsterish "Indian" garb is just not okay. It's just not. It doesn't matter if Blondeau is 10 or 20 or 50 - the appropriation and misuse of articles of Native cultures is not okay. Especially not when these are, essentially, fashion/modelling photos, as opposed to some kind of art photography that is attempting to make some kind of commentary or statement on, or with, the appropriation of aforementioned culture. Fashion and modelling photos exist to sell things: in this case, to sell us, I guess, a 10-year-old girl, and an aesthetic.
Which brings me to "freedom of expression" - Brubaker may honestly believe that she is living some kind of code of freedom of expression, but being staged and photographed by someone else is not freedom of expression for the model. It's Brubaker's expression, or the stylist's, or the fashion designer's. The object of the gaze is very rarely the one with all the power, or even most of it, and this is compromised doubly, trebly, by the status of the object: a kid, in the benighted "costume" of a minority/oppressed culture(s).

I don't object to the sexualization of children, per se, though to be very explicit I don't especially condone it, either. What I object to is the sexualization and objectification of people, specifically women and girls (because how often does this question even come up around little boys? How often do we see boys posed the same way adult models are?)

Laura Mulvey wrote her game-changing article ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema") on "the gaze" in the early 1970s (published around 1975). 36 years later, the gaze is still going strong: still held by men, still object-ifying women. The women keep getting younger (though even in the 1970s and earlier, young women and girls were made public objects - that's nothing new) and the media keep getting more and more diffuse and omnipresent, but the essentials haven't changed.

Gods know I don't believe in things like "childhood innocence" or some kind of inherent wordsworthian idyll of childhood - those trails of glory are all in the eye of the besotted beholder, usually the new parent(s) and/or grandparent(s). But I do believe that people, most often women, should be able to live their lives as subjects, not objects. They should have every choice available to them; they should be able to choose when, how, under what conditions, and why they might position themselves as objects in a public way. These are complicated choices to make, and the stakes can be quite substantial, and because children lack the experience that helps inform these choices, it's essential parents and other caretakers aid them in making those choices.
I have a possibly-unreasonable bias against "trick children." I hate child models, child actors, child performers - not the children, exactly, but the system, the process, of converting childhood humanity into a product. I especially mistrust and dislike the parent(s) who guide their children into that system. There are too many bad stories about children exploited for their money, being used, used up, cast aside (Michael Jackson is only the most spectacular example of this - the way he raised his own children should speak loud volumes about his own experience as a famous child). To be sure, there are positive examples - Jodie Foster seems to be doing all right.
When I see photos like those of Thylane Blondeau, I immediately think: there's all the evidence you need to take that child away from her parents. Not necessarily in a literal sense, because I am sure she loves her mom and dad, and they love her. But her parents have also foreclosed on her options, by turning her into a spectacle. They've made their daughter into a very successful, highly paid object.
She might love it. Who knows? She's 10. She doesn't have a whole lot to compare it to. And her life is forever altered by this fame as a model, as a "sexy child."
What good parent looks at their child and thinks: "I hope my kid grows up to be someone people masturbate to" or "I hope someday my kid will pose naked for a popular magazine"?
It has nothing to do with the child as The Child, nothing to do with Romantic ideals about childhood. It has everything to do with the continued, continual objectification and reduction of girls and women to nothing more than, literally, their component physical parts.

John & Hank Green [should?] Take Over the World, Part Two

2011-07-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

Part One of this unexpectedly multi-part series concludes with a set of statements and queries:

So a couple of nerds with a big teenage following have had commercial success. Those same teenagers sent one of those nerds a few hundred bucks for his birthday.

So what? Why's it matter?
To find out why, stay tuned for part two.

So: WHY DOES IT MATTER?
One perceptive reader left a comment suggesting a "why," and s/he is absolutely correct, of course. There are a number of reasons why it matters, of course, but my question was one of those sneaky teachery questions, where there's a specific answer I have in mind.

One way to begin answering this, coincidentally enough, is by watching John's latest vlogbrothers video, posted on 27 July, 2011. John runs down a quick (and abbreviated) list of nerdfighter accomplishments: raised $150,000 in 48 hours in the Project for Awesome; gave money (along with the Harry Potter Alliance) to charter airplanes of relief supplies to post-earthquake Haiti; got Helen Hunt to hear the Helen Hunt Song, etc.

Nerdfighters are pretty intensely invested in fighting world suck, the official term for - well, erm, world suck, which really shouldn't need any further defining. They make videos, they write songs, they do art, they knit monsters, they do whatever needs doing, or whatever they are moved to do. Sometimes the decreasing of world suck is a low-level kind of thing: being kind to one other person can do it. The everpresent acronym DFTBA reminds them and us and anyone listening to be awesome, the direct antithesis of sucking.
Not precisely highly nuanced, academic discourse, but not very many people except academics are very interested in - or, honestly, moved by - highly nuanced, academic discourse. The Brothers Green and their nerdy band of awesome followers managed to figure out what the national Democratic Party has failed to enact: quick n easy soundbites WORK.

Along with the art and the internet activity and the chat and nerdfighter love stories (of which there are plenty, it seems, up to and including at least one marriage proposal via John Green in a vlog, a marriage which has resulted in at least one new baby nerdfighter) and reading books and singing goofy songs and listening to wizard rock (because the crossover between nerdfighters and HP geeks is enormous), one of the other things nerdfighters - who, again, are largely teenagers or college kids! - seem to do very well is donate money. They're fundraisers of a prodigious nature, on either the collecting or giving end, and the funds they raise go to ferociously good causes - clean water in Haiti. Via the Project for Awesome (actually a vlogbrothers invention, if I understand correctly; alas, thus far Nerdfighteria lacks a dedicated historian with enormous quantities of time and resources for research and compilation), Shawn Ahmed's uncultured project which has done things like rebuild a school and provide clean water supplies in Bangladesh.

More recently, and sadly, nerdfighters have been donating to the This Star Won't Go Out Foundation via the purchase of this star won't go out bracelets. The "Star" is Esther Earle, a Harry Potter devotee, HPA member and dedicated nerdfighter with a tremendous internet presence, who died a little less than a year ago from cancer. Esther is celebrated and memorialized and honored all over nerdfighteria (google "nerdfighter" + "Esther" to see how many folks who never met the girl in person are making Esther part of the awesome they don't forget); in fact, John Green's upcoming novel The Fault in our Stars is dedicated to Esther.
Esther was a huge part of Potter fandom, and her family attended LeakyCon2011 this summer as guests of the conference. Esther's father, Wayne Earle, wrote about it on his blog, and in fact it was reading what Mr. Earle wrote that prompted me to finally sit down and begin writing this blog post, which I have been contemplating and working on and mulling over for months. To wit:

Everyone at the conference was given a This Star Won't Go Out bracelet and I usually found a way to mention to the wearer that I was Esther's dad! We were witnesses to love in action.

The "fandom" as it's called, is huge and has made a gigantic imprint for good on the lives of this generation. It was Esther's world so we tried to give her space to make friends and be herself. Now that she is gone, her friends have become our friends. No surprise there. And they are awesome. They know how to give hope and accept one another. They are eager to show compassion and love without restraint. They know how to tell a story and they know how to celebrate life! They proved that by rocking out last Saturday night during the "Esther Earl Rocking Charity Ball." The ball ended with chants of "Esther! Esther! Esther!" She was also remembered at three other events there, one of which was when I read from the first chapter of my Esther book.

Remember again: a lot of LeakyCon attendees are younger people (not all, and probably not even most, though). And I mean young: college-age and younger. And here is the middle-aged dad turning up and being literally and metaphorically embraced by these folks, simply because he's Esther's dad, and they loved Esther, and because, as Mr. Earle says, "they are awesome. They know how to give hope and accept one another. They are eager to show compassion and love without restraint."

After I read Mr. Earle's blog post, which is also a testament to the power of reading and communities of readers, and is also intensely moving (ie, tear-inducing), I thought: "YES. THIS is what nerdfighters do. This is why they matter. This is power."

Because it is power.

But this isn't just a feelgood story about how Today's Youth aren't as bad as we think they are, or a counter to all those "We have no empathy" stories floating around out there. It functions that way, of course, but it would also be easy to write off nerdfighteria as a bunch of "good kids," nerdy readers of books who were always already going to Do Good Deeds. Nothing remarkable or praiseworthy because expected, and because expected, as if it had already been done.
And I expect that to an extent this is true. Probably a lot of nerdfighters are Good Kids (I was one myself, to be honest, though in a sarcastic, possibly sullen sort of way). They're a self-selected, self-selecting group, in a sense; readers of certain kinds of books, drawn to likeminded others who have also read those books.
But there are well over half a million youtube subscribers, and over a million people who follow John Green on twitter, and probably any number of people who have read one or more of his books or participate on the ning and don't subscribe or follow. And I somehow doubt that every single one of those people is a Good Kid. Probably a lot of them are just regular old people, neither Good nor Bad. Probably a lot of them forget to be awesome on a regular basis. Probably a lot of them don't devote their out of school hours to charity work, to visiting nursing homes and hospitals, to working at soup kitchens or animal shelters or wherever. Probably most of them pocket their allowances or their babysitting money or their paychecks from crappy minimum-wage type jobs, and then blow that money on iTunes or ringtones or movies or technogadgets or taco bell or cute shoes or nice jeans or whatever else it is that teenagers spend money on.
But sometimes, they kick in some of that money to causes. Good causes, causes with tangible, real-world effects. They give money when they don't get anything at all back from it - no gimmicky bracelet (except the lovely this star won't go out, which I find far less obnoxious than many of the gimmicky bracelets, something I attribute to the use of lower-case letters). no reusable shopping bag, no "entered to win an autographed whatever," no t-shirt, no sticker or postcard or anything. Just because they can, and they want to, and they've remembered to be awesome.

And so nerdfighters can say, cheerfully and honestly, that they have rebuilt a school in Bangladesh and provided wells and clean water in Haiti and Bangladesh, that they chartered a plane full of medicine and essential supplies for Haiti during the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, that they help support families affected by children with cancer. And probably any number of other projects that I don't know about.
Meanwhile, they make videos and write songs and read books and chat on the internet about the weather and school and teachers and families and friends, and make art and knit animals and make music and get excited and get sad and don't forget to be awesome. Because mostly, they're young: teenagers, college kids, maybe kids in their early 20s.
But they are young.

Which is where I will end Part Two of this series. Part Three, hopefully the final part, will bring it all together and explain why all of this is worth thinking about seriously.

John and Hank Green [could] Take Over the World, Part 1

2011-07-26T23:13:00.000-07:00

Part the First: A brief history of my discovery of John Green and Nerdfighteria; a brief recent history of the accomplishments of the Brothers Green

The first thing I read by John Green was Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which I picked up because I liked David Levithan and because I knew it had gay characters. Up to that point, Green's name was just a name to me, a name I knew was semi-important in my chosen field of study; a name on my very long to-read-someday list.
After reading WG, WG, which I loved, I intentionally sought out Green's other books: An Abundance of Katherines, Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, this last which I only read this summer. I poked the internet with a long stick to see what would surface when Googling Green's name - I got about as far as "nerdfighters," and moved on. I had courses to plan, life to live, a dissertation to procrastinate on (and be confused by), back pain to contend with. I taught WG, WG in the fall, making the rare choice to require my students to purchase a book still only available in hardcover. They liked the book quite a lot; I was gratified by this, and by many of them reporting that they had previously read Green's books. I was also gratified when they told me, some of them rather excitedly, that John Green would be speaking at the public library in January. I shelled out the $20-some for a ticket, after hemming and hawing - I am on an absurdly tight budget, and even a $20 ticket is a big expenditure. But I decided that John Green is an Important YA Author - and Award Winner!! - and how often do those kinds of writers appear at my local public library? So I went, and mentioned it in passing here. And the talk was terrific, though I was baffled: what was with the audience hollering "Good morning, Hank?" while the Guest of Honor filmed it all with a little video camera? All the references to "nerdfighteria?" And so on - baffling. I felt conspicuously old and out of place, but I didn't mind, really; I was delighted to see an auditorium full of teenagers, on a Friday night, come to listen to a writer. Teenagers who were chattering giddily and being excited and and being dropped off by their parents, for an evening at the public library. I grinned for a moment, thinking of those parents, who must have been delighted when their teenagers asked to attend an author's talk at the public library. On a Friday night. After the talk, Green signed books for the throng for hours. Again: teenagers, many of them easily in the mid-to-upper reaches of teenagerness, hanging out happily at the library, talking to friends and new acquaintances and buying books (John Green's, and Siobhan Vivian's, who teaches writing at Pitt and with whom I am very happily acquainted; her books sold out before the night was half-over, the news of which she received with a dropped jaw and delight). I think there was music in the Teen Room; there may have been some kind of drinks and/or snacks of a low level. All of this activity centering on an author. A good author, even - Green's books are very smart, and very well-written. On a Friday night.

Post-talk, I realized I needed to do some deeper research into this whole "nerdfighter" business. The internet, as always, was my friend, because this is where Nerdfighteria lives (sort of?) and where John and his brother Hank have cultivated a veritable army of nerdfighters.
They vlog. They post, three times a week, short videos on some subject. Each brother does a post in turn. They have done this since 2007, when, evidently, they began this as a project to stay in touch in different ways. Vlogbrothers has its own youtube channel, and has accrued millions of views (152+million upload views). The channel has well over half a million subscribers (including me). Videos that I personally have watched have covered everything from the uselessness of pennies to religion to finance to history to science to NASA. Nerdiness of all kinds, with the catchy and useful slogan "Don't Forget To Be Awesome" (DFTBA, which also has a hand/"gang" sign which, due to my inability to separate my middle and ring fingers from each other, I cannot throw down).

So, no big news here, right? Some geeky dudes making videos which a bunch of teenagers watch. That's basically the definition of the entire internet.

EXCEPT:
the effect the brothers Green have had are staggering. I realized I was in the presence of something genuinely awesome when Hank opened his birthday gifts on youtube, livestreaming it. Yes. Nerdfighters galore sent cards - mostly handmade - and gifts (likewise handmade, including a remarkably awesome anglerfish hat which someone promptly dubbed Hanklerfish) to Hank for his birthday. After much debate around the internets prior to the birthday, John & Nerdfighteria agreed that, for Hank's birthday, the appropriate gift was to send a dollar (or more - no limit specified) to Hank so he could donate it to the charity of his choosing. So on his actual birthday, Hank Green spent hours livestreaming himself opening cards and gifts sent to him by strangers (except in nerdfighteria, we're all neighbors, I guess). Strangers who were, for the most part, half his age. Strangers who sent dollars - singly, in pairs, in handfuls. Foreign currency came in as well, in considerable quantities. I sat, mesmerized, and watched for well over an hour (and I came in after at least an hour had gone by) as Hank opened, and read out, cards. He commented on them, he checked in on the chat window, occasionally responding to remarks there. He enthused over every. single. item. None of it felt forced, or fake. None of it condescended, in any way. I only stopped watching because I had to go to something - a meeting, maybe? an appointment? But I could have watched for hours, happily.

It was after Hank's birthday that I started thinking seriously about Nerdfighteria, and nerdfighters, and the brothers Green. After collecting up his birthday dollars, and then kicking in matching funds, Hank donated over $1200 to the water.org project he's "adopted" in Haiti at Savann Tabak.

This may not be massive fundraising, but it's the output of essentially one-day fundraising: dollars for Hank's birthday (aka Hanko de Mayo). even allowing for Hank's doubling, it's not a bad chunk of change from what's essentially a gaggle of teenagers.

I follow both John and Hank Green on twitter; only this summer, John's upcoming book The Fault in Our Stars became the number-one book on amazon and barnes & noble.com: nearly one year before it is scheduled to be released. When the book went up for pre-ordering, it had just a black & white placeholder instead of an image of the cover art, because cover art had yet to be created. The Wall Street Journal ran a story about this feat of best-selling, with the (offensive to my mind) title "Tweeting from a La-Z-Boy, An Unfinished Book Hits #1." Just this week, I discover that the release date for The Fault In Our Stars has now been pushed forward (that is, earlier) by a good four+ months, evidently due to the high demand. John Green, in what I can only conceive of as a fit of masochism, has committed to sign every. single. book. in the first run, which will be 150,000 books. (Questions about what books will be signed? Go here).

Hank Green, among other projects (he's an entreprenerd, he's a scientist, he's an eco-geek, he's a musician), just released his latest record, Ellen Hardcastle (evidently named for a nerdfighter; I do not know the story on this one, alas). Turns out that Ellen Hardcastle charted on Billboard.

Hank invented glasses for watching 3D glasses in 2D, which somehow sounds like the punchline to a bad joke (though, to be fair, the 2D glasses got mentioned on cnn.com AND by Roger Ebert, who evidently ordered himself a pair).

So a couple of nerds with a big teenage following have had commercial success. Those same teenagers sent one of those nerds a few hundred bucks for his birthday.

So what? Why's it matter?
To find out why, stay tuned for part two.

[I intended to write just one insightful post on this topic, but one post won't be enough. Thus, a multipart series is born]

The Hermione Granger series and Fat Kid Rules the World at the movies

2011-07-19T12:50:00.000-07:00

Two newsy items that have made me happy in the last couple of days.

First! On Global Comment (where the world thinks out loud, apparently), Sady Doyle has this terrific, insightful, genius, witty satire/scathe of the HP series: "In Praise of Joanne Rowling's Hermione Granger series." Doyle hits solidly on the head all the aspects of the series that have troubled me at one point or another (note: I AM a Harry Potter fan! I wrote about Prisoner of Azkaban in my undergraduate senior thesis!).
A choice block quote:

Being special, Rowling tells us, isn’t about where you come from; it’s about what you can do, if you put your mind to it. And what Hermione can do, when she puts her mind to it, is magic.
Ditto for the whole “Chosen One” thing. Look: I’ve enjoyed stories that relied on a “Chosen One” mythology to convince us that the hero is worth our time. ... But it’s hard to deny that “Chosen Ones” are lazy writing. Why is this person the hero? Because everyone says he’s the hero. Why does everyone say he’s the hero? Because everyone says so, shut up, there’s magic.

This loops back nicely to a post Jonathan Auxier (whose Peter Nimble & his Fantastic Eyes will be coming out very soon) recently had on his blog about prophecy stories; there are a number of very smart comments on the post as well, the very least of which is mine.

Doyle also hammers on the politics of the series in such a sharp paragraph that it draws blood:

As the series developed, its politics did, too. Dumbledore, memorably, falls in love with a younger man in the third installment. Other female characters were introduced, and developed beyond stereotype; we learned to value McGonagall as much as Dumbledore, to stop slagging Lavender Brown off as clingy and gross because she actually wanted her boyfriend to like her, to see the Patil sisters and Luna as something other than flaky, intuitive, girly idiots.

Yes, yes, yes. Most especially to the Dumbledore love plot, which would make Rowling's actual ex post facto "Dumbledore's gay" have some meaning, instead of being the vapid, empty, offensive remark that it is.
Doyle's entire article is so vastly worth the read that I'm linking again! Go read it!

Second! Movie adaptation news that I find actually pretty cool and potentially awesome: K.L. Going's Fat Kid Rules the World is being filmed NOW, evidently in Seattle. Matthew Lillard directs; most excitingly, Jacob Wysocki (aka Dante Piznarski on ABCFamily's maddeningly short-lived, brilliant "Huge") is starring as Troy Billings, the eponymous Fat Kid.

I've read Fat Kid Rules the World several times, though not since last summer, and I like it quite a bit. Since my last reading of it, I've read a fair bit of Fat Studies work, which makes me wonder how the novel will hold up when I read it again. But I like Going's work in general; I've taught King of the Screwups twice, and it was very well received by both classes of mostly uninterested undergrads. More recently (this summer) I read Going's very curious early novel Saint Iggy. I confess I'm not quite sure what to do with the book yet - I think it'll need at least one more read to really sink in - but my reaction is not negative.

Fat Kid is a great book because it gives us weird protagonists who remain weird, and unlikely, even as they progress and develop in the book. Marcus is always an unknown quantity, and Troy doesn't suddenly become skinny (and I LOVE whoever made the casting decisions, because Jacob Wysocki is probably the exact perfect size for Troy; too often, "fat" gets translated as either cartoonish or as very slightly pudgy. Early photos from the set show that Troy just looks like your average normal fat kid, neither terrifyingly Other nor terrifyingly prettified). There are valuable lessons about Life and Love, but they aren't painfully didactic, and just because those lessons occur, doesn't mean that everyone's life gets better. It's entirely possible that the lessons occur, but not every character was taking notes that day. Going's very good at writing smallish transitions that end up being hugely important (or the opposite: huge transitions that end up having little to no effect).

I'm also a fan of Jacob Wysocki; I loved his character on "Huge," and in some of the sketches he's done with Bath Boys Comedy (of which he is a member). In particular, I'm very fond of "Puppet Suicide" , a PSA advocating awareness of, and an end to, puppet suicide [which I thought of not long ago when I heard about the Vent Haven Museum of Ventriloquism, which evidently functions as a kind of final resting place for ventriloquist dummies] My favorite, though, is "Seeing Eye Big Guy," an ad for, well, a seeing-eye big guy (if you're allergic to a seeing-eye dog, try the Big Guy! he wears a loud shirt!). Bath Boys' stuff is pretty amusing, especially the more pop-culturey stuff, but it can also be quite...well...the Bath Boys are all around ages 20-22 or so, and there's a decided 20-ish-year-old dude mentality to some of the sketches. Others are just brilliant.
Wysocki is also starring in Terri with John C Reilly, which is currently playing in selected cities NONE OF WHICH ARE PITTSBURGH CAN WE PLEASE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT? Terri looks like a pretty good, possibly insightful, movie about adolescence and outsiders and oddness, and has gotten very good reviews. And I would like to see it very much.

Lots of very cool things going on these days. Definitely read Doyle's piece on the Hermione Granger series, and definitely prepare for the Fat Kid movie.

Schrodinger's cat is trendy

2011-07-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

There seems to be quite the trend in fiction - especially? YA - to reference old Schrodinger's cat and the thought experiment it denotes. It comes up in Will Grayson, Will Grayson (because, atheistically bless his little heart, John Green is one doozie of a nerd). It comes up elsewhere, and I really thought I'd been keeping some kind of count or record, but searching this site gives me nothing. I'll try to scrape the barrel of my memory to recall.
It just popped up again, sans Schrodinger, in something I recently read (which of course I no longer recall, since I've crammed books into my brain lately like a fiend). Possibly it was Libba Bray's Beauty Queens; equally possibly, but less likely, is Holly Black's very awesome White Cat. Regardless, there was the experiment, laid out in tidy, non-jargony prose.
For awhile, Maxwell's Demon, entropy, and the second law of thermodynamics kept cropping up as well. Maxwell's Demon first wandered into my life when I read The Crying of Lot 49 for the first time. That demon has since popped up from time to time in other fictional locales.

It makes me wonder about these odd, pop-science "metaphors." Neither was necessarily a popular science idea until they started cropping up in fiction of one kind or another (or internet memes). But how and when did that transition happen? And why the desire to use the scientifick metaphor?
It just reminds me, as humanities-wrought scientific metaphors always do, of Eliot's essay on "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and his weak (very weak, as some chemistry/physics majors told me) effort at scientific metaphor - and how, when we read Eliot's essay for my first-ever critical theory class way back in 1999, the professor mentioned the insecurity of theory, of literature - and the way literature and critical theory try to appropriate the language of science to disguise or legitimate themselves.
I'll need to keep better track of these references, unless some enterprising and extremely bored soul has already made a list or database online.

EDIT: Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency makes use of old Schrodinger and his imaginary cat.

from an Almost Anywhere

2011-07-08T16:11:00.000-07:00

found this odd candelabra in a thrift store in Pittsburgh. I grabbed it up immediately, because it reminded me of one of the gifts Christopher Chant brings back through the Place Between.

"he went to an Anywhere where a man under a yellow umbrella gave him a sort of candlestick of little bells" (The Lives of Christopher Chant, Diana Wynne Jones).

It doesn't chime - it's just a candlestick, really, no bells at all - but it looks very like I picture Christopher's much more lovely and otherworldly chiming bells. And so I had to have it for myself.

Verisimilitude & Anachronism

2011-06-23T21:36:00.000-07:00

Is it too much to ask that books maintain some kind of internal order that also adheres to external historicity?
In other words, if you're going to set your Paranormal Fantasy in Victorian London, then you need to know your 19th century very well, or fussy readers like me are going to throw your book aside in disgust.

This is what happened when I tried to read Clockwork Angel. I hadn't read any of the Mortal Instruments books by Cassandra Clare, but the Clockwork Angel seemed potentially appealing, so I brought it home from the library.
I gave it a try, I really did, going at least 60 or 75 pages in before giving up. I just couldn't care about these two handsome young men and our feisty heroine. Or whatever magical world Clare has cooked up. I'm a bit tired of the Girl Who Has To Choose Between Two Handsome Men Who Love Her as a plot device, because lordy - hasn't that been done to pieces?

What got me most was a passage when Tessa and one of the Handsome Men have to flee from some monster, and Tessa says "oh god, o god" in fear.
Because in the Victorian era, no respectable middle-class Christian girl (which is what Tessa is supposed to be) would use the Lord's Name like that. It would be either truly prayerful, asking God to aid or deliver her (which is not how the text reads), or it would be some other expression of fear, worry, horror.

The spunky young heroine who refuses to be confined by the gender expectations of her culture is another anachronism I'm losing patience with. Yes, I know women and girls were bitterly oppressed and narrowly restricted for virtually all of history. And Yes, I know this makes for dull reading, especially for the allegedly-girl-centric YA readership. And there certainly are plenty of examples of women who managed to break or push on the bounds of societal expectations, and probably many more who wished they had. But the large majority didn't. And so again, and again, and again, to see the vaguely medieval narrative, or the vaguely Victorian narrative, of the smart, VERY well-educated (also unusual) girl who refuses to be married, who doesn't want to be married to a wealthy, goodlooking young man but instead is a Free Spirit who Finds Love while Pursuing Her Dreams in another location - this narrative is bunk-o. And I am running out of patience with it. I'd actually kind of love to read a medieval or early modern narrative about a girl who DOESN'T have all these secret (and then not-so-secret) hopes and dreams but who still manages to live a not-so-awful life. Because I expect there were scores and scores of women throughout history who actually lived pretty happy lives. Or maybe didn't even know what they were missing out on, so had no reason to lament their lot in life.

Finally, I just finished Franny Billingsley's Chime, which I frankly don't know what to do with just yet. As I read, I felt deeply thankful to Diana Wynne Jones for introducing me to the "True Thomas" tale, and to the woman who preys on young men - Fire and Hemlock stymied me for a long time, but eventually I figured it out. My reading of Chime probably would have been both better and worse without having read Jones's amazing novel first: I would have lacked the knowledge of the stories at work, but I also wouldn't have had Jones's brilliance to compare with Billingsley's novel (note: in virtually every contest, Diana Wynne Jones will win. She's just that wonderful).
Some aspects of Chime I liked very much indeed: Billingsley does some wonderful things with words, and I kind of liked Briony, although I also thought she was a bit thick (I saw where the book was heading quite early on, and again - is this because of Fire & Hemlock, and thus not a weakness in the text?). The dreamy odd landscape/chronoscape of the Swampsea was both appealing and infuriating - it's clearly fixed in a world like, if not the same as, ours - there's London and motorcars and electric lights and trains and such - but then there's also the Magical element. Which again, fine, but it seemed to be at odds with itself: real magic seeming like backwoods legend of provincial people except then it is real magic but no one's really fazed by this? How does London fit into the world of the Swampsea?
If you're going to build a secondary world, build it - don't draw half a sketch and knock in one nail to a scrap of lumber. There was just enough fixed detail about the "real world" to make the Swampsea confusing rather than dreamlike, although Billingsley's language counters that.
But Eldric (eldric? what is he, some kind of Elf?) struck me as a simpleton rather than a sarcastic, smart charmer; either I or Billingsley couldn't get his voice quite right. There were an awful lot of gaps that I would have preferred to be erased or left as tantalizing lacunae; instead, it felt a bit like a very carefully, beautifully dug hole that some random careless person had chucked a few handfuls of gravel into and considered it filled.

At one moment, late in the book, one character describes the twin faces of Briony and Rose (BrionyRose, ho-hum) as the result of "genetics."
We're also made to understand that we're a decade or so into the 20th century. Briony makes this clear several times.
The word "genetics" wasn't coined until 1905 or '06. Though the character using the word is known to be eccentrically very smart, it's still highly unlikely that a lifelong resident of the Swampsea would be conversant with the language of biological science to the extent that s/he would casually include "genetics" into daily discourse. Briony, we know, is extremely smart and well-educated, but she seems to have received a classical education in the good old tradition - and it's not terribly likely she'd have been coached in genetics. It was simply too new, and - quite possibly - not considered decent for girls to learn, especially in the Swampsea, especially not the daughters of the parson. And stripping down to trousers and a sleeveless top, alone with a young man - I'm just not sure how well that would fly in the loosely-fixed era Billingsley's creating.

There were other moments that felt chronologically discordant - I felt like I was reading a mashup of The Crucible and I Capture the Castle. This could have been really fascinating, really interesting, as a setting, but Billingsley somehow manages to give both too much and too little detail to seal her scenes.

Still, the plot wasn't a bad one, just not the most original ever, and the historical problems were a fairly minor annoyance (well, "genetics" really jarred me). Briony, and especially her sister Rose, were rather intriguing characters, and the Swampsea is also an intriguing setting [but again, I think of Jones, and The Spellcoats].

But is it too much to ask that writers and editors really cling to verisimilitude? It might be. Though if a large part of the interest of your story comes from its historical setting, then you ought to take care with that setting.

Patrick Ness Wins!

2011-06-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

Via his Twitter feed, I learn that Patrick Ness has won the Carnegie Medal!!!

This is fantastic news; his Chaos Walking Trilogy is one of the best literary discoveries I've made in the last few years.

Congratulations to Patrick Ness!!! I cannot think of any YA writer who deserves this more.

And if you haven't read this series, RUN RUN RUN to your library or bookstore and get The Knife of Never Letting Go. While you're at it, pick up the other two: The Ask and the Answer, and Monsters of Men. You won't be sorry - and you'll want to do nothing but read them back to back to back until your mind is thoroughly blown.

booking through thursday: e-reading

2011-06-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

This week's Booking Through Thursday question!

With the advent (and growing popularity) of eBooks, I’m seeing more and more articles about how much “better” they can be, because they have the option to be interactive … videos, music, glossaries … all sorts of little extra goodies to help “enhance” your reading experience, rather like listening to the Director’s commentary on a DVD of your favorite movie.
How do you feel about that possibility? Does it excite you in a cutting-edge kind of way? Or does it chill you to the bone because that’s not what reading is ABOUT?

Well, I'd hate to try to say categorically what reading is ABOUT. I expect it's about something different for almost everyone who reads, and sometimes - often, even - it's about different things at different times for the same reader!

I have no desire to own a nook or kindle or e-reader. I don't like reading like texts on screens. Even three or four page articles from, say, the New York Times online is too much screen-text. I like the materiality of my books; I like the way they look on my shelves; I like the heft of them (even when my backpack is overloaded with dissertation-related books from the library).

I do have an occasional wish for an e-reader so I could download all those lovely old children's books on Project Gutenberg - there are a ton of Angela Brazil titles in the public domain that I can't easily get my hands on in book form but sit digitally in Project Gutenberg's servers. But I can download and read them on my laptop if I really want to, or I can put in interlibrary loan requests and wait for copies to show up from across the country.

Whenever I hear about the bells-and-whistles features on e-readers, all I can think of (and literally, it's almost all I can think of) is UltraWord (tm) in Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots. My brain yells out: "Thrice-read! It'll smell like cantaloupes!"
I'm not much of a tech geek or a bells-and-whistles kind of girl, though, and I realize there are people who love that kind of stuff. I like that DVDs give me the option - watch the film straight, or turn on the director's commentary. As long as I still have that choice with books, I'll be okay.
It's also important for me to note that I really just flat-out cannot afford an e-reader. I rarely buy books - I hit my library, then scour used book sales and yard sales to add to my collection. A very few specific authors or titles I will allow myself to buy new. But my book-acquisition budget is tiny, and a $200 device to allow me to buy more books is not in the offing.

I am also very interested in the results of this study, especially this: "The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues, such as the location on the page and the position in the book to find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read."

Cognitive mapping is, evidently, the jargon for my longheld sense of confusion or disorientation over reading on a screen; it also, I think, explains why what I read on a screen doesn't stick very well in my memory, yet my book-reading recall is very, very good indeed.

I'm a little chilled by the thought of an UltraWord(tm) takeover, but on the whole, I am okay as long as I still have the choice of reading regular old paper books. And I look forward to the day when people start unloading their paper book collections on the cheap at yard sales - I'll be there, snapping those discards up for my own collection.

Though, to be fair: When moving day rolls around, all those cartons of books DO make me groan. Having to pack just a nook, instead of ten bookcases' worth of books, would make a big difference to my aching muscles.

Books about books - notes for potential syllabus

2011-05-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that a general lit class about books about books (and/or reading, with a little writing thrown in) would be a pretty cool one to teach. Titles keep popping into my head, and I've decided to write them here, rather than on tiny scraps of paper which I will inevitably lose, or which some cat will puke on.

The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (because manuscripts don't burn)
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Matilda by Roald Dahl (because Dahl's description of Matilda's reading is probably the best description of what reading does that I have ever encountered)
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Misery by Stephen King
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (or one of its sequels, Lost in a Good Book or The Well of Lost Plots, which last is my favorite Fforde book)
"The Composition" short story by Antonio Skármeta
"Umney's Last Case" short story by Stephen King

What others am I forgetting? There are tons of books about books, or writing or reading - these are just the ones that come immediately to my mind. What other children's or YA books need to go on the list? And can I count Un Lun Dun as a book about a book?

keeping pace

2011-05-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

I've been on a YA-reading jag since the semester ended (with a detour to re-read the unbelievably great Kraken by the equally great China Miéville). I've been adding them to my Goodreads library, giving them stars as they deserve them, but other than that, I've just read too much to break it all down in any more detail. A few deserve mention, though.

Hold Me Closer, Necromancer by Lish McBride. Mainly because my loathing of Twilight is so strong, I've steered clear of Paranormal YA. But McBride's novel was suggested by a child_lit member, and since I was trying to read broadly and deeply in the YA world, I added it to my pile of books. I'm glad I did - it was quite terrific. I know it's even better than I thought while I read, because it's burrowed into my brain - I find myself thinking about it semi-frequently since I finished it, and I usually take that as a very good sign. McBride gives narration to our necromancer protagonist, Sam, but alternates with third-person narration focalized around various other characters. There are werewolves, necromancers (good and evil), witches, various forms of post-dead spirits and undead, a couple of very good mortal human friends and some clever dialogue. Each chapter is titled with a song title (and the novel itself is a play on, of all things, a line from Elton John's song "Tiny Dancer" - "hold me closer tiny dancer"). It feels very contemporary without feeling forced; it was funny without being absurd. The intrusion of the paranormal/supernatural into Sam's "normal" world was handled very, very well - there was a good mix of "wtf?" reactions along with very nonchalantly blase reactions (sometimes from the same character). The novel's conclusion felt rushed, and a few chapters from the end, I felt VERY much like I was being set up for a sequel, but by that point, I was charmed enough with the book and its characters that having the prospect of a sequel dangled in front of me was very welcome.

I don't like the romantic-comedy genre (except, of course, for My Most Excellent Year), but Gabrielle Williams' Beatle Meets Destiny was just enough of the quirky and angsty to break the veneer of ick that usually accompanies the rom-com. I liked Williams' writing style especially - it's self-referential but only occasionally; it's cinematic, in a way that felt intentionally amateurish - like a very skillful but totally amateur making his first documentary, maybe. The characters were all flawed as people, which made them better characters. One of the claims inside the jacket copy is that everyone in the book does the wrong thing, and that's about right: in some ways, it's a romantic-comedy of errors. Again, enough quirks in the characters, the plot and the style to keep it from shlock.

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher has been on my radar for awhile - we got an ARC of Sapphique at the bookstore when I still worked there, and I flipped through it a bit. A friend of mine mentioned it recently as one she's considering teaching in the fall, and so I decided to bite the bullet and read it. And frankly, I don't know what I think of it. I have Sapphique from the library as well, and I'll be reading that soon - perhaps it will help me organize my thoughts? I felt vaguely irritated as I read Incarceron - it had all the "right" elements of your basic dystopian fantasy, but it somehow didn't quite work. The beautiful, privileged girl who rebels against her fate! The guy with mysterious powers/knowledge/wisdom and an unknown background, who is able to see the chinks in the power structure! The roguish, unpredictable friend! People with names like Keiro and Attia! One of the things about the current spate of YA dystopia that's irking me are the names: lots of Ks, lots of Ys, lots of unusual vowel arrangements for names that end up sounding mostly like names in current usage, but like they're spoken through a mouth of mush, or written phonetically by a child. I think Peeta is my worst and best example - though I love Collins' books - and the character - what kind of dumb name is Peeta? It's a snooty-British pronunciation of Peter (Peetah, as Wendy says in Disney's Peter Pan), or it's an alternate spelling of flatbread (Pita), and either way, it's goofy.

But I read Incarceron through to its finish, and I'm curious enough to read the next book, so it can't have been all bad.

Hidden Talents and True Talents by David Lubar, also recommended via child_lit. My editions were in a typeface, and with cover designs, that reminded me strongly of the YA books I pilfered from my sister when I was a kid - so mid-to-late 80s aesthetic. It made me feel like I was reading much older books than I was, which was weird. I quite liked Hidden Talents, actually - I liked it a lot. True Talents disappointed - I think taking the characters out of the school was a mistake. It scattered their identities too broadly, or something - it made them less of a team. Because of the 80s look of the books, it threw me everytime computers and the internet were referenced, or iPods; this was a good lesson in the importance of typography and design - and why physical books convey a different experience than e-books.

And finally, Natalie Standiford's Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters. I LOVED How to Say Goodbye in Robot - really, one of the best YAs I've read in the last year or two - so I was keen to read more from Standiford. Sullivan Sisters was good, but very different from Robot - if I'd never read the latter, I probably would have like Sullivan Sisters even more. The novel is three letters from the three sisters, "confessing" to their behavior/actions of the last couple of months, which - they believe - is why their family has been suddenly disinherited by their (still-living) grandmother, the incredibly wealthy, snobby and imperious Almighty. The three sisters are interesting, and different from each other in lots of ways. Most interesting, maybe, is that their stories overlap, narrating essentially the same span of time but from their three different perspectives. Things Norrie never mentions are central to Sassy's confession; Jane goes into detail about things Norrie brushes off as insignificant; Sassy offers new perspective on both girls' representations of Almighty. It was very well-crafted, and the characters - and family - Standiford created were very appealing to me - so much so that I wish there were more Sullivan books (there are six children in the family, in age from 21-year-old philosopher-poet St. John to six-year-old Takey). My one big quarrel with the book is Norrie's relationship with Robbie: Norrie is a 17-year-old high school senior. She meets Robbie in an extension education class on Speed Reading at Johns Jopkins. He turns out to be a 25-year-old grad student.

Now, the college boy who dates the high school girl is a fairly regular trope in YA, and baffles me then - my own experiences as a college undergrad was that high schoolers lost all interest as anything but objects for the boys to ogle (if even that); the few guys I knew in college who were still dating their old high-school-aged girlfriends got massively teased for it. Querying my undergrad students this spring, they mostly seemed disdainful, uneasy or outright contemptuous at the idea of college students actively pursuing high schoolers.

Now ramp that up another notch: a grad student? pursuing a 17-year-old? REALLY? No. I just can't buy it, even if the inability to buy it is a plot point. Norrie's interactions with Robbie's grad-school friends is awkward - they clearly are contemptuous and disdainful and laugh at Robbie, calling him cradle-robber in front of Norrie - but it's eased when Norrie reveals herself to be much more cool and intelligent than expected. But still. There was never a moment when I really believed in Robbie's interest in Norrie. Any 25-year-old grad student guy who wants to pursue a high schooler, even a very smart and pretty high schooler, is a HUGE red flag to RUN THE OTHER WAY.

This may make me an appalling snob, but there it is. At the very least, a 25-year-old guy should have more sense than to go after a girl who is still just 17. Most of the 25-year-old guys I have known would be lustfully regretful if presented with their own version of Norrie - but they wouldn't ask her out, or pursue a relationship with her, if only because of fear of 1) jailbait and 2) social recriminations from their friends.

But other than this, Standiford does a great job with all of her characters - as I say, she makes them so interesting and vivid that I am left wanting more.

I'm working on another stack from the library - currently about to give up on Andrew Smith's The Marbury Lens, because it's actually just too creepy for me to read. I rarely - almost never - have this happen, but I've tried several times today to read it, and each time I feel excessively disturbed by the book. Maybe another time, because I can see that it's good and smart and doing very interesting things.

But I have a number of books left that shouldn't give me profound heebie-jeebies, so that should hold me for the rest of the week. Besides, I requested a ton of books via the public library's interlibrary loan system, and I just got notified that Moon Over Manifest has come in for me.

Okay for Now

2011-05-02T23:39:00.000-07:00

Somewhere online, I recently read something about Gary Schmidt's new book, Okay for Now. Whatever I read sufficiently interested me to put in a library request for it (the book was still in processing). It showed up at the public library late last week, and I finally read it on Monday.

I really, really wish I could remember where I got the idea to check out this novel, because it was wonderful. Schmidt goes a little hog-wild with the traumas/crises by the end, but on the whole, it's a really great book. He hits the most appalling lows and the most soaring highs with such deft skill that you're almost not aware of being led to and through them, if that makes any sense. Doug, the narrator, has a fantastic voice, one that in some ways reminds me of Christopher Paul Curtis's narrators in Bud, Not Buddy and The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963, but is also entirely its own.
Schmidt has created some excellent caring and engaged teachers in this book, representations I'm always happy to see, because they resonate with my own personal experiences and my own priorities. He also has some grim teachers, including a principal who insists on referring to himself in the third person, which ought to be hilarious but somehow manages to be menacing.
At the heart of the book is another book: John James Audobon's Birds of America, with a handful of key plates reproduced (in black ink, of course, alas) throughout the novel.
Like My Most Excellent Year, believability isn't the most important thing here, though Schmidt does a fantastic job of creating a plausible, if unlikely, "lived reality" for his characters. I am reminded of the wisdom of Coco Chanel echoed by fashion/pop culture bloggers Tom and Lorenzo: before you go out the door, take one piece (of jewelry, etc) off, to keep from overdoing it.
This is excellent wisdom for writers as well - before sending your book out the door, take one piece off. Because I don't want to spoil Okay for Now, I'll use MMEY - instead of having the orphan who is deaf who needs to see Mary Poppins, who communicates with Julie Andrews - just leave it at the deaf orphan.
Schmidt could have culled one or two of the extra bits out of his novel and still had a glorious work; as it is, those pieces feel like the extra square of cake that makes your stomach ache but looked sooooo good on the platter.

Still, Okay for Now communicates emotion, it communicates experience, so wonderfully that the implausibles and excesses can be easily looked over. It's got the sweetness and light, and the darkness and shadows, of real life in it. As I read, I thought "This book is Newbery material for sure." And if it isn't nominated, and at least given an Honor Award, then I'll give it the KerBery award (boy, there's a mangled mess of punning parentheses lurking behind my name - kerry - and the Newbery name - but I can't quite extract it). Maybe just the KBery Award.
Regardless, Okay for Now was a tremendously good, affecting book that I plan to acquire as soon as it goes into paperback (in another year or so).
Most highly recommended.

A snippet to think about

2011-05-02T12:33:00.000-07:00

Grading finals for Myth & Folktale, I've come to the last paper for that class, in which the student is discussing, quite intelligently, the problems of eliding myth and history, and the alteration of historical truths for contemporary mass culture entertainment (that would be Disney's Pocahontas if you're wondering).
Anyway, student writes this, and lacking any actual commonplace book to put it, I'm sticking it here for later contemplation:

humanity relies on word of mouth and literature to identify areas of culture which produced positive outcomes and weed them out from decisions that negated prosperity

This is kind of an interesting version of the function of literature, yes? And also ties in very well with my muddy thoughts about evolution and adaptation - scientific principles applied, loosely and with accommodations, to problems of fictional or historical adaptation.

wet blanket

2011-04-28T23:37:00.000-07:00

When news of this "royal engagement" came down the line last year, I was mildly interested; actually, I was trapped, driving to my parents' and unable to tune in any radio stations except jesus radio and, oddly, a BBC station which was wetting itself over the Engagement.

I have no strong feelings about british royalty. It's quaint and outmoded, I suppose. I have a stronger connection to long-dead British monarchs, mainly - only, really - because of the role they played in the history and culture that interests me. [For instance: when James of Scotland became King James I of the United Kingdom, that unicorn got added to the coat of arms of the UK. Previously, that unicorn had been cavorting with its friends only on the Scottish coat of arms].

Everyone's been abuzz about this wedding for weeks now, and still I didn't care until I found, after re-reading for perhaps the twelfth time, Un Lun Dun, the wonderfully museumlike website of China Miéville. Cabinet of curiosities, really; I've been slightly obsessed with it since then, because each new post seems to unfold hidden doors and unseen windows and odd ripples in reality. And I have always enjoyed peering around hidden doors and prying open unseen windows and drifting through ripples in reality.

Well of course Miéville posts about the engagement, and brought me up sharp. Like a quick, businesslike crack to the head, I suddenly feel my nose crinkle in distaste at the wedding coverage.

Especially on this day, on this thursday in april when the President of the United States has to answer to the yatterings of a racist schmuck and his imbecilic cronies and compatriots. For more on Klansman Trump (an appellation I only wish I could claim as my own), please see Baratunde Thurston.

meanwhile, back at buckingham palace: hoop-la-di-da sucking the wells of international attention dry (not to mention the pocketbooks of...who? all over Britain - England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland - presumably, people are being treated to the spectacle of the best wedding their taxes can throw).

Miéville quotes James Connolly, who, to my shame, I had to look up [and who, evidently, was executed not quite 95 years ago, an anniversary we can look for in just over two weeks]. The quote is worth repeating, because it's what lodged in my head and my heart and has made me feel dismal about the wedding of these two fortunate-in-birth-and-genetics people.

we confess to having more respect and honour for the raggedest child of the poorest labourer in Ireland today than for any, even the most virtuous, descendant of the long array of murderers, adulterers and madmen who have sat upon the throne of England.’

The poorest, raggedest child - and my reductionist association of poverty+Ireland=potatoes reminds me of Juliana Ewing's creepy short story "Land of Lost Toys," in which we learn of one of the humblest of toys in the world, who is recognized as nobility amongst the lost toys: a potato, with a face scraped in it, clutched and loved by a small child with no other plaything, a child who dies early of - what? disease? dirt? hunger? neglect? poverty?

I will not be goggling and ooohing at the spectacle of wealth and privilege on display this weekend. And I cannot approve of the media, the - to quote Miéville, quoting Keir Hardie [oh, look him up yourself; I had to] - "toady who crawls through the mire of self-abasement to enable him to bask in the smile of royalty."

I'll be thinking about that child and its potato-doll instead.

Seal of Disapproval

2011-04-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

One of the books on my list of suggested YA novels is Dishes by Rich Wallace. New book, new to me author. It's just a skinny little thing, 145 pages hardcover (and evidently costing $16.99. Viking, not cool).

About halfway through the book, I had to put it down. It was getting on my nerves, and I had other things I needed to do. I updated my facebook status before going off to do my errands: "i think the YA novel i'm reading might be both homo- and fat-phobic."

After the soothing cupcake-and-sparkle of My Most Excellent Year, I picked Dishes back up in the futile hope it would improve.

It didn't.

It's rare for me to say "what was the point of this book?" I am aware of subjectivity, of art for its own sake, of that elusive and nasty word "relatable" - there are many reasons for reading and writing, and I'm open to most of them. This one?
Search me.
There's no obvious plot: Danny, our first-person narrator who has no real personality, is working as a dishwasher for the summer in Ogunquit, Maine. He's gotten the job via his mostly-absentee dad, Jack, who bartends at Dishes, the gay bar in town.
What we know about Danny: he likes running and keeping fit. He likes pretty girls. He has a vague, fleeting romantic streak that is poorly expressed and doesn't stick with him. "Sex I've had," he tells us, but never a girlfriend. Jack, his father, was seventeen when Danny was born; Jack mostly stays out of Danny's life. In Ogunquit, Jack is known as quite the man about town - always a different girl.

Danny meets a pretty waitress named Mercy. They flirt. They have sex. Hector, a gay waiter at Dishes, befriends Danny. They have meaningful conversations on the beach at night. Danny flirts a little, but asserts his hetero-ness over and over.
Blah blah blah.

Homophobic:
we are always being reminded that Dishes is a gay bar! full of gay men! Hector and Chase, both young, attractive waiters, are gay! and, of course, they both lust after, and hit on, Danny. Who feels uncomfortable. Not because they're gay! Oh no. Danny's all open and tolerant. He just feels bad that he can't give them what they want.
What's really gross is Mercy.
At a league softball game, after Mercy and Danny have had an awkward "date," she comes up and says "You're playing?...For the gay team?"
Danny: "we won this morning."
Mercy: "I'm impressed." Doesn't sound like it.

Mercy points out her brother, playing on the opposing team (firemen, of course).
We're treated to another episode of Danny's flirting. Hector says "I was sure you were a switch-hitter," when Danny steps up to bat righty. Danny: "You wish." I flex a bicep and give him a very manly look.
Oookay, Danny.
Now we're treated to Mercy's brother, and his teammates, making antigay remarks. They make comments under their breath, "like the occasional faggot or pussy."
Mercy asks: "Is everyone on the team gay except two of you?"
She's really interested in knowing who's gay and who isn't.

Later, after the game, Mercy and Danny go for another late-night date/walk. She interrogates him about Hector, wanting to know - surprise - if he's gay. Then she brings her brother into it - he wants to know why Danny's interested in her, a girl. Danny, who by this point should be wondering why this girl is such an idiot, OR kicking her to the curb for being a homophobic schmuck, reminds her that he isn't gay. Mercy: "He[her brother] said he'd kill you if I got AIDS."

"I start to say something about Buddy being an asshole, but I remember in a hurry that he's her brother, so I don't. But I certainly say it loud and clear to myself."
To Mercy, he says nothing of significance, until he asks her if she has a problem with gay people (it's taken him over 70 pages to realize this question needs asking; neither Danny nor Mercy is the sharpest knife in the drawer. Maybe they deserve each other).
Mercy: "No. I have a problem with people who can't figure themselves out."
Danny, understandably, is confused, because Mercy makes no goddam sense.
She says " You're always hanging around with these...."
"These gay people."

Sigh. Still, Danny isn't bright enough to call it off, so he continues this inane, and offensive, conversation.
Mercy: "I don't call them queers or faggots like my brother does. This isn't homophobia. It's about whether I can trust you."

This is the point where any reasonably sane hetero guy with any life experience at all gives up the ghost, and runs as fast and as far as possible because clearly, Mercy's nuts. Psycho, as the kids say.
Her sob story: she dated this guy in college, who cheated on her. With a guy. Her ex-bf went back and forth between her and the guy. She tells Danny: "I went and got tested and sweated that out until the results came. I was clean, okay, but that was criminal, if you ask me."

Danny lets it go, because, hey, he's found a really pretty girl, and she seems to like him (he actually says this at some point in the text). And she lets him have sex with her in a disused storage room, so - great. It's unclear if he actually likes Mercy; it's hard to see why he would.
For the remainder of the book, Mercy keeps popping up at Dishes, checking up to make sure Danny isn't, you know, talking to any of those....those....gay guys. Who, of course, are just throwing themselves at Danny. And are really promiscuous to boot. Except the "marshmallow bouncer" Sal, upstairs, who can never seem to find a hook up. Every comment about Sal is actually about Sal's fatness - when he runs downstairs to break up a fight, everyone jokes about how the whole building shook, ha ha.
We're told various characters could "stand to lose some weight." That Danny's mom isn't cute anymore, she's "really overweight." And more fat jokes at Sal's expense.

Wallace makes some vague efforts at cloaking the homophobia, but they're weak. Mercy saying she's not homophobic doesn't mean she isn't, which seems, temporarily, obvious to Danny. But he's pathetic too, and is sure all the gay boys want him, and mostly he just wants to get laid, so he lets it all go. Hector, the only one in the book with the potential to have a soul, makes a few comments to the effect that you straight dudes are all the same - you all think all gay men are dying for you. Danny's retort: "well, weren't you?" Hector: sheepishly, "kinda."
Mercy's creepy jealousy seems to be her main character trait, and that's one I can't see many guys putting up with from the get-go. There are never any female "rivals" (her word for all those...those...gay guys at the restaurant), so we only ever see Mercy's paranoia deployed at gay men. And she is always very careful to identify them as gay - the bar as gay, people as gay, whatever.
Suddenly, at the end, she's all lovey-dovey, when Hector and Sal get together. Danny, fat-phobic as he is, is puzzled - Sal's like three times the size of skinny Hector! Mercy suddenly becomes the font of wisdom and lovingkindness: "they're exactly the same inside. Why shouldn't two kind souls be together?"
It's funny how two pages earlier, you were shooting laser-eyes at one of those kind souls for daring to speak to this blank flop of a Danny.

Then everyone goes home happy, feeling like they've carved out their niches in the world.

No really. That's pretty much how it ends.

If this book is actually a peep inside the mind of an 18/19 -year old straight male, then I thank god I never could read minds. Danny's only criterion for girls, evidently, is prettiness; he seems totally comfortable with Mercy's creepy jealousy and her homophobia; he has no interests, no ambitions, no emotions. In fact, the most emotional scene in the book is one between Danny and Hector, when they briefly discuss their mutual longing for a real emotional, romantic connection with someone. Danny clearly means "possessive and sex-based" when he says "emotional, romantic connection," because that's what he gets with the ill-named Mercy.

This is an icky, fat-phobic, insidiously homophobic, book that should never have been published by a major publishing house (Viking, I'm ashamed of you). The homophobia is all the worse because it's under the veneer of "acceptance." Danny and Mercy both mouth correctnesses, but undermine their words with their suspicions and persistent classifying every gay person they encounter. We don't see much conflict between straight and gay characters, because the heteros mostly hide their disdain for the gay fellows at the bar. The strife and tension is almost never made manifest. Instead, it's hazed over with a weak-ass happy ending that pairs of the fat guy and the sappy gay boy, leaving all the other promiscuous gay boys to each other, while Mercy and Danny face their emotionless, sterile - but sexual - future together.

A grim read, indeed.
Highly UNrecommended.

most excellent

2011-04-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

The semester is almost over; classes ended last week. I'm in the lull before the grading storm - my students will turn in their finals at the end of this week, and I'll be grading like mad until 4 May, at which point grades are due and I will be free from this semester, which has been one of the most difficult, frustrating and work-overloaded of my life.
As a reward for finishing classes, I checked out two large bags full of YA books from the public library. I pestered the wonderfully brilliant and helpful child_lit listserv for recommendations, particularly asking for LGBTQ books, and books that adolescent boys actually read.
One of the suggested titles was Steve Kluger's My Most Excellent Year, a book and author I had never heard of before.
I read it yesterday.
Picked it up in the late afternoon; kept reading until I was finished, late at night.

Normally, I am not very sentimental, and my preferences tend to veer away from romance-driven plots, or any book featuring adorable small children. But somehow, Kluger's book (which is about both romance and an adorable small child) just worked for me. It is delightful. It was a joy to read. At one point, fairly late in the book, I had to go get some food; as I set the book down, I said [out loud, to an empty room] "I love these people!"
When I begin referring to characters as people, I have been won over.

Kluger's book is cleverly - if not originally - constructed as a series of interpolated texts: diary/essay excerpts from the three protagonists - Augie, TC and Alé, written, in their junior year of high school on the theme "My most excellent year"; chat messages; emails; newspaper articles, etc.

The plot is fairly simple, really: TC and Augie have been friends since first grade, since right after TC's mom died. The two boys adopt each other as brothers, and incorporate each other's families into the larger blend - to the point that the boys refer to each other's parents as "Mom" "Dad" or "Pop." TC's family, going back generations, are devoted Red Sox fans; TC and his Pop share their obsessive love of baseball, specifically the Red Sox. Augie is an American-born Chinese, the only child of a delightfully progressive set of parents: mother writes entertainment reviews for the Boston paper - reviews which are the thin mask of her political activism - and Dad owns a bookstore/cafe. Augie is also gay, though he "doesn't know it" at the book's beginning (though everyone else does, as we see from TC's writings, and from some particularly affecting emails between Pop and Augie's Dad). Enter Alé, fiercely smart and politically active daughter of the now-retired Mexican ambassador. Alé is beautiful and fierce and well-connected due to her parents' devotion to the diplomatic corps; she fails to ingratiate herself with her new classmates by mentioning attending functions with celebrities and "Bill and Hillary," who actually come to dinner at Alé's family's home. TC - cute, charming, likeable - falls for her right away. She takes one look at his cute, charming, likeable self and settles into disdain, dislike and contempt. She sits with Augie at lunch on her first day at the new school; he wants to pick her brain about encounters with such divas as Judi Dench and Liza Minelli.

Most of the book circles around the problem of TC trying to win over Alé, and Alé trying to resist his charms (which are, evidently, many; every character who gets to narrate in this book, with the exception of TC, swoons for him. I swooned for him before too long). But Augie also has his own set of problems, in the form of Andy - the growth of their relationship is fascinating and adorable and a little painful to watch. Augie's out, eventually, to his totally unsurprised family and friends, but Andy's definitely in, and the push-and-pull of Augie's truly flamboyant outness and Andy's considerably less flamboyant personality is great to watch.

One of the things Kluger does really nicely in this book is something approaching subtlety, though this is hardly what I would call a subtle book. But the three protagonist-narrators reveal, repeatedly and throughout the novel, how their views of themselves are at odds with others' views of them. For instance, Augie tells us early on how all the boys copy TC's attitude and "look," turning their shirts backward when TC shows up one day with his worn backward. Many pages later, TC refers to this moment of unintentional, and unconscious, trend-setting; he recalls the day all the boys turned their shirts backward, worrying that they were making fun of him.

Using multiple narrators to reveal different things about characters is not a new trick, but what Kluger does that I really admire is leave those things alone. They don't become plot points, they don't become Heartfelt Discussions Between Friends. We get Augie's version; we get TC's version. There's no further discussion, no further commentary. No talk from anyone about "gosh, I never looked at it from that perspective before."

Kluger uses this same trick to do a narrativized version of he said/she said, too, with TC's and Alé's narratives: each will comment on the same moment, with wildly varying interpretations. We get TC, bemoaning something he said, sure it's set him back months with Alé; pages later, we learn, from Alé, that those very words were the thing that finally broke her resistance to him.

Because a student recently wrote about this, I was probably more aware of this than I normally would have been, but the relationship between Augie and Andy opens so smoothly, with so little comment, that it's almost shocking. My student wrote about the obnoxious plotline of "we're the only two gay guys here, let's fall in love" that often crops up (cf, Kurt and Blaine in Glee). Augie and Andy's relationship isn't at all staged that way; neither boy is openly gay at first (though Augie's a confessed diva who ends up directing and staging the freshman-year talent show). And there are no awkward discussions about "are you?" or "when did you know?" there's just two boys who totally have crushes on each other, hanging out, being awkward and shy because neither yet knows the other reciprocates, and because neither has had any experience with relationships yet.

The most sentimental twist is the introduction of adorable Hucky Harper, a six-year-old deaf orphan (I know, right?!) who somehow conceives a passionate hero-worship of TC. This happens around a baseball diamond, because nothing in this novel gets far from either musicals or baseball (a delightful pairing, really) - Hucky watches from the sidelines and shakes his head yes/no at TC, telling him when he should swing the bat. TC ends up with an unreal batting average for games at which Hucky is present. Eventually, the two form a friendship - TC frantically begins learning American Sign Language, seeking extra help from a teacher whose mother was deaf, and who is thus fluent in ASL. There's not a lot of goopiness around Hucky in the text, either - he's adorable and knows how to use his adorableness to his advantage, getting extra hot chocolate and toys by pulling the sad face. The older kids are at once charmed and exasperated - they can see through his ploys, but fall to them anyway.

Hucky is another moment when Kluger allows us to see TC and Augie differently, without making a fuss over it. TC tells us that Hucky reminds him of Augie, when TC first met Augie - off on the sidelines, alone, lonely. Much later, Augie mentions how strongly Hucky resembles TC right after TC's mother died. Each older boy is motivated partially by his sense of affection for his friend, a friend they see replicated in little Hucky. But they never discuss this with each other, or anyone else; it's simply a dribble of insight that Kluger releases into the novel for the reader to hold in her head.

TC never once does anything but take Hucky absolutely seriously. He doesn't spend much time "poor little tyke"ing; instead, he hangs out with Hucky, and works his ass off to learn ASL. Eventually, a plot unfolds around Hucky's love of Mary Poppins, and his devout wish that Mary Poppins will come and live with him.

By the novel's end, a number of highly implausible things have happened, through the auspices of some rather deus-like characters: Clint, a secret service agent and one of Alé's closest friends from her childhood, and TC's Aunt Ruth, a member of the House of Representatives. Both Clint and Aunt Ruth are introduced and given personalities from the get-go; neither is dropped in miraculously when needed, so I give Kluger some credit here.

But when the implausibles start piling up, rather than spoiling the novel, it somehow nudges it right to the line of magical realism, rather than unbelievability. And I think this, more than anything, is what I loved about this book: it has a definite aura of the same kind of almost-magic that good works of magical realism have. It's realist fiction, but there's just a faint flavor, an undertone, of the kind of fantasy that I'd call "fairy tale" in the most benign or positive sense of the word. But this magic is never made cloying or obnoxious; instead it feels like you're watching an improbable set of coincidences and circumstances naturally mesh together to produce a fantastic outcome. And sometimes, though rarely, these kinds of things do happen.

My Most Excellent Year most reminded me, and strongly, of the equally wonder-full Will Grayson, Will Grayson, though for slightly younger readers, maybe. When the audience full of Will Graysons stands up to appreciate Tiny Cooper, you know, you just know, there's no way that could ever happen. Except for the tiny part of you that says: But why not? and knows that, really, there's nothing to prevent it from happening. And the larger part of you that says: this is wonderful, and I don't care if it could happen in real life or not.

My Most Excellent Year is not the most literary, cerebral book I've read this year. It's not the best-written, or the most original, or the most shocking. It's not tackling huge social issues (although in a way, it is, quietly, without making a noise about doing so). But it is a fantastic read. The characters - all of them, TC, Augie, Alé, Lee, Andy, Pop, Hucky, Mom & Dad, Lori - are all complex and likeable and funny and kind and thoughtful without ever being so perfect as to be unbelievable or unlikeable. Even TC, who is so highly regarded by everyone (even, eventually, Alé), is saved from being planted on a pedestal by his own narration, which reveals him to be far more complex - insecure at times, wildly overconfident at others, occasionally arrogant, often baffled, a steadfast friend, a devoted baseball enthusiast, a very smart kid with a political bent, a 14-year-old boy with a massive, mostly unrequited, crush on a great girl.

The adjectives I keep coming back to are charmed and delightful - and those are no bad things to feel after reading a book.

breaking newsflash that will shock you shockingly

2011-04-10T19:03:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has this incredible newsflash: many adults are buying The Hunger Games books - for themselves to read!!!!!!!

I know. Give yourself a moment. Maybe a sip of brandy, or cold water to revive your shocked senses. It IS kind of hard to believe, isn't it, that adults might buy books for young adults or children, for their own reading pleasure? Who would think that adults - and we all know how sophisticated American adults are, with their fondness for football and FoxNews and "Real Housewives" programs - would lower themselves to voluntarily read a trilogy of very smart, well-written books about politics and war and morality?
Actually, maybe it IS surprising that adults are reading these books, since most of America seems unable to confront these issues in real life.
But a good book is a good book is a good book, and after all, we routinely make young adults read "grown-up" books (please see any high school reading list) - why not flip it around? I do wish that media would stop behaving as if it's noteworthy that adults are reading books for younger readers, or at least stop presenting this as if it's something shocking! and surprising! and wow! Because it's not. It really, really isn't. And - since the article invokes them, I might as well do it too - I think Harry Potter and those heinous Twilight "books" have proven, in eleven different books, eleven different releases, that adults read YA books.

Have you recovered yet?

The article accompanying this bombshell brings us tired tropes and the inevitable Harry Potter comparisons (the inevitability of these comparisons is really getting me down; I loved the HP books, but I am feeling sick to the teeth with them). Intrepid and evidently ill-read NYTimes writer Susan Dominus refers to Katniss as having angst like an S.E. Hinton character, which is a travesty in itself; Katniss's "angst" revolves primarily around providing food and money for her mother and younger sister; then, later, about keeping herself and/or Peeta alive. Worry about the availability of the necessities of life does not qualify, in my book, as angst. Further, Hinton's characters are all - well - dreamy caricatures, the kind of sensitive yet tough, emotional yet rough boys who populate hetero girls' daydreams and don't exist in too very many other places in reality.

We also get a description of Collins (her fine features and long, flowing hair), along with this chestnut: "Her life story may be less dramatic than the rags-to-riches tales of Rowling and Meyer — neither had published anything before their best-selling successes..."

Sigh. Neither Rowling nor Meyer (as in Stephenie, as in perpetrator of Twilight) were at anything like "rags" before their riches came along. Meyer seems to have grown up fairly middle-class; she attended Brigham Young University, got her BA, and married her husband. She was a full-time mom when she wrote Twilight. Rowling, of course, worked at a variety of jobs, including teaching in Portugal, before returning to Edinburgh to write her first manuscript and work towards a teaching certificate. The "rags" in Rowling's story comes, I suppose, from the fact that in the year she was writing and taking courses toward the teaching certificate, she was on the dole. I view this as being not terribly different than my own situation: working toward my degree, taking out student loans to pay for housing, etc. The difference is that Scotland, like most of the Western world, has a reasonable attitude toward public assistance. You don't have to be eating trash from a gutter to receive it, and you don't have to slink around in shame if you accept it.
Either way, neither Meyer nor Rowling was ever in rags, and neither was Collins (who, among other things, received an MFA in writing and worked as a writer on several children's television programs).

I hate the rags-to-riches myth, for a number of reasons. First, it's not true. None of these women were lounging in the diamond-encrusted lap of luxury, but none of them were living on the street or in true distress over where their next meal would come from. Second, I think it somehow obscures and glamorizes the work and craft of writing (okay, except where Meyer is concerned; you cannot convince me there's any real craft going on in Twilight, no artistry - and I have read the novel twice).
And finally, I simply oppose the rags-to-riches myth on general principles. I think it's unrealistic and counterproductive; it lionizes the wealthy as deserving of their wealth, and it similarly denigrates the poor for not having the gumption to become wealthy.

Dominus also refers to a New Yorker piece from Laura Miller, which I have not read, but which evidently suggests that The Hunger Games is "a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience," a description or analysis that makes me want to throw up.
I do think The Hunger Games trilogy is doing something both interesting and important with regard to adolescence, but "fever-dream allegory" is not that something. For me, every single time I've read any of the three books, what strikes me most are the political and economic critiques. The way that war is figured, the way that power is figured, the way that corruption and decadence are figured; the way the book thinks of reality television and consolidation of power and complicity and superficiality and ignorance about the broken backs on which one's luxury rests - this is what the trilogy is about.
It is NOT an allegory (which, in its strictest definition, requires consistent one-to-one correlations of symbols and meanings). The brutality of the arenas is not a good analog for the brutality of the school locker room, or the school cafeteria, and I am committed to believing in the brutality of both of those. That is: I believe, deeply and sincerely, that high school is a miserable hell full of pitfalls and dangers and humiliations that are unparalleled in the "adult" world. But even I can't make the allegoric leap from gladiatorial arena to high school hallway.
This quote from Miller - or Dominus's use of it, anyway - sells short the very important work of the trilogy, which is not a happy set of books. The last pages of Mockingjay are chilling rather than consoling or uplifting. I wrote my opinion of Mockingjay right after it was published (I read it in a day) - that opinion is here.
Here's how I wrapped up my reading of Mockingjay, and the trilogy as a whole:

The dead stay dead, the broken remain broken. There is no recovery, there is no "getting over" the Hunger Games and their aftermath. This is not a book about glorious happiness arising from the ashes of difficult struggle. We're not left on a happy note, at all - we're left with the Hunger Games, with the reminder of the terrible possibilities in the world. We're left with the fact that terrible things happen, and scar us for life. That sometimes, the nightmares never, ever end.

The way both Dominus and Miller seem to handle the texts tries to cover this over, with suggested allegories and backpedaling references to history and to the author's biography. Suzanne Collins, who I am beginning to admire more and more, despite her gushing over the decision to cast Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, resists this; Dominus quotes her saying "I don’t write about adolescence ... I write about war. For adolescents." This is entirely to Collins's credit, and should be unsurprising to anyone who has read her trilogy (at least anyone who wasn't primarily concerned with whether Team Peeta or Team Gale would win out - and as always, I recall with very deep fondness, the class of undergrads who were revolted when I mentioned the "team" language circulating around the book; those kids said "I'm Team Katniss").

I do wish the Times or someone would hire - even as freelancing contractors - people who really and truly know the field of children's and YA literature, to write about that literature. It deserves better contextualization that it's given by writers like Dominus and Miller, for all the good they may be at their jobs (an assessment I am not capable of making). Besides, there's a glut of smart PhDs or PhDs-to-be out there, lusting for a chance to earn a wage based on their years of hard work and study and reading and writing.

Good writers about books are almost as important as good writers of books. This is true for adult fiction, for nonfiction, for poetry - and it is most certainly also true of children's and young adult literature.

a brilliant metaphor

2011-04-04T22:02:00.000-07:00

I've been struggling with this Myth & Folktale class; I tend to create unrealistically high expectations for myself as a teacher, especially with classes where I don't feel completely at home, and Myth & Folktale has turned out to be the most uncomfortable class I have ever had. It's not that I don't know the material; I don't really know how to teach it effectively. I think. And I don't have the level of expertise and depth of knowledge that I should have to do justice to the class. I have spent more time on this class - reading, preparing, researching, planning, agonizing, worrying - than I have on any other class. I'm probably putting in a good 30 hours a week on that class alone.

But one great thing has come out of it: one of my students suggested a metaphor for adaptation and transmission of myths/legends/stories over time that I think is brilliant in its simplicity and its aptness.
We were talking about the way an historical event or personage becomes the basis of a folktale, and the ways that tale changes over time, until it bears very little resemblance to the truth. The context for this was, I think, the Paul Revere myth; we read Ray Raphael's chapter from Founding Myths about Revere, and Longfellow's ~~dreadful~~ poem. And someone had asked: how did we get from the true story of what happened the night that Revere (and others) tried to alert the colonists about the approach of the British troops, to the wildly heroic, and historically inaccurate, myth we now have.
I tried to say something about adaptation and transmission and distortion and distance, and it probably made no sense at all. And then one of the seniors in my class raise his hand and said: "So it's just kind of like that game "Telephone"?"

And the more I've thought about it, the more this is just the best metaphor, or analogy, for how stories are passed along through time. It's also a great metaphor for evolution, which another student noted: as the story is passed along the "Telephone," the best bits get preserved, and the parts that don't excite or interest the teller/listener, get stripped away. Adaptation. Evolution. Storytelling. Mythmaking. Gossip. Telephone.

It's brilliant.

Related Worlds: Diana Wynne Jones

2011-04-01T11:24:00.000-07:00

I can't be as eloquent on this topic as Neil Gaiman; I don't have the same personal connection to DWJ as some people had. I haven't even had a lifelong relationship with her. But I have loved her books - and because I love her books, I love her. The news of her death has made me feel sad, and it has provoked me to re-visit a number of her titles; her books are always great comfort reading. And reading the tributes paid to her by her friends and colleagues and fans make me appreciate anew just what a marvellous writer she was.

I found DWJ via the child_lit listserv, when I was a sad young pup just out of college, working miserable office-assistant jobs in Washington, DC. I was not terribly happy back then; I didn't quite know what I wanted to be doing with my life, but it turned out that - despite my BA in British and American literature - I wasn't qualified to do much of anything at all. Money was tight, I had been temping for almost a year and living partially off my credit card; I had just started an actual administrative assistant job, and didn't really know what I was doing. I didn't have any friends yet in DC area.

But I had found - actually through that admin assistant job, which turned out to be pretty terrible - the child_lit listserv, and all the smart readerly, writerly people on it. And lots of list-serv posters mentioned Howl's Moving Castle, repeatedly; I got intrigued enough to write down the title and author and go to the public library in Arlington, Virginia.
This is the cover of the edition I borrowed. A hardcover, with that protective film, stiffened and crackling and worn with age and use.

I loved this book, from the first time I read it. I ate it up. I ran back to the library for more, and somehow got Dogsbody, which was a slight disappointment. But I persisted; I think I moved on to the Chrestomanci books next, though I can't really recall the specifics. I was lucky enough to have libraries that had shelves full of Diana Wynne Jones's books; I had no extra money for buying books (still don't have much of it). Over time, I've accumulated my own shelf-full of her books - and she has her own shelf, which is packed nearly full when all the books are in their places.

The full shelf is a rare sight, though, because I re-read her books on a very regular basis. There are always a couple that are lying out, near my bed (right now, Time of the Ghost and Black Maria), or perhaps in my living room.

I have kept her books out of my critical, academic life. It isn't that they aren't great material for critical analysis; they are. It's not that they're outside my field; they aren't. It's more that, for me, her books epitomize what great writing does for the reader who isn't a professional reader. It's not just entertainment, or escapism, or amusement; it's far more than that. It's transformative. It's magical, but not in a hokey, pixie-dust kind of way. A great book should both take you right outside yourself and also, simultaneously, make you feel more at home in your own skin, and Diana Wynne Jones's books do that.

I named this blog, where I do write about children's books and YA books and child culture and media, in honor of Howl's Moving Castle. I love the image and the idea of a moving castle; I love Howl's moving castle. But that is as close to "professionalizing" her work as I am going to get, other than teaching it. Analysis doesn't "ruin" a book, but it's important for me to keep her books, which are so gloriously wonderfully readerly and writerly, separate as examples of the magic that happens when a reader and a writer and a book all meet in one place.

When I started teaching, as part of grad school, I was determined to spread the word. I feel, more strongly than about most books, that I must bring the gospel of Diana Wynne Jones. I have recommended Howl's Moving Castle more times than I can count. I once interrupted a dad and his maybe-10-year-old son in a bookstore to recommend it; they were searching for more fantasy titles for the boy to read; he'd gone through all the more recent series. Idiot bookstores here seem to stock very few of her titles, but they can generally be relied upon to carry Howl's Moving Castle. When I worked at one of those bookstores, I made Howl a "bookseller recommendation," and pushed her titles hard.
Naturally, Howl was the DWJ title I first included in one of my syllabi. It wasn't a perfect fit with the theme I had developed - which was journeys; I expanded it to include other-worlds, which gave me the in I needed for Howl - but I was determined to teach it. Then - and ever since then - when I include a DWJ title, it is with a bit of recklessness, a feeling that the book may not actually fit the theme, or do much to advance our thinking on a particular topic; but it's a great book, and it's important for these undergrads to be exposed to great books.

That first class loved Howl, as have a number of classes since then. I've tried teaching a few other of her books - most recently, just two weeks before her death, The Merlin Conspiracy, to an ungrateful batch of serpent's teeth who were confused more than enchanted by the book. But Howl has always been received enthusiastically; many of the students, when they see the publication date (1986) are perplexed and slightly outraged that they didn't know about it sooner.

I love that their joy in discovering the book is so strong that they feel indignant about not knowing it earlier; they feel they have missed out on something.

They tell me, almost wonderingly, that it's better than Harry Potter!

And of course: it is. All of Diana Wynne Jones's books are better than Harry Potter, though I am a Potter fan. But DWJ's books soar, while also keeping at least one foot planted solidly on the ground. Her books bring magic and fantasy and wonder and delight and awe, all while casting a sidelong glance and a bit of a wink at the reader. Even when she takes on Epic Battles Between Good and Evil, she is never working in cliche, or simple tropes. Good and Evil become vastly complex, confusing and confused, complicated people, or ideas, or things. Her characters - and her readers - have to work through the confusion and the complexity, searching for solutions, answers, explanations. Her more intricate books - Hexwood, Time of the Ghost and the one that has stymied me the most, Fire and Hemlock - demand re-reads. You haven't really read the book until you've read it more than once - or for me, half a dozen times, often with mental contortions and an internal monologue of my own that makes me picture Sophie stamping her foot and shouting "Confound it!" while throwing about weed-killer.

On the child_lit listserv, we've talked often about our "comfort" reading: the books we go to again and again and again. Howl's Moving Castle is probably my number-one comfort read; for more than a year of grad school, I was reading it at least once a month. But all of her other titles are in frequent comfort-reading rotation. None of them bore me; none of them get tired, or stale, or old. Even knowing half the text of Howl by heart doesn't keep me from getting caught up in it.

There are many great books in this world, and I've read a respectable number of the ones in English. Really good fantasy - well, any really good book - makes you think but also pulls you into the world of the book. You get lost in the world (or worlds) of the book.

Diana Wynne Jones's books do this, and more, because her books - her characters - are somehow truly alive. I mean this in an almost-literal sense. I don't have to fall into the world of the story; when I open Howl's Moving Castle, at random, the story is there, alive, waiting for me: Calcifer is crackling and refusing to bend down his head; Sophie is snorting at Howl's lies; the streets of Porthaven are visible through the window. Christopher Chant is scrambling through the Place Between, the man with the yellow umbrella has that wonderful chiming stick of bells, the hushed and formal Castle under Gabriel de Witt is industriously and decorously going about its business. Even now, the large families in Caprona are laughing, scolding, joking, singing, spellcasting, squabbling, eating; the wonders of Time City are being enjoyed, used, cared for by the Lees and other inhabitants, and by the many visitors from all the Stable Eras. The white Dragon is asleep in the chalk hills; Jamie is walking the lonely Bounds. Maewen is making her way to Dropwater, where she will (she must!) find Mitt. All the many animals - all those wonderful cats, and the dogs, Helga the demonic goat, Molly, the unicorn-in-disguise Molly, the quacks, the baby dragon, Mini the lady elephant - they're all going about their business, eating and licking legs unconcernedly and nosing for treats. They are real enough and live enough that even without a reader, they are there. Diana Wynne Jones was a magic-user, and her magic was strong, stronger than most - strong like Venturus, the seventh son; strong like Roddy, whose own gift is enhanced by the hurt lady's knowledge - and Diana Wynne Jones's magic was with words, words that could create and maintain many worlds.

And, as Mrs Fairfax notes at the end of Howl's Moving Castle, "That is the neatest use of words of power I have ever seen."

fantasy casting agent

2011-03-31T00:47:00.000-07:00

One of the more enjoyable book-to-film adaptation games is Fantasy Casting. Inevitably, when any book I like is made into a film, I'm disappointed. No one ever looks totally right, important plot elements get changed, Hermione Granger suddenly says things like "I didn't know my hair looked like that from the back!"
But Fantasy Casting Agent allows me to have total control over who appears in my mental version of books I love. Usually, Fantasy Casting happens by chance; I'll see someone and think: {gasp!!!!} "there goes Katniss/Deeba/Count Olaf!"

I have two entries in the Fantasy Casting category, both discovered by chance.

First up, from China Miéville's extraordinary, wonderful UN LUN DUN:

Explorer and adventurer Yorick Cavea! This is a taveta golden weaver, and I think he's perfect for the role.

Next up, from The Hunger Games:

Cinna. Played by makeup artist and drag queen nonpareil RAJA (also known as Sutan Amrull), currently in season three of the incomparably great RuPaul's Drag Race.
This is an inadequate screencap of Raja, but she looks JUST. LIKE. CINNA. When I first saw Raja out of full drag, in the workroom on the show, I actually kind of gasped and jaw-dropped with the sense of recognition of Cinna. This is precisely, absolutely, completely how I have always pictured Cinna.

I have always loved Cinna; I always pictured him as being dark and incredibly attractive, obviously fashionable, and with that touch of gold eyeliner. Raja - Sutan, really, because Cinna has to be coded male - fits this to a a particularly gorgeous calligraphic T. I would really and truly LOVE to see Sutan be cast in this role; I don't know how great her acting chops are, but she's definitely got presence, and she loves performing. Cinna's role is small enough - and frankly, close enough to what Raja does in "real life" - that I think she could pull it off. And they simply are never going to be able to find anyone who looks more like Cinna. Ever.

Finally, I have discovered the home of Count Olaf, legendary villain from Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events. Turns out Count Olaf keeps a place in the southside of Pittsburgh - who knew?

After zooming in to this detail on the door of the house, anyone acquainted with the books will be unable to deny that this house is marked, distinctly and unmistakably, as Count Olaf's.

Requiescat in Pace, Diana Wynne Jones

2011-03-26T08:32:00.000-07:00

Diana Wynne Jones has died.

This is heartbreaking news, though she had been ill for several years. She is the absolute master of contemporary fantasy for younger readers; her books have an entire shelf to themselves at my house. Her books are my go-to comfort reading; they are among my very favorite books, ever. Howl's Moving Castle, of course, is the source for the title of this blog.

Judith of Misrule, a dedicated Diana Wynne Jones reader, offers perhaps the best tribute, in the form of a quotation from one of Jones's books, The Magicians of Caprona:

For, as Paolo and Tonino Montana were told over and over again, a spell is the right words delivered in the right way.

Diana Wynne Jones made magic of one kind and another with her words, in all of her books. She will be missed, most greatly.

imaginary class planning

2011-03-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

ew class theme for my imaginary children's/YA lit class. it's an obvious one but I think I could make it work.

and that theme? Friendship.

Books to be read include:

A Little Friendly Advice by Siobhan Vivian
How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

Film:
The Goonies

Possibles include:
Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

Considerations:
add in at least one animal-as-friend text (ie, Shiloh, except not Shiloh because it depresses me)
at least one adult-as-friend
add at least one broken-friendship-that-isn't-repaired story

Tokyo Disney, accessibility, miniatures and service

2011-03-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

My mom emailed me a link to one of her Disney-geek websites, parkeology.com (why the e? who knows?).
The site is focused on the obscure and the small details that make Disney parks special/unique/interesting.

This weekend, they posted about Tokyo Disney, a place I am not likely to get to anytime soon.
The writer is focusing on the (evidently incredible) results of wedding Japanese commitment to courtesy and service with Disney's formerly-legendary emphasis on customer service [in recent years, the extremely strict regulations for cast members have been relaxed, at least at the Florida parks; as a person who has worked crummy minimum-wage jobs, I empathize, but I also feel like something is lost when groups of cast members stand around and chat about their boyfriends like any mall employees might. That's not part of "the show," as the old-time Imagineers would say].

A lot of the Parkeology post is taken up with story cards for non-Japanese-speaking guests (the cards shown are printed in English). These are neat - they explain the narratives and themes of the park's attractions, and do so accompanied by gorgeous illustrations - so that non-Japanese speakers can follow along despite Japanese narrations inside the attractions.

But the thing that blew MY mind is the shorter piece of service preceding the story cards. It's accompanied by the photo at right, which is of small, evidently wooden, models of the vehicles for various attractions.Because theming and detail are so important to the Disney Park Experience, all the vehicles are different, tailored to the theme and mood of each attraction.

If you cannot make out the text on this explanatory placard, it reads: SCALE MODELS: Our Visually Impaired Guests May Touch These Models To Easily Understand The Shape of Some Attraction Vehicles.

I don't do disability studies, though it's at the fringes of my consciousness, via queer theory and fat studies and being alive in the world where one can SEE how most places and things are not well adapted for the differently abled.

I have never seen or heard of anything like this particular accommodation for visually-impaired guests. It blows my mind. It makes me feel unaccountably teary in its almost extreme considerateness. Highly detailed scale models of the ride vehicles, for guests to handle and examine if they cannot visually see the vehicles. A way to experience an aspect of the attraction that has tremendous visual impact and that adds to the overall immersive experience. Making those small details - those aspects of the show which were so essential to the project of Disneyland and its offshoots - available to guests who are visually impaired.
It makes a difference, you know; take the vehicles for, say, Peter Pan's Flight (a perennial favorite, though one I personally loathe; it terrified me as a small child - those swinging cars felt terribly unsafe - and then bored/horrified me as an adult who had spent years working on Peter Pan for my masters thesis). Guests board miniature pirate ships suspended from a track on the ceiling. They aren't just generic cars or ski-lift-style hoists; they are miniature versions of Hook's pirate ship. A blind, or otherwise visually impaired, guest won't know this. But the model allows for that experience in a literally hands-on way.

It's absolutely incredible to me. It's an adaptation or accommodation that, once it's pointed out, seems almost essential and obvious, but it's one that is absent from the other parks (and in fact, from virtually anywhere I've ever been). It's evidence of an near-universal thoughtfulness and consideration for all the needs of all the kinds of guests. I know very little about Japanese culture, and don't want to make huge generalizations based on this tiny bit of evidence. However, the fact that someone thought this was necessary, and then a number of people agreed on it and actually executed the plan - this speaks to a culture of consideration for others that I find entrancing.
When I first moved to Washington DC I used to have to take the metro from my workplace to my apartment in Arlington. I had to change trains, during rush hour, at Metro Center - this was a thing that required nerves of steel. A suit of armor would have helped as well. One afternoon, fighting towards my train along with what felt like half the world's population, I saw a visually-impaired man (he had a cane and was clearly using it to navigate) get literally pushed aside by the crowd trying to cram into the metro car. The blind man was also trying to enter the car; he had to feel for the opening with the cane. The impatient horde of rush-hour commuters actually shoved this man out of the way. It wasn't just the pressure of a crushing crowd; it was an aggressive, "out-of-my-way" shoving, the kind of behavior you see on local news on "black friday," when shoppers claw each other for deals on elmos and ipads and wiis. That man, and I, didn't get on that train.
I was shocked.
Actually shocked. I am still shocked when I think about this. That man was at a disadvantage; he had a visual impairment that demanded he take a few extra seconds to find his way into a train car. His impairment - because he was using a cane - was extremely obvious to everyone around him. Accommodating him would have been the work of literally seconds, a tiny shred of time when the crowd hung back and allowed this chap to find his way into the train.

Instead he was shoved off-balance in the tiny stampede of commuters.

Those small scale models for visually-impaired guests makes me suspect that, in Japan, that blind man with his cane would have entered calmly and unhindered into the train car.

Those scale models also make me think back - because everything is related to one's dissertation - to Mister Rogers; that kind of accommodation is being neighborly in an entirely pragmatic but essential way.

I love those scale models, and whoever thought of them.

alcohol, genetics and Native Americans - a query

2011-03-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to read a curiously un-gripping book on the 1854 cholera epidemic in London (The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson); one of the nonfiction things I like reading about is disease and medical history. But it's got to be a good story as well, and truthfully, most stories about devastating illnesses and the ways societies and/or individuals cope with and cure them, usually ARE good stories. But this book is just not doing it for me; there are long journalistic digressions from the main story of the man, John Snow, who was working on figuring out the cause of cholera (a cause that would lead to cure; contaminated drinking water carries the cholera bug).

One of these digressions had to do with tolerance and genetics and evolution; Johnson describes how frequently drinking water rather than some kind of alcohol was a fairly recent thing in the 19th century. For hundreds, thousands, years before, people who settled in towns, villages and cities drank alcohol, because - due to their fixed and substantial populations, procuring clean water was not feasible. But evidently, a tolerance to alcohol had to be acquired over generations; as Johnson points out, "alcohol... is a deadly poison and notoriously addictive." He tells us that "early agrarians lacked that trait [a gene producing an enzyme allowing humans to process alcohol] and thus were genetically incapable of 'holding their liquor'." Thus, over many long years, humans with that gene came to be dominant in urbanized/settled regions as humans lacking that gene died without reproducing (this is how evolution works). The key here is urbanization and agriculture; shifting away from hunting-gathering, with is almost by definition migratory, humans stayed in one place and began mucking up those places with their waste products, which end up in the water supply and deliver brutal gifts like dysentery and cholera to the inhabitants who drink that water. Thus, alcohol, which kills off most of those waterborne bugs.

This is when Johnson gets interesting. He writes:

The descendants of hunter-gatherers - like many Native Americans or Australian Aborigines - were never forced through this genetic bottleneck, and so today they show disproportionate rates of alcoholism. The chronic drinking problem in Native American populations has been blamed on everything from the weak "Indian constitution" to the humiliating abuses of the US reservation system. But their alcohol intolerance most likely has another explanation: their ancestors didn't live in towns.

Johnson doesn't give sources for his comments on genetics, and I also lack the time to really thoroughly research this (I suspect it's not as easy or solid a claim as Johnson makes it appear, though I don't really know). But it's an intriguing possibility. I haven't done more than dip a few toes into anything like serious Native American scholarship and criticism, but you don't have to read much fiction (Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian will suffice) to know that alcoholism and alcohol have been catastrophic for Native Americans. A genetic explanation doesn't, of course, get us anywhere in terms of a way of solving this problem or aiding Native populations, and it's perilously similar to the "weak constitution" claim, which makes the Natives seem at blame, or at fault, for alcoholism. And having an alcohol intolerance doesn't mean you should have been naturally-selected out of existence; it simply means that Native populations either kept their water supply clean, had other kinds of tolerances, or moved around enough to maintain uncontaminated water, and thus had no biological imperative to shed non-genetically-tolerant people.

Ultimately, the genetic basis for specifically Native alcoholism isn't terribly productive in any ways other than intellectual or historical ones. The problem is what alcohol abuse and alcohol intolerance does to individuals and their families (who are also frequently impacted by the "humiliating abuses" of the reservation system).

But it's an interesting claim, and one I have not come across elsewhere. It makes me rethink the dreadful representations (from the 18th and 19th century) of the alcoholic "savage" in a very different light; it makes the way Native people were taken advantage of by traders, settlers, explorers, etc using alcohol as payment and lure, seem even more appalling than it did (a difficult accomplishment).

Spaceship Earth and Walter Benjamin

2011-03-15T21:10:00.000-07:00

Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" (from Illuminations) was one of my early critical influences. I read it as part of a project on narrative theory, my third year of college; since then, I have taken grad classes that dealt with Benjamin (one in particular that looked specifically at "The Storyteller"), and have come to realize Benjamin is far more complicated than I initially thought. Still, some of the basic things in that essay that really moved me still affect me strongly, and though they have deeper meanings and connotations and contexts than I fully grasp, they also retain their surface meaning(s). In other words: this is a simplistic view of a very complex text, and I am aware of that.

Experience, Benjamin tells us, and wisdom or counsel, are what the storyteller offers. And we are losing (have lost?) the ability to communicate experience; we have lost any counsel or wisdom we might have been able to offer. In Part VI of this essay (in the version linked to above) is the stuff that really hits home for me. Benjamin identifies as concomitant with the rise of capitalism the true menace to experience and storytelling: the rise and primacy of information.
Information replaces experience, replaces story. The already-explained and the instantly verifiable replaces the psychological work of the story-listener/reader and the art of experience and counsel-sharing of the storyteller.

Benjamin wrote this essay in the mid 1930s; I would argue that, in many ways, in mass popular culture, information has almost totally eclipsed experience and story. Or, perhaps, experience has been downgraded and filtered and collapsed into information.

You can see the replacement of story and art with information in a very vivid way if you pay a visit to Disney's Epcot Center in Florida. My family began making annual pilgrimages to Disneyworld when I was a small fry; my parents now "snowbird" not far from Orlando. When I visit them during my spring break, there is disneyfication. I get almost as much of a charge from the critical outrage I experience as I do from the pleasure of entertainment.

At any rate, for years I've been touring peacefully through the iconic attraction at Epcot, Spaceship Earth, the slow-moving ride inside the geosphere at the park's entrance (the "giant golf ball" to the uninformed). As a small fry, it was narrated by Walter Cronkite; as an older kid, it was revamped and narrated by Jeremy Irons in richly British accents. One particularly glorious moment comes when the ride vehicle rounds a corner to face a tableau of animatronic figures with masks in a Greek amphitheatre, and Jeremy intones "The theatre is born." (you can hear Jeremy say this around 3:45 in the above clip). The ride was a journey through the art of human communication, from cave paintings to the invention of papyrus "paper" to a common alphabet to the movable-type printing press to the explosion of art in the renaissance (pronounced by Jeremy, wonderfully British, as the renAYsance) to mechanical reproduction on a grand scale to films, television, radio, internet.

A recent reference to Spaceship Earth ("the most relaxing 15 minutes of your life") on the website of Karsten Knight plus my recent Florida/Disneyfication spring break, made Benjamin and Spaceship Earth to collide in my brain, prompting this (lengthy and link-riddled) post.

A year or two ago, however, sponsorship of the attraction changed hands from AT&T to Siemens. And the ride changed. A lot.
Now it's narrated by Judi Dench (anglophilia at epcot, what can I say?), and instead of being the story of communication, it's the story of information, and information technologies.
No longer do we have Jeremy Irons telling us that the Greeks elevated the spoken word to an art form, and the theatre is born; now, we have Dame Judi tell us that the Greeks founded schools, and developed mathematics, which lead to mechanical inventions that paved the way for technology.

In the former narrations, Glorious Rome falls to invaders, and thus the Dark Ages descend. "But all was not lost; far across the land, from Cairo to Cordoba, Jewish teachers and Islamic scholars continue the quest for knowledge." We learn that these Jewish and Islamic thinkers "shared new discoveries with all who would listen."

This is a bit of history that I don't think most people know about; we mostly get that Anglocentric history with the blacked-out bits of the dark ages, where Europe and the world just goes dark for a few centuries, until slowly, aided by unicorns and King Arthur, they pull themselves up into the medieval age, then the Renaissance. Meanwhile, everyone outside the white Christian world continues to writhe around in abject squalor and ignorance (see 7:20 or thereabouts for the best visual representation of this).

Obviously, this unicorns and ignorance version is utterly false; as Jeremy tells us, Jewish and Islamic scholars (in Spain, in much of North Africa and the Middle East) were working away, inventing modern medicine and any number of other things; meanwhile, all of Asia was clicking away, China leading the race of progress by a good many miles.

My point here is: Jeremy includes the non-Christian, non-white world, briefly, here. And it's a really important inclusion, one that makes note of both the preservation of and the continuance of scholarship.

Judi Dench, on the other hand, now tells us that these "Arab and Jewish" chaps had all this Roman-and-earlier knowledge stored away in libraries, where they, the Arabs and Jews, "watched over it." No mention here of new ideas or inventions made by the Arabs (who used to be Islamic scholars) and Jewish folks; no, they're just maintaining the warehouses.
Dame Judi makes this entirely too clear by saying: "call it [the Arabs & Jewish folks] the world's first backup system."

BACKUP SYSTEM?
no.
no!
NO!
you did not just call thousands of humans, some of them truly brilliant thinkers, a "backup system."
Oh, but she did.

The ride does not improve from this point. We got paeans to progress and technology, information, computers, a very nerdy fellow (Steve Wozniak? Bill Gates?) in a garage fiddling with a prototypical personal computer, greenlit screen and all. We get told a new language was invented, one spoken by computers. We get technology and computers are awesome rah rah huzzah!
We got lots of tableaux of people alone with their technology.

In the old days of Spaceship Earth, it was about communication and the arts; it was about the way humans were able to connect with one another. In the setup to the ride, accompanied by misty images of fur-wearing folks hunting woolly mammoth, Jeremy Irons and Walter Cronkite told us that human invention of arts and language and writing meant that we were "no longer alone."

The tableaux at the end of changed. Used to be a pair of voice actors in the radio booth; now it's just one man. The woman seems to have been repurposed into the 80s, where she gets an afro and yellow tights and stands alone surrounded by huge computers. The small obnoxious child who shrieked "Extra! Extra!" while brandishing mass-printed newspapers at us in our ride vehicles is now, very curiously, pushed back and facing into a corner, back to us, while a new, older voice says "extra! extra!" in a muffled way. This child laborer, turned to face the corner, is a freakish alteration, reminiscent of the end of the Blair Witch Project and absolutely baffling.
Instead of seeing how communication technologies connect people - through a series of mini-tableaux of - essentially - webcam communications (a mother singing to a child at bedtime, grandparents watching a grandchild's graduation, a field researcher discussing a find with a colleague, two kids sharing clips of their athletic achievements, one in California, one in Japan), we get the nerdy guy alone in his garage, and then a new "interactive" gag about where you, the rider, want to live.

Information and isolation, instead of experience and wisdom. Technology and data, instead of arts and invention.
It's a grim visualization of the (admittedly first-world) ills of contemporary life.

As noted above, my musings were partially prompted by Karsten Knight's fairly offhand comment on his website. Spaceship Earth used to be a very blissful 15 minutes of slow-moving British narration through a eurocentric but otherwise fairly inoffensive art-appreciation show. As a kid, visiting the park in August with my family, Spaceship Earth was a blessed relief: usually with a short line, the ride was cool and dark, enabling us to sit, slightly tipped back in our ride vehicles, relaxed.

Now I feel unhappy, tensely awaiting that awful "Backup system" comment, angered by the translation of some of the west's greatest artistic achievements into nearly literal blips of data. Computers are great - I'm using one right this second, and so are you - but Steve Wozniak or his avatar inventing a PC really doesn't have a patch on Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. You see both of these represented now, but the avatar-nerd gets more time and focus than Michelangelo. Greek theatre has vanished, replaced with mathematics. The very real scholarly, intellectual and artistic pursuits (of which medicine was one very important aspect) of the Islamic/Arab world are totally elided, replaced with the truly offensive and insulting "backup system," as if cultures and civilizations and humans are some kind of primitive floppy disk, a precursor to that old 5-inch floppy.

It's Benjamin's essay in animatronic form, and it's truly heartbreaking. My dissertation work also deals with Disneyland, and my reading about Walt Disney and the early years of his work has me genuinely convinced that, at the heart of what Walt Disney and his studio did, was a true commitment to the twin forces of technology AND art, and what each could do for the other. Spaceship Earth strips art right out of the picture, replacing it with gleaming technology for its own sake, information instead of experience and story-telling. It's a vast step backward for Disney, in my estimation of that company's philosophy (not its corporate philosophy, which was never Walt Disney's philosophy to begin with; this is a man who plowed most of his eventually sizable income right back into his studio and his techno-artistic endeavors).
It's a bloody shame is what it truly is, and it's no longer that 15 most relaxing minutes of your life. Now it's a hurried-along, 10-minute barrage of information without counsel, wisdom or art.

A Peter Pan aside

2011-03-14T21:17:00.000-07:00

listening to an archived episode of BBC Radio 4's amazing nerdy-intellectual program "In Our Time," (about fairies) one of the guests said, in a most matter-of-fact tone:

What Peter Pan is really about is dead children. Every Wendy-house is a kind of tomb, really.

I love that the guest (Diane Purkiss) says this in such a decided tone, as if there were no disagreement at all about the place of dead children in Peter Pan.

Purkiss also mentions - and my mind is blown - a Persian demon or spirit called Kubu, who is evidently a lost dead child, much like Peter Pan, who seeks other children to keep him company (in other words: Kubu will kill your babies so he can have friends). Some quick googling doesn't turn up much except - oddly - a geography paper about salt and henna and spiritual beliefs, which mentions Kubu, a "manifestation of a stillborn child."

For more Peter Pan thoughts (including a guest post by me!), please see Jonathan Auxier's excellent, and excellently written, blog The Scop.

(disclaimer? note? Jonathan Auxier is the partner of a former classmate of mine at Pitt, children's literature scholar/current grad student Mary Burke Auxier. it's a small world)

teenage boys

2011-03-13T19:18:00.000-07:00

I have never been a teenage boy. I do not regret this, but it does mean my own empirical evidence for male adolescence is fairly limited. I'm dependent on second-hand, after-the-fact anecdotal evidence from males of my acquaintance, evidence of the kind that would never stand up in a court of law.

There's a common belief out there that Boys Don't Read. I know this is bunk. Yet! When it comes to YA fiction, I'm becoming more and more concerned that perhaps, in fact, teenage boys don't read YA lit.

The question arose last fall, in Representing Adolescence, and it stumped me: What do adolescent boys actually read? Which books?

When I was in high school, the guys of my acquaintance (if they read at all) were into Tom Clancy and Stephen King and Michael Crichton. Maybe James Patterson, maybe Thomas Harris. Maybe the early, errant John Grisham. One or two standouts read Robert Jordan (in particular, a boy I sat next to in AP European history, who somehow managed to read Robert Jordan almost every day in class yet still pay attention, respond to the teacher, and get staggeringly high grades on tests. In that nerdy way I had and have, I was smitten).
These seem, still, to be the go-to books for teenage boys; at least, at the bookstore where I worked from 2008-2010, Patterson, King, Clancy were still in high demand. The only YA titles I remember any male readers asking for - aside from ones assigned for school reading - were Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak.

So what ARE teenage boys reading? Or, more accurately, what YA books are they reading? Or, more to the point: Where are the really good YA books for YA boys?

Because of my own interests, I know some of the titles and authors that gay teenage boys read; those tend to deal with LGBTQ issues, which - alas for our culture of compulsory heterosexuality/homophobia - are not likely to be picked up by straight teenage boys.

There's something really girly about a lot of YA fiction that's out there, even the good stuff. I try, whenever I can, to resist gender normativity and all that, but the fact is: the publishing world thinks in terms of male/female, and they go all out for the girls in the YA department. All those miserable supernatural romances, all those fancypants girls with scads of money serials, all those books about friends and trauma and first loves and music - all have a girl-oriented feel to them. It may be just in packaging - Natalie Standiford's mind-bendingly great How to Say Goodbye in Robot, while narrated by a female, is not an overly girly book. Yet some jackass decided to give it a vivid bubblegum pink dustjacket, thus dooming it to a life of female-only readership.

The teenage-culture world seems to skew heavily female, in ways that strike me as troubling. There are junior-girl versions of lots of things; magazines make this most vividly clear. You have Teen Vogue and People, Seventeen, and that host of tweenybopper magazines (Tiger Beat, Teen Beat, etc). But there's no comparable set of junior versions of magazines for teenage boys; there's no Teen GQ, no Teen Esquire. The concerns and interests of adolescent boys are imagined to be identical to the concerns and interests of adult men. How can this be?

It used to be that girlhood and womanhood were collapsed into each other (and in many ways, still are), while boyhood (short pants! living in the nursery!) and manhood were two distinct things. Now there's a "training" stage for girls as they grow up into adult women, a phase of life when clothes, makeup and boys are all the rage (as reflected by the teen-girl magazines). This is distinct from women's periodicals mainly by the absence of home decor and organization from the teen mags; women's magazines are mainly concerned with clothes, makeup, Your Man, and your home. Teenage girls get juniors magazines, junior clothes, junior makeup, even training bras (training for what? it's not like training wheels on a bike, or training a plant to grow in a certain way - is the "training" just a weak effort at desexualizing fairly young girls' foundation garments?). But there are not similar "training" things for teenage boys. Why? Is the teenage boy meant to be read, meant to be, identical to the adult male?

There are heaps of great books with male protagonists; M.T. Anderson's excellent Feed and Octavian Nothing books; Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy; Frank Portman's King Dork; K.L. Going's King of the Screwups and Fat Kid Rules the World. But it is not at all clear to me that teenage boys are reading them unless forced to by a teacher.

Among my undergrads, when I ask what the (sadly few) boys in the class read as adolescents, mostly they say - Clancy, King, Patterson. A few read fantasy: Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman. In the YA world, only two authors get mentioned: one boy was passionate about Neil Shusterman, and several had read and enjoyed John Green's books.

So what's going on here? Where is the abundance of good YA books for guys? Where are the YA guys to read those books? Why is YA somehow the province of teenage girls?

Popularity: I really want to know about this

2011-03-02T18:45:00.000-08:00

omehow, today's planned discussion of Speak devolved into a weak conversation about popularity and unpopularity in adolescence. Since this is one of THE MAJOR themes of lots of YA realist fiction, it's worth talking about. It's also, as far as I can tell, a major theme among high schoolers.

As I have in past classes, I asked this gaggle to put up hands if you considered yourself popular in high school. A goodly number raised their hands; I wasn't surprised by any of them. I asked who would identify themselves as distinctly unpopular, and got a few hands (I always put mine up for this as well; the older I get, the more relieved I feel that I wasn't well-liked by my classmates). So I tried to get them to analyze what it means to be popular. Is it being well-known? Well-liked? does it have to do with class? Why are so few people ready and willing to cop to being popular in high school? I have some thoughts of my own on all of these subjects, but I really am extremely curious about this as a topic, and I was hoping to get some decent responses from my students.
As usual, they mostly just sat there and looked vaguely at me, or possibly into space, or "secretly" at the phones in their hands, "hidden" under their desks [industry secret: those desks have no fronts. i can SEE your phone in your lap]. A handful responded with various things, some more thoughtful than others, some more anecdote-laden than others.
The idea of popularity as relational came up, as did the phrase "people who would talk to you," which, when extracted from the high school context, kind of sounds awful. The point being made there had to do with proximity. Take random Popular Girl A. Put her in, say, English class without her normal Popular friends. Who will she talk to? A hierarchy organizes itself then, based on that class; Girl A may talk to you in English, but she won't sit with you in lunch when her other friends are there. This really needs to be mapped visually, but I don't have the time or talent for it now, but it makes a lot of sense.

But what I really want to know - and I sincerely, devoutly hope that people, someone, anyone, will post a comment about this - is how popularity was defined or organized in YOUR high school experience. One remark that was mentioned today - and affirmed by about half a dozen students in this class - was the "everyone in my class was friends, we all got along, no one was unpopular." I have heard this remark before, and every single time I hear it I want to shake my head and sigh. I suspect this often means "No one I knew was unpopular," or "None of my friends was unpopular." Because there's a swath of kids in every high school, I imagine, who are largely invisible. They might just be quiet kids; they might be weird, they might just be so average as to disappear. Maybe they don't join any clubs or sports; maybe they work two jobs, or have some weird out-of-school hobby. Maybe they simply don't fit into any readily identifiable archetype or social group and thus, uncategorizable, become invisible. There are people like this in every environment I've ever been in - high school, college, grad schools, workplaces - people who seem to never be talked about, never seem to draw attention. People who fade in and fade out and have very little to do with anyone as far as you can tell (and when you ask your friends about that person, often many of them don't really know who you mean; or maybe one does and has a tiny tidbit of information, like: he eats lunch in fourth period, or I think he used to work in Communications.

I just cannot believe in the existence of any high school in America where everyone's friendly and kind to everyone else. Where there's no one who's the weirdo loser. Where there's no small band of uber-nerds, clinging together for safety, but generally the butt of everyone else's jokes. Someone who no one likes. ALL group environments seem to resolve themselves into hierarchies of some kind, even hippie quasi-communes like my undergraduate institution. There's always at least that one kid that no one you know has ever seen speaking to anyone.

One girl, in class today, put forth the intensely troubling idea (especially in the context of Speak) that anyone who isn't "friends with everyone in the class" has brought it on themselves. That they don't want to be happy. That they don't join things, or "put themselves out there." Implied in her remarks was a negative judgment: if you don't join in, then you kind of suck. But then I think of Melinda, in Speak, and her silence and what it conceals and reveals. I think of all the troubled fictional teenagers who have no or few friends because of a perceived issue that is actually a symptom of some truly grave problem.

I know the terms popular and unpopular are simplistic and reductive and possibly not useful. What I mean, I think, is whether you perceived yourself to be unpopular, or popular, in high school. Not what other people thought of you; not what you think of other people. But how you felt, or feel, as a high-schooler.

Two easy criteria: were you ever picked last, or nearly-last, for teams in gym class? Did you ever have to eat lunch alone because you had no one to sit with?
And a third, a corollary of these two: Did you ever have to worry about the likelihood of either of these things happening?

Academy-award winning short film The Lost Thing

2011-03-01T00:57:00.000-08:00

The children's lit/Australian pride worlds are abuzz today over Shaun Tan's win at the Academy Awards on Sunday, in the Best Short Animated Film category for "The Lost Thing," which is based on Tan's picture book of the same name.

The film is just under 15 minutes in length, and can be viewed online here. Oddly, it has subtitles in French, which I found distracting, since I have a solid picture-book-level vocabulary in French and thus could actually read the subtitles pretty easily.

Tan's work is incredible; his illustrations, his style, are beyond gorgeous. Perhaps his best-known (most readily available?) book in the States is his collaboration with John Marsden, The Rabbits, which is actually quite a devastating read.

"The Lost Thing" is a wonderful, wondrous film, more than tinged with a kind of surrealist melancholy. I'm tempted to search out its symbolic and allegorical "meanings" - the number of potential meanings is rather large, I think - but part of me just wants, for now, to enjoy it as a gorgeous, strange, strangely touching, short film.

Go watch it. Enjoy. You will be very glad that you did.

Control, Comedy & the Geek

2011-02-20T18:03:00.000-08:00

Last week I read Adam Rex's novel Fat Vampire: A Never Coming of Age Story. I'm not sure yet how I feel about it, and like a fool I returned it to the library (from whence it came via interlibrary loan), so I can't re-read it and see if I've figure it out yet. I can say that the "Fat" in Fat Vampire is not as Fat Accepting as I could have liked, though it allows for the intriguing premise, not adequately explored in the vampire fiction that I'm familiar with, that perhaps being an immortal teenager in a never-changing body is not wholly desirable. Doug, the eponymous fat vampire, is stuck in a Fat body forever, now that he's been made into a vampire. And the fat body is marked here in many of the stereotypical ways that fat bodies are marked.

And Doug may not be the hero of his own story; in many ways, this book is as much, if not more, about Sejal, the Indian exchange student, sent away from India to a bland-seeming American home because she has "the Google," an evidentl diagnosable illness that manifests as an inability to function without internet mediation. That is - Sejal's life is only real to her when it happens via webcam and internet connection.

The intricacies of the plot of Fat Vampire are better left alone until I've figured out how I feel about the book.

What I found immensely interesting and revelatory, however, is this passage from fairly late in the book (page 250 in the hardback library edition I read).

Control was the basis of all humor. Even as its most innocent, what was a joke or clever comment if not a way to take control? To become King of the Moment.
People like him - the unbeautiful, the less popular - were almost inhuman in some people's eyes. They were a kind of pitiful monster, an aberration, a hunchback. ...The word 'geek' had once referred to a circus freak, hadn it? A carny who performed revolting acts for a paying audience. Was it so different now? See! him bite the head off a live chicken. Behold! as he plays Dungeons & Dragons at a sleepover.
Wasn't this how they always tried to compensate? To overcome a girl's disgust or another boy's contempt and make them laugh despite themselves was to take some small measure of control. No wonder the popular, good-looking kids were so seldom funny. They didn't have to be. Why else would people find it so hilarious to see some short kid's textbook stolen, held high above his head, out of reach? It wasn't funny - it was pure control. Insult comedy minus the comedy.

That tired old chestnut, to laugh at oneself as a way of preempting the laughter of others, to make them laugh so they won't hit you, has an obvious referent in this quote. But what struck me most was not the comedy-as-control (or power) idea, but the really almost shocking "no wonder the popular, good-looking kids were so seldom funny."

As far as literature is concerned, the funniest YA novels that I can think of also tend to have the dorkiest, or most outcast, protagonists. King Dork. Gordon Korman's masterpiece, A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag. Even Speak is funny, in its grim and dark way; Melinda's observations about high school never fail to make me laugh.

Then I started thinking about my own adolescence. Trying to recall one's own past as a way of measuring or evaluating texts is definitely dodgy, though recalling my teenage years is definitely less tricky than remembering back to my elementary school days, which at this point are largely a blur.
But last fall, while teaching the Adolescence class, I retrieved my old high school yearbooks from the back of the closet at my parents' house, where they've languished since the time I graduated. I dug them out because I was having trouble remembering how people dressed when I was in high school, and dress - or rather, identity through wardrobe - was a frequent topic in class. Finally, those yearbooks come in handy for something.
And flipping through them, appalled at the mid-90s belts-and-tucked-in-shirts of my schoolmates, I was reminded again of all those cheery smiling Popular People [I was not cheery, smiling nor popular in the slightest]. I tried thinking of the people who were funny, the people who made jokes or snide remarks or sarcastic comments that made me laugh. Admittedly I can be hard to please; crude or obvious humor, and anything slapstick, makes me cringe, not giggle. But still - I'm ready to laugh at things most of the time.
None of the shiny Popular People were the joke-makers.
I think of my post-high-school life, to the people who made me laugh, the people who I made laugh - and rarely are the funniest of them the ones who are also the most socially acceptable and well-adjusted.

This is not to say that well-adjusted, socially acceptable, well-liked people are not or cannot be funny. It's more to say that, both in my lived experience and representationally in fiction, they are not the stars of humor and comedy.

I think, if I had given this much thought before (which I haven't, truthfully), I would have chalked up the unfunniness due to a kind of obliviousness, a lack of observation skills. The gaps and chinks and lapses are often where humor lies, but you have to see them; you have to be perceptive in a big-picture way. You also have to be willing to stick your neck out, to leave yourself open to - well, yes, laughter - but also criticism. Humor often rocks the boat, and many of the upper-echelon folks are very happy with nothing but smooth sailing (and of course, because, as Adam Rex points out, they own the boat and they're in charge of the rudder, the sails and the charts).

Humor is also a way of being seen, of making oneself visible. As Doug muses, in Fat Vampire, the "unbeautiful" are barely human in the eyes of the "beautiful." The pretty people turn away from the freak show. To get looked at, to win attention - which again, is power and control - the unbeautiful need something. The Pretty People have their Prettiness, or an illusion of prettiness, and for a lot of them, that's enough to get noticed. It keeps them visible. But the D&D-playing geek? He needs to deliver something else. And humor - funniness - is one thing that is hard to resist, even if you're one of the beautiful people.

It's an interesting dichotomy: unbeautiful & funny/beautiful & unfunny. It's one that I find myself thinking about in the "real world" now, with people I know. It explains a few comments about the relative funniness of pranks, made my students who are clearly beautiful people; pranks which, to me, reeked of crudity and simple unkindness.
So much of bullying is written off with "it was just a joke," or explained as "i thought it would be funny." And so often that bullying is done by at least marginally Beautiful People. I've always had a hard time grasping these notions of humor, which are really just cruelty of a very simple-minded variety. Fat Vampire articulates, wonderfully, both the power/control issues at play, as well as the hierarchical divisions at play, in these kinds of situations.

I hope I'll remember to keep this in mind for future reading: who gets to be funny? Who truly is funny? and how do humor and control interweave?

hardly unbiased

2011-02-17T21:45:00.000-08:00

As I seem to mention often, here there and everywhere, I am the child of two public school teachers. My dad was very active in his union as well, serving as grievance chairman, working on negotiating teams, eventually being elected union president. My entire childhood was spent hearing conversations about unions, about administrators, about negotiations, about teachers and teaching. This was standard dinner-table discussion.

Now, I am a teacher, though in less gritty halls; I'm not unionized, though I am appallingly underpaid.

My sympathy and empathy for teachers especially, and unions in general, has always been strong. You could say I was raised in the union way.

So the latest anti-labor moves by Wisconsin governor scott walker strike me at an especially sensitive spot. I also have a number of friends who live in Wisconsin, or call Wisconsin home; these are extremely good friends, some of them people I've known for 13 years, people who were or are very close to me.

Most of them, as grad students, are affected by Walker's proposals.

I'm proud of the tide of activism that poured out in Madison to protest the governor. I'm very proud of my friend(s) who participated, despite grueling schedules. Democracy - and that is what this is - can be a very impressive and awe-inspiring sight, and seeing grad students, burly firefighters, sturdy-looking plumbers, high schoolers, teachers of all ages, all kinds of people who, on the surface, seem to come from across a very broad spectrum - seeing them all working for a common cause is genuinely moving.

I found photos from the protests online, a collection of the best signs. They're mostly all clever or poignant or witty, but this one - the one posted above - went right to my heart.

In addition to being the child of teachers, I have always loved school, and for the most part, loved and respected my teachers. Many of them cared for me exceedingly well, even if I didn't know it at the time (others made it obvious to me, even then, even in second grade with Mrs Chapman).

We ought all, as a society, care deeply about our teachers, our educators. It is not a glamorous job, and it is not an easy job, and very often someone ends up wearing seasonally-themed sweaters or denim jumpers or things adorned with apples. But the kids - whether they're toddlers in pre-school or sophisticated seniors in college - the kids are why they and we do it. And when teachers do it right, as many of them do - the rewards for those kids are manifold.

Care for your educators the way they care for your children. It's asking a lot - because they care, enormously, about your children. But it is not asking too much.

Solidarity with the good people of Wisconsin who want to work and live and be paid well and treated fairly.

Frankie Landau-Banks is not a Feminist

2011-02-03T20:25:00.000-08:00

Conveniently enough, BitchMedia's blog (an adjunct of Bitch magazine) has recently posted a list of "100 YA Books for the Feminist Reader" right when I've been thinking about writing about E. Lockhart's non-feminist novels.
And serendipitously enough, the list includes Lockhart's major offender: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.

I'd heard a bit of buzz about Disreputable History before I finally read it; what prompted me to hunt it down was an acquaintance mentioning on facebook how much she'd liked it. Knowing this acquaintance to be an intelligent person, I figured the time had come to bump that book to the top of my to-be-read list.
So I read it, and liked it well enough, though not as much as others have. Then I decided to teach it, last spring (spring 2010).

And it was in the re-reading for teaching that I realized how tricksy the book is, how appallingly it's presented as feminist while actually undercutting most of the ideas and values I ascribe to feminism.

The edition I used for teaching is the Disney-Hyperion paperback copyright 2009. It's stamped with the medals for being both a Printz Honor Book and National Book Award Finalist (which are grim enough), but also includes snappy quotes proclaiming the feminist credentials of the book. Lauren Myracle is quoted thus: "best frickin' girl-power book EVER - subversive and so funny." and then Kirkus Review, inside: "a funny feminist manifesto." And School Library Journal: "she [Frankie] is the ultimate feminist role model for teens."

Except that, when I read this book - and then discussed with my students, a largely-female group of about 40 undergrads - I realized this is not a good feminist book. Frankie isn't much of a feminist role model, either. She's clever, yes. She's got the kind of scheming mind that we see, in super-exaggerated-mode, in Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous heroine of Stieg Larsson's *Girl with a Dragon Tattoo* trilogy. Frankie could very easily become a hacker.

But first, she's at a very exclusive boarding school (cringingly enough, named Alabaster Prep), and she's pissed off because she can't be in the all-boys "secret society," the Order of the Basset Hounds.

And here's where the feminism problems begin. What Frankie wants is to be part of the all-boys club, evidently because her new boyfriend Matthew is one of its leaders, and she doesn't like being left out. Frankie has returned to Alabaster at the start of her sophomore year with a newly-hot body that gains the attention and admiration of Matthew (who, the back cover tells us, is "a gorgeous senior"). And he goes off to do secret Basset things, and leaves Frankie out of it - won't even tell her what he's doing.

So she follows him around and spies - because nothing is more healthy and feminist than spying on your boyfriend - and finds out about the Bassets, and decides to infiltrate. Via email, Frankie coordinates massive pranks and gets the Basset boys to carry out her wishes (wow, commanding a squadron of rich white boys - soooo feminist!). She does this all anonymously, allowing the obviously-named Alpha to take credit for the plots.

Meanwhile, she constantly dithers about how to make sure Matthew still likes her, puts down her roommate and friend Trish for being too "feminine," and worries that she'll be rejected from Matthew's group of friends if he ever breaks up with her (as she sees happen to other Basset's girlfriends).

Here's a quote:

"the purpose of the Loyal Order [of bassets] was connection. Bonding. Exclusivity. Maleness. ...They had such a large part of Matthew's heart, and Matthew had them. ... Frankie had fallen in love not only with Matthew but with his group of friends. And she knew they didn't rate her as anyone important."

This is on page 195 of my edition - out of a 342-page book.

Here's another one, from earlier on:

"Frankie found her friend's attitude infuriating. By opting out of what the boys were doing in favor of a typically feminine pursuit, Trish had closed a door - the door between herself and that boys' club her brothers had on the beach. ...another summer spent making crumbles in the kitchen, and the boys would stop asking her to come out. Instead, they'd expect warm dessert to be waiting for them on their return."

That's page 68, in reference to Trish - Frankie's roommate and friend - relating how she spent time over the summer making crumbles - berry, peach, etc - instead of hanging out with the boys. Trish explains it's more fun than listening to the drunken boys slurrily talk about sports.

And Frankie is angry with Trish.

These two quotes show the main motivation and the main problem with this book. Frankie's desire to "be subversive" and infiltrate the Bassets is because she doesn't want to be left out of the boys' club. She doesn't want to break it up; she doesn't want to challenge it, or form her own. She wants to be a member. And she looks down, angrily, on girls who choose to do things they enjoy, rather than "hanging out with the boys."
The boys, in Frankie's world, in this book, are where it's at: they're interesting and smart and funny and adventurous and clever, and a lot of them are pretty good-looking, too. And they're almost all very wealthy and well-connected. They are loyal to each other - part of the function of the Basset society - and will privilege the pre-existing male friendship over the adjunct friendship of that male's girlfriend (which, frankly, makes a lot of sense to me - it happens on both sides of the hetero gender-binary divide).
Being where the boys are is Frankie's main goal throughout the book. Even when what they're doing is lame or boring to her, she'd rather be hanging with the boys than doing something fun, if "typically feminine" with her friend Trish.

Frankie's first prank is absolutely revoltingly anti-feminist, and it's this more than anything that upsets me, because on the surface, at a quick glance, it seems to be feminist and subversive.

She realizes, contemplating her roommate's lacy blue bra, that her boobs are what's keeping her out of the Loyal Order (she acknowledges other things - chromosomes, for one - but thinks that boobs are a good symbol of difference). She wants to be a "force to be reckoned with," which for Frankie, means she wants the boys to notice her and take her seriously as a potential co-conspirator in their (admittedly lame) antics. Over and over, Frankie demonstrates that what she wants most is for the boys to like her and respect her. This is dressed up in the occasional language of breaking gender roles or subversion, but it really just boils down to Frankie wanting to be one of them. She recognizes the Bassets for what it is - a younger version of an Old Boys' Club - but rather than feeling disgusted or appalled or angered by the politics and power of an Old Boys' Club, Frankie simply wants to join. She wants the power and privilege attendant on being a Basset, but she wants it from the boys, including her boyfriend.
Everything she does is a stunt to ingratiate herself further with the boys.
How is this feminist?

Her first prank is titled "In the Ladies We Trust," and it involves boobs and bras. All the paintings of administrators and founders of Alabaster have been adorned with bras of all shapes, sizes and colors. The statues around campus have acquired them as well, as has at least one large tree. The piece de resistance is a large, pale brown parachute - the kind from gym class exercises - stretched across the dome of the campus library, "the dome's nub painted a rosy pink" and adorned with a large sign that reads IN THE LADIES WE TRUST.

There's a weak effort to give this exercise a political overtone - Frankie makes a remark about how all the portraits on campus are of men - but it is not what anyone takes away from the prank, and we don't see Frankie feeling too badly about that.

The juvenile terminology - referring to breasts as either boobs or, publicly (and in my opinion, worse) as "the ladies," is exactly the kind of thing one might expect from a pack of prep-school boys. Making the prank all about "the ladies" is objectifying and silly; taking an aspect of the female body and making it a joke is hardly feminist. What's worse is that Frankie begins her prank meditations by thinking:

"Boobs are just inherently undignified" (p228)

Boobs are inherently undignified. Being female, being a woman, is thus made undignified. There's no possibility of the kind of acceptance Frankie wants as long as she's stuck with the indignity of having breasts. This body-hating is a very long way from feminist manifesto, and it's certainly not the kind of ideal I'd want in a teenage female role model.
The indignity of breasts - of femaleness (and it is Frankie who chooses to equate boobs with femaleness) - is what enables the prank; it's what makes it funny. She degrades the campus and its founders and others represented in portraits by making them more like women. How on earth - HOW ON EARTH - is this feminist?
To say: femaleness is undignified! Let's degrade pictures, let's make their subjects into jokes, by making them girly?

The entire novel - until the last few pages, which are just uncomfortable and awkward, and not at all reassuring of Frankie's feminism - is one long paean to the awesomeness of masculinity and masculine society. I don't subscribe to the more extreme forms of feminism that decry men and advocate for an all-female, or a female-dominant society but I'm hard-pressed to understand how privileging maleness over a very "undignified" and derided femaleness counts as feminist.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is, in fact, disreputable - it's a text that reinforces every hegemonic aspect of patriarchal culture while dressed in a thin gauze of pseudofeminism. It does a grave disservice to feminist causes - but more importantly, to all readers, male and female alike - to pretend to advance equality by reinscribing masculine dominance.

empathy

2011-01-31T21:32:00.000-08:00

It seems that it's becoming all the rage to talk about empathy; John Green, when he spoke in Pittsburgh Friday night, opened his talk with some words about empathy. This is a good thing; I'm hardly going to fight against a call for greater empathy.

I would, however, like to point out that I have been talking and thinking and writing about empathy for quite some time now - at least since fall of 2009, when I know I explicitly mentioned it, more than once, in my childhood's books class. Probably longer, really, because in some ways empathy is a core aspect of my dissertation, which has been in the works ~~since 2008~~ for way too long.

As a person who is perenially ahead of the trends - usually so far ahead that I just look like an unfashionable nerd-dork - I would just like to state for the record that I got in on this empathy thing before it was cool to talk about empathy.

Just like I started listening seriously to Radiohead before the masses did (way before OK Computer).
And I started wearing chuck taylor allstar high tops in junior high school, which for me was (good lord) circa 1990. I had to hunt all over for my first pair of chucks, which were dark green, and which I still own and on rare occasion, still wear. They bear the marks of adolescence, including the rubber edging being inked up and picked at, and a rather mortifying peace sign drawn on the rubber toe of one show. Thankfully, that has faded over time.

Anyway, I offer these tidbits of avant-garde behaviors as further support to my claim as an early-adopter of empathy advocacy. I don't claim priority, just early-adopter status.

That's all. When I have more energy, I need to write about E. Lockhart: the pseudofeminism of her books, and the trouble with the newest Ruby Oliver book.

Philip Pullman & public libraries

2011-01-27T14:22:00.000-08:00

Today a link came down the pipeline to a speech Philip Pullman gave at an Oxfordshire local meeting about the region's public library funding.
I am a devotee of Philip Pullman, and had the incredible, amazing happy luck of actually meeting him in 2007. The His Dark Materials books have had an enormous impact on the way I read, the way I think, the way I think about books, Milton, children, teaching - everything. I am a committed fangirl, and I don't apologize for it (I don't fangrrrrl for too many things or people, so I feel I am allowed this one).

I am also a devotee of public libraries. Well, all libraries, really. But the public ones are the ones being pinched and pulled from both (or all) ends, and they're the ones that really do mean a lot.

Mr Pullman's speech talks both of the importance of the library to the child and to the adult. He talks of class difference, of the insultingly narrow view behind the idea that some magical squad of "volunteers" can just run everything. He talks of the faults of politicians and political appointees, and manages to deploy the adjective "Dickensian" in reference to one Eric Pickles (which is a Dickensian name if I ever heard one).

Public libraries in the United States and, evidently, England - if not elsewhere - are being pushed to their limits. Funding cuts coupled with increased demand and usage by the public equals overstretched resources. It's not just the nerdy, technophobic bibliophiles who are affected; it's the children whose parents make use of all the storytimes - for babies, for toddlers, for preschoolers. It's the groups who use the library for book clubs, for lectures, for discussions. The people who need the library to access the internet. The people who rely on librarians to help them find the information they need about taxes, about the law, about divorces and custody and dog licenses and geography and zip codes and how to become a hairdresser. The people - adult immigrants - who use the children's bookroom to practice or learn English. The people - adults - who use the libraries to learn to read, at all. The kids - of all ages, including teenagers - who spend their afterschool hours in the teen room of the local library (I have seen them do this in Pittsburgh - the teen room and reading/computer areas are never empty of teenagers). The adults like me who don't have enough money to buy all the books they want to read. The people who own e-readers and can now get e-books on loan through their library (the Pittsburgh library has e-books on lend that are compatible with what looks like every device except the kindle). The people who read music scores, who check out documentaries, who borrow music and movies and dvds of cooking shows.

Mr Pullman says it all far more intelligently and beautifully and affectingly than I can, which is why his remarks ought to be mandatory reading for everyone, especially people in town and county governments.One of the most profound comments on the function of public officials I have ever read comes here, in reference to the head of the county council:

"It’s not our job to cut services. It’s his job to protect them."

Imagine that - a town board, a city council, a county legislature whose job is to protect services.

His final sentences are really admonishments, reprimands. Though I have heard his voice, and know it doesn't really sound this way, I imagine these final words being spoken in a loud roar, a bronze-bells sound that stuns and deafens and moves the auditor:

"Leave the libraries alone. You don’t know the value of what you’re looking after. It is too precious to destroy."

teaching is hard work: a little-known fact about concentration

2011-01-26T22:29:00.000-08:00

This semester, for the first time ever, I am teaching classes that are back-to-back. I have fifteen minutes between the two (which boils down to about six minutes of my own time - the end-of-class questions and comments always takes time, and usually the before-class moments involve solving someone's problem as well). I've taught two classes on the same day before - one morning, one afternoon; once, I only had about an hour and a half between recitations (for the same class).
But fifteen minutes? shoot. that's nothing.

Each class is one hour and fifteen minutes in length. One, Representing Adolescence, is both a class I've taught before, and extremely familiar turf. I know my YA. The other, Myth & Folktale, is brand-new to me. And I am definitely a tourist in Myth & Folktale. But I've been working hard since late October to educate myself, and it's paying off (though next week, we start the ancient Greeks - Hesiod - and the real test begins).

The point of all this schedule talk is: I am exhausted when I leave school.
Why?
Because teaching is hard work.
Teachers, and the children of teachers (of which I am one), know this already.

It wasn't until a couple of summers ago that I realized just why class is so exhausting. I'd been teaching for at least two years by then; it was my third summer of teaching in the six-week intensive schedule (class twice a week, for 3 hours and fifteen minutes each day).
I was watching, on one of the last days, one of the girls fiddling with her phone, texting or checking messages, or something. Discussion was going on, and I was listening, but her phone was in a bright pink case and caught my eye. And in that moment I realized: when I'm teaching, there is NO daydreaming. No doodling. No checking messages. No working on my grocery list, or my To-Do list, or drawing pictures of cats and dinosaurs and bored stick figures while I listen to the professor or a classmate. When I'm teaching, my brain is entirely, entirely focused on the task at hand.

Usually, when we (people) do things, our brain is occupied, but there's room for a bit of multi-tasking. Cleaning and listening to music, for example. You can handily do both. Studying and listening to music, perhaps. I've had a couple of different kinds of jobs, including a Real Job as an Administrative Assistant at a national nonprofit, and I know how unlaserlike my focus was. You work for a bit, check some email, go to the bathroom. Get a drink. Work some more, while an acquaintance makes a face at you as she passes by. Set one task aside for another. Your mind can wander a little. In these here days of uber-connectivity and technology out your ears and twitter and facebook, the distractions are almost infinite.
It's not hard to find studies about this - a google search turned up a massive crop on productivity, distractions, etc. Whether distractions are good or bad, stress-inducing or stress-relieving, isn't the question here. The point is, it's likely that the average desk-job employee spends 20-25% of her workday NOT doing the work she's there to do - in other words, doing personal crap.
So much for "teachers work a shorter day."

See, in the classroom, there are no breaks to check facebook, or email. You can't put off your students, when they're there staring you in the face.

And to teach a discussion class - or even a lecture class - your brain has to be pretty close to 100% tuned in to what you're doing. You can't gaze out the window and drift away for a few seconds while a student is asking you a question. You have to be ON the whole time.
At first, I thought the tiring-ness of this was because I was new to teaching. But my parents - lifelong public school teachers, now retired - both said "nope. that never changes." It's always tiring, because the concentration required to maintain your class is tremendous.
And because every class is made up of different students, even if I'm teaching the same book for a second semester, it never becomes automatic or mechanized. There's never a point where I can detach my brain a little from what I'm doing, or saying. When the students talk, I need to be listening - and not just paying attention. I need to be processing their words and thinking as they speak how to respond. It's a little like the focus you need in a job interview - you cannot just start woolgathering while the HR person and the CEO ask you what you'll bring to the team.
So my three hours of teaching is three solid hours of work. Not 80, or 75% of three hours. It's every minute of that time.

Grading works the same way - you cannot actually grade writing and let your mind wander. So every minute of grading is a full minute devoted, not just 40 seconds. If my mind starts wandering, I have to stop work. You cannot effectively grade an essay if you've read six sentences with no idea of what you've actually read. there's no toggling back and forth. There's procrastination, of course, and the nice thing about grading is that you do that on your time frame (for instance, I don't have to show up anywhere at 8am to begin grading, and stay there until 5pm). I can start grading at 10pm and work until midnight. But those two hours? those are two solid hours of work.

One of the complaints, or criticisms, or snarks, leveled at teachers is "you don't work a full day" and "you get summers off."
The actual school day may be less than 8 hours, though many public schools require teachers to arrive well in advance of the students' arrival and the start time, so it's quite possible to spend close to 8 hours in the building. And you get a lunch break, and a work period (in which, as far as I can tell, most teachers spend their time doing work - grading, prepping, etc - and not checking facebook). But then you go home. And your bag is full of essays to read, tests to grade, texts to re-read for tomorrow, lessons to plan.
And again, a lot of that time - all the in-class time, and all the grading of writing - demands all of your focus and attention.
It's exhausting. It's draining.
But it's also, often, completely exhilarating - at least the classroom part is, at least for me - and that's what makes it worth while.

what he says

2011-01-18T19:37:00.000-08:00

From the very, very smart Philip Nel, a pithy summary and rejoinder about the study, publicized today, that claims college students aren't learning anything.

To quote from Nel's quoting from Inside higher ed, the study shows:

Students majoring in liberal arts fields see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains. (The authors note that this could be more a reflection of more-demanding reading and writing assignments, on average, in the liberal arts courses than of the substance of the material.)

I read this finding with joy this morning - my liberal-arts education, and my undergraduate liberal-arts college are exceedingly important to me. I would not be the brilliant and incisive (/end sarcasm /end hyperbole) reader and thinker I am today without them. I believe in the liberal arts education. It's nice to know that there are some at least quasi-scientific findings to back that up.

Of course, this tidbit gets buried in the ridiculous hyperbole of reportage: Nel quotes one article titled "University students learn next to nothing."

Go read Phil Nel's post. It's short and sweet, and says everything I would say much more intelligently and concisely. One thing my liberal-arts education didn't seem to successfully teach me is how to restrain my verbosity.

a lack of interest

2011-01-12T20:48:00.000-08:00

Short post, I hope, but a Call To Action!!

On Monday morning, the 2011 ALA Award Winners were announced. This is always an exciting moment for those of us who care about children's books. This year, I didn't have any real skin in the game (so to speak, borrowing the phrase from Merlin Mann), since I haven't read any of the Newbery or Caldecott nominees. But I will, eventually.

The big winners were Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool (Newbery) and A Sick Day for Amos McGee, illustrated by Erin E. Stead (Caldecott). The complete list of winners and honor books is online, and is worth a look. I'll be hunting up the Newbery and Printz titles soon, though getting them through the library is always tricky after the awards are announced (an hour or two after the announcement, Moon Over Manifest had almost 50 holds on it for the Pittsburgh public library system).

The real reason for this post, however, is the very unwelcome news that NBC's Today show is breaking its 11-year tradition of inviting the Newbery & Caldecott winners on to the show the day after the announcement. Today evidently told YALSA, the young adult library organization that conducts the awards that they would not be hosting the award winners and a YALSA rep to discuss this year's winners, "citing a lack of interest and scheduling problems."

A LACK OF INTEREST???

Are you kidding?

The Newbery and Caldecott awards are THE prizes in American children's literature. Winning either of these - but especially the Newbery - is a virtual guarantee that the book will never go out of print. Because so few adults spend enough time in the children's book world, the Newbery is a hugely important marker of quality - adults will choose Newbery titles as gifts for the children in their lives, based solely on the fact that the book is a Newbery winner. The bookstore where I worked, a Barnes & Noble, has a special section where Newbery winners are shelved. Most libraries I've been in either have a Newbery section, or lists of Newbery winners posted prominently. Schools, districts and teachers will select Newbery books as part of their curricula.
Newbery winners are marked for life - for eternal life, in a way - as representative of the best of children's literature. They become the go-to set of books for younger readers.
In a country with something like 75 million children, it is hard to believe there is a "lack of interest" in books those children are almost certain to be exposed to.

But evidently, Today feels that scheduling and interest are amenable to Snooki Whatsherface from that televisual abomination, Jersey Shore. The lesson Today conveys is pretty clear: for all the lip service NBC and other media pay to concerns over education in the US, books and literacy will always be displaced by fake tans and low intelligence.

There's room in this world for Snooki and the Newbery books (alas, Snooki herself is not likely to know much about the Newberys), and Today ought to know better than to privilege one over the other. Especially in the current climate of anxiety and finger-pointing over the perceived failings of the American educational system.
The reason why education and intellectual achievement are devalued in this country isn't just because of poor parenting or bad teachers. It has a LOT to do with the culture at large, a culture to which the Today show is a huge contributor and reflector. Books don't matter, especially books for children, especially great books for children, is what Today's decision tells me. Being an exhibitionist tart with an artificial tan and no conspicuous skills or abilities gets you more attention than a book that will likely be read to and/or by millions of kids.

It's completely disheartening. And it's infuriating. I am composing an email to Today, and I may even follow it up with a real paper letter. I encourage other people who care about children's books, who care about literacy and education, who care about literature to also contact Today and let them know they have made a very poor decision.

You can email the Today show at: TODAY@nbcuni.com.
You can write to them by post at 30 Rockefeller Plaza New York, NY 10112.
You can place a telephone call to them at (212) 664-4602.

Let them know that there is, in fact, a great deal of interest in children's literature. Let them know that, by their failure to include the award winners and their books, the show is contributing directly to the culture that devalues education.

It'll only take a few minutes of your time, and who knows? Perhaps, if enough people contact them, Today will find room in their busy schedule of reality "stars" and celebrity gossip to squeeze in a piece on the books the children of America are going to be reading.

educate yourself

2010-12-12T18:05:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite discoveries on the internet this year is the writing and visual arts work of Frank Chimero. Today, he writes about something that, coincidentally enough, is something I'm currently dealing with myself: online learning. He defines the type of "class" he's looking for thus:

Why don’t more of these things exist for every topic? I’m going to call them SurveyCasts in lieu of a good name, mostly because they act as those typical 101-level surveys of topics most students are asked to take at liberal arts universities. Except these are created, made for, and distributed using digital technology and the web instead of classrooms filled with students in chairs.

Serendipitously, I'm trying to learn all about classical Greek and Roman history and mythology in advance of teaching a class on Myth & Folktale in the spring. Though I know the myths themselves, I don't know much about them, or the history (cultural, social, political, military, literary) that gave rise to, and perpetuated, them. So I did some googling and found, via "Open Yale," the class lectures from a basic history class on Ancient Greece. I listened to part of one, and it's immensely interesting; the problem, as Chimero points out, is "no one wanting to watch a 50-minute video of a guy speaking at a podium, but also how the courses are built on the semester schedule, and 16 weeks is entirely too long for a successful SurveyCast."

My own needs would be extremely well served by these "SurveyCasts" that Chimero suggests, especially ones in history and science.

But then I think, as well, that I would LOVE to curate my own survey - I love, more than anything, talking about books. And teaching, of course, though to create these surveys one would be operating in lecture/presentation mode, rather than discussion-leading/teaching. But I'd love to do such a thing, had I the technical wherewithal (and, let's admit it, the time) to do it.

But what would I - what could I teach?
One of the issues the SurveyCast idea raises, for someone with my pedagogical orientation, is that literature anyway isn't a question of pouring in knowledge. It's not accumulating a series of details, dates, events into a neatly memorized timeline. It's about...grappling with a text.
But then again, I could see a SurveyCast doing just this, being an example of excellence in close reading as well as in teaching. Say my survey is Golden Age Classics of Children's Literature (how original). So each SurveyCast would be on a different text, and there'd be maybe 15 episodes all together. Maybe 10. Each no more than 15 minutes in length. Let's take Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as an example.

Images! the episode would need to include images: photos of Charles Dodgson, just for kicks; photos of Alice Liddell and her siblings, taken by Dodgson. Images of Dodgson's original, handwritten manuscript with his accompanying illustrations; images from Tenniel's editions. Maybe a sort of montage or collage of other editions - the Sabuda pop-up, the Helen Oxenbury edition, Arthur Rackham's illustrations.

Intercut with the images, or perhaps as voice over, the little biographical note I give about Dodgson when I teach Alice. I try, when I do this, to explain Victorian photography and Victorian attitudes about children and sexuality (ie: very few Victorians would look at a photo of a child and think: "erotic art!"), but to do it in a fairly brief way that doesn't make a huge issue out of the obnoxious question: Wasn't Lewis Carroll a pedophile? Instead, I focus on his documented work and interests - his mathematics and logic work, his photography, his writing, his relative conservatism, his work as a deacon.
I also try to position the book in children's literary history; the Golden Age narrative, the Alice-as-watershed narrative. I don't embrace this wholeheartedly, because I think you can find examples of "delighting" texts prior to Alice, but I do think that Dodgson's book marked a large shift.
I might mention nonsense verse, especially Edward Lear's work, and its relation to Alice.

Then the Myth of the Creation of the Story: that "golden afternoon," the boating excursion, etc.

Then, on to the text! Assuming knowledge of the plot, I'd point out some of the institutions being question or attacked: the judicial/legal, royalty, social norms, education, etc. I'd talk about Alice's out-of-control body, and some of the critical hypotheses about that. I'd talk about the peculiar conclusion. I'd talk about wordplay, and punning, and who the audience really is for this book. I'd talk about its persistence in our culture, as text/story for adaptation and re-telling, and as a referent. I'd probably do a close reading, or something like it, on the Tea Party chapter, particularly because it gives an opportunity to look at Alice's rather unpleasant personality.

Could this be done in an entertaining 15 minutes? i don't see why not.

It would be an intriguing project to undertake. I can't, of course, since I lack all necessary technical resources, but it's kind of interesting to think about.

I can think of several people off the top of my head who I would LOVE to see do this kind of SurveyCast, though. I love the idea of it. The shared knowledge that comes out of a small class discussion, when the classmates are all engaged in the material as well as involved with their own academic interests - it's one of the things I miss most in my post-class-taking (frankly, post-New College) life.

So: SurveyCasts! Consider the possibilities.

Dear Glee:

2010-12-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

Glee, I love you. I really do. Mostly, mainly, I love you for Kurt and Burt Hummel. This week, I love you for Brittney and Artie.
But Kurt is the reason I come back, time and again, Glee, because you have shown - beautifully - that you know how to handle a complex character. Your episodes on bullying were remarkable.

But. BUT! Glee - what are you doing? You've added Ashley Fink as Lauren into the Glee Club (which is cool! I liked her on Huge, and she's been a cool quirky bit player on Glee since the first season).

Except, Glee, you're....you're being mean. You're being sizest. You are perpetuating some very, very unkind and narrow-minded stereotypes about fat people, which is, in essence, a form of bullying. Every time we see Lauren, she is eating, and/or talking about food. She demands food as a requirement for joining Glee club. She demands food before she'll perform at sectionals. You've done a pretty shoddy job in making her a real character - you've made her a caricature, a rather tired, unpleasant stereotype of a fat person who eats all the time.

This is not cool. Do you not know any of the statistics about women - especially young women - and body image? I understand if you're not up on the latest in academic Fat Studies; I wasn't, until fairly recently. But Fat Studies intersects with body politics, which intersects with Queer Studies - and Glee, I know you know about that.

Glee, I expect better from you. I expect WAY better from you. You've done amazing things - amazing - with your representation of a gay teenager. Kurt's character has been dazzling to watch, especially this season, as you've given him a gay love interest. You know how to push boundaries and change the way people think and talk about things. You can do this with Lauren's character, too, and it doesn't even need to be a big plot point. Just turn her into a person who isn't just, only, and all about eating. As Marilyn Wann (a leading Fat activist and Fat studies pioneer) writes in the introduction to the Fat Studies Reader, the only thing you can tell by looking at a fat person is the level of your own prejudices.

Making Lauren into a fat person who does nothing but eat and/or talk about food is no different than any other offensive or bigoted stereotypical representation. Glee, you do a good job of being playful about difference, but you also are always respectful and supportive of difference. Except in the case of Lauren (and sometimes Mercedes), the non-thin members of the cast.

You can do so much better than this, Glee. If you're not sure how, please watch a few episodes of Huge. If you don't want to watch a show from a competing network, why not go read Lesley Kinzel's extremely intelligent blog?

I don't want to have to stop watching Glee because of indirect body shaming and fat jokes. I will if you continue, but I'd rather see Glee do what it does well (superbly well, in the case of Kurt) - push its viewers and its cast toward a more inclusive, comprehensive view of the diversity of human existence.

most sincerely yours,

Kerry M

Tangled up & new

2010-12-05T18:59:00.000-08:00

I saw Tangled this weekend, courtesy of the strong-arming of two friends of mine. Though I like Disney, and I'm crazy about Pixar, somehow I don't always do a good job of getting to the Disney animated films when they open (case in point: still have not seen Princess & the frog).

But I am glad I saw Tangled, especially since I very recently taught two pieces of Disney criticism to a class, and so had my Disney-critic brain finely tuned. A lot of people in the children's lit academic community are passionately opposed to Disney, for a variety of reasons (many of them pretty good reasons, too). I do not share this wholehearted opposition to Disney, though I am pretty much on board with the skepticism and disapproval of the "princess" films and attendant marketing, etc.

Tangled does the Rapunzel story with some nice twists. The original story, collected by the Grimms, is not particularly charming nor enlightened. It seems that Disney's collaboration with Pixar, and perhaps, response to criticism, has created a more serious effort at remedying the outdated princess formula.

We get the backstory in an opening sequence: the magic golden flower of the sun takes the place of the rapunzel-lettuce; the generic man & woman are replaced with the king and queen - but essentially, we get the gist. Gothel steals the baby to use the magical powers of her golden hair, which is how Gothel stays young (youthfulness and healing are its powers, incidentally). Rapunzel is raised in a tower in valley enclosed by cliffs and a waterfall.

But what Disney does is give this princess an actual personality, with some real psychology. We see Rapunzel going about her daily activities (accompanied by a forgettable song) - she bakes, cooks, reads books, sews, brushes her hair, looks out her window, dances - and paints. Rapunzel's paintings are one of the most charming effects in the film - soft washes done on the walls of her tower. They tend to imagine scenes featuring Rapunzel and her immense quantity of hair, but they have a very charming style, especially the van gogh-esqu central piece picturing the floating night lanterns released by the kingdom annually, in honor of the lost princess.

Gothel, the villain of the piece, is a masterful and terrifying piece of psychological abuse. She is sickeningly sweetly passive-aggressive, wearing down Rapunzel's natural curiosity, playing on her emotions, telling her she is getting "chubby," telling her she is too weak to handle the world outside. Gothel & Rapunzel have a truly disturbing dysfunctional psychology between them, and it's the most realistic thing in the film. It's scary. Gothel's big number is titled "Mother knows best," and its manipulative force makes it perhaps the most frightening villain song of them all (though Scar's nazi-esque "Be Prepared" in The Lion King is pretty creepy). This psychology is continued consistently throughout the film - we get a number of scenes of Rapunzel alternating between joy at freedom and weeping and wringing her hands in anxious self-loathing and self-reproach at leaving her poor mother.

Having just taught June Cummins' essay on Beauty and the Beast ("Romancing the Beast"), I was especially aware of Rapunzel's dream or motivation. Cummins points out, accurately, that Belle initially wants to travel, explore, see new places - but jettisons all of that for life in the castle which (oddly) creeps ever-closer to the village as the film progresses.
Rapunzel's dream, her one goal and desire for a large part of the film, is to go in person to see the night lanterns.
That's it.
That's her goal, and she sticks to it.

Enter Flinn Rider, our erstwhile Hero, who is a bad guy (more like an arrogant guy) at first but eventually, of course, softens into a sweet romantic hero.
I don't expect, in a huge and hugely mainstream movie, to see the heterosexual romance plot disappear. I'd LIKE to see that, but I don't expect it. I don't expect it in Tangled, in Love and other drugs, in any of those comic-book-movies. Feeling angry, disappointed or frustrated in the presence of this plot, in this kind of film, is truly counterproductive. The Disney princess films - and this one especially - operate as fairy-tale romantic comedies, and those follow a very set formula. Even the really great ones (Bringing Up Baby) follow the formula. We can criticize the heteronormativity of this love plot - and we should - but to react as if Disney is doing something unusual and/or unusually bad in continuing to follow this pattern is simply unfair and unrealistic.

But Rapunzel is - despite her creepy appearance, which is a cross of Precious Moments figurine and Bratz Baby doll - a truly spunky heroine. The movie isn't paying lip service to the spunky heroine, as I think it does in Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. Rapunzel is in charge of her quest from minute one, when she clocks Flinn Rider with her cast-iron frying pan and locks him in her wardrobe. She keeps her hold on that frying pan for much of the movie, in fact. She bullies Flinn into guiding her to the city for the night lanterns, and emotional outbursts about her mother aside, keeps a pretty solid grip on things.

Look at this still: this is essentially a bondage scene, with a dominatrix. Rapunzel has the upper hand here, and not because she's captivatingly beautiful - it's because she's got some weapons (frying pan, and her hair, which she wields like a lasso, a rope, a whip), and she's got a whole lot of determination.
Even the moments of romance or sentimentality are cut with Rapunzel's almost-edgy sense of humor. In the Snuggly Duckling, the tavern to which Flinn guides her in an effort to get her to renounce her quest, the viking-esque thugs who threaten them all are disarmed when Rapunzel yells "Where is your HUMANITY? Don't you have a dream?"

The opportunity for treacly sentiment is huge, but the movie doesn't take it: Mandy Moore puts an edge in Rapunzel's voice, and she sounds more exasperated and impatient than saccharine. There's no soft focus here. The song that follows, sung by the thugs, reveals that all of them do in fact have dreams - and those dreams have a decidedly queer tone (one wants to do interior design, one wants to bake, one wants to be a concert pianist, another is a mime, and finally one is passionate about collecting tiny ceramic unicorns). But the number is staged as a kind of comic tavern-song, reminiscent of Gaston's big song in Beauty & the Beast (but much, much more positive and much, much more playful about gender norms). These same thugs reappear to aid Rapunzel and Flinn, and their arrival is signalled by the presence of a tiny ceramic unicorn placed strategically for Flinn to see.

Throughout the film, we see Rapunzel insist on her own dreams; we see Flinn agreeing to help, and then helping (but not taking over) along the way. Rapunzel rescues him more than once from various sticky situations - the Snuggly Duckling is just one of these - and it is only at the very end of the film that Flinn sacrifices his own life to rescue Rapunzel from Gothel.
The scene when Rapunzel realizes that she is the lost princess is done with psychological smartness; you do not feel like you're watching a Disney Princess soft-focus number. There are "camera tricks," which of course are animation tricks, there is horror registering in Rapunzel's (still disturbing) babyface. It's a moment with as much emotion as the scene of the Queen's transformation to the Witch in Snow White, a scene that was (and is) much heralded for its effectively. Rapunzel decides to confront Gothel with her new realization, and fight for her own life, her own self - unlike princesses of old, who usually attempt to flee when something goes kaput.

Visually, this movie is lovely - Rapunzel's hair is an absolute masterpiece of digital animation. The scenes with the night lanterns are beyond stunning - I want to live in that kingdom. I'm partial to floating lanterns anyway; ever since the millennial new year's celebrations and the glorious, gorgeous lanterns released from - Thailand? I think. But this is rendered beautifully, affectingly - it's the moment of Rapunzel getting her wish.

The movie also takes up what happens after your dream comes true, in a way that works really well. Flinn and Rapunzel discuss this more than once, coming to the conclusion that when you achieve your dream, you move on to a new dream. There are always more dreams to be had. It's uplifting in a matter-of-fact way.

This movie does not fix all of the problems with the romantic comedy and/or fairy-tale genre. It doesn't shatter fairy tales the way Angela Carter does in The Bloody Chamber. Like all romantic comedies, you know the outcome from the first moment you see the two main characters - you know before you get to the theater that Flinn and Rapunzel will live happily ever after. But Tangled does something different, for a Disney film: it gives us psychologically developed characters, with complications and personalities of their own. More than that, it places Rapunzel in the true center of the film - she is the sun around which the whole story orbits. It is her gravitational force directing this show, and none of the characters are allowed to forget it. Compared to Disney princess films of the past, this one has made some very big leaps forward. It isn't perfect, for sure; it's not a masterpiece of feminist rhetoric. But it creates a space in which that kind of progressive ideology can be glimpsed, and even achieved, in moments.

The Magicians: potter, narnia & frustration

2010-11-29T23:17:00.000-08:00

At the prompting of a couple of my Adolescence class students, I finally caved and checked out Lev Grossman's The Magicians from the library. I stuck with it, despite wanting to give up after about 50 or 75 pages; I got stubborn about seeing it through.

I find myself crankily perplexed, now that I've finished reading. The book is a weird mishmash of things, with a take on children's fantasy that I don't quite know how to read. In essence, it's a coming-of-age magical school story; the bulk of the narrative occurs during Quentin's years at college: Brakebills school of magical pedagogy (which seems, somehow, to be a slight misuse of the word pedagogy; at any rate, I wish my own pedagogy was magical). My students brought up the book when I mentioned (after a question in another class) the relative rarity of novels set during college, with college-aged protagonists -- in particular, the rarity of such books aimed at a younger readership (Pamela Dean's Tam Lin is an exception; it seems that most YA college-setting books are also fantasy fiction, frequently set in fantasy lands with fantasy universities of Magic - Diana Wynne Jones's Year of the Griffin is one such example).

Quite a long time ago, I read a book that my sister had read (I think for college - so this would have been mid-90s). I can't remember what it was called or who wrote it, except that it was set around college-age, and in New York City (I think), and felt grey and gritty and slightly headachey. I think there was a character in it named Flavia, which I remember only because it was the first time I came across that name.
Anyway, I read the book as an early-high-schooler, and didn't really care for it (most likely because I didn't really understand it, not on an emotional experiential level). The impression I have of that book is just flat and grey like that awful grimy dead snow and slush that collects in street gutters in the very late winter.

The Magicians was very like that. I am a fan of books (and films) about great unhappiness, or bleakness, or depression. Someday this pain will be useful to you leapt to the top of my list of favorites after I read it. The movies I love most leave you feeling, as a friend once said, a little bit like you wish you were dead. I do not like uplifting or rollicking stories. I don't like happy characters.

But the characters in this book were painfully flattened, paper dolls really, tricked out with window dressing from Rowling's books (obviously) and retreading ground already well laid by the unbelievably talented Diana Wynne Jones. I have no idea if Grossman ever read Jones's work, but anyone who has cannot miss the resonances and echoes of her ideas and themes. This is not an accusation of plagiarism, but what it does do is make Grossman's work pale by comparison. Pale to the point of nonexistence, really.

Fillory, the books-and-world within The Magicians, is a straight-up ripoff of Narnia. This is also, evidently, intentional, but it doesn't work right. Neither do the Potteresque references, oblique or direct. It's as if Grossman read the Potter series, then said "I can do better than this, and I can make it more sexy and add drinking and make is Edgy and Raw and Powerful."
Then sat down and overhauled Rowling's books.
Except he inserts all kinds of crap instead of improving.

The Potter and Narnia aspects of the Magicians are too large, too significant, to be just references or allusions or even, as reviewers like to say, sly jokes or tongue-in-cheek jabs. Too much similarity just makes the book feel like it's a mashup of these two fantasy series, refracted through the grey, snow-grimy lens of flat, frankly unlikable, characters. The characters who struck me as most interesting - Eliot and Alice - get desperately short shrift; neither is at all developed. They're shorthands, and dull ones at that: Eliot, a fop, a connoisseur of wines, an unrepentant alcoholic, effortlessly talented at magic. Alice, small, a bit mousy, fiercely talented and intelligent.
But we know nothing about what these characters are, or want, or feel, or believe - they are figures being moved around the book in a way that feels desperately disjointed and desperately, insufficiently, clever.
Grossman's attitude toward the fantasy genre is obnoxious, especially since he owes his entire novel's publication (and maybe its existence) to the genre and that genre's popularity. The Magicians would not exist were it not for the Potter phenomenon. Yet he seems to be smirking sidelong even as he borrows and incorporates elements of those books into his, as if to say "this is REAL Littrature; your poor fluff is just for foolish, deluded adults and unknowing, inexperienced children. True sophisticates will appreciate the cleverness of - ha ha! - a secret teenage wizard who is unhappy for no obvious reasons!"
There might as well be a sticker on the front cover that reads: THIS ARE SERIUS LITRATURE. SERIUS LITRATURE IS SERIUS.

The total absence of anything approximating joy or even mild pleasure left me impatient and irritated with every character in the text. Again, I love misery, but I don't want to see people wallowing in it without knowing how or why they're miserable. Quentin does not have anything that looks to me like depression or true anxiety, anything like a mental illness; he also has no external causes for his misery. He has serious anomie, a state of life I can relate to, but have no desire to wallow in vicariously. Moreover, Quentin's anomie doesn't lead either him OR us as readers anywhere, except into a totally obvious anticlimax in Fillory that is hugely unsatisfying narratively and emotionally.

I am still not really sure what Grossman is trying to do - or thinks he's doing - with his Narnian world. There are some nice touches to Fillory - the clocks embedded in trees, the Cozy Horse (though that is a bit cloyingly saccharine, and sounds like it belongs in the Raggedy Ann books), the large "soft and sympathetic" sailor bunnies. But all of these things are really just slight turns on creations from Lewis's fantasy world; it isn't Grossman's originality or creativity here at all. The Neitherlands, the world between worlds, full of pools through which one passes to another world, is a straight ripoff of The Magician's Nephew - and plays too prominent a role to be just a riff, an homage, a reference. You cannot pilfer from books and then pretend to have done something original and clever by surrounding your pilferings with dour, unlikable characters.

In the end, this book is more of a problem than a delight, and it isn't a problem in a bright and intellectual way, either. The pleasures of wrangling with this particular text are relatively few; Grossman is doing nothing subversive with children's fiction at all. He's hewing to the old line that those silly books are for children, and we adults are just too wise, too sophisticated, too knowing to believe in that kind of foolish crap. And look what happens to the sucker who, even as an adult, does return (literally and metaphorically) to fantasy land!

If anything good has come out of my reading of Grossman's novel, it's that I now appreciate, even more vividly, the brilliance of writers like Diana Wynne Jones. Even Lewis's Narnia, for all its many problematic aspects, still has a glow of originality around it. The Voyage of the dawn treader is a glorious book, one with truly complex emotions and themes, far more so than anything Grossman can come up with. And for fantastic college stories, Dean's Tam Lin blows Grossman out of the water.

And realizing that Narnia and Tam Lin and Derkholm are even better than you initially thought is nothing to sneeze at. Though I don't advise you discover their greatness via Grossman; instead, re-read those old classics with a smart but affectionate eye.

teenage dream: Glee and gay boys

2010-11-22T05:39:00.000-08:00

I watch Glee with a mix of delight and frustration; it's inconsistent, it has an infuriating habit of starting, then dropping, plotlines, it has an obnoxious tendency toward "special" episodes of guest stars or themes that disrupt any momentum the show may have developed. But it also has some great secondary characters (ones who chew up that scenery like crazy), some thoughtful and captivating plotlines, and the best parent on TV.

A couple of weeks ago, Glee hit it out of the ballpark with "Never Been Kissed." I've been thinking about this episode a lot, and not just because it introduces a new location, an all-boys high school that I have been referring to as gay hogwarts (it's the blazers and the senior common room that got me).

THE moment of that episode is Kurt's visit to gay Hogwarts, when he meets adorable Blaine, who sings with the Warblers, the school glee club. In this delirious alternate-reality, the Warblers are "like, rockstars" who stage impromptu performances in the aforementioned common room. Blaine and his cohorts launch into a cover of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream," sung to Kurt (played with even more than usual aplomb by the staggeringly fantastic Chris Colfer, about whom I cannot say enough in praise).

Watching the episode the first time, I kind of groaned; I don't really like the song and so that made the moment less charming than hoped for.
But then I read the post Tom and Lorenzo wrote about the episode. And ever since reading that post, I can't stop thinking about "Never Been Kissed."

TLo write:

Sure, teenage romantic fantasies are inherently silly to adults because they come from a place of such inexperience and naivete, but they serve an important function in the sexual development of kids. They train them to dream about the best possible outcome. Just as they've been trained their whole lives as to how to make that outcome happen.

Which is some incredibly astute theorizing on adolescent fantasies about romance.
And then, because they're amazing, TLo go on to say:

Teenagers see thousands of murders depicted onscreen by the time they reach 18 but most of them never see a boy kiss another boy or sing him a sweet love song. You want to prevent gay kids from killing themselves? Push for more scenes like the above. Giving a young gay boy the dream that someday Prince Charming will come and sing a love song to him? You cannot imagine. You simply cannot imagine how revolutionary such a thing is.

And even though I spend my days thinking about queerness, thinking about adolescence and childhood and queerness, even though I was more aware (and I sincerely hope, more sensitive) of queer issues when I was in high school - despite all that, TLo are absolutely right: I cannot imagine. I simply cannot imagine how revolutionary such a thing is.

Because of the way criticism works, though, and because I think about what I read, I am beginning to both imagine and understand how revolutionary such a thing is.
even if Glee falls apart again, even if the show goes downhill from here, I will be thoughtful and thankful for this episode that shows us - not in a jokey dream sequence, not in a way we giggle or sneer at - the teenage dreams of a gay boy.

Ah-ha moment, courtesy John Hench

2010-11-21T21:27:00.000-08:00

from the back page of John Hench's Designing Disney: Imagineering and the Art of the Show.

quote on the illustration is not attributed to anyone else, so I assume it's either Hench or Walt Disney himself.

spring semester, planned!

2010-11-21T20:50:00.000-08:00

I bit the bullet and slapped together my spring booklist/rough schedule for the adolescence class. This sounds much more haphazard than it really was; I've been musing for weeks now what to add, what to subtract, what to recycle, what to try new for the spring version of this course. I've read and read, I've made lists, I've informally polled my students. Finally, I realized I can't fiddle with the list forever - book orders were due three weeks ago - and so I just went ahead and put down the books that, for today anyway, seem most interesting/useful/engaging.

The list, in roughly the order in which we will tackle them:

The Breakfast Club
Freaks & Geeks
King Dork
Fancy White Trash by Marjetta Geerling
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
Speak
Huge (TV show)
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher
Liar by Justine Larbalestier
King of the Screwups by K.L. Going
I was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader by Kieran Scott

along the way we'll read an introductory bit of queer theory, and an introductory bit of fat studies from Marilyn Wann.

It's a little trauma-heavy, but then so is the entire YA catalog. LIAR absolutely broke my mind, and I'm very keen to try it out on unsuspecting undergrads. The non-blonde cheerleader has the huge advantage of being set in Florida (a deliciously weird place), and is relatively trauma-free. It's a girl-centric book without being TOO annoying, and it - like King of the Screwups - turns the idea of "the outsider" on its head [sometimes literally, in non-blonde cheerleader].
Cracked Up to Be was pretty great, though it uses some of the same old cliches and tropes, but it does some interesting things as well, and is very dark. I think it'll be a nice trio with Speak and Perks of Being a Wallflower.

I'm excited about this semester.

Now, I just need to get my Myth & Folktale class organized, which - of course - is the real challenge.

reading Madapple

2010-11-03T05:23:00.000-07:00

After trawling the lists of best books at the YALSA website, I collected a pile of teen fiction at my library on monday. Last night I started reading Christina Meldrum's Madapple, and it's thoroughly fascinating.
It's a terribly strange premise: girl raised by brilliant but wacky mother, kept isolated from modern life, essentially: no electricity, no running water, no mirrors, no television, no contact with other humans. Homeschooling - heavy on the science and botany/herbalism, other books with many passages redacted. Girl beaten for reading a hidden copy of The Scarlet Letter. Mother dies, girl has to cope.
Meldrum's got BIG themes and issues going on - metaphysics, theology, mysticism, along with all the other good stuff about family and identity and being that one finds in a really good YA novel.
I stayed up far too late last night reading, and I'm a little sulky now because I have to go to school, where I'll be busy all day and unable to read more.

In other news, I think I've decided on a general "theme" for my adolescence class in the spring, a theme so broad it's practically no theme at all. But the organizing principle is going to be .... difference.
I think I am going to put I was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader on the booklist. *cackle* *cackle* *cackle*

now, off to teach grammar, and then day one of discussing K.L. Going's King of the Screw-Ups.

Fabians and Glenn Beck

2010-10-30T20:58:00.000-07:00

As posted earlier, I'm doing some Glenn Beck research. I found a transcript of the program in which he discusses Fabian socialism; I've been reading it and struggling to understand Beck's point. [Note: I decided to do this as a break from reading freshman comp essays. I understand Beck is speaking, not writing, but his abuse of pronouns and his general incoherence on the structural level is far below what I would consider acceptable from my freshmen]

So he starts off by talking about "they" and "them," and shows clips from British television, neither of which are contextualized. I am thoroughly unclear about who "they" and "them" are. He uses a number of categories to describe potential "them"s [environmentalists, progressives, liberals] but is not specific about which he's referencing at what point.

Beck goes on to quote from a number of news sources (which, to his credit, he documents) which themselves quote a variety of persons (Robert Kennedy Jr, a NASA employee, etc) asking questions like "when do we jail global warning deniers?" and asserting that denying global warming is treasonous.
I don't have time - or, frankly, interest - fact-check every single one of these quotes. I'm willing to go along with Glenn on this one and say: "golly, these are overblown responses." Sometimes, I like moderation.
But then things get weird.

Beck says, and this comes from the foxnews transcript itself:

Where did these ideas come from? Well, you can find them all from the same place — progressivism here in America, Marxism overseas and Fabian socialism in Australia, New Zealand, England and Europe. They are all the same thing. They are all the same stock of people.
I've talked to you a lot about progressives and Marxists, but Fabian socialists — look them up. You will be astounded what you find. It's all the same pool of people."

Never mind that political or ideological positions aren't really a "place." I'm creeped out by Beck's use of phrases like "stock of people" and "pool of people" - it just feels a little (a LITTLE) like the language of early eugenics-movement proponents. I guess it's "stock of people," which makes my mind immediately leap to racial stock, or genetic stock. This is very likely my own personal bias; I doubt very much that Glenn Beck is a eugenicist, unconsciously or otherwise.
Now we get some history about the Fabians, a topic about which I know more than the average schmuck because of my decade-long scholarly interest in Edith Nesbit. Just this summer I checked out a gazillion library books on Fabianism for my dissertation.

Beck:

But Fabian Socialists was a society that was founded in January of 1884. The members sought to influence public opinion on socialism. But what they — what made them unique was, at the time, if you wanted to be a socialist, you needed a mass revolution. Well, they preferred the selective education — selective education. You've seen it here beginning under the Woodrow Wilson administration. It was the education of the powerful few, especially those in government and the media who could lead reforms in government.
It is why our media is so screwed up. And they all think alike.
Their strategy is called doctrine of inevitability of gradualism. What does that mean? The doctrine of inevitability of gradualism.

Oh Glenn. I'm going to treat this like a student paper.
First we get the assertion that you need a mass revolution if you want to be a socialist. I don't deny revolution and socialist reformers go together (reformers want change, after all), but Beck's got it backwards: it's your socialist beliefs that lead you to want mass revolution, not the other way round. You don't start with revolution. It's where you end up.
Now, onto selective education (which I think is how Beck ends up with his anti-media line, which lacks transitional phrases surrounding it, and thus is simply tossed into the mix here almost at random).
Here's the thing: late 19th century social reformers (ie, the Fabians) were intensely interested in helping the poor and lower classes. They believed the best way to do this was through education. Socialists of all stripes, including Fabians, were founders and proponents of educational centers, often referred to as workingmen's institutes, where workers (and others) could go hear lectures, see performances, read periodicals and newspapers, read books. Yes, there was political content to some of this, but not all of it.
I don't know about you, but Victorian laborers have never struck ME as belonging to the "powerful few." The powerful few, who have existed in every culture across every nation and every age, are almost always already well educated. And since we know that, even late in the 19th century, there were more workers/lower-class folks than wealthy, any drive to educate the poor is by definition not selective, nor does it target the few.

Now onto the "inevitability of gradualism."
Beck later describes this as "baby steps," and to an extent he's correct. My reading notes from a biography of Nesbit references either Beatrice or Sidney Webb (founders-in-chief of Fabian Society) as believing that "dawning conscience and increased social intelligence" would convince people of the rightness of the Fabian cause - not revolution. My copy of part of an article on the history of fabianism leads with a quote that states that their aim was "to help in the reconstruction of society in accordance with the highest moral possibilities." It was a slow campaign of rational persuasion. So, Beck is wrong again: to be the Fabian kind of socialist, you needed to eschew revolution, not embrace it.

Next up, the origin of the Fabians' name:
Beck says:

"OK. Now why the name "Fabian" — the Fabian society? Well, this is after General Quintus Fabius Maximus. He had a brilliant strategy. He advanced in his battles not through front-on battles, but instead through harassment and attrition.

The early Fabian Society adopted as its motto "when I strike, I strike hard." Their logo, their mascot, was the tortoise. The tortoise.
Quintus Fabius was known, initially derisively, then with approbation, as "Cunctator," which means "delayer." Fabius's military strategy of delay was deployed during the attempted invasion of Rome by Hannibal, when Hannibal's forces far outnumbered the Romans.
And Beck is right: the strategy of Fabius depended on indirect actions, harassment, preventing the opponent from obtaining supplies; essentially, on everything BUT direct engagement.
Beck makes a weird and kind of pointless analogy to rebuilding a carburetor in the living room, and then says "Gosh, is it becoming inevitable that we just can't get out of this debt bubble? A little step at a time?"

This one is inexplicable. I have NO idea what he's trying to say here. Again, if this was a student paper, I'd write "Transitions needed? What is the connection between this and your previous statements?"

And finally, Beck gets on to running down old George Bernard Shaw. He plays a clip of Shaw espousing some of his eugenicist beliefs. He mentions that Shaw received an Oscar and the "Nobel Peace Prize." [at which, after the world's shortest google search, one can see clearly that Shaw - primarily a playwright - was in fact awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Big difference, Mr Beck, especially when you're going to toss around the eugenics accusations].

Fact: In the early 20th century, eugenics was part of medical science. It was not a creepy racist fringe belief, practiced by evil maniacs. G. Stanley Hall, the man who practically invented the category of adolescence, a man who pioneered both psychology and education in the United States, was a eugenicist. Francis Galton, who coined the term "eugenics," was a British eccentric and polymath whose work gave us the techniques and uses of fingerprinting as a method of identification.
It really isn't until the 1930s - right around the time the Nazis get their hands on it - that eugenics begins to decline and experience a backlash. This after forced sterilization programs in countries like Belgium and the United States - primarily targeted were mentally ill patients, criminals and persons of undesirable nature (prostitutes, alcoholics, the undeserving poor).

Beck's discussion of Shaw just gets weird, and he wanders way off course - again, frankly, I don't know what he's saying. He calls out George Soros, he rants against secular humanists, he invokes God God God repeatedly. He tells us that George Bernard Shaw invented the gas chambers (this seems to be untrue. I think Shaw was probably busy having affairs and writing plays, not inventing death devices).

And on and on. And then winds up railing against the environmentalists again. And perpetuating some of the most revolting abuse to pronouns that I have seen in a long time. Beck winds down with this:

When you think the way they do, you tend to dehumanize individual situations. Suddenly, you're convinced that it's OK to kill one person or two in order to save thousands or end suffering for either thousands or for one.

Erm, good sir, this is precisely the reasoning that led to the dropping of the bombs are Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I wonder if Beck argues against that?
And it's also, if I'm not mistaken, part of the reasoning behind the "doctrine" of preemptive strikes created by that wacky Marxist socialist liberal madman, George W. Bush.
It's a thorny moral decision, really: if you knew that killing ten people could save 10,000, what would you do?
But this is a complex question and Beck doesn't deal in complexities.

After this delightful exercise, I will never again attempt to read and analyze anything said by Glenn Beck. It's more exhausting and infuriating than grading terrible student papers.

But I could not let slurs against the Fabians go unchecked, even weird, vague, inaccurate slurs. E. Nesbit is one of my absolute favorite writers, and she's one-third of my dissertation. People - Glenn Beck or anyone else - can't just throw around anti-Fabian remarks. The sloppy misuse of "history," too, is a big problem. My students do this too - they give "evidence" in the form of huge generalizations with NO context and NO supporting documentation. I mark off for that.

So, Glenn Beck, your grade for this assignment is an: Unsatisfactory, with the additional comment of "see me." At which point I will recommend you go to the writing center for some intensive remediation, because you're unfit to go forward with your speaking/writing career.

to be investigated: fabian socialism & glenn beck

2010-10-30T11:49:00.000-07:00

I've checked in periodically with the livestream of the "rally for sanity" via comedy central. Stephen Colbert just showed a montage of fear-mongering, name-calling from a variety of tv "news presenters."

and one clip - just a few seconds - was of Glenn Beck, standing in front of his confounded blackboard, saying - in grim, serious, ominous overtones: "FABIAN SOCIALISM."

HUNH????????????????

I need to do some digging and find that clip and see why on earth Glenn Beck was talking about fabianism, on fox news, circa 2010.

Fabian Socialism - the Fabian society - was founded in the late 19th century, in England, by a group of particularly earnest and intellectual reformers, including (and this is why I know anything about it at all) Edith Nesbit. I've written about the Fabians for grad seminars, and very likely will have at least a footnote about them in my dissertation. And - like many other 19th century British reform movements - it had limited efficacy. The Fabians still exist, but in altered form. They are not, at least unless things have changed dramatically, a hugely powerful group.

What Fabianism has to do with Glenn Beck is a mystery I will attempt to solve later on, since i have no real time for it today. But it is a mystery that baffles me endlessly, so it MUST BE SOLVED. I'll get Nancy Drew on the case.

adolescence, again

2010-10-25T22:00:00.000-07:00

Book orders for the spring semester are due in a week, and I'm teaching Representing Adolescence again. Because I like to mix it up, and because it feels a little shocking to me to teach the same syllabus twice in a row (like cheating, somehow), I'm going to do a mostly new booklist.

BUT WHICH BOOKS????

So far, the only title I have settled on for sure is Justine Larbalestier's LIAR.

But what else would be good? I haven't organized a theme or anything yet, I just know that I need to teach Liar. I'm contemplating Courtney Summers' Cracked Up to Be and/or Peter Cameron's Someday this pain will be useful to you, because they are books I like a lot, but I'm not quite sure that I really know what to do with them.

I'd like to stick to mainly realist fiction, novels or films. I may do some TV again - some Glee, perhaps, maybe some bowing to the inevitable and some Freaks & Geeks.
But the books are the essential, and I'm just not sure which to choose. The course, after all, is about representing adolescence, so the books need to lend themselves to thinking about the ways in which adolescence is represented, regulated, etc.

Any suggestions? I'm vaguely tempted to do some of the books I have real problems with: Twilight, 13 Reasons Why, Like the Red Panda because I think they'd provide good discussion. At the same time, do I really want to read any of those books again?

Suggestions?
Ideas?
Advice?

international reading: booking through thursday

2010-10-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

This week's Booking Through Thursday:

Name a book (or books) from a country other than your own that you love. Or aren’t there any?

Well, OF COURSE there are!
The easy answer here is British literature, which is really where my heart is. My favorites are largely British: Dickens, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, everything by Diana Wynne Jones. Lately, I've been zipping through Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, as well.
Dylan Thomas (Welsh) and J.M. Barrie (Scottish) are also high on my list.
And recently I fell head-over-heels for Melina Marchetta's Jellicoe Road, which brings Australia into the Anglophone favorites list.

But these are all still Anglo/English language, so I'm going to look further afield.

Non-Anglophone favorites:
Petersburg, by Andrei Bely (Russian)
Crime & Punishment, Dostoevsky (Russian)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (Colombia)
Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, both by Haruki Murakami (Japan)
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (France)
If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino (Italian)

This is in no way a comprehensive list, just a few highlights. But it's a sad truth that most of my reading is solidly Anglophone; it's just not as easy to find great non-Anglo books as it is to find great Anglo ones. It isn't especially difficult to come by the non-Anglo titles - searching out Nobel Literature winners' titles, for instance, is pretty easy. But the majority of what's placed on ready offer, in conspicuous locations, is Anglo - British or American. Even Canadian and Australian titles are more obscure. This is unfortunate, because the rest of the world surely does have great writers and great things to say. Language is limiting in ways that are maddening.

a place holder: walter pater & kids these days

2010-10-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

James Kincaid gave a brilliant kaleidoscopic talk at school on Tuesday. My head is still swirling with it - he did that wondrous academic thing I love, of taking a number of textual examples and ideas that seem mostly unrelated, throwing them together into a big pot, then letting them marinate with brilliance and insight until, finally, there's some kind of stew of genius.

I'm still thinking it all over, and suspecting I missed more than a few crucial pieces of information (listening to the mostly-faculty audience loudly singing "Big Rock Candy Mountains" overrode most of my other intellectual capabilities), but I want to note one thing that leapt out at me.
Kincaid quotes Walter Pater, a man whose work is mostly unfamiliar to me, except for the brief snippets I skimmed in my history & theory of criticism class ages ago. My ignorance about Pater is one of the newest bits of solid evidence suggesting that I really am not, in fact, a Victorianist at all. But never mind that academic identity crisis.

The Pater that was quoted, and discussed, is from the conclusion to his Renaissance book, where Pater writes that "not the fruits of the experience, but the experience itself" is what is important.
He's saying - foreshadowing, setting up, whatever - what Kerouac writes in the beginning of On the Road - that the way to live is to burn burn burn like a Roman candle.

That what you take away from an experience - the fruits - isn't the point; it's the experience itself.
This makes me think of my Kids These Days...angst, which is really about people and technology, and the problem of constant documentation of things, rather than engaging in things themselves.

and a million other things, also arising from both Pater and Kincaid's talk.
But those are for another time when my brain is less fogged from grading, a head cold that won't leave, and sleepiness.

discomfort in the classroom

2010-10-13T22:17:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking about the uses of discomfort in the classroom lately.

One of the very excellent grad student teachers in our department has, as a standard clause in her syllabi, that uncomfortableness will happen in her classes. That discomfort is part of the critical learning process. This instructor, who is BRILLIANT, is a person whose gender is not readily obvious, and who in fact doesn't fully occupy either side of the (false) gender binary. This - along with the content of the courses - is part of the discomfort.

She was one of the instructors and mentors we had as first-year teachers, and I vastly admired her position on this - it reminded me in certain ways of a strand of New College-esque "fuck shit up" attitude that pervaded a number of my classes there. From the queer activist perspective, shifting and dodging and denying binary identifications and categories is all part of the plan for disrupting those binaries. It forces the undergrads to confront categories that they may never even have considered before. Discomfort is a good thing.

This week, I have been teaching the extraordinarily smart (and now, depressingly, canceled) ABCFamily show HUGE. In conjunction with the three episodes I selected for viewing, I also asked my class to read Marilyn Wann's "Foreward" to The Fat Studies Reader (2009).

One of the first comments a student made about HUGE is that watching it made her somewhat uncomfortable, but that she grew to like it and in fact ended up watching all 10 or 11 episodes over the weekend.
I asked them to consider the opening scene of the pilot episode - an overhead camera shot of the kids on the first day at Camp Victory (the so-called "fat camp") where the show is set, milling around and waiting for their turn at the weigh-in. The camera slowly moves in and down, panning across the kids standing around in pairs, in awkward knots, as individuals who don't yet know each other.

All of the kids are wearing bathing suits.

All of the kids are fat (in varying degrees).

It's dis-comforting. We're not used to seeing images of large groups of mostly-unclothed fat people. We're not used to seeing fat people without either the fuzzy black bar of shame obscuring their faces (in stories about the OBESITY EPIDEMIC!!!) or the punchline of a mostly-cruel joke at the fat person's expense (sometimes told by the fat person herself).

When Will, the main protagonist, played wonderfully by Nikki Blonsky, finally takes of her shorts and t-shirt, mimicking a striptease right in front of the camp director - intentionally aimed at the director - we get lingering shots of Will's body in all its fat glory, in relatively close-up, well-lighted shots.

Both Wann's foreward, and HUGE, ask us to reconsider, or consider at all, a number of things we're mostly used to ignoring. Wann does it more stridently, more explicitly, and more forcefully; HUGE does it more subtly, more emotionally. But both say: LOOK.
Wann makes the great observation that all one can diagnose from looking at a fat person is one's own level of prejudice and stereotyping. The act of looking at another can - and often does - tell us vastly more about ourselves than it does about that other person. This is not a new or original idea; it's part of what makes the critical concept of "the Other" circulate so frequently and potently through almost every kind of subaltern studies that exist. Looking at the Other is a way of looking at the Self. If your gaze is properly calibrated - say, by reading Marilyn Wann, or by watching a show clearly framed through a fat-positive, queer sensibility - this Other/Self looking can be revelatory and positive for both parties.
Examining your own life of privileges and oppressions is essential, Wann argues, for critical work in the field of fat studies.
But this is the case in all fields, in all areas of life: ignoring or failing to properly address one's own privilege and oppression makes it almost impossible to speak well and convincingly about anyone's privilege and oppression.

But to look at yourself, to say "I experience these privileges every day, because I am thin/beautiful/male/young/straight/affluent/healthy/white/etc" is hard. It's even harder to say "I experience these privileges at the expense of people who are not thin/beautiful/male/young/etc." It's hard - though maybe less hard? - to say "I experience those oppressions because I am fat/plain/female/old/differently-abled/poor/brown/etc."
It's even harder to realize that you can exist in both privilege and oppression simultaneously: Wann points out that the very thin anorexic knows as much about fat-shame and oppression as does the very fat person.

But seeing one's own privilege, when before it always appeared simply as "the way life is" - THAT is uncomfortable. Having to look where before we looked away, or were simply not shown something - THAT is uncomfortable. Having to address our uncomfortableness - THAT is uncomfortable.

It's also learning. It's education, it's critical thinking, it's cracking open your brain and your perspective. It's like being given glasses that allow you to see a whole new color in the spectrum, one you never even knew existed. And now that you know about it, you can never unsee it, or forget it. Even if the glasses are taken away, your mind and memory retain the impression of that new, unexpected, unlooked-for, color.

It feels sometimes like I'm being lazy in the classroom, that I'm not actually actively teaching anything. I felt like this last year, over Octavian Nothing: Kingdom on the Waves. The ways in which my students responded to that book - what they focused on, how they reacted, what confused, upset, pleased them - all had to do with the content of the book, not specifically with anything I said in some brilliant lecture [I don't lecture, to begin with]. Same with Marilyn Wann, and watching HUGE - the moment they saw that opening scene of all those fat kids in their bathing suits, the work of discomfort and learning began. I didn't do anything except provide a context, and choose the texts.

Is this even teaching?
But perhaps that is a question for another day, another post.

Meanwhile, discomfort reigns in my classroom, and I am making us all continue to stare at it, to live in discomfort - at least for one more day.

thank a teacher

2010-10-05T21:41:00.000-07:00

sunday night, I read the (now-removed, soon to be reposted) story of an amazing english teacher who fought the good fight for good YA books and lost to an unsupportive administration who caved to parental book-banning pressure. It was a remarkable story, even before the book-banning appeared to give the story a dark turn; this english teacher got her students reading: in class, in a book club that swelled to over 100 members. these students, in turn, demonstrated the benefits of reading books you like by performing better on standardized tests.
Somewhere online, I came across a mention of National Teachers' Day, and got to thinking about teachers (again, as always, big surprise).

I'm a pedigreed teacher: both my parents taught in public schools. Both hold masters degrees in education. I, of course, teach the mostly-privileged at a university. I was raised to be respectful and appreciative of my teachers, a thing that probably would have occurred anyway, because I loved school. so, a brief ode to some great teachers, and some thoughts on queer teachers.

Second grade, Mrs Eva Chapman, teacher extraordinaire. Evidently reported to my parents, during a parent-teacher conference, that I was "perfect." [I only learned this much, much later, like late in college. no swelled heads in our family]. What was perfect was Mrs Chapman's teaching, which introduced to our second-grade classroom classics of art and music (I learned about Van Gogh and Renoire and Haydn in her room, as well as Don MacLean and The Marvelettes). We were told the story of "The Elephant's Child" via feltboard; I pestered immediately for my own copy of the Just-So Stories. We learned about winnie-the-pooh, accompanied by shepherdesque stuffed animal friends. We learned nursery rhymes and coloring, we learned about breeds of dogs, we put on an Extravaganza of singing and dancing (that, in retrospect, should have warmed the little flamboyant hearts of any babygays in the class). I learned to be curious in her classroom, or rather, learned that my curiosity had a place in school, in education, in the world. And that the payoffs to following my curiosity could be fantastic - i mean, Van Gogh! what a light at the end of the tunnel of learning....

There were some lean years of uninspiring teachers, but in highschool, my history teachers more than made up for it. Mr Bogey, AP European teacher, filled my notebooks and my brain with details and information and stories that still crop up from time to time. A few years back, in one of the last classes I took in the PhD program here, the subject of Italy's unification came up, and I, without even thinking, murmured the crucial dates and names. AP Euro was a lot of wars and dates and names, but there were also a lot of stories, and ideas: there was art and architecture, there were all those philosophers and thinkers and writers.

Mr Neubauer was THE teacher, though, in my junior and senior years. AP American History, AP Government & Politics, respectively. The knowledge acquired in those classes is also still handily tucked away in some fold of my brain. but more than that, mr neubauer gave us power. he taught us some fundamentally important Supreme Court cases dealing with free speech and expression. He taught us that West Virginia v. Barnett meant that we could not be compelled to pledge allegiance to the flag. he encouraged us to ask questions, to argue, to debate. He ran his classes like the best seminars I ever had at new college, and he did it with a bunch of relatively close-minded teenagers from very affluent, conservative families. He let me be the oddball outspoken lefty liberal and somehow, quietly encouraged me to feel like it was right and good and okay to be that person. he laughed sympathetically, commiserating when I came into class freezing cold with sopping wet hair from swimming in gym class. he let me, and a few of my cronies, sit on the window ledge during class, not in desks (initially, i began sitting on the window ledge to try to absorb what little heat i could from the heat vent on the ledge - see wet hair, above, for more details).

His class was the "radicalizing" moment of my life, I guess. We had to write about controversial topics, choose a side and argue it, and somehow, I can't remember why, I picked gay marriage as my topic. I really don't know how I came to choose it, but this was fall of 1996, and anti-gay feeling was free-floating in the world. And I picked it and - because we had to - made public my pro-gay attitudes, which somehow led to a whole slew of other things, including an effort at forming a gay-straight alliance in our high school (though we didn't know to call it that; it was just a before-school meeting of a very few gay kids and their very few allies, in the office of the district social worker, who, it turned out, was sticking her neck WAY out for us).
We caused a commotion, somehow, without necessarily meaning to; we weren't allowed to put up posters about our little group. We couldn't "recruit," as it were. We couldn't let the closeted queer kids in our school know that there were friends and allies and other queer kids, and that we were all there to help each other. Yet the Christian Prayer group was allowed to meet in the school building, with announcements on the PA, praying publicly around the flagpole in the mornings. It was gross and appalling discrimination, and Mr Neubauer made sure we had the intellectual tools we needed. He couldn't or wouldn't join the fight, for reasons I grudgingly accept and understand, but he taught us what we needed to know to go to law books, to do research and articulate our (lost) cause.
We failed in forming a lasting group. We were forbidden from posting signs or making announcements about our "diversity" or "tolerance" group. I came home after the final meeting with the principal, and burst into tears at the injustice of it. That we were right - legally, morally, ethically RIGHT - and still lost was an unbelievably bitter pill to swallow. It still sticks in my throat, to remember that feeling.

Our district social worker was threatened with being fired or disciplined for her support of our group. She stuck with us.

After school ended - our senior year - we had a little picnic in the park. The queer kids and their allies (all eight of us, I think - it was a small group) met up and had snacks and picnic food and pondered the future.
And a teacher from our school came, and brought her partner.
This was not a teacher I ever had, or knew; she had been almost silently instrumental in the forming of the group. She had spoken to the social worker after several of the queer kids (and their friends) wrote or mentioned the desire for a place to talk about being gay in a gay-unfriendly environment. There were NO openly gay kids at our school until that year, until two boys whose courage I can't even begin to truly emulate, came out. One of them was in this teacher's class, and was one of the students who wrote about the issue.

I was impressed at the time that this teacher would attend the picnic and bring her partner, but it wasn't until years later that I actually realized what an amazing thing she did. In the town I grew up in, there simply were NO visible gay people. The gym-teacher-lesbian jokes circulated, and occasional other, similarly unkind rumors - but there were NO out queers in that school or that community. And, as evidenced by the attitudes of other students and the principal, when we attempted to go public with our nascent GSA, it was an environment that was extremely hostile to gay people. At a bare minimum, it was grossly, offensively ignorant of the needs of gay students; the ever-delightful principal said "i can't have a support group for every kid who gets a pimple," as if that was the equivalent of being queer.

In a town where very conservative religious people dominated the scene (Mr Neubauer said - and I don't think it was a joke - that our town was the only one in New York to carry Goldwater in that election year), being an out queer teacher must have been an impossibility. To say, publicly, that you, a teacher, were also a lesbian - that was a very dangerous proposition. I don't know what would have happened if it became known throughout the community that an actual lesbian!!! was teaching Our Children!!! but I can imagine, and none of my imaginings are very nice.

So for this teacher to voluntarily attend our sad little picnic, with her partner, after being closeted for who knows how long - my god! what a thing to do! what a gift to give your students, some of whom weren't even really her students.
And how crushingly sad, to have to live and work and teach for years and years while hiding. One of the "It gets better" project videos is a silent one, from two queer teachers who keep their faces hidden and who hold up cards with text on it. It's heartbreaking to see these women saying "it gets better," even while hiding their faces. But they are saying: We are here for you. We, your teachers, are here to help you.
And this teacher, who wasn't my teacher, did a herculean job of this. She went to the social worker and said: these kids, my students, have a need. they need a safe space and safe people to talk with about being gay in a place where gays are erased. they need help. they need more than i can give them, because my position is tenuous. but they need help.
and we got it. she made that happen. she said, silently, through what she did: I am here for you. I know how you feel, more than you can possibly imagine. and at that picnic she said: I trust you enough to bring my partner. I trust you enough to be fully myself with you.
It's an expression of care that blows my mind to think of now.
I wonder what it felt like, for her, to walk with her partner across the lawn to the picnic tables where we sat, a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds preoccupied with boys and girls and college and the end of school and ourselves and our own lives. I wonder if she was scared, or proud, or if her partner was scared, or proud, or bored. Not bored; I can't think bored was in it.
I wonder if that teacher knew, or knows, what she did for us all, and how much it mattered.
The courage and actions of quiet everyday people, in their quiet, everyday lives, can sometimes make a world of difference. It's not heroic, it's not grandstanding, it may not even be noble or proud; but very often, teachers provide us with a safe space in which to be ourselves, which is one of the biggest gifts anyone can ever give.
It's what Fred Rogers did, essentially, except it's squads of teachers, saying and doing (in dozens of ways): "you're okay." and the good teachers, these teachers who say and do and make meaning in all these many ways, these good teachers hold the world at bay for a short while for us, while giving us the information and tools and knowledge we need to carve out our own safe spaces.
Some teachers sacrifice a lot, like the english teacher who ended up leaving her position after her books were banned. Some teachers risk a lot, like my not-my-teacher, coming with her partner to a silly little picnic. Others don't take obvious risks but, like Mr Neubauer, solidly, stolidly provide the tools and ability and confidence needed to make revolution happen, knowing exactly what it is they're doing, and why.

I am grateful to these teachers, and to all the teachers who were never my teachers, but who did for their students what mine did for me. The teachers who fought, quietly and loudly; who protected their students and gave their students the ability to build their own defenses; who made it clear that, though they may give grades and write hall passes and assign detentions and scold you for talking too loudly in study hall - who made it clear that, for all that, they were on our side.

Why Mister Rogers Matters

2010-10-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

A lot of academics spend a great deal of time trying to explain why their scholarly work matters. I know I spent a lot of time - and still do - trying to justify my ivory-tower life: what does reading and writing have to do with anything in the Real World? How is this not a relentlessly selfish pursuit?

First: because I teach. The activist angle of teaching was first made clear to me at Georgetown, by my brilliant and wonderful advisor. She said: "yes, these kids are privileged [and at Georgetown, almost quadruply so] but they are also the people who will be in charge of corporations and companies. They'll be in politics and positions of power. And if you can introduce to them now some of these ideas [any activist/progressive/radical ideas], it may affect the way they do their business in future."

Teaching is, or can be, activism, and my teaching often is. This is good, and it's the main thing I do, day in and day out, to make sure my work actually does something.

The second thing I do - and what I'm writing about now - is scholarly work on things that matter. Things that can actually make a difference in the way people understand themselves, or others, or the world around them. I made a decision in my first year in Pittsburgh that I was going to consciously write in clear, legible prose; I jettisoned the obfuscating and tortured jargon and construction of so many literary theorists. If a roomful of PhD students can't make sense of a phrase from Frederic Jameson, how in gods name can the "workers," the disenfranchised, the disaffected, make sense of it? And if it's all just babble to the elite, how can it be anything but condescending, self-congratulatory largesse?

So structurally, linguistically, theoretically, I choose the pragmatic and readable.
The topics are even more important.
My dissertation is, ostensibly, about imaginary/imaginative play spaces in children's media, and the way these spaces enable and encourage radical play, difference and experimentation (specifically with gender and sexuality, but with other aspects of life as well).
Really, though, what I'm writing about are places where it's okay - even great, even better - to be different. To be yourself. Places where you, in whatever form you feel like expressing yourself, are safe and loved and admired and respected.
The ultimate of these is Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, a show which seems to have made worlds of difference in the lives of scores of children (and their families). I've spent considerable time in the archives, reading viewer mail, and the love and affirmation these kids (and adults) feel for and from Mr Rogers is staggering. Almost every letter is a tearjerker. Almost every letter mentions, at least once, Mister Rogers' mantra of "I like you just exactly the way you are."

How rarely are we told this?

Lesley Kinzel, the astute and incisive writer of Fatshionista, writes back in response to the appalling burst of suicides from young gay kids in recent weeks - the most dramatic and spectacular of these, of course, being the death of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi. Lesley writes, in an effort to support those kids who are bullied and hurt and abused and sad and lonely:

So instead, I’ve written what I would have liked to hear, back then, in my darkest adolescent moments. I am touched by people every day who tell me that the things I write here — even the things I am convinced no one will relate to, that I believe are too specific or too raw or too me — that these things help them. That hearing it helps people to know that they’re not alone. Thus, I’m hoping that this will likewise speak to some of you.
You are okay.

She's doing the work of Fred Rogers here, whether she means to or not. We should all be doing the work of Fred Rogers: reminding each other that yes, YOU are likable and lovable; that you make each day a special day but just your being you; that there is no one else in this world exactly like you, and that that adds to the glorious variety of the world. That I like you just the way you are.

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is off the air in most districts now, except perhaps on weekends; in Pittsburgh, home of the program and Fred Rogers, it's still on daily. It's dated, sure; there are no cellphones, no iPods, no laptops. No networking, except through Mr McFeely's speedy deliveries. No Facebook, except all the real friends who visit each other, both in Mr Rogers' neighborhood, and in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

There's nothing like this on tv now, where educational children's television is all about skills acquisition, and not about emotion. There's no Mister Rogers, showing up every day at the same time - as he promises at the end of every episode - to say "Hi neighbor. I like you!"

The letters in the archive come from parents, from children of all ages, from adults, from the very elderly. Everyone you can imagine writes to Mister Rogers, and they all say, in varying ways, the same thing: we love you, Mister Rogers, because you love us. We need someone to tell us, every day, that we're okay, and mean it. We feel better about our abilities and disabilities, as children, as mothers, as friends, as siblings, as fathers, as retirees, as very elderly single women with no families, because of you. We are able, because of you, to go out into our worlds as happier, more confident people, willing and able and actively doing things to make the world a better more interesting place.
So writing about Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, for me, is activism. It's me saying: LOOK! Look how much we needed Fred Rogers. Look how much he - just one guy, on a low-budget public tv show - was able to do, for so, so many people. Look how little he had to do, to do so very much.
It's saying, Fred Rogers wasn't a saint. He was a very, very good man with powerful motivation and a message that we all need, that we all know we need. If he could do it, so can we all. There's nothing so extraordinary, after all, in that show: bringing in something new to look at and think about. Going on a visit to an everyday place: a music shop, a restaurant, a dance studio, a potter's workshop, a shoe factory. Saying: sometimes it's really hard, isn't it? and you get angry, or sad, or confused, or scared. And that's okay, because I like you when you're angry, or sad, or confused, or scared. Because I like you, just exactly as you are.
Because you make every day a special day, by just your being you.

Because every one of us is important and meaningful and real and human. Always, every day, even when you're scared, or angry, or confused, or hurt, or sad. And you contribute to the infinite variety on this planet, the infinite variety that makes the world so very interesting and fun and curious and amazing. Losing even one person from that huge mosaic of difference makes the whole thing a tiny bit less bright and shiny.

It's so incredibly easy, to do what Fred Rogers did. To listen, to be there, to say: I like you, just as exactly as you are. To say, with words and actions: I care about you, because you're you, you're a person who is unlike anyone else in this world world.

To say, and mean it, that You make every day a special day, by just your being you.

and that's why i'm writing my dissertation.

What just happened - LIAR

2010-09-23T21:22:00.000-07:00

I finished Justine Larbalestier's LIAR today. It's a book I feel like I've heard about a lot, but - weirdly - knew nothing about going into it.

*************THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD, MATEY**********************

and seriously, you don't want this one spoilered. to spare your eyes I will provide a cute image to fill some space. see, here is a kitten diligently reading a book, maybe even LIAR. But probably actually reading Rotten Ralph or If you give a cat a cupcake.

Coming out of it, I'm not sure I know much more.

It was a terrific book. Micah's voice is utterly compelling and real and intriguing. The structure of the novel - in sections of varying degrees of truthfulness - worked wonderfully, and presents some very interesting and provocative (and unanswerable) questions about truth-telling. The whole premise of lying, actually, as both theme and narrational device, is inspired.

I was perplexed, at the library, hunting for this book. Larbalestier's other books are in the fantasy genre, and I'd always thought Liar was strict old everyday realism.

And then, werewolves.
And then, lying.

And oh - there are more puzzle pieces at hand than there are in the finished picture, but how do I know which to discard? Larbalestier says the book is intentionally vague - clearly haunted by the ghost (or IS it a ghost?) of Henry James's Turn of the Screw. Or intentionally multiple, would be a better way to rephrase it. I can imagine this book driving my students insane.

So we don't know, and we can't know - not for sure - what the truth is here. Micah's our narrator, and she is totally, completely and always unreliable. Except maybe when she's not. Does she ever tell us the truth? What about? Does it matter?

Whatever the "truth" or Truth or truth is - how Zach died, whether Micah's brother exists, existed, where or what or if upstate and the farm are, if Micah has the family illness, and if that illness is in fact lycanthropy - there are some thematic truths here that struck me repeatedly.

This book is about Betwixt and Between, to borrow Barrie's phrase. It's about being some of more than one thing. It's about being a third in a binary world. It's a totally queer book, in a lot of ways.

Micah is biracial - and this assertion never changes. She lies about being a boy, at the beginning of high school. She is a werewolf, by definition a being that is neither fully human nor fully wolf. She is liar, except when she's not, which is when? She is attracted to Tayshawn and Sarah, almost equally. She is not anyone's girlfriend, except when she is.
She lives in a world that demands everything be resolved into binaries, and Micah is neither one nor the other. You could say the book operates this way as well: is it a fantasy about werewolves, or a very chilling story about an extremely mentally unbalanced girl? are the pills birth control, or are they antipsychotics, or are they some kind of sedative?
There are no answers to these questions. All possibilities remain open; Micah, in both her lying and her truth-telling (which we cannot distinguish from each other) refuses utterly to foreclose on any of them.

LIAR, and Micah, break binaries at every turn. Fantasy or psychological realism? wolf or girl, straight or lesbian, sane or insane, only child or sibling'd - there are no clear answers and - more importantly - no way to resolve any of these. The answers simply cannot be had, because part of the point of the book (as I read it) is to refuse to provide them. We are meant to be on shaky ground. Because it forces us to look at possibilities, at multiplicities - to think beyond binaries. To stick with binaries is to be endlessly frustrated with this book, and with Micah. To stick with binaries is to, in some ways, obliterate Micah. She cannot be resolved into one thing OR the other.

And so everything we think we know about narrative, about truth-telling, about werewolves and detective stories and YA romances and desire and family and Micah is blurred and opened up on itself. This is a book that generates multiplicity and possibility, and in that, it is absolutely brilliant, and revolutionary.

Our inability to know is put on huge display in this book. No one within the text knows anything for sure; none of us reading know anything for sure. This resonates with me particularly along gender-identity lines: the queered body, unknowable as male/female, straight/gay, resolutely and perpetually resisting and refusing to be known and categorized. There's a huge amount of power there, but there's also a huge amount of power being challenged.

This was a staggering book to read. I had to put off my planned errands for the day until I'd finished the last 70 pages or so; I couldn't not know. But of course, there is no knowing here. This isn't a smug or smarmy poststructuralist endless delay of meaning - there's almost a flat-out assertion that there is no meaning to get to. This is a kind of gauntlet-throwing in the face of all systems of classification and knowing.

I HAVE to teach this book. It will break everyone's minds, and that's exactly what needs to be happening.

day & night/ booking through thursday

2010-09-16T21:38:00.000-07:00

this week's question!

Today’s question is suggested by Mae.
Do you divide your books into day and night reads? How do you decide?

ANSWER:

nope. I do not. I just read. If I'm particularly gripped by a book, I just read it every chance I get to read anything. I'm not good at putting books down if they're more than usually gripping; I end up staying up late, and finishing, all kinds of books (especially children's and YA, but then, isn't that the bulk of my reading?). I think Jellicoe Road may have been my most recent stayed-up-to-finish read [and, I'm excited to add, I ordered it in to the bookstore so I can get it with my discount and own my very own Jellicoe Road. I feel a little wistful that I have to make do with the American edition; it'd be nice to have the Australian On the Jellicoe Road instead].

There are a few things that I have discovered I cannot, or should not, read right before bed. The main one is Edgar Allen Poe. Foolishly, several years ago, I picked up a collection of Poe stories, since it had been a VERY long time since I last read Poe. And like a fool, I elected to read a few stories before sleep at night.
NOT A WISE DECISION.
so I leave Poe, and Stephen King (not that I read him often anymore) and that ilk for daytime/early evening. But otherwise, anything goes.

adolescence, stereotypes and cliques

2010-09-13T20:04:00.000-07:00

My Adolescence class is picking up steam, I think (I hope). We started in on actual primary texts this week (the introductory classes were reading various contemporary news/opinion articles on teenagers, "emerging adults" etc, and some fun with G. Stanley Hall); today's topic was the John Hughes' film THE BREAKFAST CLUB.

Somehow I managed to never see the entire film all the way through until about seven or eight weeks ago. My sister was a fan of the movie when we were younger, and I frankly cannot grasp how I managed to never see the movie in its entirety before now, but there you have it. I've seen it twice now, in a span of about seven weeks, and it's pretty fantastic for a lot of reasons.

But today - and the reason I put it on the syllabus - we talked in class about stereotypes. The students had a lot to say (which was joyous, and a number of them raised points that I hadn't thought of, which always delights me), and I'm looking forward to talking more on Wednesday. In the interim, I got to thinking (as I drove home from school) about the kind of stereotypes in the movie: the jock, the basket case, the brain, the delinquent, the jock ("Sporto"!).

And I wonder if these kinds of stereotypes really only manifest during adolescence. The kinds of cliques Melinda identifies at the start of Speak, for instance; it's a more comprehensive and updated list than Hughes's collection of types, but it's essentially the same kind of stratification.
Now, stereotypes run rampant across the adult world, of course, but it seems to me, on intial thought, that those tend to be organized around some relatively fixed aspect of a person's identity. That is: racial, ethnic, gender, sex/sexuality, religious (which can cross over with ethnic, for example: Jews and Muslims, where it's not just religion that's being singled out but a kind of ethnic or at the very least cultural identity). There are other "character types," - the Boss, the Soccer Mom, types within professions - the Lawyer, the Account Exec, the Secretary - but those are only visible when the person is inhabiting that role. For instance, once The Secretary gets in her car and drives home or goes to the supermarket, that Secretaryish type is almost or entirely invisible to everyone else. Ditto Soccer Mom, who, alone at the library or at Hot Yoga or the supermarket sans children, could just appear to be a woman.

Put another way: in my first year of grad school in Pittsburgh, a co-student of mine said (as we discussed clothing): "you're not really subculturally aligned."
At the time (and admittedly still) that comment rankled, for some reason; possibly because I was then 25 and it seemed to me that the time for subcultural alignment had come and gone long ago, and my acquaintance's remark (and her own persistence in subcultural alignment) struck me as silly and childish.

In retrospect, I was never subculturally aligned, primarily because I was never aligned. I was odd-girl-out through most of my high school years, and then in college, surrounded by a seething mass of mostly-hippies, I was again un-aligned except by virtue of my non-hippie-ness.

BUT. Subcultural identities and/or stereotypes seem to hold strongest and truest in adolescent and/or young adult life. I'm sure there are exceptions - bikers are one, I think, where there is a distinct "look" that accompanies biker life that makes bikers far more visible away from their bikes than for other kinds of subcultures.

The question is: WHY?
why do you get cliques? Why do you get jocks and princesses and brains and criminals and goths and hippies and hipsters and headbangers and stoners in high school, maybe in college, and then - somehow - they seem to seep away into the larger, less obviously differentiated mass of adulthood.
And when you do see vestigial subculturally aligned adults, they seem....well....sort of sad. The adult man who presents as Jock seems kind of like a joke, reliving (possibly imaginary) glory days of his youth. Adult (and old) hippies just seem out of it, kind of very worn and faded and disconnected from reality (though they probably seemed like that as young hippies too). Adult Goths seem sort of pathetic. In each case, encountering the older version of these younger identities always feels like the older version is either 1) immature/not really grown up 2) sad 3) trying to remain young and cool and/or 4) desperate for attention.

These visible marks of difference and identity that we put on as teenagers, and which are then used (by us and against us) to sort us into stereotyped categories, somehow shouldn't be necessary as an adult. You shouldn't need to wear lots of black eye makeup and petticoats to make your personality, your individuality, known. Ditto with the jock attitudes, or the hipster glasses, or whatever group you like. There is a point, it seems, by which one ought to have grown out of these stereotypes. How often do you walk into a gathering of adults and group them off into "jocks" and "cool kids" and "nerds" and "delinquents" and "goths" and "brains"???
you may get tech geeks drifting together, you may have a group of Beautiful People, but you can't tell by looking who those people are (even, sometimes especially, the Beautiful People).

So how does this work, this stereotyping, this subcultural aligning? WHY does it work? Is it part of that "trying on identities" thing the developmental psychologists talk about? How come most people only try on one other identity? I don't know anyone, personally, who went through multiple of these disguises. You went from Generic Girl to Goth, or from Brain to Cool Kid, but there wasn't much movement after that. Angela Chase's season-starting transformation in My So-Called Life makes this very visible; she switches it up, dyes her hair red, starts wearing plaid and funky skirts and shoes. But she doesn't try on yet another new persona.

I'm intrigued by this, and by how it works, and how it lingers, and if that's even a bad thing. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe carrying the external, visible marks of your subcultural alignment is a useful, important, disruptive thing. I'm not sure.

It's unexamined territory, for my brain anyway, which is pretty content to be un-aligned and (consequently) always observing.

Jellicoe Road

2010-08-31T19:28:00.000-07:00

WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME ABOUT THIS BOOK???????
or - where have I been for the last couple of years, that word of its greatness somehow passed me by?

I read it - the entire book - today. I should not have devoted the whole day to it, but that's what books will do to me, especially good books.

And Jellicoe Road is an amazing book. I cried. Repeatedly. What an absolutely gorgeous and unexpected story....the intersecting and bisecting and intertwining stories and characters are so wonderfully, vividly crafted. I really did not know, for the first 50 or 75 pages, where this book was going; the shifts in tone and plot happened so naturally and subtly that I don't even know when it crossed over into emotionally gripping and mysterious - all I know is, at some point I couldn't put the book down. When I tried to, the characters swarmed my brain; I could see them even when I closed my eyes.

I don't think I have anything profound to say about this book, not yet anyway, just that it took my breath away (almost literally). Having read Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca within the last ten days, and then coming to Jellicoe Road, I was simply not prepared for the depth and complexity of the story and emotions of it. Which is not to say that Marchetta's other books are shallow - they aren't. But their themes and concerns are, in some ways, very different from those in Jellicoe.

I will give Jellicoe Road the absolute highest recommendation I possibly can give. And I will have to acquire it for my very own, read it again, and think think think about it.

Mockingjay: an observation

2010-08-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me, in mulling over Mockingjay (and my reaction to it), that the book makes a little more sense, and makes me feel better, if I think of it as a revenge tragedy in the best Jacobean tradition.

Because I think Mockingjay IS a revenge story, since I think Katniss is motivated largely by personal and/or selfish reasons - and most of what is selfish or personal to Katniss has to do with the people closest to her. She wants revenge: for Rue, for all the tributes, for Wiress and the morphling addicts and Mags, for herself and the Victors who have to live with what they've done, and what's been done to them. Her mission against President Snow is almost totally one of revenge.

And the classic revenge tragedy can really only have one set of outcomes: deaths. Lots and lots of deaths.
Which is precisely what Collins gives us.

So: Mockingjay = Jacobean Revenge Tragedy.

Mockingjay: all done [spoilers]

2010-08-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

Putting the book cover here to blot out any unwanted spoilery things....I give most of it away, so if you don't want to know, STOP READING NOW. blindfold your tender eyes.

So I read Mockingjay in its entirety today, and I'm still a little shell-shocked. There was an awful lot I didn't expect - there's an awful lot that needed wrapping up, so Collins had her work cut out for her.
I had - and still have, five hours later - a sort of sickish, empty feeling as I reached the end of the novel. Not because I was unhappy with what Collins does with her characters and her plot, but because it's that kind of a book - that kind of a series.
One of the things that came up in class discussions about The Hunger Games - which the students always initiated - is the sheer violence of it. And how that violence is never gratuitous, and is necessary and profoundly affecting.
Collins seriously ups the ante on the violence in Mockingjay. This is a novel about war, about living in the heart of war; by the novel's final section, it's all ground-level guerrilla warfare, which makes me think that Collins is (intentionally or otherwise) referencing our everlasting and grim street battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of the main points that I especially moved/disturbed/interested me:
Finnick, and Finnick and Katniss's relationship.
The decimation, by novel's end, of the corps of Hunger Games Victors.
The death that tips Katniss past the point of endurance. It's ghastly. Some of those final scenes reminded me, in a terrible, terrible way, of Schindler's List, of the scene when Schindler sees the little girl in the red coat in the liquidation of the ghetto.
The terrible and relentless way that virtually everyone is revealed as untrustworthy, or as having ulterior (or at least more complex) motivations.
The hijacking of Peeta.
The epilogue.
The many, many children and young people (like early 20s and under) who die or are grievously injured.

This last item is of particular interest to me. Back in my youthfully ignorant early days of studying children's literature, Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire came out. I read it voraciously, having been sucked into the HP machine. And at the end I was shocked. I remember saying, repeatedly; "Kids DON'T die in children's book. they just don't."
Well, actually - they do. And they seem to be doing it more and more frequently. I know Death is a common one for YA fiction, but the deaths seem to be growing more frequent, and more intense. It's not just an elderly great-aunt dying, or a sister with leukemia in hospice (hi, Lurleen McDaniel!) - it's protagonists. Or it's protagonist's closest friends/family/allies, dying brutally in front of the protagonist's eyes.
I wonder about this, a lot.

I am very unhappy about the turn that Gale takes, and unhappier at Katniss's reaction to it.

Katniss is selfish; this book made that abundantly clear, although it's not exactly a secret throughout the other two books. But it made me uncomfortable this time, especially in regards to Gale. Every decision Katniss makes, every action she takes, is done because it will protect or help her family and loved ones. She protects Gale and Peeta, her mother and Prim, the other victors, herself (sometimes, but only sometimes; she is willing to sacrifice herself for them). Katniss is resolutely not political. She doesn't care about the revolution, the uprising; she wants revenge for herself and those she cares about, and that drives her against President Snow. The compassion and loss and grief and anger she feels when the people she cares about suffer, or are killed, are real and deep and meaningful, but the fact remains: Katniss is simply not engaged in the larger political struggles. She is fortunate (?) in that her decisions and actions usually result in something positive for the many and not just for the few, but that's a secondary benefit, not her primary motivation.
Contrast this with Gale, who seems to grow more resolute, grimmer, harder, as each chapter passed. Gale is willing to do whatever it takes to defeat the Capitol. Even if it means killing everyone inside a mountain. Even if innocent people are hurt. He is not acting out of personal revenge (though he does also experience personal rage about the way he and his have suffered because of the Capitol) - Gale IS political, unlike Katniss. And while it's hard to feel good about some of Gale's choices, it's also hard to feel good about many of Katniss's. Gale is, essentially, utilitarian about the war, brilliantly so. You may kill 100 people, many of whom may be innocent, to save a country. It's the logic of the Bomb, of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. It's a cold, calculating, horrific logic, but if you can step outside your personal emotions, it's a logic that makes sense. And can even be a good thing.

The epilogue was, in the way of many epilogues, unsatisfying to me. I suppose it's better than ending on a "we looked into the clear bright future, my Love at my side." but.
the nightmares never go away. ever.
and the trick of evaporating time to age the protagonists, and give them children (you might as well just print HOPE in giant glittery letters, or perhaps REPRODUCTIVE FUTURITY!), is one that irks me. I am never sure why, except that suddenly, our protagonist/narrator is someone 10 or 20 or more years older. And that jump is unforgivable. What we lose in that jump is unforgivable.

This is a book about war - it's Hunger Games played large-scale, across a country. Katniss and Finnick realize this, when they see the obstacles and traps laid around the Capitol; they see it as just a huge games arena, though with higher stakes and more people. It's about survival, and death, and horror, and power - it is so much about power. The ways of hurting people that appear throughout this trilogy are mind-boggling. Collins doesn't back away from the fact that war - in any level, whether it is the annual Hunger Games or the Quarter Quell or full-on rebellion - was is a terrible thing that rips everyone and everything apart. No one is safe. No on comes out unscathed. The bright and shiny future never materializes. It is brutal and it is easy, this kind of battling and war.

This is not a happy book, and for this I applaud Suzanne Collins (loudly, and long). No one clasps hands and faces into the cold, clear light of a new day. No one faces the future bravely, with Love by their side, certain that the new world they've created will be a shiny happy gleaming tomorrowland. Collins make it plain that even "winning" is brutal - Haymitch is an alcoholic from start to finish. Annie is broken and disoriented and mad. The dead stay dead, the broken remain broken. There is no recovery, there is no "getting over" the Hunger Games and their aftermath. This is not a book about glorious happiness arising from the ashes of difficult struggle. We're not left on a happy note, at all - we're left with the Hunger Games, with the reminder of the terrible possibilities in the world. We're left with the fact that terrible things happen, and scar us for life. That sometimes, the nightmares never, ever end.

Mockingjay

2010-08-24T06:28:00.000-07:00

It's Mockingjay release day, and very soon I will be zipping off to my bookstore to get my copy. I plan to spend the day comfortably curled up on my bed, reading my eyeballs out.

I've been waiting for this one for quite awhile; I was lucky enough to read Catching Fire in advanced reader copy, which has meant I've been cliffhanging for a very long time now.

I'm very excited and quite a bit nervous about this concluding book to a very great series. The series has gotten so much buzz, too, in the last year - I have that vaguely snerky, totally immature feeling one gets when suddenly something you love becomes hugely popular. I was geeking out over these books over a year ago, and now suddenly, everyone I know is picking up The Hunger Games for the first time and going bonkers.

But!! No matter! I'm ready to discover Katniss's fate. And Cinna's - I adore Cinna.
I hope - gods I hope - this final book isn't all about the Love Triangle of Katniss, Peeta and Gale. I am not "Team Peeta" or "Team Gale," and I'm kind of irked that such things even exist. Those relationships are important, yes, but not central to the books' narrative.

And now! Off to get my Mockingjay.