You get the reference, and you know you do.
So I was doing my homework for my public libraries class today, which dealt with youth/outreach services. And I started thinking about it, because I kept reading all these articles which were along the lines of "Wow, young adult lit these days has themes like death, and sex!"
Wow guys, who knew.
I just turned in a homework assignment with about that same level of sarcasm, if not worse. And, well, lots of reasons for that, really. Let us examine:
1. I'm pretty seriously out of touch with the normality of this whole YA lit thing. I mean, the first time I read Shogun, not to mention Roots, I was like 7 or 8. And I understood them pretty well, actually. And let's do a theme check, here: Death? One of those from disease on like page 2 of Shogun. A bit later some random guy gets his head cut off, and let's not even mention the very strong sepukku themes. Roots has some fairly intense rape stuff, not to mention Kunta Kinte getting his foot chopped off with a freakin' axe.
So yeah, seeing Spot run never quite did it for me. I was reading Old Yeller concurrently with The Indian In the Cupboard and stuff like The Jungles of New Guinea and Give Us This Day, one of them a history on one of the worst theaters of World War II, the other a prison camp memoir by somebody who was on Bataan. I once shocked my grade school librarian by asking if we had a copy of Mein Kampf, which I wanted to read when I was reading The Rise And Fall Of the Third Reich.
1a. And let's digress for a moment. The Jungles of New Guinea. That book was cool. They used to sell these paperback history books, and I mean pocket book sized, in supermarkets back in the day. Jungles of New Guinea, Glory of the Solomons. Raider 16, which may be the coolest book ever ("Ok guys, we're going to put a bunch of guns on this ship, make it look like a freighter, and then sail around and either pirate people or blow them up." How is this not awesome?). I read a lot of Edwin Hoyt that way. Train trips to California, you understand. Mom had to keep me busy, so I read all this WWII history when I was like 10.
2. Going back to the whole "Ohnoes death and sex!" thing, parents, seriously, grow the fuck up. We can handle it, if you let us. Honest we can.
3. On the other hand, it's not exactly like what we got in school was at all related to normality, either. Everyone says all this shit about Harry Potter, but seriously, we were all reading David Eddings and FR/Dragonlance tie-in novels, not to mention Star Wars and such, back in like, 1992. I am fully in accord with the character in My Teacher Is An Alien who burns his 6th grade English book, because holy shit were those things bad. I mean BAD. And that really deserves some examination, so let's do that:
A) Ever notice how English textbooks all have stories by a bunch of guys who wrote shit 40 years ago? I used to wonder at that. I used to actually get excited when the guy who wrote whatever forgettable short story it was, you know, STILL ALIVE.
B) Besides that, have you ever noticed how an awful lot of non-genre literature is over-artsy, overpretentious shit? I mean, on the one hand, knowing what metaphors and allegories and such are is a good and useful skill, so you should include things that teach that, but reality check here. The Pearl sucked. The Old Man and the Sea sucked. That short story we read once in the yellow freshman English book where that guy climbs out of his apartment and wanders around for no reason? That sucked.
The Most Dangerous Game was pretty cool, though, but half of that was because I had just read a Dirk Pitt novel (Dragon, fwiw), which had a homage to it. But that ties in to another point, which is
C) Ever notice how non-genre lit is on the decline, and genre lit is on the rise? Because, well, let's think about that for a moment. Contrast people having weighty moral issues and physical travails while fishing with people having weighty moral issues and physical travails on spaceships. You should be keeping a simple fact in mind here, which is that fishing, to be perfectly honest, is REALLY FUCKING BORING, and that flying around in spaceships fighting aliens is REALLY COOL.
D) Seriously, though, I'm probably never going to read another Hemingway book because Old Man And the Sea scarred me THAT deeply. Which is sort of sad, really.
E) There are about 5 pieces of poetry that are good, and the rest is crap. These 5 pieces vary by person. This makes teaching poetry hard. Also, nobody actually gives that much of a shit about iambic pentameter. Sorry, Mr. Elliott. I wish I could break that gently. But I think you knew that from the lengthy poetry units we did.
My list, for the record, is comprised mostly of JRR Tolkein, Rudyard Kipling, Dylan Thomas, and that one Robert Frost poem I can't remember.
F) If you're putting together an English compilation, and you realize that you've extracted one scene from a classic work, and it's like, one of the main scenes, but it only works at all if you've read the entire work, just stop, collect all your pages, and burn the book. Because there's no way that's going to work out well for anyone.
Yeah, our American Lit book featured, for James Fenimore Cooper, Natty Bumpo's death scene. Thanks, assholes.
G) Also, on the subject of American Lit. ...wow. Seriously, wow. That's the best we can come up with? It's like...Mark Twain and...Mark Twain. I admit to liking the whole Sinners In the Hands of An Angry God thing, because hey, RAAAAAARG, but Emerson? Thoreau? Shoot me. Just SHOOT ME.
Yeah, sorry Mr. Elliott. I know you love them.
I think it's pretty indicative that I can't even remember who else we read in that class.
H) But at least British Lit was cool. Because, let us contrast again:
Thoreau: I'm going to go live in this cabin. This will be a very important mental and spiritual journey for me. I shall ponder many things.
Macbeth: I'm going to kill this guy and jack his kingdom. This will be a very important mental and spiritual journey for me. I shall ponder many things. I'm also going to have a fucking awesome sword fight.
In one of these, things happen. This is inherently more exciting than books where things do not happen. Just saying.
I) All I'm saying is, English majors are a huge danger to effective teaching of and enjoyment of reading. I'm totally serious about that, and I'm all prepared to talk about the English Praxis II in support of it.
Anyway.
Posted by Dwip at April 5, 2007 9:41 PM