Literary Autobiography, Part 5

I guess the best way to round this off is to give some idea of where I am right now in my literary life.

At this point, my interests are pretty extensive. I'm going back and forth between a sci-fi anthology of Ray Bradbury's works (really weird), and a book on the Philosophy of Art (which is making a lot of sense).

I'm also working on an autobiography that revolves around my long-term employment with Starbucks. It's sort of like that guy's "How Starbucks Saved My Life", only way more snarky. And I'm convinced that my stories about companionship between partners and our connections with customers will be a little more vivid. Because they make this story more than I do. Gill's personal story of white privilege, and him losing it, and then developing new meaning in his life, was more shocking to people like him than it was to people like me.

Besides, his portrayal of Starbucks is how it used to be at least seven years ago. I felt a huge sense of nostalgia while reading his book, but at the end I thought to myself, "this is not how it feels for so many others."

I think everyone has the potential to tell a story. How often are we impressing this upon our children? How much are we encouraging them to explore and develop their own life experiences? In many ways, schools preach safety, the well-worn path of academia, the illusion that you will become successful if you squeeze yourself into that four-year-university-right-out-of-highschool demographic.

And so many kids are learning right now that that's just not how it works anymore. You're not guaranteed a job when you're done with college, because chances are, there are none. Or you have to compete with people twice your age, with more experience.

So what do these kids do? Go right back to school to get their master's, because that's all a lot of these kids every really learned to do: jump through hoops, fulfill the requirements, be rewarded with a piece of paper.

I think we should do what the Europeans do: tell the kids to take a year off. Get a job. Travel a little bit. Make some mistakes. Figure out what you really love. Then go back to school. You appreciate it more that way. And getting the party out of your system allows you to better focus on your long-term goals. Education is meant to enrich your life experiences, not monopolize them.

I think that's a big motivator for me, as a future educator. I want to impress upon my students that they are not learning in a vacuum. What they are seeing, and learning, and producing, is relevant to what is happening in the real world. And we should shatter this polarity between sheltered school community and everywhere else. Learning should not be isolated to the classroom. We need to impress upon children that the world is a classroom. Learning happens everywhere, not just within the confines of a text book. School should be a hub where we share our experiences, and testing should mean showing how we have internalized those experiences.

I'm rambling. Insert random picture.

Yeah, it's always good to end it with your heart smiling. <3

Literary Autobiography part 4

In my last post I explained my "Descent into Fandom Process."
When I came across the Twilight series, something went horribly wrong after step 3. Or... step 3 and step 2 got horribly mixed up and I had what I like to call a "Pop Culture Conflict."

Literary works become popular for many reasons. The characters are relate-able, the conflicts are timeless, the ending leads to some internal moral insight.... but this is not the case for Twilight.

At first I considered that maybe it's because the books were targeted to girls between the ages of eleven and sixteen. Until I started to see young women my age, reading this garbage. 

My words are cruel, I understand. But when a book is entirely centered around a self-hating, whiney, unremarkable teenage girl who develops her self-esteem by dating guys who want to kill her out of blood lust.... we women of a post-feminist era need to take a step back and ask ourselves what the hell went wrong.

Margot Adler wrote this extensive article on the surge of vampires in our literature and media, noting the fact that our contemporary portrayal of vampires involves moral conflict. Blood-sucking, light-evading, hellish creatures grappling with the fact that they are not human, but desperately trying to act human.

I don't like it. I want my vampires to be evil, because the archetype of the vampire gives us a glimpse of our own maliciously animal nature - and in contrast, reminds us of our true goodness and humanity. And this is why people find vampires to be oh-so-sexy. The fantasy is completely taboo because we so desire to link sex with blood, and darkness, and decay, and desecration. But to white-wash this charismatic and brutal personage is to take away its power in the psyche.

There's my Jungian psychology for the day.

When I was in high school, I fell in love with Anne Rice. Her early stuff was hypnotic. The characters were average until they became vampires (except Lestat; he was awesome before he turned over... and being a vampire just amplified it). But then you begin to realize just how depraved these characters really were. You began to see the irony in how they lived, because no matter how hard they tried to blend into polite society, to live fashionably, they were fundamentally apart from the people they feasted on. And to watch the character's slow realization of this was heart-wrenching. You'd finish the book with a greater sense of your own humanity, because the characters you just fell in love with (or grew to despise) were so very nihilistic.

Why aren't girls still reading those, huh? Why not encourage teenage girls to explore their own psychology through something as sexually tensioned as a vampire novel? I feel this is far better than having them relate to a "heroine" as pathetic as Bella. That series has started a deplorable trend: all the girls want a vampire for a boyfriend. Don't bother, they just want to suck your blood (pop your cherry) and leave you for dead (move onto their next naive target). And most vampires are stuck on themselves anyway.

Notice, ladies, how you're not getting any of his attention.

Literary Autobiography, Part 3

And then there was Harry Potter.

I didn't jump on this bandwagon immediately. There's a very predictable sequence of events that occurs when it comes to me and cultural phenomena.

1. Ignore it. 
2. Rant about how everyone is obsessed with this book/movie/artist/musician.
3. Take a look at it because at this point it has become so all-pervasive you can't not give it some attention.
4. Become head-over-heels obsessed. This level of fandom can last for a really, really long time.

 Yes, the Harry Potter series is a cultural phenomenon. It is an epic fantasy/adventure with an array of colorful characters, an intricate plot, a lush setting. It's embedded with enough British folklore, classic allegories, moral and ethical dilemmas and just weird made-up stuff to keep you preoccupied for years.
I say years, because... well, seven books. And some of them are really long.

I remember when people were completely up and arms about Harry Potter as being completely evil because "it has witchcraft." **rolls eyes** "It is turning kids to witchcraft." **heavy sigh** "JK Rowling is the devil." **scream** "Let's hold book burnings." **dies**
Madness I tell you.

And now that all seven books are published, we have people debating on the Christian allegories in the story. 
And in my personal opinion, I felt how these allegorical events played out in the end of this series were more dramatic and impactful (word?) than anything you'll find in something like, oh, The Chronicles of Narnia. 
 
This series really should be included in language arts programs. Kids are so inspired by this series. They draw pictures in response to reading these stories. They go outside and play quidditch. Can you imagine? Kids wanting to go outside again? It's wonderful to see some imagination again.

Here's a trailer parody for your enjoyment. =D

Literary Autobiography, Part 2

So my elementary school years were rich when it came to reading. The Goosebumps Books were hugely popular, and by the end of fifth grade, I had developed quite a collection. I also fell in love with the early works of Louis Sacher because we thought the character situations were so utterly ridiculous.

But then there was middle school. I've come to view middle school some ferocious beast that seeks to suck the passion out of learning and ignores personal development. That sounds awful, I know. Kids enter middle school in a really strange mental state because of the puberty mess, and they begin to develop what we like to call "an attitude." Eleven- and twelve-year-olds are capable of some really sophisticated thought processes, but I remember middle school handling me as an unsophisticated child who's incapable of developing her own unique thoughts. In elementary school, personal expression was rewarded. In middle school, results were rewarded.

So for a time, my love of reading was shunted and it was because of a school program that, ironically, sought to encourage reading. Essentially, there were particular books in our school library were on a reading list, and they were marked with points. Book points were determined by "reading level," which was always some elusive scale to me. Maybe it had something to do with the length of the book, or the difficulty of the wording... needless to say, the higher the reading level, the more points a book had. Students were expected to read these books, but! in order to acquire the points, you had to take a multiple-choice test based on the book. It gets better. If you missed points on the the little quiz, you only acquired a portion of those points.

It was an idiotic system. Kids would check out books that had upwards of ten points, not because they were genuinely interested in the story. I got fed up with it all. Books I liked were either "below my reading level" or were not even marked on the reading list. It was rather discouraging; just what I needed when I was already in a state of constant self-doubt.

Has any one else experienced something similar?

Literary Autobiography, Part 1

I tried thinking as far back as I could to determine, what were some of the first books I've ever read? I don't remember my first real book. In my mind, it feels like there was one day when I really didn't know how to read, and the next, I did. And soon after that it was nothing but books. Like some weird.... literary Cambrian explosion.

That's right. The art major just made an evolutionary biology reference. Watch out.

Here's some of the books I've read, you know, standard stuff:

At the time, this was really big too.

I recently went back  and read this book. As an adult, the stories are a little sub-par. They were fun for us, when we were in first grade. It was the amount of spookiness that we appreciated during sleepovers or Girl Scout camp weekends. But even to this day, it's the pictures, the bloody pictures that make my skin crawl. 

 Yeah, I thought you'd appreciate that. You're welcome. You can thank  me more when you wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares of spiders laying their eggs in your face.

I guess my point in all is this is that for children, stories come alive when there is a visual story to tell. Kids need pictures. The best way for children to develop a value for the written word is to associate it with an image. Hence why kids love the picture books. I still love picture books. When we were in elementary school, we always raved about the books that received Caldecott Medal. Okay, in case you've forgotten, every year the Caldecott Medal is awarded to a particular children's book that has exceptional illustration in addition to an engaging story.

Get kids to even just look at picture books at an early age and you instill in them a love for stories, and eventually a love of reading. I say this because those who love to read usually can visualize what they're reading quite vividly. Hence, the title of this blog.

I think art is a powerful tool for children, in that they can give a visual representation to the words that move them. Also, art requires communication, and promotes dialog between people.