Bodice-Rippers And Other Children's Books

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situs bandar cemeWhen I was a boy, I lived with my maternal grandparents. My grandfather used to sit at his desk writing reports in the evenings before he went to work. The other police officers used to call him the Midnight Cowboy because he was from Texas and he liked to work the night shift. When I’d wake up in the mornings he’d be at the kitchen table with coffee and a cigar, reading The Journal-Courier. When my grandmother got home from Saint Raphael’s Hospital in the afternoon, she would sit at the kitchen table, drink coffee, and read The New Haven Register.

When my grandparents renovated their house, my grandmother insisted upon an office/living room with floor to ceiling bookshelves on either side of a fireplace. On the shelves nearest her reading chair, my grandmother kept all her mystery and detective fiction. On the top shelf were the books I’d later learn were called bodice-rippers—you know, the ones whose covers showed buxom women falling out of their blouses as they ran from a handsome man in a flowing white shirt. If the cover was really inappropriate, my grandmother covered it with aluminum foil. I used to have a hard time getting the foil back on the books and the books back on the top shelf.

In time, my grandmother cleared off the lower shelves for me and filled them with kids’ books. I also had my own books on that shelf, the ones I wrote and illustrated on blue-lined note cards. I’d construct them at my grandfather’s rolltop desk, which was along the back wall just beyond the far set of shelves. I distinctly remember one I wrote about a pet turtle that had died.

I began elementary school in 1974. Ridge Hill School was new and reflected the prevailing philosophies of the day, with open classrooms and mixed age groupings. Even in first grade we changed teachers for subjects. Mostly I was grouped with second and even third graders. So it was a surprise to my mother when we moved to the shoreline and I was placed in a remedial class. My mother was told that I had been placed there according to standardized test scores. Being a first grade teacher herself, my mother demanded to see the test results. As soon as the eksekutif pulled out the answer sheet, all the adults could see the problem. I had made geometric patterns on the bubble-in sheet. Apparently, the teachers had made me take the test with the older kids, and told me I could join the first graders at recess as soon as I had finished.

Once I was re-tested and re-tracked, I excelled in school, and I loved my teacher, Mr. Brucker. On Fridays, students took turns bringing a book from home to read to our classmates. At Christmas time, I brought in my copy of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which I had just gotten as a gift and had read the weekend before. Mr. Brucker had to stop me before I got any further than the title, and told me privately that I could read it to him during sustained silent reading time.

The following year I had a teacher that I didn’t like. One time, Mrs. Morasky gave us an assignment to write a short story. I wrote one about a race car driver named Spider. I began the story in the past tense, and then at one point wrote about an actual race Spider had been in, and said, “And this is how it sounded on that day.” From there I proceeded to narrate my story in the present tense. When I got my illustrated story back, it was littered with red marks from Mrs. Morasky’s pen. She had changed all my present tense verbs to past tense verbs. I had to go to her desk and show her that she had missed the spot where I had used a flashback, which explained the shift in verb tense. Mrs. Morasky was neither impressed nor amused. Damn teacher’s kid!

By sixth grade I was riding a bus with high school students, and I would look to see what they were reading in their English classes. I had a really pretty neighbor named Jen. One day I saw she was carrying The Red Badge of Courage, so I went and found it in the school library and read it. Several weeks later she was carrying A Tale of Two Cities, so I got that next, and struggled to finish it. I was just as good in math as I was in English, but I found math boring, so I would carry a book or two with me at all times, and in pre-algebra class the following year I would sit in the back and surreptitiously read novels under my desk. Mrs. Dommers never stopped me because I did fine on my tests.

I always loved books, I guess because I was always surrounded by them and by adults who were reading them. I didn’t even have to be reading a book to derive pleasure. I used to get excited just being in a library or book store. I had an aunt in New York. She was a school librarian and the widow of a lawyer. My bedroom during the six summers I lived with her was across the hall from my deceased uncle’s library. Most of his books were too sophisticated for me, but I liked to sit in there on a couch along the back wall. I would get a feeling of nervous excitement just being among all those books.

It’s fun now to watch my son and daughter develop a similar love of books and writing and stories. We have a library with floor to ceiling shelves, and kids’ books on all the low shelves. We created book nooks in corners of each kid’s room where they can sit and read quietly, and they do. Next year is first grade for Cormac, and I hope he gets a teacher he loves.

What Would Shakespeare Say?

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bandar cemeI got in trouble with some parents one time for pointing out that Shakespeare’s plays were full of sex and violence. I said that I thought it was interesting that we make a big deal about all the sex and violence on TV while Shakespeare’s works are venerated as the highest literature. This ended up with a dad yelling at me, “Did you tell my daughter that Shakespeare’s plays were like reading porn?!” Clearly my words got a little exaggerated in transmission.

But think about the sexy lines in Romeo and Juliet or the comedies, the cross-dressing actors, the hyperbolic violence of the tragedies and histories, or the orange girls selling rum-soaked oranges to the groundlings. In fact, the Puritans shut down the Globe for licentiousness, and yet the plays that graced its stage are considered our highest literature.

I’ve had a few conversations lately that have made me think about the distinctions we make between fiction and literature, high and low art, or even among types of writing performed by teachers and students every day.

I’ve been interviewing candidates for the summer institute. One of the requirements for the institute is that the teachers compile a portfolio of original writing. So one of the questions I have asked is what kind of writing do the teachers think they will work on. This question always causes angst, and every year several teachers admit that they have a secret desire to write a novel. This year I got a couple of variations on this theme. One teacher admitted she desperately wanted to write chick lit and another that she wanted to write telenovela episodes. I think both women were waiting for me to frown discouragingly like some stereotypical movie professor, complete with tweed jacket and elbow patches.

Later I had a conversation with a student that was remarkably similar. She is writing her term paper on creative writing and the importance of its inclusion in English curricula. And like her soon-to-be colleagues, she was feeling guilt over the fact that she wanted to ask her students to write poetry. Considering Shakespeare’s sonnets, she asked if I thought it would be odd if, instead of asking her students to write an essay which analyzes Shakespeare’s relationship to his mysterious dark love, she were to ask her students to write a sonnet to someone they admired from afar. I told her I loved the idea. From a critical standpoint, what better way to learn the structure of a Shakespearean sonnet than to write one, and what better way to understand an apostrophe than to construct one? Critical skills aside, I said, the ability to write a good love poem is arguably a more useful life skill than the ability to analyze one.

But we never teach this way, do we?

English is always defended as a practical skill—everyone needs to be able to read and write, so get an English degree and then go to business school. The ability to write well will undoubtedly help you to make money! Or what gets emphasized are some of the most esoteric aspects of the field, like literary analysis. I write literary analysis, but since only 1% of the adult population of the US has a PhD, and only a fraction of that fraction are English PhDs, and even a smaller fraction of those are professors at research universities, that skill can’t get any more specialized.

Is that all English is, a nuts and bolts skill that will enhance more lucrative professions or a highly specialized skill used by only a fraction of a fraction of the population?

I was at an interdepartmental committee meeting with one of my colleagues from the English department, and we were asked questions about the practical uses of our fields outside of academia, and the other English professor got very exasperated and said, “None of this discussion is relevant to what I do! English is the largest discipline in the Humanities because it is the most important, and it is called the Humanities for a reason. I teach young men and women how to be human!” I wanted to applaud. I should have. Isn’t this what all narrative is, from oral stories like those codified in the Iliad and Odyssey, to the Gospels, Chaucer’s tales and Shakespeare’s plays, to stories and novels, movies, and TV shows? We listen to and tell stories to learn about the human experience and to thereby gain some insight into its mysteries. But try making that argument to the Board of Finance!

Sometimes we, and even the authors we love, are our own worst enemies in making such an argument. Nathaniel Hawthorne infamously railed against the “mob of scribbling women” that were producing popular fiction. William Faulkner was once told that his novels were too difficult for the average reader, and that many undergraduates would complain that they did not understand his prose even after three readings. Asked for a comment, Faulkner replied, “Try four.” But for every author who defends so-called high art, there are those like Norman Mailer who once defended TV sitcoms as just a modern form of story telling, and the only thing he protested were commercial interruptions because they break the narrative line. Faulkner himself wrote more than fifty movie screenplays, including those for To Have and To Have Not and The Long Hot Summer, which were the first films to bring together Bogart and Bacall and Newman and Woodward, respectively. Former UConn English Professor Scott Bradfield once offered a graduate seminar titled “Lit and Shit: What We Read and What We’re Supposed to Read.” And of course there’s Mark Twain’s observation that “a classic is a book that everyone praises and no one reads.”

So absolve yourself of guilt this weekend when you watch reruns of Law and Order or rent a romantic comedy, and don’t feel like you have to shut your door and draw the shades when you ask your students to write that love poem.

The Old Dance

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situs bandarqI had a funny phone call the other day. I had to call the Teachers Retirement Board, and I ended up playing phone tag with this guy for several days till I finally reached him Thursday afternoon. I was wondering why this guy was returning my calls. My experience with most bureaucracies is that I might get one courtesy return call if I’m lucky. Turns out this guy was so good about returning my calls because he wanted to ask me which of the six Courtmanche brothers was my father. (My father is Gary, brother #5). The guy from TRB had graduated from Hillhouse High School in New Haven with my uncle Gordy (brother #2) in 1958. We had a nice conversation about New Haven and my uncles.

I hung up feeling like I’ve had this conversation before. For one thing, my family is huge. My father is one of ten siblings. I’m one of twenty-five first cousins on my father’s side. Many of us went into teaching: my father, my uncles Red, John, and Joe, my aunt Betse, and my cousins Brian, Jackie, Jennifer, Nikki, and Stephanie, while cousins Alicia and Michelle are finishing college and planning on going into teaching. Several cousins are still too young for college, including Joseph, who is in middle school. And if I want to get really crazy, I can throw in my mother, my step-father, an aunt on my mother’s side, and god-knows how many second cousins. I lost track.

Another fairly significant bunch went into law enforcement. One standing joke in the family is that you can’t spit in New Haven without hitting a Courtmanche. The other one is that everyone in New Haven knows at least one Courtmanche relative. Half the city has been taught by one of us and the other half has been arrested by one of us. Sometimes both. In truth, my uncle Wayne is a corrections officer in Cheshire, where there’s a prison for juvenile offenders. When he first began working there over twenty years ago, he was escorting a kid to his cell, and seeing the name on my uncle’s badge, the kid said, “Hey, you related to Mr. Courtmanche, the principal at Cross?” Wayne said, “Yeah, he’s my brother.” The kid said, “Hey, tell him hi. He’s a cool dude.” Like me, that was not the last time Wayne had that conversation.

Growing up in New Haven, I found it a blessing and a curse to have so many teachers and cops in my family. It was cool when a party got busted and some cop who knew me let me and my friends go without arresting us, but the thrill of such an opportunity was fleeting because I knew that cop would be calling my grandfather (a retired former chief of police) the next day, and I would catch hell on Sunday when I went to my grandparents’ for dinner. I also found that I made it through high school with virtually no traffic tickets, despite being a typically reckless male teen driver. Of course every Sunday my grandfather would take me aside in the driveway, pull out one of his ubiquitous notebooks, and tick off a laundry list of violations he had gotten calls about. He had even gone so far as to give me one of his old license plates for my car so that it was easy for his old friends on the force to keep track of me.

The experience of having lots of teachers in the family was less punitive—though it certainly could have been. I went to a Catholic high school, and we had two sister schools. One was the now-closed Saint Mary’s in New Haven. One day when we boys got out early on a nice spring day (OK, maybe we cut our afternoon classes) a bunch of us peeled off our jackets and ties and drove downtown to St. Mary’s. St. Mary’s had the unfair reputation of having lower academic standards than our other sister school, and so in our adolescent minds we correlated this with elevated levels of promiscuity among the girls. Thus the inspiration for our sojourn that spring afternoon. We snuck into the school and got caught by a bunch of the nuns, who dragged us into the head nun’s office. She was like the principal and mother superior rolled into one. I was placed in a line before her desk with five of my friends (some got away). We felt like we were on trial. Then, after several minutes of awkward silence in that very warm office, the head nun shouted, “John, I’m deeply disappointed to find you involved in these shenanigans!” We all looked over at our friend John, whose head was hung especially low. Then John replied, “I’m sorry Aunt Joan. Please don’t tell Mom!” And at that moment I thought, my god I know that feeling! I should point out that John is now a cop in New Haven. Funny how these things come around.

It makes me think of the Physician’s Tale from Chaucer, in which the physician tells of a knight who is looking to hire a governess for his beautiful daughter, who has just turned twelve and is at risk of becoming “too soon ripe and bold.” And the physician says that he has advice for governesses: “And you mistresses in your old life/that lord’s daughters have in governance,/never take of my words no displeasure:/think that you be set in governings/of lords’ daughters only for two things:/Either for you have kept your honesty,/or else for you have fallen in frailty,/and know well enough the old dance,/and have forsaken fully such mischance for evermore.” He then tells us that the best governess is like a poacher who becomes a game keeper, and sure enough it is the formerly wanton woman that the knight hires to be governess to his daughter. She is best prepared to recognize the perils to which the young girl might fall.

Brooding Male Protagonists And Summer Vacation

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judi bandarq onlineI’ve been so swamped this week with simpulan exams, planning for the Connecticut Student Writers Recognition Night, the Summer Institute (the Orientation Day is next Saturday), and the Student and Teacher Writing Conference that I feel like haven’t had a minute to even think about subjects to write about this week. And today is so beautiful that I am immensely distracted by the sunlight falling upon the Japanese Maple outside my window and the cool breeze gliding in.

I stayed at work till almost midnight last night reading my students’ simpulan projects. The students in Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers work in groups to write a curriculum for a course of their own design that implements their ideas for teaching, especially teaching writing. Curricula is truly a new genre for these students. They’ve never read one before, little yet tried to write one, and they get very frustrated with themselves when it doesn’t come as easily as they expect writing to come to them.

Nonetheless, they always do a decent job, and occasionally produce something really awesome. I still remember one curriculum from five years ago called Exploring the American Immigrant Experience Through Literature that was just terrific. The former head of the social studies department at my old high school used it as an exemplar for her teachers. This year I read some good projects on the American Dream, Social and Political Change, Representations of Power, and Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British and American Women Writers. The students who designed the Social and Political Change curriculum conceived of the ambitious goal of studying the evolution of media alongside developments in society, politics, and literature. So for the Puritan period they have the students studying sermons, and during the Revolutionary period studying broadsides, right up to blogging and social networking during the contemporary era, which they brought right up to the election of President Obama. The students took on a little more than they had the time to bring to fruition, but I really love the concept. One of their central ideas was to have the students learning about these genres by writing them. Imagine, in the first quarter students would be writing and delivering sermons, and by the fourth quarter they’re creating facebook pages with live-streaming blogs embedded within. Pretty cool idea if you ask me.

The young women who wrote the British and American Women Authors curriculum realized they had some serious knowledge gaps in their chronologies, but now they’ve made reading lists for themselves for the summer. My favorite email from them was the one in which they asked if I thought Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein had enough in common to be grouped together for the 1800-1850 British unit. I wrote back “Bertha, Heathcliff, and the Monster! What a terrific trio of characters!” In each case there’s an idealized Romantic character who is transformed into a tragic and vengeful killer (or would-be killer) by the rejection and mistreatment of his or her suitor. I was telling one of my friends about this proposed unit, and she wondered aloud why emotionally maimed men like Rochester and Heathcliff are so attractive to women, not just the Jane Eyres and Catherine Earnshaws of the world, but to real, living, historical women, too. In a recent article, Gina Barreca asked similar questions about the attractiveness of a character like Edward Cullen from the Twilight series. I guess it’s no more consternating than why men fall in love with the Hester Prynnes of literature and life, or with someone like my all-time favorite fictional character, Remedios Buendia from One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of whose suitors falls to his death just trying to get a glimpse of her showering. I guess those are questions to address in the curriculum.

At this point, while most of my colleagues here at UConn are finishing up the semester and getting ready for summer, I am entering what is our busiest time of year at the CWP, but I am looking forward to working with a stellar bunch of teachers at this year’s Summer Institute, and doing an independent study with one of my talented undergraduates. But since the semester is over here and the demands of the Summer Institute will be so great, I plan to write this column less frequently for a little while. I will resume weekly columns again in the fall.

My thanks to everyone who has been reading all year. I know there are more readers than is indicated by the postings because so many of you email me or mention to me in person that you enjoyed this or that column. I hope to see some of you at Recognition Night May 12, from 4-7 PM in Jorgensen Auditorium, or at the Student and Teacher Writing Conference on May 20. If I don’t, endure and enjoy the end of the year, have a great summer, and I will be back regularly in September.