Friday, November 19, 2010

Literature Does Not Exist in a Vacuum, and Other Things the Seventh Harry Potter Movie Taught Me

I don't think there are any spoilers in this post, but just to be certain, I am talking about the latest Harry Potter movie, so anyone who hasn't seen it might want to beware.

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Last night I was one of those crazy college kids out at midnight to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One. This morning I am one of those crazy, sleep-deprived college kids who will go through thier Friday absolutely over the moon at the fact that the movie was so good. I was euphoric leaving that theater last night. I was so happy I had no words. I just sat in the car and beamed. This was the story I loved, the story I read aloud to my little sister and then re-read out loud just for fun a second, and a third, and a fourth time. They kept many of what I thought were some of Rowling's best bits and I was grateful for that.

I had a rough day yesterday -- I gave my book review of Android Karenina (coming soon to a blog near you!) and I taught part of a lesson on Narrative Poetry.  The poem I chose was one of my favorites, The Geebung Polo Club by A.B. Paterson, and the response volume fell flatter than a water balloon eating concrete after being dropped from the 90th floor.

It was bad, in other words. No one said a thing. Getting answers out of those kids was like pulling teeth. And after all that stress, I needed a win, and I found one. Dan, Emma, Rupert. David Yates and all their many friends and accomplices DELIVERED. But stories are curious things -- as we were watching the movie, my friends and I, we couldn't help making connections to other things we had seen, things we had read. Each of us brings a unique selection of prior knowledges and texts with us when we read: it's like packing a suitcase and stowing in on the train for the remainder of the ride. And for us, many of those things we were bringing with us were poems.

Before the movie began (we were at the theatre two hours early, we had to amuse ourselves somehow) we were singing quietly amongst ourselves. Selections included Pippen's Song from Return of the King, The Call from Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and There and Back Again, also from Lord of the Rings. All these songs can link back to Harry Potter -- they talk about the eventual triumph over evil, the renewal of hope, and the belief that we, too, have a place and a purpose in the world.

During the movie I thought several of David Yates' nature shots looked like Lord of the Rings country (including one where Harry, Ron, and Hermione are walking through a field -- I wanted someone to start singing "There and Back Again" right there) that Locket!Harry and Hermione reminded me of some perverse version of Adam and Eve (and also, at the same time, Scary!Galadriel from Fellowship of the Ring) and, perhaps best of all, that Dobby's death reminded me of a poem, one of my favorites and one which, unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to share with my friends on the car ride home because we were too busy discussing the rest of the movie.

While Dobby needs no other epitaph than the tremendous life he lived, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem" is, I think, also fitting given Dobby's final lines.

"REQUIEM"
Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie,

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.


This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be,

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.


And more than anything else, I wish I could share this expereince of poetry with my students, the idea that it connects us and shares threads of experience just like stories do. It provokes emotion, attempts to answer our questions about life, and binds us to other people. It does not always have an arcane meaning. You do not have to beat it with a hose to get a meaning out of it, to paraphrase Billy Collin's excellent poem Introduction to Poetry. Sometimes you can merely let it be.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

My Grandma and Cricket Magazine

My grandmother was one smart woman. She knew where my head was at. She knew where I was going, and I hadn't even gotten there yet when she died.

This morning I had an odd desire to revisit a magazine I read as a child, a magazine that, as I now recall, my grandmother faithfully renewed for me every year until I was well beyond the age to which it was geared. That magazine was Cricket. I loved Cricket with a passion. Before that she'd subscribed to Ladybug and Spider, both publications that, in thier time, I loved too. But Cricket was the one I stayed with the longest -- the stories were better, the pictures brighter. It was practically a party, opening up a new issue every month. I especially loved saving all the issues and going back through to read the stories that came out in episodes. I loved them so much I saved many of my favorite stories in a box, laborously ripped from the magazines that had originally housed them. I think I still have a box of the magazines at home, too. I don't want to get rid of them -- it's a link to my childhood and a link to Grandma.

I picked up an issue several years ago in the children's section and was a little disappointed -- the myths and legends that I had loved so much had been replaced by newer, gritter, young-adult kinds of stories.  I don't care what your teacher education manuals tell you, not every child wants to read about the problems they might be facing in their day-to-day lives. I know I didn't. Ramona, Amber Brown, and pretty much anything Judy Blume every wrote were not welcome additions to my library bag.

I think this magazine might have been part of why I became a writer of stories. Because my grandmother saw they were important to me, and continued buying that magazine subscription so I could continue to see new examples and continue to read. In pedagogy now we're talking about the writing process and how reading (and subsequent discussion of that reading) is important to formulating how a story works.

Thanks, Grandma. I think you taught me that already.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Collecting My Thoughts

Under the subject heading of "Things That Don't Get Done While I Am Computerless," we find one item: Creative Pursuits.

Well, we knew it was going to happen sooner or later --the lack of a functioning personal computer is slowly starting to drive me bonkers. Nothing is getting done when it should. My North and South Mashup, which I have had ideas on for the past week, has gone exactly nowhere, a serious problem considering that is a homework item. My LOTR fanfic is floating out in the ether, my steampunk story is also on a oneway track to nowhere, and all this pent-up creative energy is creating a block on completing schoolwork that I can, in fact, complete on school computers. I have a poster to create, lesson plans to review, journals to write. And nothing's getting done.

Can I also state again for the record that I hate not having a comma key? I am a lover of long sentences, and while it is nice that my roomate is letting me borrow her computer when she's not using it, I ABSOLUTELY HATE that her comma key is not working as it should. I have to press down twice as hard to get a comma to register; ergo, every time there is a comma I have pause so the damn thing will register. Grrrr...

Sorry. This blogger has not been having a very good several weeks. Hopefully sometime in the next few days my mood will improve enough to write some posts on the steampunk novels I've been reading and my opening thoughts on the projected arc of the mash-up.

I have at least made one small bit of progress, however; in lieu of a witty title like Jane Slayre or Android Karenina, I've decided on something a little more subtle -- Elizabeth Gasket's North and South.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Homelessness and Space

The worst of news, readers.

Last Friday, after a visit from the angel of doom and my idiotic tendency to prop my feet up on my desk, I spilled tea on my beloved laptop and turned it into a zombie computer. After taking the battery out, drying it out for the better part of three days to the best of my ability, it will not turn on.

Thus, three years worth of pictures, music, and, worst of all, writing and homeworks, are now in electronic limbo. They might still be on my harddrive. They might not. I have no way of knowing and no way of checking, yet, but I have some of the smartest and most technologically inclined people I know working on it, so we'll see how it goes.

This episode has made me realize two things. One is how incredibly dependent I am on my computer to entertain me, keep me connected with people I don't see on a daily basis, and complete my homework. I wanted to watch a TV show yesterday (and I watch all my TV online) and felt silly going to the computer lab to turn on 'Castle.' I didn't want to check my facebook becuase really, how trival is facebook anyway? And I don't want everyone else in the computer lab to see what incredibly silly game I'm playing!

The second thing I realized is that without my laptop, I feel like a displaced person. I feel homeless without that electronic space to call my own.

I am not by any means trying to trivialize homelessness here. I come from a county with an incredibly high cost of living and an equally high homeless population. I can't say I've ever been physically homeless, but my brother and sister, who have participated multiple times in events like Sleep-Out Saturday, inform me that it's not fun.

When I speak about being homeless, what I really mean is spaceless. I don't have that personal space to store my thoughts or my productions anymore. My stuff doesn't have a home anymore. Using a school computer's not the same -- I have access to the same spaces as I did before, but in a public space. I have a hard time using a public space to do personal things, like write this blog, for instance. I didn't feel anchored enough to devote my time to thinking about blog topics -- I was too worried about when I could get another computer to work on real homework later on that evening.

Hopefully we can recover my data. Hopefully my stories won't have to be recreated from scratch and I won't have to re-acquire all my music. And hopefully I can use this feeling that I have right now, this dreadful, uncertain listlessness, to understand the small percentage of my students that statistics tell me will be homeless. I know my schoolwork's suffering because  of my lack of a computer -- how much must they be suffering when they dont' know where they're sleeping that night?