Angry Management

So for two nights in a row, I had to stay up to finish books. First Chris Crutcher's Angry Management, then Daisy Whitney's The Mockingbirds. I am a longtime Chris Crutcher fan. I didn't discover his work until I started teaching, when I started facing the reality that many kids, most kids, aren't readers like I was. Many kids grow up not reading--it's not something they do outside of school, it's not something they choose to do, it's certainly not something they love. Often, it's not something they do even in school. It's horrifyingly easy to avoid, and most kids don't have a reason not to avoid it.

As a teacher, one of my greatest pleasures, one of my hugest victories, became being able to help a student who considers books a waste of time, stupid, lame, find a book that he or she (too often he) loves. I have given so many books by Chris Crutcher to so many students. But first I loved his novels my own self. They're all great, but Whale Talk might have been the first one I fell in love with. I also love/d Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, which has just about the best premise of any novel ever: the fat kid and a scarred up girl have a close friendship--they're brought together through being outcasts, but their friendship transcends that. However, the fat kid starts swimming and losing weight--but he's afraid that if he loses weight, he'll lose his best friend. Read the title again. There's a lot more to this book than what I've told you--Crutcher has been a counselor working with kids who've been to hell and back, and his books have some hard truths in them, because kids deal with a lot of hard truths.

He's also written about his books being censored, and several of his essays about censorship are central to my censorship unit. Speaking of, (hint to teachers!) nothing like a censorship unit to get kids to read. "Many adults don't want kids to read this," is such an excellent way to get non-readers to pick up a book, and often they won't put it down because first they have to figure out why adults don't want them reading the book, and then they have to finish it as a big fuck-you to all those stupid adults. More power to them.

So I was very excited to read Angry Management, but I'd be curious if it did anything for readers who haven't read Crutcher's other books. In the foreword, Crutcher describes it as three "novellas" which bring together "characters I've created separately over a fifteen-year span. In this book, they've stayed the same ages they were when I created them. Hey, the Hardy Boys have remained teenagers for more than three quarters of a century."

The premise that holds these novellas together is that all of these students are in an "anger management" group together; this is how they meet, learn a little about each other, and get the chance to interact. Angus Bethune, who's featured in a fabulous story in Athletic Shorts, Crutcher's book of short stories out of which I love to teach "The Pin," gets to be friends with Sarah Byrnes, and they help each other figure some stuff out. There is also a lot about Montana West, a character in The Sledding Hill, not one of my favorite Crutcher novels (if only because others are more wonderful).

Crutcher has worked with a lot of kids with lousy parents, and a lot of kids who've ended up in foster care. Montana is one of those, and her adopted little sister, Tara, is another. Montana's parents want to give Tara back, give up on her, and I think the most moving passage in this book is when Montana's trying to figure out how to help Tara: "How can she [Montana] tell her mother that feeling bad feels right when everything in your world is wrong; that at first you need your foster parents to make things familiar, which in this case means fucked up. It makes such sense at a heart level, but even for a wordsmith like Montana West, it's impossible to articulate. It's so true, and it sounds so crazy."

So everyone should read Crutcher. But maybe this book isn't the place to start. Read Whale Talk, and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, and Athletic Shorts, then all his other novels, then this one. I'm curious to hear from any Crutcher fans who disagree...

The Mockingbirds

I just finished the most remarkable YA novel: The Mockingbirds, by Daisy Whitney. Alex hooked up with this boy--"What's his name? Remember, Goddamn it, remember. Carver. . . . No, it's Carter. Definitely Carter."

And she slowly--with the help of her friends and sister--comes to the realization that he date-raped her. She knows her fancy boarding school won't do anything about it--the administration "totally ignores everything because [it] ... destroys their notion of who Themis students are--of who they're educating to be future leaders of the world and all that stuff." But her older sister, when she was a student at Themis, started The Mockingbirds, an underground society made up of students, that administers justice in situations like Alex's. If you bring someone before the Mockingbirds, and they are found guilty, they have to give up what is most important to them. The quarterback quits the football team, theater kids have to stop being involved in theater, that kind of thing. Alex's rapist will have to quit playing water polo.

One thing I love about this book is how much it foregrounds the students, and their willingness and ability to step up and take care of each other when the adults refuse to acknowledge what's going on. But Alex does have one good teacher, who gives the author, herself a victim of date rape, the opportunity to have someone in her novel say things like:

"You don't have to have been fighting him off the whole time for it to be date rape. You don't have to have been saying no the entire time, either. In fact, it doesn't even matter if you were having the time of your life, Alex," she says, her words precise, like individual slices of certainty. "What he did to you was nonconsensual, and it doesn't suddenly become consensual because for one moment you put your hands on his back. That one moment doesn't wipe the slate clean and make you sober. You were drunk. And you said no. That's why it's date rape."

So yeah, at some moments it might get a little preachy. But the above is spoken by a teacher, who's allowed to and even supposed to be preachy. I'm just glad this book exists. It presents a messy situation and a protagonist who feels guilty about her own behavior--she was drunk, for one thing--but it is clear about labeling the situation as what it was: rape. And the protagonist gets to have a boyfriend! Her life isn't over after she's raped!

I also love the narrator's thoughts about everything after the "trial," which ring so true for many essential battles we fight in high school and college and throughout life:

...Justice doesn't . . . erase what happened. It doesn't make you who you were before. I'm becoming someone else--someone else I'm figuring out how to be.

I wonder briefly why I went through it, why it was worth it. Because in some ways, nothing changed. This is just how it goes, this is how it feels to take a stand. It feels like life, like chocolate cake, like just another average school night; it feels like wanting to be alone. You don't parade in the streets, you don't dance on the grave. You sit on the steps and you watch the school go by and the moon rise higher in the sky and it feels like...

Like normal, actually. It feels like normal.

I want normal. I like normal. I did this for normal.

June Jordan

I just started reading June Jordan's essay collection, Some of Us Did NOT Die. I'll probably have more to say about it once I'm finished, but to start, it's amazing.

All I knew about Jordan before I started reading it was a little bit about her "Poetry to the People" project. So of course, I looked her up on Wikipedia--which describes her as "one of the most significant and prolific Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century." Um, I don't think I can name any other Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century. I think that's what we call damning someone with faint praise. Anyway Wikipedia also informed me that June Jordan was the first to say, "We are the ones we have been waiting for." I don't remember ever hearing that attributed to her--or to anyone. Oh, citing your sources.

Hmph.

I went to the Portland Art Museum the other day, and was surprised and happy to see a small Catherine Opie show and an even smaller Alice Neel show. It's my local museum now, and the local museum has always been so important to me, since I was a kid growing up in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts was a short bus ride from me, and it was free, and by the time I was in high school, I knew that collection so well. I had my favorites that I visited: Lucretia, of course, and the mummy, and "dead boy," and that little tiny beautiful girl in the really ornate frame... that's what I remember off the top of my head. There is also that enormous Chuck Close painting, the Magritte Renée loved so much, and "Mrs." Nathaniel Allen.

I miss the museums in New York too, of course--I got to know parts of the Met's collection pretty well, and I love the Whitney, and MoMA was in Queens for much of my time in NYC, and always so expensive (the Met is donation only, and the Whitney has a student/educator membership rate, so I was able to join), so I didn't get to know that collection as well, mostly only going on the occasional insanely crowded free Friday night. Same with the Guggenheim, but that's such a weird museum anyway. I was content to go two or three times a year and walk up the spiral and then down again. It's such an awkward way to view art.

Anyway, so here I am in Portland, missing New York museums, but also missing the awesome Minneapolis museums I grew up with. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts was classic and close and great. PAM is weird. First of all, there's the weirdness of the Jubitz Center, their modern art wing, a separate building which is accessible only through what feels like a secret passage in the basement. That's where the Opie show was, and the Neel show is in the basement passage. The Opie show is mentioned on the website, but I don't remember reading anything about it in the members stuff that's sent to me. The Neel show isn't mentioned anywhere on the website, and there is no way to search the museum holdings. As I recall, all the Neel paintings were long-term loans, but geez.



That's all I have to say about that right now.

Obama's "A Letter to My Daughters"

Reading Debbie Reese's post about Obama's children's book and the controversy over the inclusion of Sitting Bull on his list of "thirteen groundbreaking Americans" (quoting back cover copy), I went to this link included in her post, and read about the 1862 U.S.-Dakota war. This war took place in Minnesota and resulted in the "largest mass execution" in American history--38 Native Sioux men executed, at the order of President Lincoln. I learned a lot of Minnesota history growing up in Minneapolis--I learned over and over again about the French voyageurs--but I don't remember ever hearing about this war, much less the execution.

I recommend Debbie's post, even if you're not from Minnesota. She has some interesting observations about Obama's book, specifically about the inclusion of Sitting Bull within it, and about the illustration of Sitting Bull.

Al Capone Does My Shirts

I just read two amazing books long after I should have read them, but I stayed up late and got up early to finish them, reading them back to back. If you haven't read Gennifer Choldenko's Al Capone Does My Shirts, and its sequel, Al Capone Shines My Shoes, you have an exciting reading experience ahead of you. I don't know why it took me so long. Maybe since I've been teaching high school, I've been more focused on YA. Maybe I'd heard about the first book (published in 2004, so while I was teaching middle school) as "a book about autism" so I didn't make it a priority. Which is shameful enough in itself, but even more wrong because these are not novels about autism. They are about Moose Flanagan, whose family moves from Santa Monica to Alcatraz Island (outside San Francisco) so Moose's dad can take a job--really two jobs--as electrician and guard at Alcatraz, and Moose's sister Natalie can go to a special school in San Francisco. Natalie is different--now, in 2010, her condition would probably be diagnosed as a form of autism, but in 1935, when the novels take place, she is dismissed as "weird," "retarded," and other things just as bad and worse. It is suggested--and would be the typical thing to do at that time--that Moose's family should put her in an asylum, but Moose's family has rallied around Natalie, especially his mother, who wants to try everything possible--maybe not to "fix" her, but to let her have some kind of life. So they uproot themselves and move to Alcatraz.

But while these books are in large part about Moose's family and the ways in which they adapt to live with and care for Natalie (and that part of the story is moving and complex and fabulous, by the way) they are also about a middle-school boy who, in the middle of his seventh grade year, leaves his friends to live on Alcatraz Island, famous prison and home to many murderers, kidnappers, and other infamous criminals. Alcatraz is sort of the setting of the story, but I would say that's also a major player, one of the characters.

These books are awesome. Read them. I don't think I have more to say about them right now.

Portland

I didn't realize it until after I left Brooklyn, but Sahadi's was one of the things I would miss most. My friends, museums, Film Forum, and Sahadi's.

Portland is amazing, and the food here is great--I have found fabulous restaurants of nearly every kind, though the (east) Indian food is just not as amazing, and WOW I MISS ROTI! And Bed-Stuy. But that's another story.

But there's this tea that I would buy at Sahadi's, Pompadour brand tea, and I brought two boxes of their Rosehip and Hibiscus Flowers tea with me when I moved. But then I found it at a little shop on Hawthorne, and I was happier than I expected to be. However, last weekend Emilyn and I tried to stop there, and the store was gone! I was sadder than I expected.

However, today I went to the Bipartisan Cafe, at 79th and Stark, and just up the block was International Food Supply. They don't carry Pompadour brand, but I found Rosehip tea that has hibiscus flowers in it, plus I bought some Turkish Delight as a gift. So I am very happy. Shop at International Food Supply, 8015 S.E. Stark. I will go back when I need yogurt and some other things. It was very exciting, I was sorry I only needed tea.