Filed under: Uncategorized
What would my blog be without the obligatory tribute to Tori Amos? Oh, yes, yes, I know she’s been passe for something like ten years now. But real art is not about trends, nor is real admiration. I’m not just going to jump off the Tori Amos bus because you don’t think she’s cool anymore. Granted, I’m not going to do any Tori Amos name-dropping at the next Brooklyn loft party I go to, either, but that’s a whole other issue. I do have to save face publicly, even if privately I’m hollering along that I “never was a cornflake girl” on my evening commute.
What happens to our idols, though, as we begin to age? I remember being so moved by novelist Pat Conroy’s prose about the Carolinas that I quite literally applied to school in Charleston, SC. The vivid quality of his prose and the images of a dying, lusciously beautiful South that he laid bare in the pages of books like The Prince of Tides were enough to send my little New England brain into orbit. Not to mention the fact that the promise of entering into a school in a historic, beachy town where nobody knew my name was thrilling when I was sixteen. Now I see his work as a bit sophomoric and painfully sentimental, but I still feel deeply connected to those novels. They did, after all, change my life.
And that’s the power of our idols. They change our lives, if even in some slight, unknowable way. When you find someone you admire–someone famous, remote, and untouchable–you want to pass that secret to other people, to handle it with care like a fragile robins egg for another to see, know, admire, and pass on. You hoard your idols, collect their works, savor every droplet of inspiration that seeps from the speakers, or the pages, or the screen. They become you, you become them–their ideas become your obsessions, their words your creeds.
….and so it is with Tori Amos and I. The brilliance of her piano playing, the weighty, allegorical lyrics, the stunning, complex beauty of her face and her songs all existed out there in the intangible world of music. Loving Tori Amos was to love an idealized version of myself–stay with me, folks–in other words, Tori Amos was what I would be if I could redraw my own life starting at birth. If I had my way, I’d be an enormously gifted pianist with a penchant for literary lyrics and a wry smile. I’d write about Daisy Dead Petals and the Flying Dutchmen and I’d tickle the ivories and get paid millions to do it. Everyone would want to interview me, and I’d make my nest in some remote English farmhouse, complete with cows and birds and an extensive library filled with the rarest of rare books.
But no. Instead, I have had my years of Carolina thanks to Pat Conroy and my years on the “stage” as an English teacher, and I’m not penning top-charting bestsellers, but I’m writing about birds and laughing with kids as we dissect Shakespeare’s double entendres and life is good, not Tori Amos good, but certainly Tori Amos inspired.
I’m still a Cornflake Girl deep down, and always will be. Even if neither Tori nor I are really girls anymore at all.
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I should be accustomed to living in a land that is the butt of jokes by now. After all, I heard plenty of dim-witted fellow Americans spout off about how the South is full of a bunch of toothless bums who can’t wait to engage in taboo acts with family members when I lived in the South for eight years. I used to be able to just roll my eyes and hop back onto a plane and enjoy my idiot-free time with my lovely Southern friends on the beautiful beaches of gorgeous Charleston, SC.
…but there’s just something about this terrible new show on MTV: Jersey Shore. Have you seen this? The cast has to have a cumulative IQ of around 85, and its doubtful that any of them realize just how ridiculous they are. I googled it after yet another student made a reference to it in class. Now when I walk about, if I mention I live in Jersey, I fear that moment of recognition when someone envisions boozefests in Atlantic City with a bunch of 22 year old hooligans named “The Situation” and “Snookie” that aren’t even FROM New Jersey. Yikes.
This may be what inspired us, on some level, to take wandering trips around the Jersey burbs the last few weeks. This state is pretty incredible, and I don’t care how many Jersey jokes you’ve heard in your life. It’s too bad for you that you’re not in the Garden State.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anne of green gables, children's lit, scholarly criticism
What kind of adult reads children’s literature? This adult. I’m not sure there is much else that is as nerdy. Unless you consider reading scholarly criticism of children’s literature to be even more obsessive and creepy.
I bought Seth Lerer’s book Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter a while ago. I do have a bit of a defense–I teach a course I designed called “Storytellers” in which we trace the narrative arc of storytelling from the days of Aesop to the Grimm’s brothers to Disney and on down to those cheeky chroniclers of human folly on This American Life.
Lerer’s book starts with a whimper, pandering to the audience and offering flimsy scholarly evidence for the ways in which audiences received and interpreted Aesop’s tales. can we really know this much from a few measly references to Aesop in crumbling documents scattered here and there? Doubtful. But it is the chapter on girls in literature that captured my interest.
Called “Theaters of Girlhood,” Lerer’s chapter traces the ways in which girl characters in children’s literature have achieved their place in the modern literary canon. With explorations of my favorite books from childhood (Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Charlotte’s Web) Lerer outlines the ways in which wily, sharp female characters have been maligned to roles of domesticity or tamed back into submission.
It’s actually pretty fascinating to look at these women as the precursors to modern tales like Harry Potter. Lerer points out that Harry always gets the praise and adoration from fans and from the characters in the text, even though it’s really the female Hermione Granger who does all the tough intellectual dirty work.
He writes convincingly about the ways in which the bookish, bright Anne of Green Gables–who dreams of being called Cordelia and of living in a kind of poetry-inspired dreamworld–is constantly pulled back down to Earth by not only her foster parents Marilla and Matthew, but by her teachers as well. Eventually, she becomes a schoolteacher and marries her high school sweetheart–a life much less exciting than the original sprightly Anne had dreamed of.
Lerer won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for the book, so I suppose he already has enough readers. But if you’re interested in any of the same nerdy scholarship on children’s lit that I am, I suggest you check it out.
