Mr. P Recommends…

[Published Wednesday, August 29, 2007, at doctorbippie.blogspot.com and proweirdo.wordpress.com]


This is a little something I used to send off with my seniors on their last day. One year, some students had asked what I read in high school and what I liked, so I put together a list, then annotated it--perhaps as a final dash of salt in the wounds of students trying to escape homework once and for all. In any case, here are a couple of entries I made.

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Books

Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger

When I was a freshman in college my sister, still a sophomore in high school, sent me a hard-bound copy of Franny and Zooey as a birthday gift. It rang like a bell in my brain for weeks. I have since accepted that my little sister is never wrong about books.

In two separate novellas we are introduced to two of the unique siblings Glass. Only Franny could have a legitimate existential crisis over a pair of frogs legs, and only her brother Zooey could help her find her way by summoning their dead brother Seymour for a transcendental pep talk. If you were a precocious child or a searching adolescent, after reading this you’ll likely follow the Glass family to the ends of the earth.

Salinger’s prose is perfection, his style inimitable—but, boy, did I try. To this day, no one (except my father, and maybe David Letterman) has had a greater effect on the way I speak.

By the way, Salinger is still alive today (as far as we know), holed up on a farm in New Hampshire where he receives no visitors and stubbornly persists in not publishing; he hasn’t released anything since 1961. Making contact with him has become a modern literary Quest for the Holy Grail. If you ever end up meeting him, you will have earned the extra credit to end all extra credit. C'mon, I dare you.


The Diaries of Adam and Eve, “translated” by Mark Twain

You’ll recall we read a bit of this during the Virginia Woolf unit, as a springboard to a discussion about gender and voice. But I hope it became clear that, while Twain plays on and derives humor from some familiar gender stereotypes, this is in no way a one-joke piece. If anything, the book’s “gimmick”—the translation of previously undiscovered texts direct from the Garden of Eden—provides it with the fuel for genius. The man and the woman, while playing their traditional, stereotypical roles to perfection, also happen to be the first of their sexes. As a result, Adam and Eve are able to play out the battle of the sexes unhampered by the cultural baggage of gender politics (including that of Twain’s era, more than a century ago) is set aside. They are freed from blame for their behavior (at least for a time), and thus we readers are freed from having to blame them. After all, it was not them but their types that became stereotypical.

And so Eve and her reluctant mate emerge as so much more than mere caricatures. Instead, they can be seen and enjoyed as two young people in a new, uneasy relationship not only with each other but with the universe and their creator. Adam’s exasperation with (or obliviousness to) Eve’s complexity, which would thud rather than resonate in any well-heeled romance, only strengthens our desire to see Eve win him over. And she does—at a price.As the book jacket of this edition reminds us, the Diaries represent the only instance in Twain’s prolific career where he narrates in a woman’s voice. And I can honestly say that Eve is one of the most compellingly sweet and deliciously complex female voices I’ve ever read. This book is a tiny gem—well worth a trip to the library or bookstore.

High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby

Good movie, better book. Everyone says that, but there’s a reason they do.

Guys will especially enjoy this. As for the ladies, well… All I can say is, Yes, this is the way we think. And I’m sorry.

(Forging) My "Weird" License

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Hunter S. Thompson wrote that. Or mumbled it under his breath through a cigarette holder, I’m not sure.
For me it is a call to action. Not, as the author might see it, to booze and pills and guns and golf. (Though I must say that, for some reason, I respect the hell out of that.) Rather, a call to join the working week of the creative class, among people who try to induce change in the minds of some kind of audience, letting their tweaked inner life out in a droplet or a flood for the public’s fickle tasting.
I left teaching in part because I was looking for a creative outlet, for a part in the “means of production” of the culture I was introducing to teenagers with better things to do. I mean, I was always creative, so that wasn’t new. And I’ve always been a teacher; I have that way about me.
But the job, the day in and out, was for me an endless internship for a position I didn’t know how to seek, a perptual practicum in professional weirdness. I embraced the work–too hard, it seems. I burned out and I fell apart. I laid low for a while.
But I’m back, and I’m going pro.