Great Posts!

Read these and be inspired!

Great Scenes / Vivid Imagery:

- Jacob
- Emelia

Great reading responses:

- Kaylin's reading recommendations
- Chanler + Chanler's personal reading question
- Martie
- John
- Jill

Other great posts:

- Alex D. on "This is Water"
- Azzie on "I Have a Dream"
- Kate on "This is Water"
- Amanda on "Rebel Music"

One blog you should just read all of: Kaylin's Wonder and Ponder

Reading Response: _Never Fall Down_

Never Fall Down, by Patricia McCormick, is narrated by a young Cambodian boy, Arn, who is 11 in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge comes into power. The novel is based on the true story of Arn Chorn-Pond.  I am embarrassed to admit that I knew very little about the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and I was truly shocked to learn about the atrocities that occurred in Cambodia at that time.  While many genocides involve one group persecuting another, the brutality of the Khmer Rouge was directed at their own people.  One thing that made the book difficult to read was my inability to understand what would motivate a group to do such awful things.  They seemed to have a vision of a happy Cambodia in mind, but for some reason that vision did not seem to include any Cambodians.

The recent and ongoing violence in Egypt and in Syria are reminders that struggles for power and struggles for ideals (religious, economic) within a nation can result in terrible casualties.  Arn is incredibly lucky to survive the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge and to be adopted by an American family, but he is permanently scarred by the deaths of his family and friends, the death and torture he witnesses, and the injustices he is forced to commit to survive in Cambodia.  Though his post-Khmer Rouge life in New Hampshire seems like a dream come true, he faces intolerance, ridicule, and suspicion in addition to having to learn a new language and culture and process his own trauma and guilt.  He thinks, "after all the thing I been through, now being rescue [sic] is something I also have to survive" (195).  This part of his story really struck me because as a reader, I was so wrapped up in hoping for his survival that I didn't consider the challenges he would face afterward.  His experience suggests that there are no easy endings to the kind of violence and fear he encounters in Cambodia; there is no return to normal for a child who spends his formative years surviving genocide.  But he still finds a way to make his experience meaningful for others by telling his story and organizing survivors.

Great Posts! Week 1

Here are a few examples of strong, well-developed posts to help guide your writing.

Block 1:

Free posts - Lily, Christine

Reading Repsonses - Matthew G, Elizabeth

Block 3:

Free posts - Gabrielle, Porscha

Reading Responses - Jake, Mary Beth

Block 4:

Free posts - Jim, Richard

Reading Responses - Aimee Claire


Great posts!

_Freakshow_ Response

Freakshow by James St. James is a young adult novel that chronicles the senior year of high school of Billy Bloom, a teenage drag queen who has moved from a life in Connecticut where he was pretty happy, if not 100% out about his sexuality and gender play, to a conservative school in Florida that supposedly has no need for a Gay Straight Alliance organization because it has never had a gay student.  The horrific torment Billy experiences for being gender variant in this environment is deeply disturbing, but Billy perseveres, transforming himself into the heroic Superfreak and attempting to unite the school's silent outcasts and impact the school on a large scale.

In a broad sense, the story line is familiar - Glee is the most recent example I can think of of this outcast-seeks-acceptance-and-everyone-learns something plot.  But it's well done here, with the narration of "relentlessly fabulous" Billy drawing us into a story that may be a little clean and tidy, but takes on a difficult and important subject with style that goes beyond over-the-top.  The familiarity of the plot may help some readers work this into their ideas of the kinds of stories that are told about teenagers and schools all this time.  This one has a lot more sequins.

A big question that I'm left with after reading is what happened with Billy's mother, who was his confidante and partner in crime until she abruptly sent him off to live with his father.  From the way she is described throughout, I have trouble believing and understanding how she could turn on him like that upon discovering him dressed in drag.  I guess that's St. James's point, that her seeming open-mindedness had very finite limits.  Even her son being in a coma after being beaten nearly to death did not sway her.  As a parent, this was so sad to me.

Billy spends much of the book in confined spaces: a sink cabinet, underneath his bed, and even closed into a pullout couch.  He clearly had some mental health issues that were completely separate from his gender identity, though I think they were exacerbated by the fear and cruelty he experienced at school.  Part of me wants to read this symbolically, like his feeling of being confined by social limits and needing to break them was balanced by a psychological need for physical limitations.  But I don't know if I'd stand by that interpretation.

_The Vanishing of Katharina Linden_ Responses #1 and #2

I decided to take a break from Proust and the Squid this week to read more fiction.  Nick recommended his summer reading book, Helen Grant's The Vanishing of Katharina Linden.  Described on the cover as a "strange, haunting modern fairy tale," VKL takes place in a small (real) German town called Bad Münstereifel.  The novel is narrated by 11-year-old Pia Kolvenbach, whose grandmother's recent dramatic death has made her a town pariah.  When one of Pia's classmates disappears, she and her friend Stefan attempt to figure out the mystery by learning about the town's folklore and ghost stories from their elderly friend Herr Schiller and conducting their own investigation.

I really enjoyed this book, though the mystery part, the main plot line, was my least favorite part.  Frankly, I loved the German-ness of the whole thing.  I studied German and German literature in college, and spent a summer living in Munich and traveling around Bavaria.  Grant, who is British, decided to write the novel while she was living in Bad Münstereifel.  She works in a lot of German words and sayings (there's a glossary at the back), which I really enjoyed, and bilingual Pia (whose mother is British) examines some of the more interesting words.  I also found the descriptions of setting to be very true to my experiences of German towns.  I've never been to Bad Münstereifel, but the descriptions really reminded me of the Bavarian towns of Berchtesgaden and Königsee.  It helped to be able to see the buildings and streets in my head and to know a little bit about the traditions that were mentioned in the novel.

What I liked most about this book was the way it used creepy folklore.  Fairy tales are a major part of German folklore (the Grimms' tales were all collected in Germany), and many of those stories are actually very dark, though the Disney versions may not make it seem that way.  Pia learns about the town's folklore traditions of ghosts, witches, shape shifters, and burning men, and Grant works them in in really interesting ways.  The book in this way reminded me a lot of Freud's essay on "The Uncanny" (das Unheimlich), a particular sense of literary creepiness that he argues is connected to repetition of details and dark secrets being revealed.  The book taps this sense of the uncanny that is key to German literature and that also reminds me of my time in Germany.

Grant's choice of narrator was interesting.  At first, I was not all that impressed to read another story about a little girl solving a town murder mystery - to me, that's an old and done story.  But Pia is more complicated than that.  Her relationship to the story, because of her grandmother's death and the way the town connected her to later tragedies, makes her somewhat unreliable.  Also, she is very clearly eleven.  She has little fantasies of being the one to solve the mystery, and it is clear that these fantasies motivate her more than justice or concern about her classmates.  She and Stefan make (and miss) hilarious connections and have no ability to discriminate between possible scenarios of what happened.  They use the folklore of their town, but they also rely on random horror movies to generate theories.  They are actually kids most of the time, and I like the way that Grant plays with this genre.

_Proust and the Squid_ Response #1 & 2

This week I returned to Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.  A professor of child development, Wolf examines reading from historical, cultural, and biological perspectives.  Wolf has a particular interest in dyslexia, which her oldest son has.  The book emerges from her concern that, as reading becomes more and more an online experience, the human brain is losing some of the unique capacities enabled by traditional print reading.

So far I am enjoying the book...but skeptical.  I hear echoes in her argument of some older arguments about how literacy changes the brain that I thought were pretty much dismantled by the New Literacy Studies group.  Once I get further in, I will go back to some of the NLS work to compare and develop a stronger opinion about that.  For now I'm trying to suspend judgment.  I'm also not easily convinced by arguments that digital literacies are either THE future of literacy (in a positive sense) or will result in the death of our current forms of literacy (in a negative sense).  I'm also suspending judgment on that issue until I have a better sense of her argument and can better put it in context.

Whatever my final thoughts on her arguments are, Wolf does say and quote some lovely things about reading that certainly ring true for me.  "The generative capacity of reading," she writes, "parallels the fundamental plasticity in the circuit wiring of our brains: both permit us to go beyond the particulars of the given" (17).  She continues, "the rich associations, inferences, and insights emerging from this capacity allow, and indeed invite, us to reach beyond the specific content of what we read to form new thoughts" (17).  I read for many reasons; one of the most important ones is that reading makes me think in ways that are neither direct results of what I'm reading nor possible without it.  Wolf describes this as a "paradox: the goal of reading is to go beyond the author's ideas to thoughts that are increasingly autonomous, transformative, and ultimately independent of the written text" (17-18).

_Wintergirls_ Response #2

After all of our talk in class about whether YA fiction is too dark, it was good for me to begin with a book that is pretty intense, dealing with two girls with eating disorders, major mental health issues, and self-harm through substance abuse and cutting.  It is hard to read, and Anderson doesn't offer any easy answers, as much as I may have wanted Lia to enjoy drinking hot chocolate with Elijah enough to choose that kind of life over the one she was living, for example, or decide that her stepsister Emma having a healthy body image was more important than her quest for thinness.  I read many dark and difficult books in my own adolescence, but it is harder now, as a teacher and a parent, to think about these issues that may someday affect my students and children.

One of the things that caught my attention in this novel were the contradictions that were not emphasized as much as the strike-out ones but that are key to anorexia as a condition.  Lia knows she is and is proud to be the thinnest girl in the room at the memorial for Cassie at school; yet, her image of her body at New Seasons is grotesquely overweight.  She hides her thinness from her family under layers of clothing but she takes pride in her appearance as a sign of her strength.  She disapproves of her stepmother Jennifer's attempts to control her 9-year-old stepsister's diet, but doesn't identify the factors that contribute to her own negative body image.  Anderson does not attempt to explain these contradictions away.

Something that surprised me in the book was the way Cassie's ghost made it into Lia's meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Parker.  I think having the metaphorical ghost of a character who has died present in a narrative is a common enough thing that it really never occurred to me that Lia's hallucinations might be real and different from her other issues, not just a literary representation of her feelings of guilt about Cassie's death.  When she was talking to Dr. Parker about Cassie's ghost and about the other issues she had had since early adolescence, I began to wonder if she were really developing schizophrenia.  I don't feel like that prediction was confirmed at the end of the book, but that seemed to me to be where the diagnosis was headed.

Laurie Halse Anderson's _Wintergirls_ Response #1

My reading for this week began as Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, but I left it at school over the weekend, so I pulled Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls from my to-read stack at home.  Wintergirls is narrated by Lia, a high school senior who struggles with anorexia and self-mutilation, and whose childhood best friend Cassie has just died.  We don't know the details of her death early on, but we know she struggles with bulimia and alcoholism.

One of the ways that Anderson brings us into Lia's mind is through the use of strike-out type.  Lia's contradictions in thinking about food are shown as her thoughts of hunger struck out and followed by her "strong" thoughts resisting the urge to eat.  For example, thinking about having a bowl of cereal, she narrates, "I could eat the entire box I probably won't even fill the bowl" (5).  When the school nurse forces her to drink a cup of orange juice, she describes her reaction: "I take the cup from her. My throat wants it my brain wants it my blood wants it my hand does not want this my mouth does not want this" (20).  The strike-out seems to show Lia's initial thoughts and reactions and what follows is what she forces herself to think.  Lia also thinks in strike-out when making reference to her family: her mother is often "My mother Dr. Marrigan" (148) and her father is sometimes "Dad Professor Overbrook" (230), emphasizing that she thinks they are more involved in their work than their parenting.