I'll start off this time with some bits and pieces for your
consideration:
•I was listening to a recorded interview with John Lennon;
he said that many teenage boys start to learn the guitar because they think it
will help them get girls. "The tragedy," he said, "is that the
only boys that trick works for are the ones who realize that the guitar is more
interesting than the girl."
•Robert Louis Stevenson said that he wrote Treasure
Island in part at the request of his
stepson who asked for a book with "pirates and no kissing." Actually
it contains practically no women—just Jim Hawkins's female relatives, who run
the inn while he's off chasing pirates. There's also not a lot of relationship,
as nearly all the connections are purely functional—the intrepid treasure
hunters are friends but they're mainly coworkers, and so, in a different way,
are the pirates on the other side.
•It's been out for a while, but I just happened across it
recently: There's no
such thing as a reading test, by E.D. Hirsch, the famous promoter of the
idea of cultural literacy, and Robert Pondiscio, his longtime associate at Core
Knowledge. Their arguments are interesting and worthwhile in their own right,
but I'm particularly struck by one body of research they cite: the one that
shows that decoding skill is much less important in reading comprehension than
interest, that poor readers reading things they understand and take an interest
in out-comprehend good readers reading about matters of no
interest/understanding, and the terrible Catch-22 that kids who haven't been
exposed to much plain old general knowledge (of exactly the type that many ed majors
are taught to dismiss as "mere rote learning"), not having any way to
connect to material, can't make much use of the reading strategies they're
being taught.
•Years after it first ran,
this is still one of the most-read articles in Slate, returning to the top
5 for a week out of every month or so. If it had appeared in the New York
Times, Slate would probably have run one of
their "Where does the Times find these women?" apparently endless
series about it, but it does look at what appears to be a real phenomenon
rather than a trend confined to the southern parts of island of Manhattan:
ambitious, driven young women who don't seem to be able to find their male
equivalents, and so settle into unsatisfying long term sexual relationships
with amiable doofuses who are just drifting along. The takeaway for my purposes
here is the last paragraph:
And yet while young men's
failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success
may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life. Don't forget your
Freud: Civilization is built on blocked, redirected, and channeled sexual
impulse, because men will work for sex. Today's young men, however, seldom have
to. As the authors of last year's book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of
Modern Sexuality put it, "Societies in which women have lots of autonomy
and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty
sexy." They're right. But then try getting men to do anything.
•Another piece from Slate:
mostly the piece is about the use of value-added as a way to find the good
teachers for such administrative purposes as merit pay and sorting out babies
and bathwater, and because it's by an economist describing economic research,
it manages not to mention much of anything interesting that happens in
classrooms. Nonetheless, what it does reveal is that the effects of good
teachers are extremely persistent; the right fifth grade teacher will still be
suppressing teen pregnancies when the kids are sixteen, boosting their
graduation rate when they're eighteen, and raising their overall success in
work, military, or college when they are in their early twenties.
•Finally, a source I'm just going to grit my teeth and admit
I'm using. One of the first "scientific" advice columnists, writing
about psychology and spouting vast amounts of very right wing nonsense (and
with a number of unintentionally hilarious catchphrases), was George W. Crane (father
of a couple of right wing Congressmen; dear me, what a memorial!) But in his
daily column The Worry Clinic, one catch
phrase he kept repeating, that I am forced to admit appears to be true, was,
"Remember that every human being is wearing an invisible tattoo that reads,
'I want to feel important.'"
Now, by the rule
of seven, I know I've just flooded your registers and made myself
completely incomprehensible. So it goes … let us forge on into the tulgey wood,
and do ignore those whiffling and burbling sounds all around, it's the local
wildlife.
§
Those stray bits all have quite a bit to do with boys, and
reading, and all that, which I'm going to revisit again.
There are some predictable upheavals and uproars that happen
when the subject of boys and reading is brought up.
Critics of the current state of YA will claim:
•there's not much role for boys in modern YA
•it has become a girl-focused field in which boys are
relegated to being Trophy Boyfriends, Supportive Nerds, and Gay Sidekicks, and
•one way or another more traditional boys are being left out
of books, and
•that's why so many boys stop reading fiction for pleasure
after about fifth grade.
Defenders will point to
•the need for young women, gay men, and people of color to
have characters who look like them,
•larger and more passionate audiences for YA than ever
before (depending on whose estimate you use, it's quite possible more boys are
reading more books—it's just that so many more girls are reading that the
overall proportion of boys reading is dropping)*
•dozens of boy characters of indisputably traditional
masculinity in various recent books, and
•a slightly retro point: if the poor boyses are feeling left
out because they're not the undivided center of attention, after having it all
to themselves for so long, well, boohoo, why don't the little sissies stop
whining and just man up about it?
The critics can then say that there we have that anti-boy
attitude in action, and that they're talking about overall trends and the
Spirit of the Age.
The defenders can retort that they didn't start the fight,
and if there are that many exceptions around, the rule is not proven.
Eventually, all the YA authors, critics, and librarians meet
each other for a fist fight out back of the ALA.
Tragically, that one doesn't happen. It might make ALA a
buttload more fun to attend, but such is life, people are so often blind to its
possibilities.
Instead, what happens is that many people get to feel very,
very important in the cultural struggle, and in shaping the next generation and
getting them all edumatated and stuff, which as we all know is very important
because eventually somebody's got to be able to read the directions to keep our
life-support machinery running.
They get to feel very important. Dr. Crane would be so
proud.
The neat mirror image both sides have of each other allows
nearly everyone involved to feel both terribly misunderstood and absolutely
right, a wonderful combination if the critics, librarians, authors, and
publishers (CLAP for short) are to feel really important. It's a perfect
coffee-house snark-off in that everyone can treat the other side's arguments
with a knowing reduction:
"Right, no wonder he's writing for teenage straight
boys, he's just doing that man thing about what a big weenie he has."
"Yeah, so it's not enough for her to be a Sex in the
City re-enactor, she wants everyone to be, especially the boys."
"Meatheads rule everything else in the schools, so
now every book has to be about sensitive meathead wangst."
"Girls like to dream about impossible, unimaginably
strange worlds, like one where hot guys have a passion for library
interns."
Is everybody important yet?
Here's a thought. Maybe there's a flip side to Dr. Crane's
bit of wisdom there. Maybe it's not just that people want to feel important. Maybe
it's also that people hate, loathe, fear, and despise anyone who tells them
they are not important.
And maybe because our culture has a thing for dichotomies,
or maybe due to too much Hollywood movie programming, or maybe it's human
nature, but one of the most common ways to improve people's feeling of being
important is to tell them that someone else isn't. Maybe Stevenson's stepson,
who wanted "no kissing", and had grown up as a boy in a
female-dominated household, was looking for a feeling of importance, so he
quite rightly sought a subject on which boys could feel important (pirates) but
then he quite humanly (let's give the guy a break, he was twelve years old)
also decided to declare something his mother and sister, good Victorians that
they all were, probably valued more than he did—i.e. kissing. In fact, his
indulgent stepfather gave him a whole pirate story with NO GURLZ! to be
anachronistic about it.
I'm skipping around that bit of psychobabble,
"self-esteem," because it seems to me that people can manage pretty
well while thinking of themselves as utter turds, and even recover from a
self-image as fuckups, scoundrels, or whatever, as long as they think it matters. I base this on nothing empirical whatever; I just
think a drunken wife-beating Klansman who believes that it matters that he drinks too much, beats his wife, and hates
people baselessly, is at least one step closer to reform than someone who
mentally adds, and I don't give a shit. This may explain how many religions seem to save people from their
own worst sides, even though it is not possible for all of those religions to
be true in all details at the same time; they envision a world in which, for
one reason or another, an individual human soul matters, and therefore both
crimes and kindness, both meanness and nobility, are relevant, and my decision to go to the devil is not purely my own affair.** (Nor is it purely anyone else's; see Form Letter 9).
In short, maybe it's not just self-esteem (gosh, darn it,
people like me …); maybe it's that people ache for the sense that what they do
matters, that they are important, not in the sense of an inflated title and the
ability to make miserable underlings listen to their pontifications, but in the
sense that the universe really would be different without them. (Even if it
would be better without them, that
still means they are important!)
I'm trying to avoid speaking for anyone on this, not even
for my own subcategory of straight white American males with decent educations
who read a lot as children. But it seems to me that I rarely if ever found
myself thinking about Robin Hood, or Philip Marlowe, or Flandry of Terra,
"And he's a Caucasian with a penis, just like me! This affirms that I am
wonderful because I am a Caucasian with a penis!"*** The effect was
something much more subtle, something that I don't think I ever thought
consciously at all: The white guy matters. The white guy brings
mattering-ness, a.k.a. importance, to the story.
When I was twelve I had one of those odd transformative
experiences of falling through the page and into Arthur Conan Doyle's The
Lost World, the granddaddy of Jurassic Park
and every other dinosaurs-alive story. If I could show a few readers as good a
time as I had then, on the sunny porch in the time between finishing mowing the
lawn and going off to a pickup softball game, I would be more or less forced to
consider myself a success as a writer. I don't remember noticing anything about
the whiteness of Professor Challenger and Sir John and all those dinosaur
hunters, until a minor character—"our Negro, Zambo"—intruded. Zambo
was bringing up the supplies with which Challenger and Co. would be escaping
from the deadly plateau, having fallen afoul of a batch of "natives" who lived
there among the dinosaurs.**** Challenger's lot were badly outnumbered and in
deep crap, Zambo was loyal as only a fictional non-white can be … and very big
and strong … so I thought when he turned up that they'd hand a machete and a
rifle to him, and maybe to the trusted muleskinners that came with him, and
even up the odds a bit.
No way. He had to climb back down to wait with the mules.
It didn't make Zambo look unimportant, to me; it made Challenger
look like he was having a momentary lapse into stupidity. Within a year or two I figured it out, and then it made
Challenger seem, retroactively, like a blowhard and a dork.
But I am guessing that for a kid with African ancestors,
that dismissal probably stung with the force and precision you get by telling someone
they are unimportant. It wasn't that Zambo was cool and it was as unfair as
dismissing Lando Calrissian from Star Wars would have been—the guy was barely
even there, and then right when his arm and gun might have made a big
difference, he wasn't even important enough to stand around being stalwart or
maybe die heroically. He was unimportant and anybody who identified with him would have felt that.
So I'm going to propose a radical notion here: what if
instead of making the CLAP of YA feel important … we all agreed to find our own
importance, not step on each others' too much … and concentrate on convincing
the readers they matter? Let's get real
here; it is not at all infrequent that a character of a given category
(race/gender/culture/etc) is avoided, or replaced with someone who has the outward
trappings but not the inward nature, and this happens in fiction generally, but
when it happens in YA, some reader someplace who is just beginning to kind of
like this reading thing is stung with unimportance. They can tell when we do
it, folks, and whether it's a troop of Space Scouts that is all straight white
males, or a girl who goes to high school with only gay mixed race werewolves,
if there's a big flag saying Unimportant people omitted, the damn kids will see that flag and read it. They're
not stupid.
Now here's the thing: what I think may be most flagged with Unimportant is not girls or boys, any particular race, or any
particular religious faith. For reasons that might have to do with my previous
piece about boys
and toilets, I think the signal that is shutting out more kids than
anything else is the one that says Your relationships are important,
your accomplishments are not. It's been a cliché
in YA for a long time—you could argue that all the male characters in A
Wrinkle in Time are taught this by
authorial sledgehammer, and god knows there are plenty of YAs in which one way
or another it turns out it's friendship, or family, or true love, etc. that
triumph. It will be a long time, I think, before you read an approving Young
Adult novel about, for example, a young gymnast with a shot at the Olympic team
who dumps her boyfriend because he's taking up too much of her time and
emotional focus (and you'll have a whole room full of those before you see an
approving story in which, say, a guy ditches his girlfriend to have more time
for the debate team).
This is not because it's humanly impossible; nor is it
particularly unforgivable; and it is not actually a conscious position as much
as it's just a logical consequence of some widespread beliefs in the literary
community, such as that stories about relationships are more artistically
worthy than ones about adventures (for a visit to the awe and majesty of death
and the horror at the heart of ordinary life, I will stack up Lawrence Sargent
Hall's "The Ledge" against Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is
Hard to Find" anytime, but in one, the situation is the focus, and in the
other it's the relationships). It's not that relationships don't matter, but
relationships by their nature don't have goals (or shouldn't—if you've ever
been trapped in a conversation with someone who wants to set goals for a
relationship, you know what I'm talking about, and may you never know). It's
not that relationships are unimportant, but if they have the only importance
there is, if actions and achievements are relegated to unimportant window
dressing, then the agency that makes for personhood is dismissed with them, and thus the personhood of any character who ismainly a do-er rather than a be-er.
And that brings me to the various accounts of male
haplessness and lostness in current YA. Has our literary culture out-Hamleted
Hamlet? After all, everyone says the guy takes no action, but in the course of
the play he launches at least four major schemes and plots, and he does kill
five people. He would seem to be giving action its due, and be perhaps a bit
overactive by current standards.
When I think about the best teachers I've had who were
people rather than books, the main thing I remember is how vital they made it seem. Poetry, axiomatic set theory,
African post-colonial politics, nineteenth-century stagecraft, judo, close
reading, realistic set design, Goju-ryu, Early Latin—those teachers made sure
we knew it was important. And
because we tried to do it, we became important too, and the knowledge stuck because it was attached to our importance.
Maybe we're teaching too many kids to look for their importance in the wrong
place, and they're resisting it like sensible people would—the boys more than
the girls because they have more of a heritage of agency, of being important
because of what they do as much as because of who they are.
I have known many dedicated artists and scientists who
somehow raised happy children on a mix of benign neglect and brief-but-intense
attention paid mostly to "who is this delightful person becoming?" I
have known many people who tried to be full-time professional parents,
dedicated their lives to "having a great relationship with my kids, "
who produced lost kids who had a hard time being happy. Being is always somebody else's job to infer about you, and they can re-infer at any time, so you never get to keep it, and your importance comes from what you "are" in their eyes; your personhood is dependent, even if it is dependent on a person who loves you (or the you they imagine and construct) with all his/her heart. But doing is your own job and once done, can only be taken away from you by lies in which you acquiesce; if you climb up on the roof all by yourself without permission, your mother can decide you are a bad person, but she can't take climbing onto the roof away from you. (This, by the way, is the point, to me, of one of my very favorite short stories, Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews.")
Not, again, to say that we must now all write tales of
mindless action, but consider how many young women, gay boys, and members of
various mistreated minorities have managed to enjoy "boy books" full
of action. Might that be because a person taking action is someone with whom
any child will want to identify? Because for kids, who are in process of becoming persons, personhood is the ultimate attractor, and everything else secondary? If so, then maybe we should stop telling the boys that they need to read these books to be more like the characters in them, i.e. appealing to bookish girls, and start saying "It's a book about doing ... challenging ... facing ... struggling with ..." all those specifications for do. Offhand, I remember that as a boy, I adored Call
it Courage, The Sky and the Forest, and Island
of the Blue Dolphins—nonwhite heroes all,
and in the case of Blue Dolphins, an actual girl. But all of them doing an immense amount -- and therefore, persons.
§
*I don't suppose anyone will notice that this means that many,
many more teens of all genders are reading,
which of course, is good news, and therefore not news at all. I think we should
give all the credit for that to the first pop star or actor to publicly say
s/he had nothing to do with it.
**See the quote that is the epigram of FatherLucifer for one way of phrasing this. And
that epigram is a bit of a clue about where the book is going. Actually one of
these days I should do a piece about the epigrams in my books; there are more
clues there than many critics imagine, and very often to the reader's
exasperated cry of "What was it about?" my best answer is,
look at that little quote at the beginning.
*** Please, nobody name a band "Caucasian with a
Penis." Just don't.
****Sadly, I now realize, none of the "natives"
looked the least bit like Raquel
Welch. I don't know how I failed to notice this at the time.
