Pulp Spills and Nerd Tumors

This guy had the best titles EVER.
My favorite is "Black Legion of Callisto."
Also, what a hell of a name for a metal band...

My parents are readers.  This isn't so much a compliment as a diagnosis.  Had it existed 20 years ago, they probably would have qualified for an episode of Hoarders, and they didn't stop collecting 20 years ago. Before they moved houses, the shelves for paperbacks were stacked four deep vertically, with two layers stacked horizontally on top of that -- on each shelf, on all 20-plus shelves in the house.  Don't even get me started on the hardbacks.  During my childhood, literary avalanches were known to occur and cause real-world suffocations. Rest in peace, Timmy; you were the brother I never knew.

The folks have since moved into a defunct survivalist's would-be compound out in the woods.  To give you a taste of this estate's decor, let me just say that the previous owner went through the trouble of climate-controlling his THREE gun-safes (complete with a dedicated back-up generator), but he chose to "install" his hot tub on the raised deck by balancing it atop cinderblocks stacked six feet high.  Not being quite so insane, mom and dad decided to turn the guy's panic room (no, I'm not joking) into their personal library.  Last weekend, I was tapped to help build it.

Let me put aside the back-breaking work of assembling bookshelf after bookshelf. Let's leave out the Herculean task of creating order out of four decades worth of haphazard collecting. What struck me most wasn't the amount of books my parents had, the amount of certain genres they had. My mom has been reading housewife mysteries and thrillers for years now, never really stepping outside the genre unless Michael Crichton or J.K. Rowling came calling.  She certainly had quite a few books to put up, but I could at least picture someone reading a comparable amount. But my dad...well, christ. My father owns nearly everything written by the major pulp writers in history. This is not an exaggeration.  His collection is curator-esque in its completeness.

I found everything Edgar Rice Burroughs had ever written, and Michael Moorcock, and Lin Carter.  Dad has a first edition of Pigeons From Hell and nearly every Conan novel, plus all of the adventures Andrew J. Offutt wrote after Howard died.  I found every novel ever set in the Dark Sun universe, and there were so many novels set in the Warhammer universe it took TWO shelves to contain them.

Now, I knew these were my father's reading proclivities, but most of this stuff had been buried out of sight for my entire life. It was...jarring to see how much my dad loves this stuff. I mean, imagine your significant other likes to hulu-hoop, and you know this; it's just one of those endearing little quirks. Then, while investigating a discrepancy on the credit card bill, you discover that your loved one is maintaining a series of storage units, each of them filled to the brim with hulu-hoops of all shapes and sizes. It was a staggering realization: the combined vertigo of underestimated passion and an otherwise unpredictable normalcy.

In two days, my hands passed over the collective history of sci-fi/fantasy subculture and the bygone days of pay-by-the-word fiction. The stories weren't so much written on paper anymore as the ink was allowed to lie on the bloated, green mold that had eaten its way underneath. I worried each title would crumble in my hands; one even did, but it turns out that dad had two copies of Casca the Damned, for some reason.

Thinking back on it, I now understand my lifetime obsession with comic books, tabletop roleplaying, the sci-fi channel, and every other form of crap art. Dad never foisted these things upon me; we couldn't have dug out those old pulps if we'd tried. I was always allowed -- nay, encouraged -- to read books of my own choosing, yet I always picked the grandchildren of the pulps like they were my long lost siblings.

Is my reading just a phenotype for some inherited cultural gene, like myopia and flat feet? Did I mutate in the nerd radiation leaking from row three of the overstocked bookshelves? Did the speculative fiction that secretly insulated my childhood alter my growth like some environmental spill, my self-identity not so much learned as breathed in via the asbestos snow of decaying, low-grade paper stock?

As an English teacher, I'm constantly justifying the importance of books -- and the act of reading itself -- for a generation that seems all too eager to dance on the grave of print media. Does the fact that my personality is so completely shaped by books I've never read help or hurt that arguement? Either way, how do I express it in a way a teenager can understand? After all, I didn't know the infection was taking root until I was already terminal.

Aditi Shankardass: A second opinion on learning disorders

http://www.ted.com/talks/aditi_shankardass_a_second_opinion_on_learning_disorders.html

For all those educators out there, this TED talk proposes a solid solution to the "Spec. Ed. first" problem we keep reading about: use the science and tech. available to make the diagnosis, not the behavior. Interesting...

Jack Russell Terriers + Scott Bakula = The Answer to Illiteracy

Just imagine the pitch meeting...

Remember Wishbone? What? You don't! It won a Peabody Award!

I'll help you out. Wishbone aired on PBS after Arthur (a show about a sexually-closeted young Ardavark, near as I could tell) and before all that other crap on PBS nobody ever watches. The title character was a Jack Russell Terrier, who had apparently received a classical education somewhere along the way, and his young master, a teenage boy named Joe. Every episode had a parallel narrative, one that took place in the "real" world and one that took place in Wishbone's imagination. Joe would get into some sort of trouble, then Wishbone would imagine himself as a character with a similar dilemma in classical literature. When Wishbone was remembering these canonical works (how did his little claws turn the pages?), he would be able to speak, the rest of the cast refused to acknowledge he was a dog, and they put him in period costume. Christ, I love PBS sometimes.

So Joe would get falsely accused of cheating on a test in school or something and Wishbone would spend the rest of the episode playing Sydney Carnet from a Tale of Two Cities (the little-doggie guillotine they built for him was adorable!). Every episode was a different book: a different, really-weird book. I mean, they did friggin' Faust, but somehow overlooked White Fang....

Wishbone obviously came from noble impulses, but those impulses just as obviously went unfulfilled. Sure, my friends and I watched it religiously to laugh at a dog dressed as Sancho Panza, but we didn't sprint to a library afterward. I'd bet money no child has ever said, "Mommy! PLEEEEEAAAAASSSSSSSEEEEEE by me a copy of Candide! The doggie was so cute as Dr. Pangloss!"

But the problem was in execution, not concept.

I propose fusing the classical focus of Wishbone with the plot device of Quantum Leap. The show will be called "Are You Still Bored?" and will focus on a maniacal high school English teacher and his victim...er, student. When little Timmy misbehaves in class, the teacher hits a button on his magic fiction time machine. Timmy is suddenly transported to the "magical" world of literature, where he can spend the rest of the episode reveling in the joys of necrophilia as Quasimodo, or gouging out his eyes as Oedipus, or strangling his wife to death in Othello.

In fact, let's just keep the focus on Timmy. We'll spend an entire season of bouncing him around literature's greatest atrocities with his English teacher occasionally popping in to mock him with informative lectures (maybe he could even smoke a cigar like Dean Stockwell). And finally, in the season finale, we'll return the broken shell of a man that was once Timmy to the halls of high school, his haunted eyes telling the story of a hundred horrific deaths and an awareness of what human flesh tastes like. However, everyone else will have learned some valuable lessons, and they'll be motivated (by FEAR) to learn more about the world of Literature.

Season Two: Cindy Lou is caught texting in class.

I work cheap and the pilot is already written. Contact my agent.

Funny but True...and Forbidden

Read this. Now.


The Ten Most Important Things They Didn't Teach you in School


Among the many things I love about Cracked.com, this has to be the single most alluring: if you took out all the dick jokes and smarmy captions (the dick jokes should stay, mind you; they are finely-crafted), this is a lucid, well-researched essay with ramifications beyond entertainment. It may be a top-ten list, but it also would be a fantastic curricullum for a life skills course. Keep in mind, this is coming from a guy who teaches life skills courses.


I would pack up and move states to work at a school that would let me teach kids that success is about "1. Talent 2. Hard Work 3.Randomly Meeting the Right People and Not Pissing Them Off," or a chapter called "Why Hippies Have Never Discovered a Single Disease Cure." Pardon the cliche, but Cracked.com is often funny because it is true. In my experience, most American teens are so steeped in inauthenticity from all sides of the culture that they find a lack of bullshit absolutely intoxicating. But despite the obvious interest kids would show in this stuff, a teacher would get fired for phrasing it this way (i.e. effectively). It'll never be common sense until we teach it to everybody.