A Summer Story

Today I am struck by the pathological need we have for stories. Maybe it’s just at our house, but a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry tells me it’s pretty universal. 

It’s summer, and the last one before my eldest munchkin flies the coop, in whatever way he chooses to do so after graduation next year. He’s particularly keen to fill this summer with all the fun he possibly can, sure as he is that this is the end of an era, and from now on he’ll be working for the man, unable to have anywhere near this amount of fun ever again, so long as he lives. (I have not disabused him of this notion, at least not significantly.)

What he chooses to spend his time on, primarily, is stories. He plays video games with storylines (and his sister and dad play many of the same ones, so they often talk on our dog walks, for instance, about how far they are in whatever game, and who they’ve met and where their character is going). 

He plays the fantasy game “Dungeons and Dragons,” as well as the more sci-fi “Mutants and Masterminds.” We play board games, most of which have a story element to them. This summer has been dominated by “Betrayal at House on the Hill,” which offers multiple narratives, so the story is different each time.

And he reads. Some of the books he reads come from his games—like WarHammer 40K or Dungeons and Dragons, but lots of them don’t.

We don’t watch much television; in fact, I’ve watched more than anyone else, and I’m the one who loves to hate tv. But then I don’t play video games. When I do watch tv, I’m looking for interesting, well-developed characters, some I can identify with, and something new and funky that I can learn about, either from the setting or the character development. My last two ‘fixes’ have been set in Australia and the Carribbean, for instance, places I’ve never been. 

The point is, when given a break, we have all in our various ways, stuffed our hours full of narratives. We have chosen stories over lots of other options for our summer. Some of the options have been taken off the menu this summer due to health and family issues, so maybe this is therapy. Yeah. That makes sense.

When we have down time--when we need down time--we fill our days and our minds with stories. And they seem to be all we need.  Both kids have commented on what a relaxing summer it’s been, despite the deaths of two family members and a mom in the hospital in the last few months. 

They’re not wrong. The ability to escape to another world, whether we’re an active participant, as in a video game, or dragged along (swept away?) by a novelist or screenwriter, lets us come back to our own world refreshed.  Either we’ve seen how problems can be solved, or we’ve actively helped solve them. Either way, stories make us stronger, smarter. Better. 

Viva summer.

Rapunzel Revisited

Five thoughts on Rapunzel that would have taken the first blog too far afield:

1. The Barbie movie is interesting.  In fact, there’s a spate of Barbie movies from about 2001-09 starring Kelly Sheridan as the voice of Barbie, that retell a variety of fairy tales, from Rapunzel to the Nutcracker, and they’re quite good—interesting adaptations.  Rapunzel does some work to explain why the witch steals the baby (she is a spurned lover of the king—it’s almost like Disney writers know their Barbie).  It also adds a spunky baby dragon sidekick--why not?--and a magic paint brush that Rapunzel can use to paint things in to life.  All these Barbie movies are a little postmodern.  Rapunzel has the means to save herself.

     2. There is a whole rash of folk tales about over-protective fathers throughout myth and folklore.  Some set an impossible task for their daughter’s suitors, like “The Glass Mountain,” which has an early cognate in Marie de France’s “The Two Lovers” and some are just too clingy, like the father in many a “Beauty and the Beast” tale, where Beauty is just as reluctant to leave her father and grow up as he is to let her go.  The desire to imprison one’s daughter to keep her follows about the same fairy tale logic as the bad guy shtick: “You won’t marry me, so I’ll imprison you until you fall in love with me,” but it does serve as an absurd extreme for us to learn from.  Real people, we hope, wouldn’t go that far, but it sometimes helps to see our impulses played out to their logical conclusions. 

3. If you want to go Freudian, you certainly can.  In many of the tales where a father locks up a daughter, he puts her in a chest or a box (symbolic of the womb).  In the tales where a woman locks her up, it’s often a tower (a clearly phallic symbol).  Is this a way to control the power of the opposite sex?  I’m not offering answers there, just acknowledging those readings are possible.

4. Leaving the tower is just the beginning.  In Rapunzel tales, frequently the prince finds the maiden because she’s singing, or because he overhears the witch ask Rapunzel for access.  But once he gets up there, she does just what the witch fears—runs away with him or conceives his children.  What happens when they run away is as awkward as the end of The Graduate.  They don’t know what to do.  They wander, sometimes together, sometimes alone.  Sometimes Rapunzel ends up in a desert with twins, and the prince finally finds them and she heals his blindness with her tears.  Sometimes they go a little "Baba Yaga" and have to outrun the witch with the help of magical items given by protective fairies.  But it’s almost never just “leave the tower; get on with Happy Ever After.”  There’s more she has to learn before that can happen, which seems to acknowledge the deficits of her sheltered existence, so I approve.

5. In the past this has been a relevant tale of sexual politics and the marriage economy.  A daughter used to be worth more (literally!) if she were a virgin, and therefore fathers had a reason to ensure they didn’t get too much experience too soon.  But a box or a tower is a ridiculous extreme and almost a challenge, as can be seen in the story of Danae or “The Miller and the Two Clerks.”  Shifting the focus to the mother’s fear changes it somewhat.  Mothers fear losing companions and help with the housework, and when the daughter leaves, she often isn’t seen again.  This gets closer to the modern mindset.  There is a real emotional loss when the baby bird leaves the nest, and we sometimes still need reminding that it’s ok, in fact important, not to build towers, but to build up our daughters instead.

(The image comes from my new favorite version.  My daughter loved it too, commenting on the beautiful images and the charming idea that the characters don't have to be royalty for the story to work.)

Rapunzel Tales, or the Fear of Letting Our Daughters Grow Up

The idea of a daughter contained has appealed to many parents over the centuries. In Greek myth, King Acrisius of Argos locks his daughter Danae in a box when an oracle tells him his grandson will kill him. Rather than let events unfold as they might, where his daughter normally would marry someone from another town and go live with her new family, assuring that any grandchildren grew up well away from him, Acrisius acts on his fear and walks right in to the prophecy, as so many do. 

He imprisons Danae in a chest and Zeus gets in by trickling in through the cracks as a shower of gold, landing in Danae’s lap. The metaphors abound. The short-sighted father, in trying to keep his daughter off the marriage market, has as much luck as one does avoiding a sunbeam. Danae gives birth to Perseus, who much later and in an accident completely unrelated to his feats of daring, kills his grandfather with a stray discus at an athletic event. 

This image of locking away daughters, then, has old roots, and sometimes it is the father who is unwilling to let his daughter grow up. There is a medieval French tale called "The Miller and the Two Clerks" (famous now because Chaucer tweaked it for his “The Reeve’s Tale”), where a father locks his daughter up in a bin each night within his own one-room house to protect her virginity. That fails too, of course, in this case hilariously, when the daughter is convinced to let in a house guest on the grounds that he has a magic ring capable of restoring her virginity.  He neglects to tell her he picked it up from her father’s own fireplace moments before. In any case, the Daughter in a Box trick fails.

And then we get to the tower stories. Many European variants on this tale exist, and many of them make this a woman’s problem. It is, of course. Mothers worry about their daughters and about losing them to marriage. But the Grimms’ version and some Italian versions (“Beautiful Angiola” from Sicily and “Filagranata” from Rome, for instance) change the imprisoner to a witch. The witch possesses something a woman wants—something from her garden that the woman is willing to risk anything to obtain. And the witch, who has no child, wants the baby daughter whom she demands in compensation for theft. In the Grimm version, Rapunzel's father fetches lettuce for his pregnant wife, but in "Angiola," the woman and her friends are plundering the witch’s garden before anyone is pregnant, and Angiola is the price her mother pays, some time later, for her thievery.

So something has shifted. The concern of an over-protective father (either for his own sake or for economic reasons—the miller, of course, can marry his daughter higher up the social ladder if she is a confirmed virgin) has shifted to a witch or ogress who has no daughter of her own. The witch protects her as well, but as much from her family as from the world. In these versions the maiden is imprisoned apparently indefinitely, as the witch who imprisons her shows no sign of relenting. In these tales there is no hope of the maiden ever being let go. It goes some distance toward indulging maternal fear to imagine a way to keep a daughter safe from the world, but to make it a witch who orchestrates this shows how unnatural and cruel it is.

But of course, with the inexorability of Acrisius stepping in to his fate, the world comes to Rapunzel if she can’t go out in the world. A dashing prince happens by, or in the recent Disney film, a dashing thief with a complex past but one more than capable of true love, and the maiden’s society, which has been limited to one, doubles--her world explodes. Whatever trials and drama ensues, the process has begun:  Rapunzel embarks on a process of self-discovery that, despite the witch’s best efforts, leads her in to the world, never to return. 

In some ways, the maternal fear is confirmed. But in others, the natural cycle of birth, maturing, and starting a new life, even a new family, is a promise made good.  That’s the problem with kids: we can’t keep them forever. They are not for keeping—not in a box, not in a tower, not at all. They are for loving and raising and letting go.

[By the way, the best collection I’ve seen of Rapunzel tales is in the Sur La Lune collection, edited by Heidi Anne Heiner. And today's image is from the Barbie Rapunzel movie, which adds dragons and a magic paintbrush. Hooray!]

Raising Readers

Summer is birthday season when you’ve planned kids on an academic calendar. This summer my “baby” turns 15, which is a kind of weird, arbitrary-sounding milestone (for a non-Latino family), but for this literacy-minded mama, it matters. It turns out that as children learn to read, it helps their fluency and vocabulary-building to read to them aloud. The benefits last at least until they are fifteen, when their visual vocabulary catches up with their aural vocabulary.

Kids understand more of what they hear than what they read on their own until they are fifteen. (I think I first got this number from Jim Trelease’s The Read-Aloud Handbook, but I’m having trouble putting my finger on the reference just now.) The number, though, stuck in my head for years, and it makes sense to me that kids’ aural vocabulary (what they hear read in context, one presumes especially from a reader who reads with fluency and drama, so that the sense of new words can be gleaned from the context) is greater than their visual vocabulary (what they read by themselves) until they are fifteen years old.

So until 15, parents have a real, practical reason for continuing storytime.  I didn’t make this felicitous date with the little one, incidentally.  Regular storytime pretty much ended when she started high school and felt herself burdened with homework nearly every night.  (I’m not indulging my curiosity about how her homework load was so much more burdensome than her brother’s just two years before… with the same teachers and same assignments….  He had plenty of time for our evening reading, which means we kept going until he was 16 and she was 14.) 

At any rate, now I don’t have to feel guilty any longer.  I didn’t really feel guilty. She’s ten times the reader I was at her age, and my goal was always to hook them on reading, not just hit an important date. Mission accomplished on both counts. They both read a considerable amount for pleasure, even in the age of video games, and since her eleventh birthday, my daughter has asked primarily for books for her birthday. I call that a win.

It’s her birthday coming up, so her reading journey I’m interested in tracking here.

In the picture book days, we read around an hour a day to her.  She loved Where’s My Teddy by Jez Alborough, which we had in an oversized board book format, perfect for propping on laps and reading together. It’s adorable, so I never minded reading it four times in a row. (One fear I always had was that they’d love something I hated, and I’d have to suffer through the same drivel a hundred times.  Reader, beware of this—read books before you introduce them to wee ones, who thrive on repetition.) When she learned to read (and she was well in to first grade), we scaled back to a conservative 45 minutes a night, and there we stayed, nearly without exception, until last summer. 

Scholastic Book Club became my best friend. They have so many economical books, and you contribute to the teacher’s library too--everyone wins. She plowed through Daisy Meadows’s fairy books and Holub and Williams’s Goddess Girls series on her own, while we read a bit above her level at home—Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Peter and the Starcatchers. We also made a point to read things she might struggle with on her own—British books like The Wind in the Willows, The House at Pooh Corner, The Hobbit, and classics like Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and A Tale of Two Cities.  For some of these, she benefitted from having a mom who taught those books, but far more of them, we discovered together. I wouldn’t have traded this time for anything in the world.  

And as she advances through high school and in to adulthood, requesting Barnes and Noble giftcards for holiday gifts and brandishing tee shirts with the Ravenclaw crest or slogans like “The Book Was Better,” I take some consolation for the loss of storytime.

Summer Reading 2017

Younger me would never have stooped to reading anything but fiction or literature over the summer. As a student, of course, I spent much of the year reading what people told me to (with the caveat that I had some control over the classes I took). Summer was a time to read exactly what I wanted, which was a steady diet of classics and pulp like a literary salad.  No biography—who needed real people when imagined ones were so much more interesting, and no non-fiction—does that even count as reading? 

Now in my mid-40s, the reading lists are changing.  There’s plenty of fiction, but more of it is modern (gasp—even contemporary—by LIVING authors), and I spend my days making connections from them to the past texts they make use of. And I am gratified that we keep re-using the same tropes and heroes.  There’s a Young Adult Odyssey, for instance, called Love in the Time of Global Warming (a double homage—playing on Garcia-Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera as well) by Francesca Lia Block, as well as Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and Carsten Jensen’s We, The Drowned, which also feels reminiscent of the Odyssey.  We really can’t go forward without looking back, and all those years reading old stuff is paying off for me in spades.

What’s more interesting, perhaps because I didn’t see it coming, is the non-fiction.  How much, after 22 years of teaching college English, I appreciate a well-wrought essay.  How endlessly interesting the world is, right here and now, without going to Narnia or Middle Earth or the forest of my beloved fairy tales.  How compelling research about the brain is, both for how I can teach better, and how I can learn better.  It’s a big world, and I’m grateful for the time to give more of it my attention.

This summer’s reading list is a hodge-podge, then: 

1.       Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors because I haven’t read enough of his short fiction.

2.       Al Franken’s Al Franken, Giant of the Senate because I’m more political than ever, and        that means I really need a laugh.

3.      Gabriel Wyner’s Fluent Forever because I’m determined to keep learning languages, and     I can’t afford to move to Europe for five years.

4.      Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad because just because I talked about it doesn’t mean I’ve       read it.

5.       George Orwell’s A Collection of Essays because damn, that guy could write.

6.       Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain because apparently I now enjoy nature writing.           Who knew?

7.       Georges Perec’s A Void because any novel written without a single ‘e’ must be quite            something.

8.       Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower because John Green recommended it some time       ago and I’ve never gotten around to it.

9.       Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies because they are the basis for so much, and because his    imperfect knowledge of Latin gives me hope.  Best find at Kalamazoo this year!

10.    Italo Calvino’s Palomar in Italian, because that is the point of learning Italian.

More will trickle in (certainly some murder mysteries, which are my pulp of choice), and some may well fall out.  But that is the way of summer, as I experience it.  What’s on your reading agenda?

The Little Things are the Big Things, or Thanksgiving in June

Graduation always makes me happy. It’s the best day of the year, as far as my job is concerned—the day we work toward with each class of students, our main reason we do what we do. If faculty do their jobs and students do theirs, the result is Graduation Day. And it’s glorious.

It’s also Big. It’s often the biggest day in a student’s life so far, although we certainly have plenty who have had wedding days or children’s births, or some other Big celebrations, but by and large, it’s a milestone. It’s a time to be proud of hard work and perseverance and a time of excitement (and anxiety) about the future. 

In some very concrete ways, we’re taught to measure our life out in these Big Things, as if there’s a checklist everyone’s privy to. High School? College? First big job? First promotion? First car? Marriage? First home? Children? 

With a laundry list like that to check off, young people might well be intimidated, might be inclined to feel lesser if they miss one or two or five of those accomplishments. 

I’m here to tell you not that the Big Things are a lie, but that you can make your own list, and that you shouldn’t get hung up on it.  The Big Things are the frame of your life, the dots in the connect-the-dots image of you.  But the Little Things—that’s where you live.

And if you stay focused on the Big Things, you miss the Little Things.

It’s a balance, of course, as all things are.We have to pan out, like Ansel Adams, and see the big picture, how we want the shape of our life to look. But we can’t dwell there. Most of our lives are spent in the middle ground—dealing with people and surroundings we encounter. I’d like to advocate for as many close-ups as you can squeeze in—attentive moments where you really see how full of wonder the Little Things are. 

Here is an underwhelmingly incomplete list of Little Things that I have come to see as Big Things in my life.  It’s just a matter of changing your lens. Have fun out there.

• ·         Hot tea on a cool morning
• ·         Sleeping in
• ·         Sunscreen
• ·         Walking dogs
• ·         Thank-you cards
• ·         Yogurt pretzels (sweet and salty, creamy and crunchy—what more can you ask for?)
• ·         Dogs who pose for portraits
• ·         Homemade bread
• ·         Goodnight kisses
• ·         Poems
• ·         Tweezers
• ·         Card games
• ·         Used books
• ·         Snail mail
• ·         A good murder mystery
• ·         Family photos
• ·         Crossword puzzles
• ·         Wildflowers
• ·         Handmade cards (anything handmade, really)
• ·         Squirrels
• ·         Learning something new
• ·         Running in to an old friend
• ·         Stumbling across a favorite something you haven’t seen in a while

What does your list look like?

Confessions of a Word-Hoarder

I am a philologist.  But let me explain what I mean by that, because we’re not all in agreement.  Dictionary.com has three definitions, one that is first and “current,” a second it marks as older, which actually means quite another thing, and the third, which it lists as “obsolete” and is the one that I claim.  Of course.

The word comes from the Greek roots meaning “lover of words.” Philo-logos. This means in its oldest form, it could refer to people who study (and love) language or those who study (and love) literature, that which we make from words. 

The current definition falls on the side of literary, but not in the sense we think of; it means literature scholars who act as sleuths, trying to place and date texts given the raw data of what appears in a manuscript or other text.  The “older” and therefore outdated meaning is the other side of that coin—historical linguistics, essentially, or the study of ancient sound systems and grammars and theories about how language changes.

Linguistics and literature go hand in hand for me and always have.  One must understand the language in order to read the literature, of course.  When I graduated from my undergrad institution, it was with a double major in English literature and French language. I knew I wanted to focus on the medieval period, and I looked everywhere for a graduate program that would let me do both literary and linguistic study (by which I meant historical linguistics and language study).  I didn’t find one. 

Instead I found a wonderful linguistics program in a department with four medievalists, and I started in linguistics (for two reasons, really: 1- I was still laboring under the notion that the more scientific-sounding the degree, the better, and 2- I wanted to learn the languages and how they changed, so I could really dig in to the literature).  “Historical Linguistics” as a field, I was told on my very first visit, was dwindling, but I could certainly pump up my linguistics degree with medieval language classes. 

Everyone felt my ill-fit.  In linguistics classes I brought up literary considerations, and in literature classes, I asked about the translation and original language.  My thesis for my MA in linguistics was really very literary, and I had to add one long, discursive, decidedly linguistic footnote to demonstrate my skills before one member of my committee would sign off on it. 

One of my German professors laughed and told me I was born a century too late; I really belonged in the glorious 19^th century tradition of German philologists, with the Grimms and others, who studied language and literature together.  That’s where that “older” definition comes from.  It used to be a thing.  But in the modern academy, we have specialized far more, and now it’s tricky to do both. 

Tricky, but not impossible.  Some programs allow one to choose two specializations.  Comparative Literature programs always include instruction in multiple languages.  Or you can choose my way.  Get a degree in linguistics, and then get another in literature.  My way is not time- or cost-effective, but I wouldn’t change a thing. 

Some famous philologists you will have heard of include Jakob Grimm and JRR Tolkien.  I do not pretend to rank myself with them, just to ally myself on the grounds of similar affections, as a lover of words.

(The image is of the first page of Beowulf in the Cotton Vitelius A.xv manuscript, now housed in London's British Museum.)