Will Grayson, Will Grayson

For the record, every time I saw the title of Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan I thought it was one of the least inviting titles for a YA novel that I'd ever seen. Yes, there are two characters named Will Grayson and they meet. But then I got to page 307 of this 310-page book, and I immediately loved the title; it actually kind of brought tears to my eyes.

The circumstances under which I read the book certainly contributed to my enjoyment of it; every two years I go with a group of college friends to one of the many barrier islands around Charleston, South Carolina and we rent a couple of houses, go to the beach every morning, see the sights some afternoons, eat at seafood restaurants, and play card games or drink and chat most nights. It's always a perfect week, and this year the weather was also perfect--hot and sunny every day. We were coming back from dinner one night, six of us, and I said "I sleep so deep[ly]* here, and I don't think it's just the drinking...." Amid the laughter came a challenge to "put THAT on your blog" to which I've just responded.
*I said "deep" which is fine in conversation, but looks like a mistake when it appears in writing.

Anyway, there were nine people staying in our house, and I kept reading a bit of Will Grayson, Will Grayson while waiting for someone to walk somewhere with me or for my turn in the shower.

Even though I don't agree with this snotty adolescent view, I enjoyed coming across it:
"now, if there's anything stupider than buddy lists, it's lol. if anyone every uses lol with me, i rip my computer right out of the wall and smash it over the nearest head. i mean, it's not like anyone is laughing out loud about the things they lol. i think it should be spelled loll, like what a lobotomized person's tongue does."
If I ever type "lol" it's because I really am laughing out loud, as I did at that passage.

I also like the adolescent take on what the other Will Grayson's living room is used for:
"the room where the nonexistence of Santa is revealed, where grandmothers die, where grades are frowned upon, where one learns that a man's station wagon goes inside a woman's garage, and then exits the garage, and then enters again, and so on until an egg is fertilized...."

What I love most about this novel is the transformation of the lower-case Will Grayson's view of love and possibility. He goes from the kind of clueless--and not very well-read--adolescent who thinks that other people can live in a
"musical cartoon world, where witches like maura get vanquished with one heroic word, and all the forest creatures are happy when two gay guys walk hand-in-hand through the meadow, and gideon is the himbo suitor you know the princess can't marry, because her heart belongs to the beast. i'm sure it's a lovely world, where these things happen, a rich, spoiled, colorful world, maybe one day i'll get to visit...."
to the realization that maybe the world that the lover he has rejected keeps offering him is actually a real world, if he has the courage to help dream it up and believe in its magic.

I simply can't fail to love a novel in which an adolescent character is capable of making this kind of distinction between philos and eros:
"I don't want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? It's so stupid, Tiny! I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it's the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do."

Most of all, given my circumstances, sharing a house with people I've known since college, with all our kids going off together to the lower level and getting along so well we occasionally called them up to see a little more of them, I loved the passage in which upper-case Will Grayson says to his friend Tiny
"I want you to come over to my house in twenty years with your dude and your adopted kids and I want our fucking kids to hang out and I want to, like drink wine and talk about the Middle East or whatever the fuck we're gonna want to do when we're old."
And that is exactly what Ron and I were doing, with two other couples who are married to people of the opposite sex and one same-sex couple who have been together for sixteen years and would like to be married. We talked, sunned, built sand castles, walked, ate, and drank wine.

And I finished reading this excellent book, whose excellence is not only due to the circumstances of the reading, although those were pretty close to optimum, in the world I'd created for myself: hot and sunny, beside the ocean, with some of my best friends. What are the basic components of the happiest "musical cartoon world" you can imagine for yourself? And how often do you get to be there?

Wake

Wake, by Lisa McMann, is a YA novel I heard about months ago over at J.Kaye's Book Blog and when I finally procured a copy, it was only to hear my almost-sixteen-year-old daughter say she didn't like it much. So I put it aside for a while, only to toss it in my weekend bag as an emergency book and then start reading it at odd moments during the weekend. Funny how those odd moments add up and then begin to increase once you get interested in a book, which I did fairly quickly.

My daughter has a specialized interest in dreams that caused her to be disappointed in the premise of Wake. But I thought it was an interesting story with a well-paced plot. It's not complicated, and it's not about many kinds of dreams; it's about nightmares and about teenagers trying to get some control over their lives.

The teenaged characters in this book are not typical; the main characters don't even have parents who can help them do anything (in that way this book reminds me of a John Green novel, where the parents are ineffectual and/or absent).

As in most books about a teenager who has a mysterious talent or power, Janie first tries to hide her power to see the dreams of others in order to appear more normal; she gradually comes to accept and use this ability. At sixteen she succeeds in "breaking the connection" between herself and a dreaming friend: "she reaches out for the wall and finds her way into the hallway as she and Carrie are walking through the forest in Carrie's dream." At seventeen she meets a boy and then an old woman who help her learn to control her power and use it to help catch bad guys, which drains her so completely she ends up in the hospital, but her new employer and now-boyfriend take care of her and the ending promises happiness, in addition to a sequel (Fade).

Wake is a quick and undemanding read, which is sometimes all I want; a little piece of brain candy.

The Importance of Ohio Public Libraries

Public libraries are one of the foundations of our system of democracy. I’m reminded of this every time I walk into mine, because carved over the door is this quotation from John Adams: “LIBERTY CANNOT BE PRESERVED WITHOUT A GENERAL KNOWLEDGE AMONG THE PEOPLE.” I never fail to find this reassuring, no matter how exasperated I am about local schools or politicians.

I live in a small town and work four miles away in an even smaller village, and so my children have always been lucky enough to have access to two public libraries—the village one, where we all loved to browse in the same room, and where the summer reading program was just steps away from the playground outside, and the bigger one where we go now to pick out books and audiobooks. In the last few years, the bigger library has had a terrific Young Adult librarian who has gotten my kids involved in library events and ordered some of the new books that interest them and keep them coming back in to see what’s new. But she was fired in the second round of cuts this spring.

Now under the Adams quotation on the door is a notice about the most recently proposed Ohio library budget cuts. I took a photo of it, because I found it so ironic underneath the Adams quotation.

It’s also ironic that Ohio’s governor, who proposed educational reforms earlier this spring, should now be proposing to cut back on the best system of public education we have in this country. People in small towns like mine need libraries. They need to be able to read and find out the Truth about the larger world, especially because mine is a town where one of the middle school “science” teachers who is NOT being drummed out of the school system for teaching religion told my daughter that she should make a choice between “believing in” either creationism or evolution and then two years later took my son aside and chastised him for making a statement in class supporting evolution when “it wasn’t necessarily true” and the other kids “had to make that decision for themselves.”

My neighbors need books more than they need almost anything else. Governor Strickland, I’m willing to pay more taxes to ensure that they continue to have access to those books. If the proposed cuts go through, my village library will close completely, and the bigger library will have to restrict its hours so severely that it will be hard for working people to keep track of when it’s open and when it’s not.

So raise my taxes. Give me the option of paying extra taxes directly to a library fund, so that I can support the library on behalf of my poorer neighbors. Don’t do any more damage to Ohio’s library system.

John Green, who went to college in the village and is the author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns, also wrote about Ohio libraries this week, so if you're interested in more of the facts, hop over there and see what he has to say. And if you live in Ohio, make sure your elected representatives know what you think about library funding.

Distoibed By You

I said I would try to lighten up the rest of the this week. But listen, it's January. I don't know about you, but I really can't get too excited about the temperatures rising from around zero to around freezing. It's still Just. Too. Dang. Cold. To. Go. Out. And I'm on day two of having a kid at home who is prostrate from exhaustion. He slept all yesterday morning and then for another half hour late in the afternoon, and we sent him to bed last night at 8:30. He slept soundly until this morning at 6:30, when he got dressed for school, sat in a chair looking pale and wan for a few minutes, and then ran down the hall retching, after which he was sent back to bed. He can lie around and read, but so far he hasn't slept for more than 30 minutes at a stretch.

And I've read a bunch of disturbing books this week. Some I will not even discuss, because I don't know why I let myself read them in the first place. Now that I have, I keep trying to adopt the attitude of the old woman in Moonstruck who is eating alone in a restaurant when an old man apologizes for disturbing her because his too-young girlfriend just threw a glass of wine at him. The old woman (played by Olympia Dukakis) gives him a look and says "I'm not distoibed by you."

But, the truth is, I am distoibed. Last time I read a book by John Green, I said that I thought he would be pleased that I found his books disturbing, and he commented that he would. His newest one, Paper Towns, is no less disturbing to me, and for some of the same reasons. The parents are all cruel, absent, and/or clueless. The adolescents are so deeply into figuring out who they are that it's hard for them to see anyone else clearly. The love interest, Margo, seems to have figured out some things that the protagonist, Quentin, wants to share, but his search for her, while exciting and amusing in parts, didn't seem to me to end up being worth the time and the trouble he took. It struck me as a leftover-hippie novel, an updated version of The Catcher in the Rye, with all of Margo's disdain for the way high-schoolers are judged for their carefully constructed facades. And here's part of the resolution, in which Quentin learns that "imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo's anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists." So yeah, don't trust anyone over 30. What keeps this novel from falling into the flower child mindset entirely is that the kids don't use mind-expanding drugs.

Maybe I shouldn't have read Paper Towns in the depths of winter, my least favorite season. The author really is amusing; I like the way he writes dialogue, and I love the way he constructed his post today at Sparksflyup. And there's always something interesting in the background of one of his books, like what a "paper town" is, and that they exist.

Disturbing YA Fiction

I mean "disturbing" in kind of a good way; sometimes you need to be disturbed out of your placid mode of thinking. When I read John Green's An Abundance of Katherines (given to my kids right after it came out as a prize in a contest by our local YA librarian), I remember reacting to the world of the young adults in it, which is curiously devoid of parents. As a child who read E. Nesbit and Edward Eager, I was used to parents having to be out of the way so the kids can have an adventure, but sure that if the parents became aware of what was going on, they would intervene. I get no such feeling from Green's novels. The parents are missing, or they don't care what they kids are doing, or they're so out of touch with the kids' world that they're completely and utterly ineffectual.

The parents in Looking for Alaska are the third type. They have no idea what's going on in their son's life. I've had this book on my to be read pile since August, when the local Freshwater supporters handed out their list of proposed banned books and put a note by Looking for Alaska: "oral sex." I had no idea how funny it is to label the book this way. The oral sex scene is about two high school kids so innocent that they don't know how to perform or receive oral sex, and so unsupervised that they have the time to find out. It rates right up there with the sex scene in The Tall Guy as one of the funniest sex scenes ever:
"And then she wrapped her hand around it and put it into her mouth.
And waited.
We were both very still. She did not move a muscle in her body, and I did not move a muscle in mine. I knew that at this point something else was supposed to happen, but I wasn't quite sure what.
She stayed still. I could feel her nervous breath. For minutes...she lay there, stock-still with my penis in her mouth, and I sat there waiting.
And then she took it out of her mouth and looked up at me quizzically.
'Should I do sometheeng?'
'Um. I don't know,' I said. Everything I'd learned from watching porn with Alaska suddenly exited my brain. I thought maybe she should move her head up and down, but wouldn't that choke her? So I just stayed quiet.
'Should I, like, bite?'
'Don't bite! I mean, I don't think--I mean, that felt good. That was nice. I don't know if there's something else.'
'I mean, you deedn't--'
'Um. Maybe we should ask Alaska.'
So we went to her room and asked Alaska. She laughed and laughed. Sitting on her bed, she laughed until she cried. She walked into the bathroom, returned with a tube of toothpaste, and showed us. In detail. Never have I so wanted to be Crest Complete."

Obviously, Looking for Alaska is a coming of age story, and one of those in which the protagonist can't come of age until he comes to terms with the death of one of his friends, appropriately enough, since his hobby is memorizing the last words of famous people.

I enjoyed the timing of my reading of Looking for Alaska, because about the same time I was reading it, John Green evidently made a big splash at the NCTE convention, with folks lined up to get his signature on his newest novel, Paper Towns. And during the same week Libby, over at Tortoise Lessons, provided a link to his ALAN Conference speech, in which he says
"Books give us the faith that others are real, that their joy and pain should matter to us, and that ours can matter to them."
During the same week, I was listening to Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran during my commute, and got to a part in which a Muslim student makes a pronouncement that fiction is merely a model for behavior, using The Great Gatsby as an example of a novel that promotes infidelity. That day I was protesting an idea something like this one in my classes, the idea that we're all supposed to learn some lesson from what we read in classes, but not from what we read--if we read at all--for pleasure.
Green says
"As if there is some kind of dichotomy between good and fun. As if [The Great]Gatsby is oatmeal and vampires are Lucky Charms. Vampires, of course, ARE Lucky Charms--they are magical and delicious and just dangerous enough to excite me. I love vampires, and I love vampire books. And please know that I would never argue against putting books kids want to read in their hands. But I am arguing that we need to make space in our classes--no matter how advanced or remedial the students--for ambitious novels. Because good is not the opposite of fun. Smart is not the opposite of fun. Boring is the opposite of fun, and when we create the smart/fun dichotomy, what we end up implying is that Gatsby is boring."

My experience as a teacher is that when a student tells me something is boring, it means he doesn't have the context to understand it, to make it matter. That's pretty easily fixed, in a class, and it also implies the truth of what so many mothers tell us (and which John Berryman fixed in my memory forever): "ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner resources." In fact, later in the speech, Green says "I think it's always good to be challenged, to know that there are other people out there, and not all of them value the same things you do." So I'm guessing he would be glad that I find his first two novels disturbing. And maybe he would like the button I sometimes wear which reads "Comfort the Disturbed. Disturb the Comfortable."