As one of the first people to teach Chris Ware’s Building Stories (which just came out last month), I thought I would share what I’m planning. Given the loud and enthusiastic acclaim that has greeted Building Stories, I expect that others will also teach the work.  (To the best of my knowledge, the only other person teaching Building Stories this term is Dave Ball.)  As serious readers of comics and graphic novels already know, Building Stories is a box containing fourteen textual objects — book, booklets, magazines, newspapers, Little-Golden-Book-designed book, small folded strips, board game, and the box itself (which resembles the box to a board game).

This poses some challenges.  Since these items can be read in any order, where do you begin?  Should you impose an order at all?  For practical reasons, I have imposed an order.  I’ve told students that they can read this work in any order they like, but we have a specific order in which we’ll be discussing it, in class.  The order in which the items emerge from the box determined my order.  That, I figured, was both arbitrary and consistent.  I say “consistent” because I expect that all boxes were packed similarly: so, each reader would encounter this “order” first.  As we get deeper into the work, I will also ask about how order shapes our sense of chronology and meaning.  However, to start, I’ve dived the class into groups of two or three, assigned each a section on which they’ll become an “expert,” and provided some “generic” questions.  Here’s what I told the students when I announced this plan a month ago, followed by a collection of readings (on Building Stories) that I’ve been collecting since then.  (My name for each section derives either from the first lines of text or from something more descriptive.)

As mentioned in class today (16 Oct.), I’ve divided up the readings for Chris Ware’s Building Stories — this is on the page I handed out in class, and the syllabus’s Schedule of Readings (scroll down).  As I also mentioned, the book is the graphic novel event of the season.  It made its debut about 2 weeks ago, and was the best-selling book on the New York Times‘ Graphic Books list this past Sunday (14 Oct.).  In this post, I’m listing: (1) the questions (same as those handed out in class), (2) the list of readings, and (3) links to some of the many reviews, essays, and stories that have been published in the past few months.

THE QUESTIONS

1. What stories does this part (or these parts) build?  Provide at least three examples.
2. What do we learn about our unnamed protagonist (the amputee)?  In some cases, the connection will be more challenging to make. Pick three moments.
3. Why tell this story in this form (book, newspaper, magazine, booklet, etc.)?
4. What questions do you have?  These can be discussion questions or simply subjects that perplex you.

Each group (or pair) should address these questions, and bring them with you on your day.  Bring an extra copy for me, so that I can follow along during discussion.

SCHEDULE OF READINGS

13 November

Group 1

1) [wordless / 7.5 x 25 cm / nights and days]

2) “God… I can’t bear it… I can’t… I can’t” / “I don’t care… I just don’t care…” [2-sided folded strip]

3) “Her laugh is like a flight of tiny birds, taking off…” / “Momma, I don’t know how I feel right now. I mean, I don’t know how to say it. I’m just not happy or sad. I’m in between.” [2-sided folded strip]

4) Branford, the Best Bee in the World

Group 2

5) September 23rd, 2000 [Golden Book]

15 November

Group 3

6) “Shit” [magazine]

7)”VVVFFFMMMMMMMMMMM” [magazine]

8) DISCONNECT [larger magazine]

27 November

Group 4

9) “I JUST WANT TO FALL ASLEEP AND NEVER WAKE UP AGAIN” / [Acme Novelty Library No. 18]

29 November

Group 5

10) The Daily Bee [newspaper]

11) “Recently, my high school boyfriend friended me on Facebook…” / “As a kid, I could sit in front of a mirror and stare at myself for hours, trying to imagine what I’d look like when I grew up…” [newspaper]

12) “Before winter starts” [architecture / blueprint / board]

Group 6

13) “god…” [newspaper]

14) “It all happened so fast… When I think back now I almost can’t believe it” [newspaper]

15) Building Stories [the box]

LINKS

Interviews

• Kevin Larimer, “The Color and the Shape of Memory: An Interview With Chris Ware,” Poets & Writers Nov.-Dec. 2012.
• Casey Burchby, “The Life Cycle of a Cartoonist: An Interview with Chris Ware,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 Oct. 2012.  Wherein Mr. Ware observes, “books offer a sort of reassuring physical certainty for the ineffable uncertainties of life, but then again I’m 44 and don’t tweet or have a Facebook page or participate in most of the things that blunt the textures of experience in favor of delivering them up more quickly to your friends, so maybe that’s just me.”
• Debbie Millman, “Chris Ware,” Design Matters, 19 Oct. 2012.  45-minute audio interview.
• Stephen Carlick, “Building stories with graphic novelist Chris Ware,” MacLean’s, 19 Oct. 2012.
• John Williams, “Book Review Podcast: Chris Ware’s ‘Building Stories,’” New York Times Book Review podcast, 19 Oct. 2012.
• Rosanna Greenstreet, “Q+A: Chris Ware,” The Guardian, 12 Oct. 2012.  In which Mr. Ware reports, “My head looks like an uncooked ham with glasses.”
• Françoise Mouly, “The Quotable Chris Ware,” The New Yorker, 12 Oct. 2012.  Click through each picture (at bottom) to find such quotations as: “I don’t think of myself as an illustrator. I think of myself as a cartoonist. I write the story with pictures—I don’t illustrate the story with the pictures.”
• Chris Mautner, “‘I Hoped That the Book Would Just Be Fun’: A Brief Interview with Chris Ware,” The Comics Journal, 10 Oct. 2012.  Wherein Mr. F.C. Ware provides a helpful definition: “memory is more like a gem or a flower or a three-dimensional something that we can turn and turn inside out and get into and out of.”
• Kat Ward, “Inside Chris Ware’s Graphic-Novel-in-a-Box,” Vulture, 7 Oct. 2012. Repr. from New York Magazine, 15 Oct. 2012.
• “Good Minds Suggest—Chris Ware’s Favorite Concept Books,” Good Reads, Oct. 2012.
• Calvin Reid, “Life in a Box: Invention, Clarity and Meaning in Chris Ware’s ‘Building Stories,’” Publishers Weekly, 28 Sept. 2012.  In which Chris Ware offers some insight into his creative process: ”I try to write in a way that hopefully reflects something of how I experience life happening…. What it’s like to be inside a body experiencing the world with all the myriad multi-layers of thoughts and memories that happen at the same time. And then the way that those things contradict each other and then the way that we think of ourselves as people, somehow all layered together.” And explains why he prefers books to e-books: “There’s something about the ideas and thoughts and feelings and uncertainties that go into books that demand a certain opposite and opposing structure to contain them. It’s almost like an aesthetic necessity that the books have, they have to confine and protect these ineffable things in a way.”
• Christopher Irving, “Chris Ware on Building a Better Comic Book, “ Graphic NYC, 6 Mar. 2012.  A long interview, in which Ware observes, “I do believe that cartooning, a very memory-based art, has something fundamental to do with a constant sort of revision of ourselves and our lives, the same sort of resorting and refiling that goes on when we’re dreaming.”  When the interviewer observes, “Your comics, especially, are about memory,” Mr. Ware responds: “Because that’s what life is. It’s all we have.”

Essays

• The Comics Journal‘s series of essays, each one by a different contributor to Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking(2010):
  • Martha Kuhlman, “The God of Small Things,” 8 Oct. 2012
  • Katherine Roeder, “Stories About Art and Buildings, and Growing Up,” 11 Oct. 2012
  • Daniel Worden, “Loss as Life in Building Stories,” 12 Oct. 2012
  • David Ball, “Beautifully Falling, Anew,” 15 Oct. 2012
  • Matt Godbey, “At the Still Point of the Turning World: Chris Ware’s Building Stories and the Search for Structure in the Contemporary City,” 17 Oct. 2012
  • Margaret Fink, “The Toc Toc of ‘Nothing, Really,’” 19 Oct. 2012
  • Georgiana Banta, “The Silent Sublime,” 22 Oct. 2012
  • Joanna Davis-McElligatt, “Body Schemas,” 24 Oct. 2012
  • Shawn Gilmore “Formal Disruption and Narrative Progress in Building Stories,” 26 Oct. 2012
  • Jacob Brogan, “From Comics History to Personal Memory,” 29 Oct. 2012
  • Isaac Cates, “The Diagram of a Life,” 31 Oct. 2012.
  • Peter Sattler, “Building Memories: Hers, Mine, and Ours,” 2 Nov. 2012
• Noel Murray And Tasha Robinson, “Delving into Chris Ware’s massive, multilayered comics project Building Stories,” The AV Club, 15 Oct. 2012.

Reviews

• Rick Moody, “Fugue for Centrifuges: On Chris Ware’s ‘Building Stories,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 Oct. 2012.
• Max Winter, “Building Stories — Chris Ware,” Full Stop, 22 Oct. 2012.
• Douglas Wolk, “Inside the Box: Chris Ware’s Building Stories,” New York Times Book Review, 18 Oct. 2012.
• Glen Weldon, “Bits Of Beauty Amidst The Gloom In ‘Building Stories’” NPR Books, 9 Oct. 2012.
• Jeet Heer, “When is a book like a building? When Chris Ware is the author,” Globe and Mail, 5 Oct. 2012
• Cliff Froehlich, “Review: Ware’s ‘Building Stories’ is stunning success,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 2 Oct. 2012.
• Jake Wallis Simons, “Building Stories by Chris Ware: review,” The Telegraph, 1 Oct. 2012
• Alex Hern, “Review: Building Stories,” New Statesman, 1 Oct. 2012.
• Sam Leith, “Building Stories by Chris Ware – review,” The Guardian, 21 Sept. 2012

Other

• Pantheon’s page on Building Stories.
• The Chris Ware Building Stories Tumblr.
• The limited-edition model of the Building Stories building (from Drawn & Quarterly).  Yes, you can actually build this.  For the Ware completist, this model is currently, temporarily, in stock at Drawn & Quarterly.  Since all 1000 copies are signed, it’s also rather expensive.
• Chris Ware’s poster for the Brooklyn Comics & Graphic Arts Festival (Saturday, Nov. 10)

That (the above) is what they have to get us started.  At times, I wonder if I’m a little ambitious in assigning this dense, layered, beautiful, complex, experimental work to an undergraduate class on graphic novels.  But, based on my experience with the class so far, I think they’ll rise to the challenge.  In any case, teaching Ware is like teaching James Joyce or (in a children’s literature class) Lewis Carroll.  The bright, thoughtful students tend to be intrigued, and embrace the experiment.  Other students require more help in making sense of it.

Teaching Ware is also like teaching Joyce or Carroll because Ware changes our understanding of what the medium can do.  He writes strips that can (and must) be read in more than one direction, pages that need to be read multiple times, and books that make other cartoonists feel that they need to rethink their approach to comics.  If you’re teaching a class in graphic novels or comics, you have to teach Ware.  He pushes the medium further, and (I expect) will be pushing my students in the coming weeks.  So.  Here’s to the grand experiment!

Image sources: Alan Trotter’s 5∞, Mark Hayes’ Passing Notes.

Giving credit where it’s due: I found most of those links via Dave Ball’s Facebook page or his The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking Facebook page.

I sometimes feel that I should apologize to students who took earlier iterations of my courses. I know more now than I did then, and have crafted a much better syllabus than we used for that earlier class.  That said, I also know that in a few years’ time, I will consider my current (new! improved!) syllabi to be embarrassingly inadequate. But, then, the more we learn, the more we are conscious of how much we do not know.

My new “Graphic Novel” course — its third iteration — occasions these reflections. I’m particularly pleased with the paper assignments: Using Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning Philosophy and Practice (a required text for the first time), I’ve scrapped one large paper for two smaller ones, both of which require (a) creativity and (b) analysis of part a.  One of these creative assignments is to render an entire novel as a single-panel cartoon.  Yes, this is challenging, but Brunetti walks you through the process, and students can follow his example (click for larger image).

The idea in both this and the other creative assignment is to get the students to think like a comics artist.  It is not to create a comics artist.  I’m an English professor, and this is neither a creative-writing class nor a studio class & so I do not expect them to create art.  In evaluating students’ work, I’m grading their analysis rather than the creative work itself.  Why did they make these choices and not different ones?  Do they think their choices worked? What have they learned from the experience? These are the questions their analysis must address.

I want students to see just how difficult and complex the comics form is. With a novel, you have all that is available to a creative writer — diction, tone, metaphor, point of view, and so on. With comics, you have all that is available to a creative writer and to an artist. It’s not only the words that matter; it’s every millimeter of space on the entire page. Students need to think about layout, design, size, shape, space, perspective, and so on.  Graphic novels — I’m using the term “comics” and “graphic novel” interchangeably — are far more formally complex than ordinary novels.  I hope the creative assignments will help students appreciate the form’s complexity.

In order to deepen their sense of how comics work, I’m also assigning more critical reading. Scott McCloud’s definition (juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence) — itself a modified version of Will Eisner’s — has become the dominant way of thinking about comics. And it’s a valuable paradigm. But Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik provide another model, Brunetti yet another, and Robert C. Harvey another still.  It’s valuable for students — and all of us — to ponder competing theories of how comics work.

An ideal course would give equal time to the single-panel comic (which McCloud excludes from his definition), the daily comic strip, the comic book, and the long-form graphic narrative (often called the “graphic novel”). Mine spends most of its time on the longer-form works, but does include more comic strips than it used to — and that’s an improvement. What I really want is a brief anthology of classic comic strips, running from Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland) to Richard Thompson (Cul de Sac). The large format of McCay would make his inclusion tricky, but let’s say we just include one McCay and as a fold-out.  Then you’d want other greats: George Herriman, Otto Soglow, Frank King, Ernie Bushmiller, Hal Foster, Milt Caniff, Crockett Johnson, Walt Kelly, Charles M. Schulz, G. B. Trudeau, Lynn Johnston, Lynda Barry, Bill Watterson, Aaron McGruder, Richard Thompson.  Oh, and I’m sure I’m missing someone.  Anyway, one could do a week’s worth of a narrative-driven strip but otherwise restrict the selection to a few Sunday strips per artist, say. This is the anthology I want to assign. Since it doesn’t exist, I furtively copy a very few strips for the course pack or handouts.

It’s all about balancing competing interests. I want different graphic styles, different time periods (my course offers only a glance a medium’s history, alas), different identity categories (race, gender, sexuality, nationality, &c.). On this last point, I’m pleased to be including Ho Che Anderson’s excellent King: A Comics Biography, but sad to have lost Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and even Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (!).  There are texts I feel bad about cutting (Persepolis, which does at least remain on my Lit for Adolescents syllabus), work that I keep meaning to include but don’t (Joe Sacco’s Palestine), and artists I lack the courage to assign in an undergraduate class (I’ve taught the brilliant, powerful, disturbing work of Phoebe Gloeckner in a grad class, but not undergrad).  But I like what’s there: Spiegelman’s Maus, Tan’s The Arrival, Barry’s One Hundred Demons, Tezuka’s Buddha (Vol. 1), Bechdel’s Fun Home, Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, Ware’s brand-new Building Stories (which isn’t out until October), and all the rest.  (If you didn’t follow the link to the syllabus in the second paragraph, then click on relevant words in this sentence.)

Every syllabus is an impossible puzzle that begets a series of necessary but regrettable compromises. That’s never more true than in Big Broad Course Topics: Children’s Literature, The Novel, the Graphic Novel. These topics are immeasurably huge, and a single semester cannot even approach doing them justice.

But… that’s OK. Each such course provides an introduction to the material, and gives students the skills to seek out more knowledge on their own. And this is the point of college: to prepare students for a lifelong journey of learning. Students should graduate from a university proud of what they’ve learned, but also humbled and inspired by all they’ve yet to learn. College is only the first step.

Taken in that context, I’d say that my syllabi for Fall 2012 — while they could be better, and will be, in future — represent a pretty good first step.  (Though, of course, critical comments are always welcome!)

The main problem with Chronicle of Higher Education blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley is not racism.  The main problem is her intellectually lazy, sloppy “journalism” that cherry-picks examples in order to “support” uninformed opinions.  In her recent piece, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations,” she reads the descriptions of dissertations by five recent Ph.D.s in Black Studies from Northwestern University.  Based on this exhaustive study of the field, she concludes:

If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

I understand why people call her racist: as commenter chuckkle notes, Ms. Riley “makes definitive evaluations of academic research without having bothered to read it…. She is clairvoyant, and can judge it in advance.  The Queen has delivered her verdict, judging it in advance.  There’s a word for that: prejudice.”  In other words, Ms. Riley’s type of casual generalizations also underwrites racist thinking.  However, Riley’s primary problem (as a writer, at least) is less her susceptibility to the bigot’s false assumptions and more an entire way of reasoning that makes her vulnerable to all sorts of unproven ideas (including many varieties of prejudice).

Based on her Chronicle columns, Ms. Riley appears to lack the ability to reason.  Indeed, should she happen to come across this blog post, I humbly suggest that she might begin her reeducation at the Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies website.  There, she will learn about the fallacies of relying on anecdotal evidence (say, relying upon five dissertation descriptions to represent an entire field), personal incredulity (because Ms. Riley cannot understand the field, it therefore must not be true), and false cause (assuming, for instance, that having a black president means that racism has been solved).  Her response to the criticism is classic tu quoque: instead of engaging with the criticism, she just turns it back on those who accuse her.

Ms. Riley’s inability to sustain reasoned argument is troubling, but the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s decision to employ her is baffling.  Plenty of bloggers play fast and loose with facts or succumb to logical fallacies.  But why would a publication that covers higher education wish to grant a platform to a person who seems to have learned so little?

Update, 7 May 2012:

• The Chronicle has asked Ms. Riley to leave its blog.  Editor Liz McMillen explains why.

This is fun.  Reading Is Fundamental‘s new promotional video features a song by the Roots; vocals by  Jack Black, Chris Martin (Coldplay), John Legend, Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Jason Schwartzman, Nate Ruess (vocalist for fun.), Melanie Fiona, Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney, Wild Flag), Regina Spektor and Consequence; appearances from Pinocchio, Madeline, Greg (the Wimpy Kid), the Three Blind Mice, Humpty Dumpty, Curious George, Little Red Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf, and even Captain Ahab on waterskis!  Plus many many more! (Find them all!)

Reading Is Fundamental has more information about the song (and its aims) at bookpeopleunite.org.  If you take the pledge, you can even download an mp3 of the song!

Hat tip to NPR’s Linda Holmes.

I don’t enjoy flying, but I do like traveling. There is pleasure in being somewhere else, in experiencing a different city or country. All that is taken for granted in daily life cannot be taken for granted — and this is especially true when in another country, when the food, language, and culture differs in varying degrees from one’s own. Prior to dinner, the Swiss have apero, a kind of extended meal of hors d’ouvres. In a Japanese restaurant, shoes get left at near the doorway, and hands adjust to eating with chopsticks instead of a knife and fork.  But even in one’s own country, cities are not identical. Normal, Illinois (where I am flying from, as I write this) has three independent record stores on the same block, and a superlative used bookstore — with lots of children’s books — on the same block. And I ran along a trail I’ve never run along before.

When traveling, daily work does not vanish. The draft of the panel proposal must be edited and rewritten, via a series of email exchanges with a colleague at another university. The invited talk itself must be timed, polished, cut, honed, rehearsed.  Emails from students, colleagues, editors, and others require answers.

But all of this work happens out of context, in a different space — on a plane, in an airport, at the hotel lobby, in the back of the taxi, in the hotel room. Because it is happening in different locations, it acquires a slightly different flavor, even a greater sense of clarity.  This sharpness of perception may derive from the simple fact of being somewhere else: because they are unfamiliar, surroundings demand more attention, perhaps heightening attentiveness more generally. It may also derive from urgency: being a conference attendee or invited speaker creates a daily schedule that reorganizes time in ways that cannot always be anticipated.

I like that, though. And, since I’m almost always traveling for business, I enjoy the interchange of ideas — in the Q+A session of the talk, or the conversations over dinner, after the panel session, and so on.  During the past few days, talking with Jan Susina, his wife Jodie Slothower, their son Jacob, my former graduate student Elizabeth Williams (and other University of Illinois grad students, faculty, and families), I’ve learned about lots of books and articles I need to read: Theories of affect, collections of comics, young adult novels. Beyond that, there are ideas that lodge in my subconscious, emerging later, sometimes long after I’ve forgotten the source.  At some point, I’ll ask Jan to elaborate on the connections he sees between Paul Klee and Crockett Johnson.

Though academics work long hours (as I’ve documented elsewhere) for less compensation than we’d like, I feel privileged to have a job in which I get to learn, share what I’ve learned with other people, and learn from other people.

Combining these intellectual exchanges with the displacement of travel brings the experience of learning into focus, sustains a degree of clarity absent from my workaday life, prods me to keep moving forward into new areas.

And it’s especially nice when someone else picks up the cost! (I pay for most conference travel myself, but I’m coming back now from two invited talks, both of which were covered by the host institution.)  So, thanks to the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of English (especially Marah Gubar), and to Illinois State’s Department of English (especially Jan Susina and Roberta Trites), and to everyone who hosted, chatted, came to the talks or otherwise participated.  It’s been a great few days!  Until next time!

OK Go!  They Might Be Giants!  Joel Plaskett!  Elvis Costello!  R.E.M.!  Stevie Wonder!  Lots of musicians have recorded songs for children — either lyrically revised versions of one of their tunes, or entirely new ones.  Here are 10 great ones.

OK Go, “3 Primary Colors Song”

“3 Primary Colors Song” is just out from OK Go.  It’s scheduled to appear on the February 2nd episode of Sesame Street.  Right now, you can watch it via Rolling Stone or via the embedded YouTube video below.

Joel Plaskett, “Fashionable People”

Joel Plaskett and a yam puppet perform a quite different version of his song “Fashionable People” (original version appears on his Ashtray Rock, 2007).  This is from a 2012 episode of the CBC’s Kids’ CBC.

Elvis Costello, “Monster Went and Ate My Red 2″

On a recent Sesame Street, Elvis Costello redid his “(The Angels Want to Wear My) Red Shoes” (from his brilliant debut, My Aim Is True, 1977) as “Monster Went and Ate My Red 2″ (2011), with vocal assistance from Elmo. Also featuring Cookie Monster as the monster.

They Might Be Giants, “Nine Bowls of Soup”

They Might Be Giants have released four albums for children, and all of them are super.  Indeed, if you get the most recent three, I’d recommend buying the accompanying DVD, because the videos are a delight.  The one below is from Here Come the 123s (2008), and it’s one of my all-time favorite TMBG songs — for any age group!

R.E.M., “Furry Happy Monsters”

Another from Sesame Street. With Stephanie d’Abruzzo singing Kate Pierson’s part, R.E.M. perform a new version of “Shiny Happy People” (Out of Time, 1991) as “Furry Happy Monsters” (1991, with new lyrics by Christopher Cerf).

Stevie Wonder, “Sesame Street”

While we’re thinking of Sesame Street, Stevie Wonder created his own “Sesame Street” theme song when he appeared on the show in 1972.

Paul Simon, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”

Also from Sesame Street in the early 1970s, here’s Paul Simon performing “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” (1972).  He didn’t rewrite the song for the show, but one of the kids had her own ideas about how the lyrics should go, and so the song gets revised anyway.  ”Dance, dance, dance!”

The Evens, “Vowel Movement”

The Evens — featuring Ian MacKaye (Fugazi, ex-Minor Threat) and Amy Farina (ex-The Warmers) — wrote “Vowel Movement” for Pancake Mountain (a Washington DC children’s TV program) in 2003.

Weezer, “All My Friends Are Insects”

Weezer performs “All My Friends Are Insects” on Yo Gabba Gabba! in 2010.  The person who created this video combined footage of Weezer on Yo Gabba Gabba! with footage of SpongeBob SquarePants.  So, visually, you’re getting something a little different than what was originally on the show.

The Roots, “Lovely, Love My Family”

Also on Yo Gabba Gabba!, the Roots perform “Lovely, Love My Family” (2009).  A very happy song, and a fine place to conclude.

Are there other great songs for children?  Yes, of course there are.  At some point, I’ll post my series of children’s mixes.  But that’s all for today.  Enjoy!

If you enjoyed these songs, you might also enjoy these mixes:

• Wordplay: A Mix About Language (Aug. 2011)
• Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom: A Back-to-School Mix (Aug. 2010)

Hat tip to Dan Shea for “Vowel Movement.”

Harold taks his purple crayon to the walls of the Ben Franklin School, on Flax Hill, in Norwalk, Connecticut.  The school houses the Head Start program.  I’m told that the mural was painted by employees of Pepperidge Farm.

The photos are all courtesy of Jackie Curtis, a friend of Ruth and Dave — a.k.a. Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson.  Known as Dave to his friends, Johnson created Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955) and its six sequels.  Krauss, author of A Hole Is to Dig (1952, illus. by Maurice Sendak) and The Carrot Seed (1945, illus. by Johnson), was married to Johnson. Both lived in Rowayton (South Norwalk), about three miles from the school where the above mural appears. And, as readers of this blog will be aware, Johnson and Krauss are the subjects of my double biography, scheduled to appear in September of this year.

I’m doing it again — teaching an entire course devoted to Dr. Seuss (the link in this sentence takes you to the current draft of the syllabus).  Art!  Politics!  Verse!  Nonsense!  Activism!  These are but some of the subjects we’ll explore in English 710: Dr. Seuss, a graduate-level course which begins on Wednesday.

Aiming to improve on the earlier Seuss course (taught 5 years ago), I did not look at the earlier syllabus as I drafted this one.  Only when I finished the draft did I read the 2007 version of the class, incorporating some of the worthier parts of that syllabus.  The idea, this time, is to structure the class around a dozen sets of questions — any of which, as I’ve pointed out on the paper assignment, could lead students to a fruitful paper.  Here are a few:

1. The Child: The Boy in the Book.  How do Seuss’s works conceive of the child? With which understanding of childhood would you link his children? In his works, what sort of power do children have? And which children get that power? How is Seuss’s work influenced by his own childhood, including what he read?

3. Activism, Part 1: Horton Hears a Heil! How do Seuss’s politics play out in his own works? Are there ideological inconsistencies between his stated goals and other messages that the books may convey? What makes an activist children’s book persuasive to its readers?

4. Cartoons, Camp, & Surrealism: The Art of Dr. Seuss. What kind of artist is Dr. Seuss? How do cartoons inform his aesthetic? How do artistic movements inform his aesthetic? Beyond The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., does camp play a role in his aesthetic? Indeed, what is the Seuss aesthetic? How does his art work?

7. Gender: Is Seuss for the Goose Seuss for the Gander? The most blunt way to ask this question is this: Was (or is) Dr. Seuss sexist? More subtle ways to ask the question might include: In what ways do Seuss’s books participate in gender stereotypes? In what ways do they resist gender stereotypes? What role, if any, should Seuss’s biography play in your answer to these questions?

10. Marketing: Quick, Henry, the DDT!  There’s debate among those who study Seuss, and in the wider public discourse about Seuss. On the one hand, there are those who argue that much of the posthumous merchandising (Grinch selling breakfast cereal, etc.) violates Seuss’s wishes: his work had a moral and aesthetic value, not merely a commercial one. On the other hand, there are those who will point out that Seuss was a successful advertising man (until the publication of The Cat in the Hat, his primary source of income was advertising), and in fact entered into merchandising agreements during his life. Wade into this debate about art and commerce. Which side is more correct? Or is there a different set of questions we should be asking?

Above: Seuss’s Ford advertisements, 1949

There are also questions about poetry, race, and adaptations, among other topics. (You can find a full list on the paper assignment.)   I chose this structure because the best discussions derive from good questions.

Another change from last time: using the anthology Your Favorite Seuss, instead of having the students buy individual Seuss books.  I have mixed feelings about this choice.  On the one hand, this is far cheaper than having them buy the individual books — and that’s my primary reason for doing this.  I realize that books are expensive.  And, also in its favor, Molly Leach has done a really nice job in redesigning the layout for each Seuss book.  On the other hand, I’d prefer for students to read the books as originally laid out.  Your Favorite Seuss includes all text, but moves artwork around so that it can include 13 books in fewer pages.  As a compromise, I’m putting the original versions on Reserve (at the library) so that students can also see the originals.

One assignment I’ve retained from the original version of the class is “Sighting Seuss,” which requires students to keep an eye out for appropriations, references, parodies, etc. of Seuss in contemporary popular culture.  Examples might include this Kids in the Hall sketch (1990), in which Dave Foley presents the “Dr. Seuss Bible”:

Another example is NicePeter’s recent “Dr. Seuss vs. Shakespeare: Epic Battles of Rap History #12″ (2011):

As it’s an election year, we should find many examples of Seuss in political satire.  Since the 1990s, people have been aligning Newt Gingrich with the Grinch.

But he’s not the only one.  John Kerry, George W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden, Barack Obama, and others have all been caricatured as the Grinch.

There are hundreds of examples of Seuss in popular culture.  The point is to get students to think about the ways in which Seuss circulates in the public imagination.  When people invoke Seuss (or his anapestic tetrameter, or his characters, etc.), to what purpose do they use him?  In popular culture, what does Seuss mean?

One big change from the last time I taught this is that formerly obscure short films by Seuss are now easy to find.  5 years ago, I showed the class a bootleg DVD of Your Job in Germany (1945), a propaganda film written by Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) and directed by Frank Capra.  You can now see this via YouTube or Archive.org.

Indeed, until this weekend I had never seen Our Job in Japan (1945), another U.S. Army propaganda film written by Geisel — and, incidentally, considered so sympathetic to the Japanese that General MacArthur worked to prevent it from being shown to the troops.  But now, it’s very easy to find (as in below, also courtesy of Archive.org).

I’ve assembled a whole page of these films.  We’ll still view a few of these in class, but now the students have the luxury of re-watching them and seeing more than those screened during class.  For those of you who lack the time to view all of those Private SNAFU cartoons, here are a couple of the better ones, which, yes, include some “adult” humor.  (The audience were GIs, not children.)  You will also note the sort of ethnic caricature common to Warner Bros. cartoons of the period.

Private SNAFU: Spies (Aug. 1943)

Directed by Chuck Jones.  If the voice reminds you of Bugs Bunny, that’s because Mel Blanc is also the voice of SNAFU. (From Archive.org)

Private SNAFU: The Home Front (Nov. 1943)

Directed by Frank Tashlin. (From Archive.org)

Well.  Any suggestions?  Let me know.  Classes start on Wednesday, and I’ll be editing the syllabus until then.  Though (of course) I can modify the reading list during the term, I tend to do that only minimally once the semester begins.   If no suggestions, well, I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about, oh,… the thinks that we’ll think!

Gene Marks’ instantly infamous “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” column (Forbes, 12 Dec. 2011) is a classic example of how privilege remains invisible to the privileged.  Though he acknowledges that he is “a middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background” and so “life was easier for” him, the rest of his column betrays too little of the awareness expressed by those early sentences. For instance, “If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study” assumes that the kid in question would have access to this technology.  Even a claim as benign as “If you do poorly in school, particularly in a lousy school, you’re severely limiting the limited opportunities you have” overlooks the fact that it takes an unusual student to rise above the limitations of a “lousy school.” Sure, there are students who do this, but they’re the exception, not the rule.

Mr. Marks assumes that opportunity is equally distributed. While we might admire the personal optimism conveyed by a claim like “I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed,” the article does not sufficiently acknowledge that some people — those with access to better schools, those who do not go to bed hungry, those with health care — have a much, much better chance of success.

I owe my own success to precisely that sort of privilege. Don’t misunderstand: I have worked hard, and I continue to work hard. But my success in life derives not just from my work ethic. It also comes from unearned privilege.

If I had stayed in public school, I’m not sure that I would have gone to college at all. On my first day of first grade, the teacher asked which of us could read. I was among those few who raised my hand — I’d been reading since I was 3 years old.  She gave us literate students a book to read. I finished it first, and raised my hand. “I’ve finished,” I said.  Her response: “Read it again.” I began to read it again. On my first day of school and subsequent ones, I learned that school was boring.

The result was that, though I still read for pleasure, I became a terrible student. I’d finish the worksheet first, and then devote my free time to amusing my classmates. I paid attention only when it suited me, trusting that I’d be able to master the material on my own. For a few years, this approach worked well. However, by the time I reached sixth and seventh grade, it was no longer working. My grades were slipping, and I began to slip behind.

And here’s where that unearned privilege saved me.

Just before I entered eighth grade, my mother got a job teaching at private schools —  first, Shore Country Day School (in Beverly, Mass.), and second, Choate Rosemary Hall (in Wallingford, Conn.). Her employment allowed my sister and me to attend both schools for free.  That’s right: in addition to receiving a salary (and on-campus housing in the case of Choate), her labor enabled her offspring to attend gratis. Had she lacked a college degree, had she lacked experience teaching and working with computers, I would not have had that opportunity.

She’s also a great example of how privilege — or its lack — gets compounded over time. She worked hard, overcoming both the diminished expectations accorded her gender, and discrimination from male bosses. But she also benefited from privilege.  As a white South African, she had access to educational opportunities that black South Africans did not.  I can say with certainty that if my mother were from the same country but of a different race, I would not be where I am today.  That’s unearned privilege.

Attending private schools made all the difference for me. Although I had peers in public school (a perfectly adequate public school) who did well and went on to college, I too easily succumbed to the prevailing attitude (among the students) that one should do as little as possible.  In private school, however, the prevailing attitude was that we all needed to work hard.  The work was challenging, and we had to rise to our teachers’ expectations.

That was just the nudge I needed. I didn’t become an “A” student overnight. Indeed, I had to do an extra year at Choate to pass the language requirement (there was no way I was going to make it through third-year Russian), and to get my grades up enough to get into college.  Aided by a semester abroad (in Valladolid, Spain), I did three years of Spanish in two years, improved my grades, and got accepted at a couple of good colleges.

At the University of Rochester, I became a model student, and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in both English and Psychology. But, here, too, privilege came to my aid. Having that excellent private-school education meant that I knew how to study. During my freshman year, many of my public-school friends were shocked by the amount of work. I wasn’t. The work may have been harder, but I knew what I had to do.

In calling attention to the role privilege has played in my own success, I do not mean to dismiss the role of a solid work ethic. Mr. Marks is correct to emphasize the importance of hard work. For most of college, I worked two jobs — one via Work/Study, and one as a Resident Advisor (which paid for room and half of board).  I say “most” because I became an R.A. my second year; indeed, I was one of two sophomore R.A.s that year.  (The others were all juniors and seniors.)  In addition to those jobs, I studied hard, spending long hours in the library.  I carried those work habits on to graduate school and into my career as an English professor.

However, I must point out that I was not working, say, 30-hour weeks in addition to doing schoolwork. The hours of the R.A. job varied, and the Work/Study job was, to the best of my recollection, about 8 hours a week, give or take. I have students now who work full-time, are the sole caregiver for their children, and are pursuing a B.A. That’s a much steeper hill to climb.

The problem in this country is not laziness. The problem is unacknowledged, unearned privilege.  It’s not that people lack industry; they lack opportunity. But the privileged — unconscious of the degree to which their own advantage has aided them — fail to see this, and so write well-intentioned, naïve articles like “If I Were a Poor Black Kid.” Mr. Marks means well, but his prescription for success would not have helped me.  And I was a middle-class white kid.

The photo is of me, at about age 11, reading The Hobbit.

Moments after I finished my the oral portion of comprehensive exams, Professor Michael Kreyling (a member of my committee) turned to me and said, “You’re going to want to relax.  But you can’t.”  He then listed many reasons for not relaxing: I needed to write a dissertation proposal, start working on the dissertation itself, send out articles to journals, and so on.

In the decade and a half since then, I’ve often thought of those words.  The longer I’ve been in academia, the busier I’ve become.  Indeed, had you told me in graduate school that, in a single semester (this one), I would be giving two different invited talks, delivering one conference paper, writing another (for MLA in January), writing an afterword (for The Complete Barnaby vol. 1), posting twice weekly to a blog, editing a book series, writing two book reviews, heading up the children’s literature track of our M.A. program, serving on various committees, teaching a couple of classes, and that this would be a laughably incomplete list of my activities,… I’d have thought: Yeah, right.  No one can do that much in one semester.  (I would also have thought: What? Me? Employed as a professor? You must be joking.)

Life was not always this busy.

Once upon a time, I was — to put this generously — not very industrious. As a young person, formal education held little interest for me; indeed, I was at best an indifferent student.  I had interests, but they tended to fall outside of school curriculum: reading and writing stories, working out songs on my guitar, playing games on the computer.  Then, at about the age of 18, I applied myself, improved my grades, went on to college, and have been working hard ever since.

But, for many years, I still retained (and, in some measure, still retain) the perception of myself as lazy — or, at least, as having tendencies towards sloth.  Empirically, I realized that (as a brief look at my CV confirms) this notion is absurd. So, I’ve also had a competing perception of myself as at least somewhat accomplished in my field of endeavor.  These perceptions have competed with one another for years.  At present, the latter view is in the ascendant.

One motivation for taking on so much was to combat my secretly slothful nature. If I signed myself up for a lot of different projects (books, essays, invited talks, conference papers), I reasoned, then I’d have to rise to the challenge and get it done.  As Jim Infantino sings,

I’m addicted to stress — that’s the way that I get things done.

If I’m not under pressure, then I sleep too long,

And hang around like a bum.

I think I’m going nowhere and that makes me nervous.  (Jim’s Big Ego, noplace like Nowhere, 2000)

Though (contrary to the song) I don’t actually drink coffee, this “motivated by pressure” approach has proven quite a successful strategy — if a rather exhausting one.

These days, I’m not “addicted to stress.”  Indeed, I would welcome fewer tasks.  And yet… I have more to do than ever before.  Rarely do I get 6 hours a sleep per night (I function best on at least 7, although that hardly ever happens anymore).

Having said that, to complain about this predicament (especially in these dire economic times) would seem churlish in the extreme.  After all, I am an academic with a tenure-track job.  Heck, I’m an academic with tenure.  For any non-academics reading this, here’s a little context: 50% of students in doctoral programs drop out before earning the Ph.D.  Of those who do get the doctorate, job prospects within academe are few and shrinking.  Each year, the academy produces five times as many Ph.D.s in English as there are tenure-track jobs for Ph.D.s in English.  When I got my degree (1997), the stats were slightly better — annually, four times as many Ph.D.s as there were jobs for Ph.D.s.

Beyond having “beat the odds,” I also have an interesting job.  Let me say that again: I also have an interesting job.  Of the people fortunate enough to be employed, how many have jobs from which they derive meaning?  I don’t have the stats on this question, but I suspect the answer is: very few.  It’s a great privilege to have a job from which you gain more than a paycheck.  True, such intrinsic motivation is especially important when your last pay raise came in 2007.  (I’m told we’re getting one at the end of this year, though.  Here’s hoping!)  But my point is that being a professor is a really great job.  I get to learn stuff, and then share what I’ve learned — in the classroom, at conferences, in my books and articles, and even on this blog.  How awesome is that?  (Answer: very!)

Still, I also have the suspicion that might enjoy life more if I did not work 60+ hour weeks.  I often think of that New Yorker cartoon, where, with a hamster wheel in the background, one hamster says to the other: “I usually do two hours of cardio and then four more of cardio and then two more of cardio.”

So, despite all that I love about my job, I sometimes want to ask: Will I ever get off the treadmill?  On the other hand, I do prefer my treadmill to the one in the cartoon.