The boy at the top of the stairs

I bought Padma Venkatraman’s CLIMBING THE STAIRS a while back thanks to rave reviews, and pulled it off my shelf a couple nights ago.

(The one benefit of a recent roommate’s departure, even though I miss her and her troublemaking cat: she cleaned; I found piles of unread books. The benefit of having recently canceled the internet in my home: I read said books instead of blogs.)

At first I didn’t get what the reviewers were so excited about. The setting–World War II-era India–was interesting, but some of the dialogue felt forced, and it seemed like Venkatraman was setting us up for a fairly obvious morality play.

Then she introduced the love interest. Then I got it.*

(SPOILER ALERT for what follows.)

The best thing about CLIMBING THE STAIRS is that it could so easily have fallen into Sarah Dessen Syndrome–the label I stole from YA Lit and Death for when the romance is built on the preternaturally perfect and mature teenage boy solving the heroine’s previously intractable problems with his unnatural sensitivity and emotional insight, ’cause we all know that’s how high school relationships work–but it chooses to go somewhere totally else.

Venkatraman has Raman, the boy, repeatedly fail to understand why the protagonist Vidya is suffocating under the restrictions of her freedom, why she lives in terror of marriage and being subject to a husband’s control. And every time he doesn’t get it, Vidya gets angry and calls him on it. And he’s bewildered, and then he thinks about it, and then he learns.

And yeah, I fell in love with him too.

And also, the main reconciliation scene? Top-notch. This is what teen romance is for.

* Incidentally: I said this line spontaneously yesterday while recounting to friends at the bus stop–I live in a college town; you run into people you know at the bus stop; it’s weird–what I’d read the night before, and we started speculating about whether you could liven up seminars by having a point in each class where you say, “And now let me introduce the love interest.”

Like, are the “new cultural approaches” to the sociology of poverty the Romeo to the study of institutionalized racism’s Juliet, and maybe those crazy kids would be able to make it work if only their families would quit carrying on an old war that no one even remembers what it’s about anymore, but people are going to die, ok, because Romeo can’t keep it in his pants and thinks he’s meant to be with every next girl, and Juliet’s a little desperate and starved of guys like Romeo’s attention, but maybe they’d be able to look back on it later and laugh about that youthful romance that they both learned something from if only her parents would stop flipping out every time Romeo turns up on the balcony? Or are they actually the little punk-ass rebel at school, who seems all subversive and so you cut school with him and think everything he says is, like, so deep, and then it turns out he stole all those cheap lines from a Vincent Gallo movie and he’s been sleeping with your sworn enemy on the side, and your grandma’s all, “I told you so,” only now your grandma’s named Steve Steinberg? Like that. I would offer extra credit to any student who wrote a convincing romantic short story about our class material, but I’d dock them points if the ending were contrived, or, worse, if it didn’t really sell the romance. ‘Cause, you know, I have pretty exacting standards and I expect students to rise to them.

This is a favorite pasttime among several of my grad student friends: come up with the tics we plan to cultivate as faculty to provide our students with endless amusement, speculation, and class bingo/drinking games. If I ever learn that one of the bizarre faculty behaviors we go into hysterics over is similarly affected, that professor will have my undying admiration. But the truth is, I probably don’t need to cultivate anything. We play this game because from our perspective, hilariously crazy behaviors are something we’d have to artificially decide to engage in. But it seems inevitable that just letting our own personalities shine through will provide fodder enough for student scorn.

If my previous calculus textbooks had been like this, I would probably be good at calculus.

Papers should also be required to be neat and legible. They should not look as if a stoned fly had just crawled out of an inkwell.

– Serge Lang, A FIRST COURSE IN CALCULUS, 5th edition

I bought this one on recommendations on the internet, and so far it is so much better than the actual required text for the calc class I’m quasi-taking. Even if the reason I got it so cheap is that the printer didn’t separate the pages right. I like to think it adds a little rustic adventure to my calc experience as I ponder how to turn the page…

Shooting the moon

Sorry for the sparse posting. Although I have about eight different gay teen romance posts half-written, they have to wait, because I am spending today learning math in my backyard.*

I am not particularly good at math because I have no intuition for it. But I am excellent at logic, and therefore I believe I can learn to be, well, good enough at math. But after being very frustrated by my math textbooks — I can do many of the problems, but I have no sense of what they’re actually telling me — I decided to google around for intuitive explanations of basic math. Why didn’t I do this earlier?

Therefore I leave you with this quote, from my great find of the day:

Math and poetry are fingers pointing at the moon. Don’t confuse the finger for the moon.

(The site has excellent explanations of exponential and logarithmic functions too; the above link is to a page on calculus. And once again, as I read this stuff, I think about how I could have been good at math, and am sad. But it’s not too late! Dry-as-dust textbooks can’t keep me down!!)

* It’s surprisingly relaxing reading textbooks when you can do it in the shade next to a lake… oh, did I mention that my backyard is on a lake?! I love my new home. Also, this is the part of the day when reading in the backyard with a big mug of tea becomes reading in the backyard with a big glass of wine. Which also definitely improves the math experience.

Fake Friday “Why?”: Why do I own so much crap… and WHY is it all so DIRTY?

Just a quick note to say sorry about the light posting… my old lease ends tomorrow, which means all the parts of moving I’ve been “planning to get to” are, you know, needing to be gotten to.

The one extremely satisfying part? Every time I find something related to my old Master’s thesis — the one I abandoned for a different topic I love at the beginning of the summer — and I throw it away. This has happened a lot because I worked on that shit for two years, and accumulated a lot of crap related to it. I saved two small things (both pieces that I wrote) for posterity. But mostly I have loved throwing them in the garbage with a big smile on my face.

Next week, having given away a box of children’s books, I will buy more in reward!!!

Because a TV show is kind of like a novel, only without all that description, and with a lot more ironic segues.

So I’m working on my last paper of the semester, which means after a hiatus I’m back to watching ONCE AND AGAIN. …As in, I settled in yesterday after a long day of reading journal articles and practicing calculus* to watch one episode… and six episodes later, sun rising, birds chirping, said, Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

This compressed quarter-season of viewing began with the particularly MY SO-CALLED LIFE-echoing “Outside Hearts,” written by one Alexa Junge. My first thought? To wonder if Alexa Young, author of FRENEMIES (which I haven’t read), could possibly be a pen name for Alexa Junge. Because I could totally believe that someone who wrote this episode wound up as a young adult novelist.

Today’s Googling and IMDBing seems to make this unlikely (though not impossible), but now I’m wondering: anyone know of TV writers who also write YA? I’ve already read, and enjoyed, RATS SAW GOD by Rob Thomas (the creator of VERONICA MARS, whose first season I deeply, desperately love**, and the new 90210, which I’ve yet to see). It seems like these should be overlapping skill sets. Is the money so good in TV that once people are in it, there’s no point to writing novels? (Thomas, I believe, wrote novels before breaking into TV.) Anyone got recommendations?

* Yes, the weirdest way in which my summer plans altered this week is that I signed up for two math classes. This impulsive decision resulted from a professor, after reading another paper I wrote, pointing out that “I’m really pretty certain that this is true!” is less than convincing as a rationale for complicated claims about what happens when many things change at the same time. (He politely declined to note that my authority is particularly unpersuasive on such matters.) We’re going to see if this is as big a disaster as it clearly has the potential to be.

** Bonus: my viewing marathon ended with “Sneaky Feelings,” where a very young Jason Dohring (a.k.a. VERONICA MARS’s Logan Echolls) makes an appearance. Logan is the quintessential example of a character I know I shouldn’t love — because he’s a terrible person — but I do, I do. How do they do that?

A conversation in my boyfriend’s car, approx. 1:20 PM this afternoon

I promise I have real book-related posts coming. I even have them half-written! It’s just, I’m in finals, and thinking a even little bit systematically about anything — even breezy teen romances — is a bit much for me. Thus, we have instead: this clip from one of my ongoing Self-Improvement Projects: Learning to Drive.

ELIZABETH: I am a driving machine! I handle motor vehicles with aplomb!
BOYFRIEND: You need to work on staying in your lane.
ELIZABETH: I move wheel, car obeys! I am its master!
BOYFRIEND: Did you see that stop sign there?
ELIZABETH: Whoa, why is that car coming toward me? Does it not grasp that I control the road?!
BOYFRIEND: Yes, the other cars are why you need to stay in your lane.
ELIZABETH: …Why are there FOOLS standing in the ROAD?
BOYFRIEND: You’re not going to hit them.
ELIZABETH: Don’t they care that they are PLAYING WITH THEIR LIVES?
BOYFRIEND: Please be less outraged by fools, more attentive to location of car.
ELIZABETH: FOOLS, GET OUT OF THE ROAD!
BOYFRIEND: …
ELIZABETH: Hey, that fool is my professor!
[Wild waving ensues. Unclear whether near-victim realized the precariousness of his own survival.]
BOYFRIEND: I think this is enough practice for today.

Our blog is pretty. Right?

So after Emily put me on the spot by finally doing her part of the Frankie Landau-Banks discussion we’d both been putting off for a million years, I explained my own delinquency in the comments thus:

My post about Frankie’s feminism is coming, but not tomorrow. All of my posts have been delayed somewhat by my being at the Population Association of America annual conference, for which I have created the Largest Demography Poster in the History of Posters or Populations. I don’t believe that this can end well, but I believe it may well be highly amusing.

And because I know you all read this blog for updates on my demographic display activities: Despite a tremendous comedy of errors involving misbooked (me) and canceled (my professor) flights, a realization ten days before the conference that we had failed to book a hotel room (me) or had booked one in the wrong country (professor), and other assorted mishaps culminating in an Amazing Road Trip Adventure, our excessively large poster arrived (only a tiny bit mangled) in Detroit and was bestowed with a poster award.

Now, I am convinced that we won this award because our poster had the best color scheme of the whole conference. I feel strongly about colors, and other people, too, feel strongly about color combinations I pick out, though not always in the way I would like. Here’s a sample snippet from when Emily and I were experimenting with options while setting up our blog:

EMILY: That is the ugliest, clashingest color combination I have ever seen.
ELIZABETH: What do you mean? I wear these colors together all the time!
EMILY: You… often clash.

In the creation of our poster, my professor and I went back and forth on many aspects of the content and design, but the one change I would not countenance was any alteration to our colors. Which stubbornness I felt was entirely vindicated by subsequent award.

And then, after all that, I looked at our blog and realized for the first time that the main visual feature of our poster — purple heading boxes fading from dark to light — is also the main visual feature of Underage Reading. Apparently, while I love all the colors, I do have a favorite. I do think our blog suffers, however, from lack of the green and orange accents that made our poster a winner.

Additionally: Emily and I realized too late that our blog’s purple-and-gray are also the colors of our high school. The less said about that, the better.

Why I love it: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

We are both blogging this week about Frankie Landau-Banks, her history, and its lack of reputability. Emily posts about the book’s use of language today; come back tomorrow (or however we space them out) for Elizabeth’s take on the book’s feminism.

Elizabeth had told me I would love THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS, by E. Lockhart. Not just that it was a great book, but that I particularly would love it, and she couldn’t tell me why because that would ruin it, but trust her.

So I was at Barnes and Noble soon after that and picked it up to read a few pages and see if it was worth buying, and I got to page 2 and burst out laughing at “It’s not for me to pugn or impugn their characters.” And then I finished reading Frankie’s letter to the headmaster and really couldn’t contain my glee at “gruntlement”, and I called Elizabeth and left a long voicemail, in which I definitely gave up on words a few times in favor of happy squeal noises, and said I didn’t know if this was what she meant as the reason I would particularly love this book (as it turned out it wasn’t), but it was incredible and if there was some other reason on top of it I couldn’t even fathom what a great book this would be.

And while there are many great things about TDHFLB, having read it fully twice what I genuinely love most, is the language, and that’s for a few reasons. One is just I like language and puns and silly words and silly usages of words, and did I say puns? So reading that Frankie does not want to pugn anybody’s character is endlessly amusing for me. On a deeper level, though, I think Lockhart does an incredible job of using Frankie’s language and thought patterns (which relate properly to each other in the way that they do in real people) to create her as a character. And while lots of books have characters with clear styles of speaking, or accents, or slang, that help put them in a time and place and form a piece of the character, I can’t think of another book where not just the way a character speaks, but the way she herself explicitly thinks about language are so key to understanding her personality.

It also helps that Frankie’s particular attitude towards language happens to be very similar to mine. I like to use language the way it ought to logically work, even when that’s not how it really works. I always get annoyed at the redundancy of the phrase “from whence”; and when no actual word in the English language signified the meaning I needed to express in my senior thesis, I made one up and used it throughout. I was telling a friend of mine about TDHFLB and the neglected positives and it was only once we were deep in argument that I realized we were having almost the exact conversation that Frankie and Matthew have:

“Mmmm,” she whispered. “Now I’m gruntled.”
“What?”
“Gruntled. I was disgruntled before.”
…
“And now, you’re…”
“Gruntled.”
She had expected Matthew’s face to light at the new word, but he touched her chin lightly and said, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”
…
“Gruntled means grumpy,” he said, walking over to the dictionary, which stood on a large stand.
…
“Why? Frankie was cross that he was being so literal. “That makes no sense, because if gruntled means grumbly, then disgruntled should mean un-grumbly.”
“Um…” Matthew scanned the dictionary. “Dis- can be an intensifier, as well as a negative.”
Frankie bounced on the couch. “I like my version better.”

EMILY: And the best thing is, she comes up with these neglected positives, like where there’s a word with a negative prefix but the positive version isn’t a word or doesn’t mean what it should. Like, there’s disgruntled, but there’s no gruntled. Hee! Gruntled!
ADAM: But that doesn’t really work, its not how the language evolved.
EMILY: But gruntled!
ADAM: We have different attitudes towards language. I don’t like made up words.
EMILY: Or ept! Like inept, ept.
ADAM: Yes. I’m glad you’re enjoying.
EMILY: But they’re such good made up words. And sometimes you have to make up words, if the one you need doesn’t exist.
ADAM: Then you find a word that does exist.
EMILY: I like my way better.

A lot of folks have written a lot of great posts and comments about why TDHFLB is a great book, and Elizabeth’s going to write about feminism in the book tomorrow later this week, but ultimately, why I love it is neglected positives.

Wednesday Words: Laurie Halse Anderson needs to stop talking about me like that

He tries to pump his fist in the air like he’s a pro football player, but he looks more like a lame college professor trying to hail a cab.

– Laurie Halse Anderson, WINTERGIRLS (the Advanced Reader Copy, so not the final version sold in stores).

In today’s Wednesday Words, the narrator Lia is speaking of her bigshot history prof father, and it’s worth noting that the paragraph preceding this was as follows:

“Excellent,” he says. “My editor is extending the deadline and she’s giving me another advance to pay for a research trip to London.”

N.B.: Do not enter academia thinking that you will get a book deal that pays for research trips to London. This will not happen to you. If you are a successful tenure-track or tenured professor in a book-writing field, however, you may get to write some books with print runs of about 1,000 copies. Dream big.

In which I admit to being a bigger nerd than even my previous posts may have conveyed.

So now that I’ve blogged about my love of genre subversion, I feel a strange compulsion to contribute my most embarrassing genre-related life experience. Hey, we’ve all got one, right? …Guys?

So anyway, when I was in fifth grade, I auditioned to be on READING RAINBOW. Ten years old is a bit old for that show, but because I was small, we thought it might work.

Until, as like the first question in their interview process, they asked me what I like to read.

Now, I hasten to explain that we were learning about genres in school*, so what transpired next is not entirely my fault.

But suffice it to say that when I cheerfully replied, “Well, my favorite genre is Realistic Narrative,” the interview was pretty much over. And my dreams of TV stardom were shot, yet again.

Rejected by LeVar? Could anything but a life of geekish isolation follow?

*Seriously, we learned the randomest shit at my school. The only other things I remember about fifth grade are the strange properties of soap molecules, and how mean and racist my teacher was.