• “Smart like Daddy, Pretty like Mommy”
• “Too Pretty to Do Homework” (Now, if they’d called it “Too Busy With Other Things to Do Homework,” they would’ve had a point) — and follow-up: the bright pink “Allergic to Algebra”

…Now allow me to put it back together again:

• One girl’s rant
• And one teacher’s strategy

UPDATED: This Jimmy Kimmel clip is absolutely hilarious — especially the girl who gets the half-eaten sandwich! — but the family whose idea of “terrible presents” is to give their kids presents for the “wrong” gender makes me very sad.

Just now Luke and his older brother were watching a video that involved teasing a cartoon dog and Luke became extremely upset that someone was being “mean to a dog.” In the midst of his enraged stomping off, he yelled, “Dogs helped us stay alive!” (The New Yorker a few months back says Luke is right about that.) To avert the tears that were forming, his dad offered Luke the chance to pick the next video. Brightening immediately, he said, “Let’s watch cat teasers!”

I love that kid. Let’s hope tomorrow’s presents (for these kids) and the next day’s (for my niece) are as successful.

Aunt Emily had spent a lifetime interfering–days–weeks–years.  There was nothing she could do better, or that she enjoyed more.  To thrust her finger into somebody’s pie and wreck it–that was Aunt Emily for you.  Lucinda’s grandmother, having died when her mother was a very little girl, had left Aunt Emily the oldest of the family; and to her had descended that divine right of putting her finger into family pies.

–Ruth Sawyer, ROLLER SKATES

P.S. Just so there’s no confusion with regards to the name, I’d like to state for the record that the above quote is not about me.  You can tell because I have no siblings.

So many vampires, with the fangs and the capes and the medals – nobody knows how they earned them.

- Professor Frink (weird scientist guy), The Simpsons

(note, this is the first of several semi-related posts on the Hunger Games trilogy – stay tuned for more!)

So, I love the whole trilogy, but CATCHING FIRE is my favorite, and here’s why – its about organizing.  And I’m an organizer and activist, and thus love and appreciate books (non-fiction or fiction alike) that actually show the organizing process – the how of how change comes about, which mainstream history and a lot of fiction tends to skip past.  CATCHING FIRE doesn’t get into as much detail as I personally might like, but I recognize I’m probably on one extreme of that preference spectrum in Collins’ overall readership, so I’ll cut her a little slack.  Because what she does quite well is thread in bits and pieces throughout the book that make two things clear: a mass rebellion does not occur “spontaneously;” and depending on your personal experience and context, you are going to see and understand (or not see and not understand) what is happening very differently.

We get a number of glimpses of organized resistance before Katniss re-enters the Games, which we see primarily through Katniss’ perspective, but which we also get important alternative interpretations of through other characters.

The changing of the head peacekeeper and general crackdown in District 12 bring to light the extent to which the underground economy centered around the Hob was in fact a set of organized survival mechanisms within an oppressive regime – ones that have not, in Katniss’ memory at least, been used to challenge that system and thus were permitted to exist, but which actually put in place the kind of networks of communication, mutual support, and solidarity upon which more overt resistance movements build.  Which is why it makes sense that the Capitol immediately does what it can to wipe out the whole underground world of District 12 upon the emergence of resistance elsewhere and small signs that at least a few individuals in District 12 might have similar thoughts.  Of course, burning the Hob to the ground and electrifying the fence doesn’t destroy deeper community networks.  In fact, Katniss’ mother makes it clear that the period of laxness has been relatively short (although apparently long enough that Katniss doesn’t clearly remember the last harsher time), and she and others seem to return pretty seamlessly to the roles they played previously.

Katniss interprets the crackdown as largely a personal retaliation by the Capitol against her.  She has no clear memory of previous similar situations, so unlike her mother and some other townspeople who seem to see the lax period as an exception and the crackdown as a more of a return to what came before, Katniss sees the opposite.  Furthermore, without context for understanding how collective action happens, how and why people respond to oppression in various ways at different times, Katniss sees both the acts of overt resistance that seem to her eyes to crop up out of nowhere, and the Capitol’s response, as direct consequences of her defiance with the poison berries.  President Snow, of course, encourages that line of thinking and its corollaries: that she is personally responsible for any and all actions that follow down the line, and that she has the capability to stop others’ resistance. (More on this in a later post).

Gale provides an important contrast here, because at the start of THE HUNGER GAMES his perspective is actually quite similar.  He’s portrayed as a more rebellious personality than Katniss – he sees the system as unjust and unfair, and it makes him angry, and more than anything else he comes off as frustrated.  Which makes sense because the only solution he’s able to present is for him and Katniss to run away and live in the woods.  Which they can’t do, because they’re each primarily responsible for feeding their families.  While Gale may be bolder than Katniss in stating his feelings towards the Capitol, he’s no more equipped to do anything about it than she is.  It’s after he leaves school and begins to work in the mines that his perspective shifts.  When Katniss tells him about seeing the District 8 uprising on the Mayor’s TV, his immediate reaction is completely different from hers:

“And it’s my fault Gale.  Because of what I did in the arena.  If I had just killed myself with those berries, none of this would’ve happened.  Peeta could have come home and lived, and everyone else would have been safe, too.”

“Safe to do what?” he says in a gentler tone. “Starve?  Work like slaves?  Send their kids to the reaping?  You haven’t hurt people–you’ve given them an opportunity.  They just have to be brave enough to take it.  There’s already been talk in the mines.  People who want to fight.  Don’t you see?  It’s happening!”

Whereas Gale proposes running away early in THE HUNGER GAMES, and is willing to try running away at Katniss’ suggestion moments before the conversation above, he’s able to see collective rebellion as a viable third option beyond the status quo and running away, at least under the right circumstances  For Katniss it doesn’t register that way, even after Gale presents it.  While there are many things that I think go into explaining Katniss’ reactions (which I will write about more fully in future posts on the series), what seems to me to explain the shift in Gale’s outlook is that he’s gone to work in the mines.  Presumably Gale is learning from others at his job who have been in that context longer and may have previous experiences acting collectively.  Katniss doesn’t get that education.

The other two examples of organized rebellion Katniss encounters are her glimpse of riots in District 8 on the Mayor’s TV, and the District 11 response to her and Peeta’s stop on the train tour.

In both cases, Collins made it clear to me as a reader that the people of those districts had chosen to organize against the Capitol.  Perhaps Katniss’ berry moment provided inspiration or created a moment in which people decided to take that step into defiance, but between that moment and the scenes Katniss witnessed they have clearly done significant collective organizing work to create and then attempt to carry out a plan for active rebellion against the capitol.  It’s that in between part that Katniss, unfortunately but also very realistically, doesn’t have the context to recognize.  When, after her speech honoring Rue and Thresh in District 11, the audience offers a salute, she realizes, “What happens next is not an accident.  It is too well executed to be spontaneous, because it happens in complete unison.”  But she doesn’t seem able to get deeper into what that means.

Likewise, when she sees the District 8 uprising on the mayor’s TV, her response is: “I’ve never seen anything like it, but I can only be witnessing one thing.  This is what President Snow calls an uprising.”  She doesn’t seem to have a sense of what must have happened to lead to the violent, frightening scene she’s seeing, nor, importantly, does she seem to latch onto what it might lead to, other than the immediate effect of people being hurt or killed, and the threat to her family and loved ones because of her conversation with President Snow.

Katniss evaluates what she sees based on what she knows – she doesn’t know any system other than the one she grew up with, and she doesn’t seem to have learned about or latched onto the idea of substantial change as a real-life possibility.  That makes sense because she doesn’t know collective action, she doesn’t understand organizing, and without some sense of that she has no context for thinking about how what seems like a complete fantasy (ie, overthrowing the Capitol) could occur.  Without some idea of how, its hard to imagine it as real.

“Miss Binney, I want to know — how did Mike Mulligan go to the bathroom when he was digging the basement of the town hall?”

Miss Binney’s smile seemed to last longer than smiles usually last.  Ramona glanced uneasily around and saw that others were waiting with interest for the answer.  Everybody wanted to know how Mike Mulligan went to the bathroom.

- Beverly Cleary, RAMONA THE PEST

(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.

The difference between a brilliant punster and a groan-inducing punster is mostly a matter of how high the threshold is set for public utterance.

– Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams, Jr., INSIDE JOKES: USING HUMOR TO REVERSE-ENGINEER THE MIND

He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground.

– Susan Andersen, BABY, I’M YOURS.

…Okay, fine, it’s a typo. Although frankly, putting a typo like this in your book (and then blogging it) is not a bad viral marketing campaign.

He was a man of hair and anger, this Aag, whose henna-tinted locks stood out from his head like wrathful orange serpents; a man, too, of chin hair, whose russet beard stuck out in all directions like the rays of an ill-tempered sun; a man of eyebrows, quarrelsome scarlet bushes which curled upward and outward above a pair of glaring black eyes; and a man also of ear hair, long, stiff, crimson strands of ear hair, that corkscrewed outward from both those fleshy organs of hearing.

- Salman Rushdie, LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE