What's In A Class? A Meditation on Failure

So, following in the steps of several historic developments (*rumps disasterous election, the rise of the far right in the US and Europe, my book release) I decided to spend the Spring of 2017 teaching a class on Comparative Genocide. What can I say? I was pissed after the election, after watching my African American students try to process what living in *rump's America will look like for them, after seeing students cry in class when considering their immigration status. Pissed for myself and everyone else. And, thus, I wanted to do something about it.

Comparative Genocide. That's what I decided to do. I wanted to contextualize the history of 20th century genocides (Armenia, Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda) and use them as warning signs in relation to contemporary world politics. This requires a lot of finesse, to not seem like I'm "just" forcing some sort of worldview on a bunch of Georgia students, which I genuinely don't want to do. I just want them to historicize the current moment in a more sophisticated manner. They should have a better understanding of the gravity and complexity of genocide than our current president, who wrote in Yad Vashem's guest book the following:

This blog is titled a meditation on failure for a reason, naturally, although my students were able to more successfully contextualize politics after taking it. I think. Their portfolios indicated yes, but those are always designed for a particular audience (me!) so they want to suck up a bit.

It was a good class. It was well balanced, contained engaging material, and had a clear focus. That was great. What it was not however, was a good first year composition course. This was an interesting experience for me, as I haven't taught a good class that was also a failure before. I've taught duds of classes to be sure, ones that were accidentally boring, or that were unbalanced, or just plain too much work. Those I accept as failures and move on. But this was a weird combination of success/failure that I haven't experienced before.

Why? 

Well, a few reasons.

My class was the only section of the first semester composition sequence (1101/1102) offered that spring. The one and only. Students were forced to take a class on genocide even if they had no interest, or were actively hostile towards it. In portfolios I received comments that students felt that way particularly until they realized there were other genocides besides the Holocaust. The Holocaust is old hat from high school, but no one ever learned about Rwanda. Weird. Still, it's a hard topic if you haven't chosen it.

The class was at 9 AM. So students who would normally take afternoon classes, because of night-owl ways or an inability to wake up in the morning, were also forced (within reason, I mean they could delay to the fall, but that probably screws a lot of them up) to get up early. I've never had so many absences at Tech as I did this term.

I like to joke around in class a lot. But that's obviously super hard to do when you're teaching a comparative genocide class. Even joking about myself (which is usually my favorite target) was hard to do in this class. I don't know what kind of charisma you need to rock a genocide class, but I did not have it last spring. Plus, I was so mad. Did I mention I was mad? So mad.

The final book I chose was way too long. I'm not sure what I would do besides We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. It's great, but also full of such good information throughout that it's hard to excerpt. However, teaching the longest book at the end of an intense semester isn't my first suggestion.

I changed the final project at the last minute to an anti-genocide organization PSA and they just were sort of duds. I liked the structure of the other assignments: a genocide infographic, a primary source analysis, and a film review blog. That all worked well, But I would likely have students do a very different oral presentation assignment if I were to teach this using the WOVEN communication model again.

All of this said, after I spent a week at the USHMM completing a Hess Seminar in January 2018, I started considering how I could resurrect this class. First, teach it in fall, not spring. Second, switch my supplemental texts. I liked John Cox's To Kill a People quite a bit. I would keep that and drop Jan Gross' Neighbors, which is just too harsh for first year students. I think I would replace it with something on Roma-Sinti and the Holocaust, since students are familiar with Jewish victims but know very little about others. I would teach a graphic novel about the Armenian Genocide, likely, and Never Fall Down for Cambodia (even though I loved Don't Think I've Forgotten). Then finish with a film rather than book for Rwanda. See, now I'm wondering if I can't bring this class back after all, and create a successful first year comp class out of it.

Hope springs eternal, I guess, even when teaching genocide.

I Wrote a Book

Many years ago at this point I remember turning to my husband and saying, "I think I can write a book someday." It seemed like a bit of a pipe dream, as I was still partway through my PhD program, and hadn't even settled on a dissertation topic.

And yet! Here we are! I wrote both a dissertation and now a book. It took like six years! It's got a title I don't particularly like, but is full of spiffy keywords so people can find it easily when researching. All the more important in the world of eBooks and the inability to browse shelves, I imagine. So, here's Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature: Engaging Difference and Identity. 

Pretty! The image is from Rachel Whiteread's Vienna Holocaust Memorial

You can read the official fancy phrasing at the link above, and also hit my author profile, if you go to the Routledge link. However, the quick and dirty description of the book is that tolerance is a rather useless goal for multicultural education, because it gives no actual suggestions for action in the face of discrimination. Tolerance discourse also easily falls apart once power structures no longer encourage it as a behavior or ideal. This is all the more important in Trump's America. It's a book about much more than Holocaust literature, although it also offers suggestions for how to find and analyze books on European Jews, Romani, the Disabled, Gay Men, and Neo-Nazis.

Anyway, I hope you'll consider asking your library to purchase it. There's a discount code now of FLR40 which will give you 20% off.

Pokemon Go(es) to Auschwitz

While I think I'm wrapping up my time writing about the Holocaust (final book deadline is 9/21, release date is late 2016 or early 2017) I can't stay away from some stories.

Who remembers the "selfies at Auschwitz" controversy of 2014? Or from 20 years before that the "someone laughed during Schindler's List" controversy? I'm going to touch on these very briefly in order to contextualize the current Pokemon Go kerfuffle. TL:DR is teenagers sometimes act in ways that make their elders all judgy. But for reals, what they're doing isn't that different than what oldsters do. But games are maybe different than selfies.

I've actually long wanted to comment on the incident where "69 students were evicted from the theater because some of them laughed and talked while Holocaust horrors were on screen."  This actually prompted a visit from director Steven Spielberg to the Oakland high school responsible for taking their class to see Schindler's List. There are several good defenses listed in the articles above. The one I want to focus on, however, is the idea of an inappropriate emotional response. Of course, we shouldn't laugh when someone gets shot on screen, right? And extra, extra we shouldn't laugh when it's a Holocaust victim, yes? Well, yes. But that doesn't mean that these students' behavior was worth universal derision. If we think about the ways in which emotional responses are policed within American culture, especially for boys/men, is it really surprising that laughter replaces distress in a moment like this? Particularly in a large group where performing masculinity is essential to one's cultural cache? The argument I want to make here is that both the laughter and the selfies are moments where individuals try to process their emotional experience within (restrictive) cultural norms.

So, flash forward 20 years. Can we have this same discussion when facing the reality that kids take selfies at Auschwitz? What's the emotional response (and record thereof) that is appropriate when visiting a death camp? I want to briefly consider the following images, gathered from a Google image search of various combinations of tourist/picture/portrait/Auschwitz.

A sunny day, a vacation picture, a death camp on the horizon.

A family portrait with crowds of tourists, a location that could be anywhere.

So...are these images acceptable because they are portraits, rather than selfies? Is it the presumed egotism of the selfie that causes the controversy? These groups aren't smiling or making the dreaded duck face. But neither are they clearly expressing shock and distress, the presumed "appropriate" reaction.

Photographer sees you, seeing and photographing Auschwitz.

What about that one time when basically every European major league football team visited Auschwitz while wearing matching uniforms? And were then photographed? Pictured  is team Italy, but you can find pictures of team Sweden and team Germany as well. Not everyone wore warm-up suits, but they did all match, and were clearly there for some promotional learning.

Alamy Stock Photo #G7PBJM

Or how about an Auschwitz stock photo? 

What I'm getting at here is that there isn't a good way to photograph oneself at a place like Auschwitz. The impulse is to track and process our experiences in all of these images, or to imagine and purchase what that experience might be like in the case of the stock photo. How are selfies different?

The one that broke the internet.

The photo above got the most traction, with articles featured in USA Today, The Washington Post, and others. It's actually a perfect storm for those who want to attack one or many of the following: teenagers, young women, social media users, emoji users, tourists, people who like pink. Yet Princess B here is doing nothing so very different than the portraits seen above, tracking, processing, and representing our experience of a terrible place. Teenagers do it differently and more publicly than their predecessors, possibly. But I'm willing to bet there are a slew of photo albums and slide carousels that hold smiling death camp visitors, processing and tracking their experience as well.

This one, including the tag "Arbeit Mach Freiiiiiiiiiiiii" faced its own unique derision
as it came from a group of Israeli teenagers.

The image above looks a little like it could be a boy-band album cover. The faces have been politely blurred (whcih maybe I should have done here as well, but I'm commenting on facial expressions, so...) Yet this doesn't seem that different than many of the images of footballers participating in promotional tours of the death camp. 
In fact, a search of "tourists crying at Auschwitz" produces no significant image results. I'm not surprised. When I was busy crying in one of those reflection areas at the USHMM the last thing I wanted was a picture. Yet I may have photographed myself out front (may have even taken a selfie) before or after the visit, documenting that I was there.

Ah, but what of Pokemon Go at Auschwitz? Or at the USHMM? I don't like it. No, sir, I don't. But I'm trying to figure out why I feel differently about this. Isn't Pokemon just another way of processing the world? How is it different than a selfie?

Pokemon @ Auschwitz 7/11/16

It's not like I can claim "distraction" as the reason why it's bad. After all, posting to social media is in it's own way distracting. Everyone will pretty much take a peek at what their friends are doing if they log in to post a selfie. Our focus slips. away from the space in front of us and towards the world of the interwebs, and friends, and others' selfies. So that's not it.

The mediation of memory is part of it. There's an anonymity to it that feels weird to me in a way that the selfie or uncomfortable laughter at Spielberg doesn't. I think the biggest problem, however, is tucked away in the slogan itself: "Gotta Catch 'Em All." Pokemon Go is an experience you have everywhere. Or can have, or try to have, as you pursue all of them. 

Memorials, by their very nature, are not everywhere spaces. They have been set aside in order to emphasize a particularity of experience. When you take a selfie at a memorial, you're still documenting a place and your relationship to it. When you catch a Pokemon, you mark an experience that you've had at a park, a grocery store, your neighbor's backyard, and then move on to the next one. It's not a process, but a pursuit. The mediation makes them one and the same, coupled with a sense of triumph that feels counterintuitive to the goals of the memorial. 

For the record, I'm not anti-Pokemon. Go forth and triumph. Just maybe not at Auschwitz. 

Hey-yo.

And because you made it all the way to the end, here's my best duck-face selfie (which is not very good, I kept laughing), in front of a disturbing painting in my living room. Still, while it references slavery and lynchings, my house is not a memorial to those things. So feel free to come catch a Wartorle over here.

A Book that Became a TV Show

It seems only appropriate that my blog on Outlander, the late 80s romance novel recently revived as a STARZ series, include some moving images and thus, I give you my first GIF blog. May it be as hilarious as the one on 50 Shades of Gray. (Probably not. That's a pretty great review.)

So, the first thing to keep in mind is that when reading Outlander I picture the love interest like this:

Hey, ladies.

In a kilt. With more chest hair, of course. It's 1742 and they haven't invented waxing yet. (Or have they? Book 2 implies yes...) So, this is Jamie in my mind's eye. He's great. He's a romance novel hero! Of course he's great! He's perfect. Just like Thor.

I found Outlander for like $3 on Amazon Kindle, knew some friends who liked it, and decided to give it a try. I did not, at first, know it was a romance novel. I figured this out once I spotted the Outlander Coloring Book at B&N. (Clearly, early in my reading of it, as it becomes completely obvious later.) However, I've read my Janice Radway and know what's up. Romance novels have a lot more to offer than merely repressive patriarchal representations, right?

Right.

I read Outlander really quickly, considering it comes in at like 800 pages or something. And here we come to my first issue with the book. This book really needed a much better editor. Gabaldon excuses some of the faults by repeatedly saying she never expected anyone would read the book, and thus, the oddities are only natural (paraphrasing from the interview in the back of my TV tie-in edition). Fair enough. But, that's what editors are for.

Another extended description of Scottish politics? Come on! 

Gabaldon obviously did a lot of research for the book. But research doesn't make up for lack of good plotting. Here's the deal. Your main character is sucked back in time through a crazy ladies only (?) portal, She falls in love so much that she's willing to give up toilets for the rest of her life. And hot baths, which are mentioned much more often.

I mean, I guess I'd give up modern plumbing for this?

However, once she finally tells her 18th Century Scottish now-husband about her time traveling ways it plays out like this "I told him. Told him everything, haltingly but coherently." I mean, come on! This is the most interesting thing that has happened so far, the biggest challenge to their relationship, or trust, or whatever. She tells him "everything," he responds with "Aye, I believe ye, Sassenach" and that's that.

So, you say you were born in 1918, eh? 

Similarly, at the end of the book Clare gets a chance to tell Jamie about the effing wolf she killed with her bare hands. Again: "I told him the things I had had no chance to tell him; about the wolf [...] He pressed my face into his shoulder and rocked me while I sobbed." 

Again?

Gabaldon seems to have difficulty deciding if she wants Clare to be a badass or not. And when she gets the chance to show Jamie how she's been a badass in his absence she often fails. Then there's the whole corporal punishment thing. I can't even count how many pages of explanations of Jamie getting beaten by one relative or another I read. It all feels like a giant excuse for the one time he "has" to beat Clare (disobeying orders, endangering others, whatever). At some point someone should have stepped in and been like "look, we get it, already." 

There's also the question of how much pleasure Jamie takes in beating (her words, repeatedly, not mine) Clare.

Gabaldon skirts around the idea of S&M repeatedly, never settling on if she's going to "go there" or not. I don't know. I just felt like there was way too much apology over and over and OVER again for the one scene. Whatever. We get it already. Codes of conduct, Jamie is still a good guy, even if he's just a tiny bit of a sadist. Because maybe he did enjoy it? Or maybe he didn't? Anyway, he promises to never do it again after blah blah blah reasons. 

Of course, the perfect Jamie needs a foil, and thus we have the decisively sadistic Jack Randall. He's everything that Jamie isn't, while packaged in the eerie likeness of Clare's 20th century husband, Frank.

Yeah, I know.

Jack is presented as a sick perverted dude, in no small part because he wants Jamie. I'm quite troubled by Gabaldon's portrayal of Jack's sexual desires as universally repellent, whether they are for his brother, women he wants to traumatize, or just men in general. One of these things is not like the others, and yet they're presented as though they are all of a piece. This is a flaw in the story itself, and one that can't be cleaned up by good editing. There's unsavory ideology at work behind some corners of Outlander, and none of it really has to do with Jamie's 18th century attitudes towards physical punishment. 

Everything needed trimmed, a lot. Less Highland politics, less contextualization of physical punishment, less...stuff.

Witch burning too? Really?

All of this said, I enjoyed Outlander. It was okay, and I can understand why STARZ thought it was a good thing to bring to TV. It's like Game of Thrones lite. There's violence and sex and intrigue, but also cuddles. I tried reading Dragonfly in Amber, but when my library copy was due I didn't bother to renew it. How can a time-travel romance novel be so boring, you may ask? Well, it was mostly missing this: 

More kilt, though. 

I rarely read romance novels (thus my inability to recognize Outlander as one at first!) so I have no real recommendations of what to read instead. But there must be more tightly plotted and inventive books out there, and those with less homophobia and more badassery. Right?

Book by a LGBT Author

Another text that could fulfill a few categories. Longer than 500 pages, one word in the title, and also a LGBT author. Nicola Griffith and Sarah Waters are both known for including lesbian relationships in their work, but it's less central in Hild than in Fingersmith. While I wouldn't, at all, call Fingersmith a book "about" lesbianism/lesbians/lesbian relationships/whatever, that is one of the core elements of the text. I think of it as not as motivating the plot as much as being the underlying heart of the book, if that makes sense. It's always in the background, subtly moving things along while the main scam takes place.

So what is it about? Scams and scam artists. The primary scam is to separate a wealthy heiress from her fortune by first marrying her and then committing her to a madhouse. Two crooks from London's Victorian underbelly, Susan "Smith" and Richard Rivers, plan to separate the innocent Maud from her fortune. Susan will keep 1/3 for the trouble of functioning as a lady's maid while Mr. Rivers woos Maud away from her Uncle's house. And that's all I'm telling you. This isn't a spoiler, as the scam is planned in like the first 30 pages.

This book was addicting. I couldn't really read it before bed because I had such a hard time putting it down once I started. It's got a delicious Gothic feel to it: the crumbling mansion, the horrible Uncle and innocent niece, and the isolation of an English country house. Mean servants, cold rooms, you know the drill. It's also got a lovely Dickensian quality to it with the house full of canny crooks that gives birth to Susan and Mr. Rivers' plot. And did I mention a madhouse? There's one of those too. Anyway, the atmosphere, the growing complexity of the relationship between Maud and Susan, and the tension of the scam all make it so fun. You should absolutely read it. I don't want to say anymore because spoilers. Just go. Read it. Now.

I've read two more of Waters' books since I finished this (hey, I had a book to write, I'm behind on blogging). The Little Stranger and now Affinity which I'm nearly done with. Little Stranger was a bit disappointing. Maybe I read it too closely on the heels of Haunting of Hill House? I find that book terrifying and the ghosts of Little Stranger didn't grab me as effectively. Affinity is enjoyable, but it's no Fingersmith. So my official Waters recommendation will be Fingersmith fo' sho'.  Also, apparently the director of Oldboy, Chan-wook Park is making a Korean adaptation of this. That seems like it will be nuts.

A Book with a One Word Title

I'm sneaking this entry in between book writing and reading a zillion things for my World Lit II class. However, if I don't write this up I'll completely forget the book! I read it in January, for Pete's sake.

Here, I'm going with a Book with a One Word Title from my Better Reading Challenge. I've chosen Hild by Nicola Griffith. This could have fulfilled a few categories: book longer than 500 pages, book by a LGBT author, and a book a friend recommended. Don't worry, it's not taking all four categories, I'm not cheating.

Hild is by an author that I like, Nicola Griffith. I've read and enjoyed Ammonite (1993) and Slow River (1995) and hated The Blue Place (1998). Man, that one was terrible. Anyway, the first two novels were science fiction, and felt like Griffith was trying on genres for size. Ammonite was clearly an homage to Le Guin and Slow River was built on Gibson and other Cyberpunk authors. Hild is where I think Griffith really comes into her own.

It's historical fiction, telling the story of the early days of Hild, who later becomes Saint Hilda.  This is the story of the early conversion of England to Christianity and the tenuous role that one young girl plays in that story. Not tenuous because she's not great, merely because there are so many power plays happening that she's always in danger. What I loved about this book was the pacing. It's slow. Very slow. Reading it felt like sinking into a really comfortable bed. (I was going to say warm syrup, but I thought that might gross you all out.) The slowness of the text really gave me a chance to feel like I was in Hild's head. She's a thinker, a planner, as well as a doer. There's something rare about just engaging with a complex thought process that isn't always even tied to action. 

We also get a larger perspective on women's roles in early Britain. (The book is meticulously researched, so I feel as though they aren't terribly exaggerated, but I'm not an Medievalist so buyer beware.) The relationship between female companions was fascinating, the women's roles at court are complex, and women just generally seem like competent members of society. The opposite of what we often expect based on other fantasy novels, as the NPR review notes. As an aside, Terry Jones also teaches this lesson in his Medieval Lives episode on "The Damsel:" 

I highly recommend Hild if you like engaging in popular conceptions of the Medieval era. Give this a chance now that you've read all zillion pages of Game of Thrones, why dontcha? 

A Book Longer than 600 Pages

Yeah, right. 

Another better reading challenge blog post. I certainly won't make 50 this year, but hopefully 10. I've read many more than 10 books so far this year (and, actually, probably more than 50 at this point) but I don't have as much time to write as I'd like. Or, not as much time for pleasure writing.

First, let me introduce everyone to an amazing resource. Amazing! I’m currently teaching World Lit II online. All of our texts are also online, making the “I don't have the book yet” excuse entirely moot. What a pleasure! Anyway, some of the readings were on rather messy webpages, so I went searching for better versions that could be easily downloaded to Kindle (the Project Gutenberg downloads have never worked for me). I came across the University of Adelaide’s eBook program, and it’s great. The books read well on a web page, but are also easily and quickly downloaded to Kindle. In fact, both the readings I reference here are available: Little Women and Vindication on the Rights of Woman. Go forth and find some books! (I also downloaded Collins’ The Moonstone which I’m super psyched to read in conjunction with Waters’ Fingersmith.)

Oof. When I started reading Little Women on my kindle I didn’t really check to see how long it was. I also apparently read both parts, packaged together as Parts I and II by the Adelade eBook website, not realizing they were published as separate books initially. So, some of these impressions are definitely from Good Wives. When I downloaded the book I just figured, “oh, I haven’t read this and it’s a big hole in my children’s lit knowledge, so I should do it.” Little did I know. So many pages! So much "womanly advice!" So much nonsense disguised as sense!

My book's cover was more utilitarian. 

I really disliked this book. I know so many people have fond memories of it from reading it as a child, but as an adult I found the larger message of meek womanhood to be extremely frustrating. In fact, rereading Wollstonecraft’s Vindication I came across this passage:

Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man.

Of course, this is what Wollstonecraft is rallying against in her treatise. Yet it seems exactly the advice that Jo et. al. receive throughout Little Women. Jo is repeatedly advised to hold her anger inside in order to model ideal femininity. While this article from Michigan Quarterly Review suggests one of the most engaging aspects of the story is Marmee's underlying anger, it's still an anger she has learned to quash and encourages her daughters to do the same. Published in 1868, America is 20 years into "first wave" feminism, but the possibilities of that movement are not reflected in the novel. 

The girls are encouraged to be obedient and proper. One of the most nauseating examples, I think, is the chapter where Meg is struggling a bit after the birth of her first child. She no longer is pretty! And endlessly charming! And she’s tired! And frustrated because she never talks to adults! So her husband just quits eating at home and goes to his friend’s house, where there’s a more charming wife. When Mama March finds out she encourages “a puerile kind of propriety,” suggesting Meg be a perfect version of a housewife until she charms her husband back home. Smile pretty, make nice dinners, and your husband will pay attention to you for a few hours a day. Yeesh.

My one word review

I also think Jo should have ended up with Laurie. They challenged each other! I think the lively discussions were good, not bad. I get why Alcott wanted Jo to remain independent, but I'm not sure a marriage to Laurie automatically undermines her autonomy. It does recenter the book around the girls' relationship with each other, but that's also undone by creating the "good wives" of Part II.

Jo's temper just gets totally checked and she meekly marries that old scholar. Plllbbbthhh. I just really have nothing good to say about it. I suppose it's admirable that Jo starts the school for boys, and that she marries for love and not money. Everyone is happily paired off by the end, the girls' having successfully found husbands due to their excellent feminine virtues.

Anyway, keep those happy childhood memories intact if you have them, and by no means give this a nostalgia reread. It’s a miserable and heavy handed book about obedience to your husband and God. Go read Wollstonecraft instead and see how many of her ideas we have yet to realize. 

A Classic Romance!

So, another entry from the "Better Reading Challenge" realm, this time about a classic romance. Romance isn't actually my genre of choice, but I DO love a "happily ever after" sort of story. STARDUST (2007) and AMELIE (2001) are some of my favorite movies for that reason.

Well, I need a book and its sequels to rightly talk about this one, so you get a three-fer here. I’m choosing Anne of Green Gables, Anne ofAvonlea, and Anne of the Island as my classic romance. Is there anything better than L.M. Montgomery’s thwarted/not-thwarted love stories in general? I mean, for romances? I claim there is not. You also may get the impression here that I’ve read a lot more than these three recently… so sorry if basically all of her works sneak in.

The way relationships develop in Montgomery’s work is really all the more poignant when you realize she herself entered an unhappy marriage after she turned down other men. In Chronicles of Avonlea she seems to want to rectify this over and over and over again.

Anne is, of course, a classic character of children’s lit. After rereading all (yes ALL) of the series earlier this year I feel like they hold up well as an adult reader. Except, EXCEPT Anne of Ingleside. This is one Montgomery went back and wrote later, and the charm has gone out of it. The sewing circle gossip seems mean rather than lighthearted and the whole thing is just…bleh. I think that’s the one everyone focuses on when they say “well, they just get worse as they go along.” Yet, Rilla of Ingleside is a really delightful book. Don’t believe the hype and give Rilla a chance.

Anyway, I love all the romances in Montgomery. Actually, I find Emily Starr and Dean Priest to be just creepy, so maybe not all. That works out okay in the end though. Emily’s a smart girl. Of course Anne and Gilbert is one of the most satisfying since it takes so long to develop (and doesn’t get stupidly put off like Emily and Teddy). You know it’s going to happen, yet they each grow as their own people before they finally get together. In contemporary boy/girl relationships I wouldn’t accept the “well, he pulls your hair because he likes you." Clearly that cements all kinds of really bad expectations for how men and women should interact. However, I’m not actually certain that Gilbert liked Anne at the hair-pulling point though, as he was just probably a jerk. Anne was right to be pissed. Yet, the book certainly teaches us about the downsides of holding a grudge after the Ophelia incident. 

Shakespeare comes to life...

Gilbert and Anne have a lovely romance because they both inspire each other (sometimes out of spite) to work harder and be better people. Once they are married their union is represented as a very happy one (DON’T pay attention to the blurbs for Anne of Ingleside AT ALL). Gilbert is sometimes stuffy and condescending, yes, but overall I accept it as a romance that I feel warm and fuzzy about (nostalgia tinged, of course).

Warm fuzzies.

Most of the books (not Windy Poplars or Ingleside which were written later and not public domain yet) are available as a set online for .99, so I suggest you give them a reread if it’s been a few decades. 

Fiction vs. Non-Fiction

My students had some questions and moments of confusion when they recently completed some discussion board postings. I decided to write a quick FAQ for them, and also post it here for future reference. I'd love to see your thoughts on what else I should include. 

Fiction vs. Non-Fiction FAQ

Which is which?

Fiction is made up. Something that is fictional is NOT real.

Non-Fiction is factual, or real. I know, this seems like it’s backwards from how it should be. But English often doesn’t make any sense.

Similarly:

Novels are always fictional. They are made up. Therefore, not every book is a novel. In fact, most are not.

Non-fiction can be referred to as a text or a book when you are discussing it. Or, for shorter pieces, call them articles or essays.

Is that it? Why do we need a FAQ?

Well, here’s some more subtleties that we can think on:

What about if something really happened in the past and an author wrote a novel about it?

Well, there’s such a thing as historical fiction which means an author takes a historical moment in time and writes about it from a made-up point of view. This is still fiction because the characters and situations come from the author’s imagination. Examples of this sort of book are The Book Thief, The Help, Secret Life of Bees, The Other Boleyn Girl, and Number the Stars.

But what if it’s about a real historical person?

You may also find a novel from the perspective of a person who actually lived. One way to tell if you’re reading fiction or non-fiction in this case is to see if the text is labeled a biography (non-fiction) or a novel (fiction). You can also look for footnotes or references at the end of the book (see below). An example of a fictional text that has a character who did actually live would be Annexed, the story of Diary of Anne Frank told from Peter van Pel’s perspective. Wolf Hall and In the Time of the Butterflies are also examples of this kind of book.

Okay, but what about a book like Devil in the White City? That talks about actual people from the past, but reads like a story.

The difference between Erik Larson’s books and the fictional examples above is in how the authors gather material for their books. In Devil in the White City or others like it, the author will include many notes at the back of the book telling you where the information comes from. They will also often include a prelude or afterword explaining their process of writing. Many popular history texts (like Seabiscuit) will read like a story, yet be carefully footnoted. Importantly, every word a character says comes from either historical record OR interviews (like In Cold Blood), depending on when the book was written. All the dialogue the characters say are words they actually said or wrote, and are not from the author’s imagination.

So what's a memoir?

Well, we tend to assume that memoirs are non-fiction. And most are. Of course, we need to consider the slippery nature of memory itself here and realize our brains are always making things up and filling details in. This is why eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. Just because someone experienced an event, we can't say we have the "truth" from any one description (or even many, because there are all kinds of motivations one might have). Still, readers believe there is "truth" or "authenticity" (both complicated terms on their own) behind a memoir, which is why A Million Little Pieces and Fragments were both so vilified when people discovered they were partially or completely fabricated (i.e. fictional). Here's a little more on the difference between memoir, autobiography, and biography. 

Both of these last two (popular history, memoir) are often referred to as creative non-fiction. 

A Graphic Novel

I'm cheating a bit here and writing about Lumberjanes. It's a comic, rather than a graphic novel, but the first trade paperback has a contained story so it's gonna work here. I'm also writing about it for two forthcoming edited collections (as long as the editors like the work) and presented on it at CHLA recently. So! Quadruple duty for Lumberjanes!

What can I say about LJ? Lots. I just wrote 20 darn pages on it. But here's the highlights:

• The girls of Roanoke Cabin (which, btw, when I presented at CHLA on this topic we were in the Roanoke Room, which was amazing) work as a group to defeat the powers-that-be. There's no defined leader, instead their power comes from working together. We can contrast this against Harry Potter & the Sorcerers Stone where the group is really there to prop up Harry's success. No such power structure here.
• The girls, like actual adolescent girls, are at different stages of development, yet aren't set up as "mean girls" that pick on Ripley (seen above on the far left). I think the rejection of the mean girls trope is cool.
• Unlike the 1990s cartoon representatives of "girl power," the Powerpuff Girls, the LJ's don't gain their abilities from the patriarchy. PPG were created by Dad and given assignments by the Mayor (who, yes, has a power behind the throne woman, but still). The girls learn things, earn badges with bad puns, and use that knowledge to defeat various enemies. I like this, as it challenges some anti-intellectualism we see in American culture. Learning is good y'all.

I encourage you to check the comic out. It was clearly more popular than anticipated,so the trade paperback is sold out on Amazon. However, you can buy back issues of 1-8 on Comixology and read them online/on yer tablet. Two thumbs up so far, although one of the creators is leaving this fall, so we'll see where it goes.

A Book Set in a Different Country

Back to the Better Reading Challenge. Today we're going with "A book set in a different country." I could have chosen a few here, as I've read books set in Sweden and Canada and Germany and Iowa so far this year (see what I did there?)

However, I've gone with Jo Walton's Among Others, which is set in England and Wales.

This is a book in which not a lot happens. And I'm actually okay with that. It's a book about recovering from a trauma, reality, and loving books. Sometimes recovery requires that not much "happen," I guess in a way that I hadn't thought about before reading this book. Mori, the main character, needs the process of reading and writing to recover from the events that led up to her running away from home and finding her long-estranged father.

It's a meditation on the power of "others," fictional, real, and maybe real. And for the duration of this book, the power of others is largely generative helping Mori to heal from the destructive months that precede the story itself. It's about how being smart is attractive and how desire can be an important part of healing (as is Lovely Bones, in a totally different way).

It is also a powerful love letter to early Sci-Fi. It brought me back to my early 20s, when I had inherited a lot of old paperbacks from my Dad and went on a big Asimov/Clarke/LeGuin/Heinlein/Herbert reading binge. My engagement with Sci-Fi hasn't stayed quite as strong as it was fifteen years ago, so I hadn't read nearly as deeply as Mori does, but it was fun to reflect on the power of possibility and imagination that helps Mori heal.

I don't know what to make of the fairies, or magic in the book, which is why it gets this category and not the "a book with magic" label. And I've just realized I've said dead nothing about England or Wales here! Ha. Well, Wales is represented as a combination of wild and etched away by industry, which if you've taken the train from London to Swansea certainly is true. Mori's role, in part, is to help the wild reclaim places that industrialization has destroyed (if you believe the magic part is true). This really has to happen in Wales, I think, rather than England, which is represented through the traditional British Boarding School and Family With Old Money. While Mori spends most of the book at the boarding school, it's Wales and the nearby town that have an impact on her life. There should be more books set in Wales. 

A Book by a Female Author

Hey, remember my Better Reading Challenge list that I posted a few months ago? And my list of female authors, AKA authors? Well, I thought it might be useful to keep track here with some short posts on my progress through these 50 books this year. Clearly, I have some catch-up to do since it's already July.

I'm starting with the category that bridges the two other blogs I posted and am going to comment quickly on Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein. I presented on this book at a Women in the Holocaust Conference at the University of South Carolina in March, so I'll try not to go on too long.

Rose Under Fire is a loose sequel to Wein's Code Name Verity. It was less well-received than Verity, and I think that's fair. Then again, Verity was amazing, so it's hard to live up to. There's room to criticize another camp narrative for young readers and it brushes up against questions about historical accuracy. Wein is well aware of that potential problem, however, and includes information on how she got her historical knowledge and where she's made allowances in order to move the story forward. This paratext is important in any YA Holocaust lit because of the way readers are often internalizing historical knowledge by reading these books.

What I liked about Rose is the engagement with two concepts rarely seen in YA Holocaust lit: medical experimentation and the Nuremberg Trials. Additionally, unlike most medical experimentation seen in popular culture, Wein humanizes the victims. Often these victims are particular sites of horror in pop culture, their bodies becoming more alienated and weirdly victimized yet again. Think X-Men, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and others here. So that's one important thing. Second, the engagement with the Nuremberg Trials, including the forthcoming trial of a guard who readers have developed some sympathy for, allows readers see how the Holocaust echoes throughout Europe long after the war is over. Rose's trauma upon leaving the camps is also worth engaging with.

I'm not covering these books, nor many other resistance narratives, in my book. There's just not room. Maybe in my next book, which is shaping up to be about female friendship and collective action. If I keep doing research. Anyway, if you are a reader of WWII adventure stories, interested in female pilots, or want to follow up your reading of The Book Thief, here's a book for you! Oh, lastly, Wein has some really interesting social media presence that helps readers gather more historical information if they want to follow up. Here's her Pinterest page, if that's your thing.

Virginia Holocaust Museum

I just returned from Richmond and this year's Children's Literature Association annual conference. It was, as always, a combination of great and stressful. I saw some wonderful papers, met a few new people, caught up with some friends, and just generally conferenced my butt off. (BTW, if you view this on a phone the layout isn't as nice. Just FYI.)

Because I got in Wednesday night and was staying in a different area than the conference hotel, I decided to check out my neighborhood a bit. And, lo and behold, there was the Virginia Holocaust Museum just down the street. Google promised a 'Powerful museum with free entrance," and Google reviewers gave it 4.8 stars. To give some perspective on the other Holocaust museums/memorials I've written about here, the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston has 4.6 and the USHMM has 4.5. Unsurprisingly, for these more widely visited sites, it's often Holocaust deniers that are ranking things with one star. In fact, reading them today introduced me to the term 'Holohoax' which I really should have anticipated as a thing that existed yet somehow hadn't. Learn something new everyday, I guess. This could easily become a whole digression into these ratings, but we'll avoid that. What I'm getting at here is that it's well-regarded by visitors and is centrally located in Richmond. 

I came away from the experience feeling conflicted. Certainly the Museum has a good heart, and is clearly trying to do good work. People are touched by it, or responding positively, as the five-star reviews would indicate (it also ranks highly on TripAdvisor and Yelp). Many people express a preference for this museum over the USHMM and seem moved by their time there. So, why was I conflicted? Well, read on.    

The structure of the Museum seems to want you to experience the "reality" of the Holocaust. Online feedback indicates that this seems to be the takeaway many people had, with comments on Yelp like, "Very hands on museum and they do a good job of making you feel like you are there" and "“I believe this place makes you feel you are one of the Jews during the WWII.” I found the way the museum "make[s] you feel are there" to be incredibly odd. After watching a film made my Richmond's community survivors you enter the first exhibit, seen below: 

Creepy Mannequins 

I felt something, for sure, but I'm not certain it was as though I was there in the barracks with these poor guys (representing early round-ups of those who spoke against the Nazi party). There's a strange kitschyness to the whole thing that limited the amount of emotional impact. Some exhibits were more funny than troubling, such as our poor woman who has just experienced the violence of kristalnacht: 

Stuff is kinda broken, I guess?

End Game: the Allies
Save the Day

There's also something troubling me about the teleological structure of the story. There's clearly a beginning, middle, and an end. We start with these first mannequins and follow through all the way to our courtroom drama. Yet, if we think about trauma as Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son, does we need to acknowledge that trauma is disordered, full of lapses, too much or too little information, and doesn't have a tidy resolution. Literature does this well for us, but I don't think it's impossible to represent that overwhelming amount of information in architecture or museum. You can see more on this in my Year of Memorials post from a few years ago. 

Much has been written on Holocaust memorials in many more and fancier words that you'll find here. Let's look at one text that directly addresses the sort of performative "really there" aspect that the VaHM is evoking:

In a museum of the dead, the critical actors are gone, and it is up to us to perform acts of reinterpretation to meaning and memory. To some degree, then, the usual museum situation (in which we look at objects) is exploited to underscore the absence to be read in the presence of objects that stand for the violent loss of which they are only the remains.To the degree this historical, material, human loss is allowed to remain a tangible 'presence,' a Holocaust museum can constitute a particular metonymic situation: inanimate material objects document and mark the loss instead of simply substituting them through representation. In this case, the enormity of the absent referent is neither contained nor scaled down through representation that claims its presence over the terrible absence produced by genocide (122).--Vivian Patraka, Spectacular Suffering 

Yet the referent is weirdly not absent in the VaHM. Certainly we have those representations of those who were lost in pictures and letters. Yet the dominant impression is of a staged performance that one wanders through as the actors have been frozen in place. In particular I was troubled by the trajectory that led me through a train car (which whistled and made rushing noises as I walked through) to the room with a door.  The door had a small window in it, covered in mesh. It led to a recreation of a gas chamber (so, so happily mannequin free). There were no directions as to what I should do. There was a door on the other side. An exit? I refused to enter.  

The interior of the "gas chamber."

I found myself unwilling to perform the role the museum asked of me: to reenact a form of violent death. (Again, with the particular trajectory, why was I not asked to stand in front of a gun and fall "dead" into a pit?) 

Luckily, I didn't have to crawl
through here.

I went back around the whole museum as there were no optional routes around the gas chamber, again, unwilling to play dead. When I arrived at the other side of the gas chamber I found myself facing the crematoria. The whole place has the lights on timers, so if you walk through backwards (as I did) you find yourself entering dark rooms whose lights don't come on until you've wandered around a bit. I was doing this wandering in the crematoria room when the lights came on and the "ovens" began to glow. 

Now, one might say, if you're going for trauma what's wrong with being tasked to walk through a gas chamber and seeing the theatrical representation of how your body will be disposed of? I think what I truly object to is that you do just that: walk through. You move on. You live. As the family behind me did, talking about their grandfather's visit to Dachau and its emotional impact. Moving into the future. It seems a disservice to those who were never able to walk again to play dead in this particular way. 






I drifted through the rest of the museum, stopping to watch some of the Nuremberg Trials from my seat in the audience. The presence of the actual Nazi leaders on video is a strange contrast to the mannequins that surrounded them. 

You can just barely see the TV here, which was playing
actual Nuremberg scenes. 

I ended with a trip to this exhibit:

In some ways this sums up the whole thing for me. Auschwitz, now open on the second floor. Not "our Auschwitz exhibit" but just that Auschwitz itself is open, upstairs. The content is there but the context is off. At the Virginia Holocaust Museum the heart is there, and the stories of survivors who came to Richmond are important in this cradle of Patrick Henry's calls for liberty and the darker history of slave trails and confederate museums. (I shall echo a common refrain here, and one that Phil Nel touched on in his CHLA talk: why a Holocaust Museum and not a Museum of Slavery? Can't we learn the same "lessons" of "tolerance through education" when considering slavery?) To prove my point, a full list of Richmond museums here.

For my criticisms of the larger concept of "tolerance through education" you'll need to wait for my book next year. There's way more than a blog's worth. 

Tolerance Cards!

I also just discovered you can get married there. Who? What? Why? I cannot imagine sending out wedding invites asking everyone to come celebrate with me at the Holocaust Museum. Anyway, people do. You can find pictures here.