January 28, 2010

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Habitual Denial

Over at The Hooded Utilitarian, Ng Suat Tong has a review of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (which I reviewed before). He has a very particular take on the book, situating it into a larger context of books about Hiroshima in Japan. His main thesis is that Kouno’s graphic novel fits a self-pitying pattern in Japanese depictions of Hiroshima, a pattern that completely ignores Japanese culpability. I haven’t read all the same books Tong has, so I have trouble getting as hot under the collar as he does. Still, I have seen how the Japanese, at least the Japanese government, has time and again denied its own role in some of the atrocities of that war. For instance, Japan has denied or distorted its alleged role in the Rape of Nanking. Likewise, Japan has also denied its alleged treatment of Koreans, especially Korean “comfort women.” On a personal note, I once had an older student who had grown up in Japan who exhibited the same mentality. In the class he was in, we read Native Speaker which briefly mentions the Japanese mistreatment of Koreans during World War Two. This student, though he had left Japan years ago and in fact was unhappy with the Japanese government, wrote an entire essay about how I was a brainwashed American promoting lies about the Japanese because I had students read this novel. So it’s interesting to me to see this denial as a larger cultural mindset and seeing Kouno as being part of it.

Still, I like her book. Jog’s response (number 15) to Tong’s review matches my own sentiments and he words his thoughts much more respectfully than I could. Still, this brings up two other ideas for me.

One is if the U.S. has a similar whitewashed view of World War Two. Many people in the U.S. view it as “the last moral war,” ignoring the oxymoronic nature of the comment. Yes, the U.S. didn’t “start the war,” but I don’t think that somehow exonerates all U.S. actions. Hiroshima is a big point of national guilt, though I think many people think it was necessary. Yet I also think many people admit the horror of Hiroshima as a way of ignoring other potential atrocities. I for one was unaware of the constant fire bombing of Japan by U.S. forces until I saw the documentary The Fog of War (which I highly recommend). And movies like A Thin Red Line only hint at some of the vicious behavior of American soldiers in the South Pacific. I haven’t thought this through very much, but I generally think most countries deny their personal responsibility for the suffering that happens in the world. Perhaps Japan is an especially extreme case. But I’m sure Japan is not the country that would spring to mind of you asked most people in the world which country is the most guilty of denying the negative effects of its military.

The other thought this review brought to my attention was an old one in literary study and that is how one views an author whose work suffers from the prejudices of the time. Think of the anti-Semitism in Shakespeare or the racism in Heart of Darkness. I know of teachers who will not teach Conrad’s novella and Chinua Achebe has a famous essay stating that it needs to be erased from the English canon. I see this and understand it and yet I can’t deny the artistry of Conrad’s work. Is it possible to note its racism and its promulgation of the association between blackness and evil and still be able to admire how it is written? I like to think so. Yet I can see how others can’t. And this poses a tough question for the study of literature. Ideas change. Politics shift. We can’t deny our own political views, but we also can’t expect authors from other times and cultures to see what we see. And yet I think it is important to see how artists unknowingly or intentionally promote a political point of view and, in some cases, how an artist is used to justify that political point of view. The British Empire taught Shakespeare wherever it went. Yet we can still see the beauty in Shakespeare’s language. I think to link art to politics and not see beyond that is to kill the complexity of art. And it denies the humanity of the Humanities.

January 6, 2010

It’s all relative, man

An attitude I hear a lot, especially as a teacher, and one that came up in the Tucker Stone interview at The Comics Reporter, is what I call the “it’s all relative, man” attitude towards art.  “I like what I like and you like what you like, so let’s agree to not criticize each other for it.” This is the opposite of elitism, for it’s axiom is no one piece of art is really any better than another and no one person is any better than another at ascribing value to a piece of art. The only value of a piece has is how it speaks to the person who appreciates it. And since there is so much variation in people, there is likewise a lot variation in valuable pieces of art. A sitcom that gets a good laugh out of someone is just as beneficial as the play that makes someone else reassess her relationship with her father. And, as the belief goes, anyone who says that the sitcom is a dumb way to spend an evening and not as valuable a piece of art as the play is an elitist bastard who is trying to paint the world with one brush.

Basically, the argument is about effect. No one piece of art has any “better” effect than another. Let me let Tucker Stone explain it. At one point in the interview, Spurgeon asks Stone why readers of a certain type of comics, superhero comics say, are so reluctant to read another kind, autobio for instance. Stone basically states that it’s not important that readers try other types of comics. The reason why not is that for Stone there is no effect in doing so. “You don’t get smarter, you don’t get more cultured.” And later her states: “The world isn’t going to become a better place if everybody starts reading a wider variety of comics.” So not only are all comics equal in value, they are equal in effect.

I don’t really want to argue with Tucker Stone. Sean T. Collins said what I would say anyway. But take the ideas in the quotations above all the way. No one piece of art has any appreciable difference than another in how that piece of art affects the reader. If high school literature teachers stopped teaching Shakespeare and instead had their students watch Love Boat reruns, would that be okay? Maybe that’s an unfair comparison. But why is it unfair? Is it simply that Shakespeare has had a larger cultural impact? If so, even that is a difference is an effect. Now let’s say that high school teachers stopped teaching Shakespeare in the original and instead had their students read condensed versions of his plays written in contemporary English, kind of like the old Classics Illustrated comics. Would that be okay? The students would still know the basic plots of the plays, enough to get the references in The Simpsons. But the students would never have to wrestle with the language and the subtleties therein. All nuance would be gone. Meaning would be predigested; they would never have to come to it on their own (in our current testing culture, this shift has been happening for a long time unfortunately). There is something about the effect of reading Shakespeare (good Shakespeare, that is…) that is fundamentally different.

I teach college writing. The most frequent thing I have my students read are essays. Over the course of my career I have assigned some mediocre essays. Sometimes this was intentional, to let my students take apart what makes mediocre writing mediocre. Sometimes it has been accidental, using a thematic flow suggested by an anthology and later regretting it. In either case, what I have found is that essays that are not as good generate class discussion and class writing that is not as good. Essays that aren’t too deep, don’t develop a point very far, don’t provide meaty evidence, et cetera just don’t give much for my students to chew on. Yet better written essays tend to provoke better class discussion and better pieces of writing from my students. Obviously this varies and it’s easy to assign essays that are too far beyond the reading level of one’s students. Yet the basic lesson remains for me. Better writing provokes more thought and more emotions in people. It makes us think, feel, and question is ways we haven’t before.

This is partially why I wrote the previous post about character. To deny that one piece of art may be able to open your eyes more than another piece of art is to deny the transcendent power of art. And so art becomes just another commodity. This is what people tend to fear when they make a distinction between art and entertainment. Entertainment is art that makes us feel good and reinforces the status quo. It is art without teeth. This is art without spirit. And if we all start to believe that this is all that art is, then art loses its transformative power. Or, more accurately, we close ourselves to that power. I believe that this is what all of us who get labeled as “elitists” are fighting against.

December 2, 2009

academic acceptance of funny books

I mentioned before that the new edition of the MLA Handbook had guidelines for how to cite comics and how that seemed like a little bit of ivory tower acceptance. Well, I just received the new catalog of titles published by the MLA (I’m a member and a community college instructor) and there is a book about teaching graphic novels in the classroom, Teaching the Graphic Novel edited by Stephen E. Tabachnick. The book is so new that it’s not listed in the on-line catalog and there is no image of the cover at Amazon. True, there are other books and websites devoted to teaching comics, but the fact that such a respected and old (and sometimes conservative) institution as the MLA has decided to publish a book on this topic shows how far the funny books have come in achieving respectability.

Some may argue that a lack of respectability is exactly what gives comics their strength. Comics can be counter-cultural in ways that TV and film can’t be. Artists as dissimilar as Frank Miller and Dan Clowes have made this argument (this is from memory, mind you; I don’t have any sources in front of me). I think there’s something to this argument. Yet books have been respectable a long time and that hasn’t diminished their ability to critique and poke authority in the eye. And I think there are two possible benefits. First, greater presence in academia means more critical attention will be paid to graphic novels. The use of this is arguable, but I like essays about pieces of literature that open my eyes to details I had not noticed. So I welcome more of this for comics. The second benefit is that more undergraduates will be reading comics. This means people who may not have otherwise given the medium a thought will now be exposed to it, and not simply exposed to it as a source of entertainment but as a site of critical inquiry and social insight.

But mostly I’m just floored that the MLA has a book like this.

December 5, 2007

The teacher with the funny voices and French movies

I was checking out Ratemyprofessor.com to see what my students have said about me, and I read the following line. “He is sometimes odd with his funny voices and French movies, but overall he is a good teacher.” I love it. The “but” is especially telling. It means that the funny voices and French movies detract from my being a good teacher. My poor students. I weird them out too much.

Still, I’m going to use this line in a future resumé. It’s too choice.

October 6, 2007

“What Teachers Make…”

My students will be handing in the first drafts of their first essays on Monday. They’re writing about education. Serendipitously, my mother told me a few days ago that I should look up Taylor Mali on Youtube. And so here’s his take, in poem form, on the purposes of education…

September 27, 2007

And yet more on Eightball #22

So at the Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon linked to this article about the case in the Shore Line Times. This is the most balanced article I’ve read about the case so far and it brings some things to light. Nate Fisher admitted that he hadn’t reread Eightball #22 before giving it to the student. So, obvious mistake. But I had previously stated that I thought that the parents thought this case wasn’t over since their daughter was being teased at school because of this. Apparently, that’s not so. As the mother says herself: “[Fisher] has resigned but we think more is called for. This sort of exonerates the administration. And we don’t think Mr. Fisher should be allowed to teach again.” So the parents think the teacher got off too easy because he was allowed to resign and wasn’t instead fired. This is incredible. Now there’s no question in my mind that these parents have gone too far. They are trying to destroy a man’s entire career over one mistake. This is simply vindictive and cruel. If Fisher were a sexual predator, then of course he shouldn’t be with young teens. But he was a well-meaning teacher. The parents have leapt to a conclusion and donned the moral blinders of child-protection. It’s parents like these that make school districts so fearful and lacking in any backbone. And it’s cases like these that keep people from wanting to get into the hornets’ nest of public school teaching. My fear of pulling a “Nate Fisher” is partly why I teach at a community college instead of a high school.

Tom also links to this article, which looks closely at Eightball #22 and the allegations against it.

September 24, 2007

More Thoughts on the Eightball 22 Debacle and Teaching

previous post

I scanned over the posts at The Beat regarding the issue of Nate Fisher handing Eightball #22 to his fourteen year-old student, and the fourteen year-old’s mother has a post with her take on the issue (she posts under the name Danielle, about halfway down the page linked to above). According to her, Fisher offered the girl Eightball on the second day of class. So he didn’t even know her for three weeks as I previously thought. So in my mind, he clearly overstepped his bounds. On the same page above, Eric Reynolds links to the reading list of the high school in question and they have authors like Bukowski on it. So Eightball #22 is tame in comparson with other titles assigned by the curriculum. Yet, those other titles are designated by the curriculum. So I don’t think Fisher stepped out of bounds in terms of offering something pornographic (this labeling of Eightball #22 as pornographic is ludicous and is what most comics people object to), but by offering something off the standard list. That made him very vulnerable. Furthermore, he was a male teacher singling out reading for a female student. I doubt he had any nefarious intentions, but as a teacher you have to be conscious about how these things will be perceived. Obviously, the mother and father were concerned, but it sounds as if the girl was as well. High school students, and especially ninth graders, are very self-centered and dramatic. They always think other people are thinking about them far more than those other people actually are. So overall, Fisher showed poor judgment. But he was a new teacher. Judgement comes with experience. Unfortunately, he won’t get that.

There’s one other thing I really want to comment on. Danielle ends by writing, ” I will never know this teachers true intent…” And many other posters talk about the need to protect their kids from teachers, and one even says that every reading assignment should be okayed by parents first. I won’t go into why this last suggestion would destroy education, but what I will say is that being a teacher sets you in opposition to parents. It’s part of the job. Yes, school is about learning important facts and skills, but it is also about showing the students that the world is larger than the one they’ve grown up in. As a teacher, your goal is to open their eyes. Obviously, some parents will disagree with how you do this (and some extreme ones will think you shouldn’t do it at all). What I gather about Nate Fisher, and I’m probably projecting, is that he really believed in this aspect of teaching. He gave something mature to one of his students to expand her mind. And he asked her about it afterwards (as Danielle mentions) because he wanted to see what she got out of it. Reflection is how learning happens. So I really believe that he was trying to be a good teacher.

Still, he made a mistake. I agree with Danielle, that things should be done as a class. The classroom is a powerful place and learning happens between students as well as from teacher to student. Students share their thoughts as a class and it makes all of them realize that several reactions to any given reading are possible and it adds to the overall insight of the class. Even so, there are times when you single out a student. Yet this is usually a self-selective act by the student. If you have a student who is very quick and very mature and who is bored in class, then you reach out to her (or, if you remain open, she reaches out to you). Just to reiterate, this is a student for whom the class does not go deep enough. So you challenge them individually. This doesn’t seem to be the case with the fourteen year-old and Nate Fisher. I think Fisher was just over-eager.

And to take it even further, I believe that sometimes it’s your role as a teacher to protect your student from his parents. I don’t work in the public school system with minors anymore, so I can say this. Obviously, a parent has legal control over a child. But the law also makes a teacher legally a parent in abstentia. This means that as a teacher you are responsible for your students’ safety. Yet it also means for those few hours, you are the parent of your students. And sometimes you need to provide something the real parents can’t provide. In some cases that’s intellectual stimulation, in other cases it’s a sympathetic adult ear. A teacher offers a student another adult in his life, another example of how to negotiate the grown-up world. And some students really need this. Keep in mind that in most cases abusers and sexual predators are not teachers, but parents and relatives. As a teacher, you can show and explain to your students that what they are seeing and experiencing at home are not the only ways for them to live. There are options. Teaching is about offering options. And that means that in some cases as a teacher your job is to help a student liberate himself from his home and family. You serve the students, not the parents.

September 22, 2007

The Strange Fate of Eightball 22

So over at The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon has been posting about the Connecticut teacher who resigned after a scandal arose over his choice to give Eightball #22 to a fourteen year old girl. Since I have taught high school English and am a parent and comics artist, I wrote a letter to Tom Spurgeon about my thoughts on the matter. I guess he liked it, because he’s put it up on his site. The only thing I would add is that I think Eightball #22 is an incredible work and one of my favorite comics.

Speaking of teaching, school’s starting for me on Monday. So I’ve been working on my syllabus instead of doing a lot of comix work. Expect an update after the weekend.