Over the course of the summer, I was not idle: We spent lots of time together as a family in sundry places--Yellowstone, the cabin, at home, and my wife and I just got back from our annual pilgrimage to Cedar City and the Utah Shakespeare Festival--and I have also read a great deal. The result was that, though I've output fewer words this year than last--or, possibly, any year in the past three or so--I still have a lot of writing to show for it. I documented experiences in my reading journal--a bit of a departure, but so many bizarre things happened during this summer, I had to write them down. And, since I had my reading journal with me, I decided to use that, rather than putting anything down online.
We're eight months into 2019 and the summer has all but closed its doors. (I start my teacher training on Monday; students arrive the week after.) When the year began, I was thinking that I would ease off on my writing in order to focus more on my reading--to make my reading journal overflow with thoughts as I closely read four books. So far, I have read one of them (Persuasion, by Jane Austen; I didn't like it nearly as much as I had hoped) and cracked the cover of another--got three or four paragraphs into it. The history book that I imagined I would finish up hasn't been touched since March or so. I can't even remember what my other book was supposed to be, and my reread of Shakespeare stalled in 1 Henry VI (not my favorite play, and since I saw it just last season, I'm not really motivated to reread it). In other words, my goals for this year are in utter shambles. That isn't to say, however, that I'm not reading. My list of finished titles (not counting comic books, which are tracked in a different list) currently has 56 entries, with the most recent one being yesterday's conclusion of my rereading of the beautifully illustrated version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. (Because I'm teaching a course on Harry Potter this January, I figured I ought to get a head start on my reread, so that I'm not spending every waking moment over Winter Break trying to cram in all seven books, the play, and the new movies.) I finished rereading It back in June--a goliath read no matter how much I love the book--and I'm picking at other things, too. In other words, there's still a lot going into the well. I'm not, however, pleased with my failure of my year's goal. It was admirable of me to want to stretch myself away from the kind of stuff that I'm normally reading, but I also found myself unhappy with the time I was spending. It isn't that I don't want to read more Austen or dive into a philosophy book; I do. It's just that…well, reading is hard and the mental energy to get to the point where I can appreciate the texts is hard to come by. I used to believe my lie that I was expending too much energy on the teaching part of my life--that when summer arrived, I would be able to read more and read better. I now know that I'm simply weak-willed. Yes, it's enjoyable to dive into a book (and the Harry Potter books are particularly good at this) and not really be able to surface because you're pulled into the world. However, not all books are that way. Indeed, I'd say most aren't (and I would put my own writing in there, too). They require something of their audience, some sort of mental exertion. Video games, however, rarely require that…so I have a lot of hours logged on Overwatch. I took a break for a couple of nights to beat Resident Evil 2 again, but otherwise it was pretty much that. Though I enjoyed Beyond Two Souls, there really hasn't been a game that pulled me in and kept me returning the way Overwatch has, though I am getting a bit bored with it. And that's kind of been what this summer has taught me: In my limited amount of discretionary time, I will likely only get worse at saying no to video games and easy entertainment that Netflix provides (even if challenging shows like Neon Genesis Evangelion is available) over expending the effort to read. I know that this is a horrible confession, especially as I'm a literature teacher, but it's an honest confession. And, to go along with the honesty bit, I know that I read quite a bit more than the average adult in America does. Still, reading (and writing) is hard. There are easier things to do with one's time (I say as I note that I have 67 in the video games/movies/comic book list). And being above average on reading--especially when the percentage of Americans reading continues to decline--isn't quite the accolade I might wish. If nothing else, summer has given me a chance to stop my day-to-day stresses and recognize that I have a lot of other areas that need attention. I can't hope to end them simply because I have ten weeks in which to relax--especially when they're such incredibly packed ten weeks as my family tends to have--and I have to learn to come to peace with that. No, I didn't miss an apostrophe in the title.
A few weeks ago, I tweeted the thought above. I picked up It back in the summer of 2017 in an attempt to read an actual horror story. (I may have mentioned this before, but if not/as a reminder, I wanted to do that because there was a book I was reading that dismissed the entire genre of horror writing as "bent books" and I had a distinct feeling the author had never in his life read a horror book and had no idea whether what he was saying was true or not, so I set out to see if he was right; he was not.) While it may have been buying into the popular conception of Stephen King as the genuine grandmaster of horror, the idea that It was his most frightening work, or the fact that a new movie was then on the horizon, I decided that if I was going to read a horror novel, I may as well start at the scariest. This was a mistake. Not because it ended up being frightening or anything--a couple of genuinely creepy moments, a lot of disgusting moments, and a couple of What-the-crap-did-I-just-read moments, but nothing really scary--but because It ended up being something that I could not get out of my mind. I've thought a lot about Derry, Pennywise, the Losers' Club, and what I've gotten out of the book was enough that I ended up studying it. (In fact, I typed up a good 3,800 words or so of the book before finishing my novella, Mon Ster, which is clearly emulating King's style, though with my own story running throughout.) During my '18 summer, I started writing in my personal reading journal. It turns out that I really ought to do that more often, as I just finished rereading the twenty or so pages I dedicated to It last year. There is a lot of really profound stuff there--and I skipped over huge chunks of it--and being honest with myself as I reflected on my readings and then wrote about them helped me to see that It is a unique and significant part of American literature. It isn't the sort of thing I'd want to teach high school students about, but that's less to do with the explicit content (though that's part of it) and more to do with the fact that the novel's themes of childhood, adulthood, memory, and forgetting don't really resonate with children. At least, I don't think they would. It's much like how Langston Hughes' poem "Dream Deferred" doesn't really strike a high school student the way it does someone who has to give up on his dreams to ensure that there's money enough in the family's coffers to fill the table. It isn't that It wouldn't be impactful, either; it probably has enough spooky stuff in there to make for a memorable read to any of the kids who tackle it. But I'm not certain I'd be able to transmit what it's given me, personally. There's a magic to It. A dark one, to be sure, but a potent one. The book is hardly flawless: There's all sorts of mental magic that furthers the plot but otherwise looks like a pretty stupid move (think, if you've read it, about the dinner that the Losers' Club in 1985 go to, and then decide--foolishly--to wander through Derry on their own, without relying on their numbers to protect themselves from Pennywise). The Turtle and Chüd are a couple of other weird things, as well as deadlights and a dozen other it-makes-sense-if-you-read-the-whole-thing examples. These pieces of inexplicable magic make the story move, yes, but the novel is much more than these pieces. It strikes me because the magic within is not about killer clowns, time traveling smoke-caves, or convincing a monster that an asthma inhaler is acid, but instead about the way that people can come together and then, inexplicably, drift apart. It's about how the most important things in a moment are disregarded, ignored, or unknown by the world at large. Graduation was this past Friday, and I am--as always--sad to see the class go. And, for the most part, I think those kids will live fulfilled, excited lives. They have much to live for…and many of them will fail to live up to even a fraction of their desires. Their small victories in a tiny charter school in Utah Valley are important to them, but are grand-scale rather insignificant. So, too, is the experience of the Losers' Club. They risk their lives--twice--to defeat a malevolent evil. Not because it threatens the world--Pennywise has lived in Derry for centuries. It never leaves the city (and why should It? There's fear enough to sow within the city limits), It isn't threatening the whole of mankind. If anything, there's a harsh, Machiavellian trade going on here: Every 28 years or so, Pennywise wakes up and wants to start eating a couple of dozen people--not hundreds or anything. Yes, they tend to be children, often seasoned with a good dose of fear to make them more appetizing, but It's not even concerned with eating all of them. A few murders and then Pennywise leaves everyone else alone. Not a bad agreement, in the big picture. Yet the Losers' Club reunites in 1985 to stop Pennywise again. They sacrifice a great deal--life and suffering, as well as causing a lot of property damage--in order to keep a rather small evil from spreading. That is, in many ways, the kind of heroism that most of us can aspire to. We haven't a lot of reach, most of us. I have been lucky to have taught about a thousand kids over the past decade-plus; my wife has probably had almost 3,000 pass through her classes. Though those numbers may seem big, they really aren't. We're making small differences that the world-at-large will never appreciate, never understand, never care to do. We all do hard things in our small, immeasurable ways to make the world better. If we don't do them, the world is worse off, yes, but in small, immeasurable ways. Rare is the experience that matters so much to the course of history that we can even see it. And though it may one day be true of my students that they will alter the events of humanity, I certainly see no such path for myself. This is part of why I'm returning to It again this summer. It eats up about a third of my summer--it is a long book, after all--and I plan on writing more of my thoughts as I go along. It is rather sad, I think, that something so gruesome can mean so much, but I suppose that isn't too surprising. I study modern history, and if ever there's a time where the gruesome can mean a lot to those looking at it, it's the twentieth century. Perhaps there's something to be said for seeking out more uplifting things. I know that there are other books that deal with similar themes. So why do I return to It? Its magic is potent, frankly, and, despite my assumptions upon finishing it last year, I don't think I'm quite ready to say that I'm actually finished with it. |
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