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Sketching a Little Madness

I teach 8th grade English here in New Haven. And when I taught my 8th graders Emily Dickinson’s “A little madness in the spring” it was a little joke to myself. I knew they would be bonkers as soon as it started to get sunny and humid. I knew we would be pushing our homeroom, communal deodorant spray on more than one of them, and I knew I would find them lying on the grass during recess, loafing around with each other. I wanted them to use the poem to justify themselves, as a smart way of saying 'let us be.' But here’s the thing. The joke is on me. There is something inside these teenagers that is positively popping. They are taking their newly-over-one-hundred-pounds bodies and they are pawing all over each other. This is what Dickinson calls “wholesome even for the King." For summer reading, I assigned Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. In it, Alexie paints a portrait of a ninth grader named Junior, growing up on the Spokane Reservation. Junior is smart and a self proclaimed "weirdo." He chooses to go off the rez for a better education. The better education, as is often the case, is at a rich, white suburban school over 20 miles away. Naturally, Junior becomes a traitor to his community on the rez, and is ostracized as the token Indian at Reardan, his new school. His people call him an apple-red on the outside and white on the inside. The outsider idea is nothing new to adolescent fiction, but what stands out in this book is Alexie's signature, candid wit, and Ellen Forney's illustrations.

For all of his hardship, Junior is saved by the cartoons he draws. And the cartoons make the book; it's sprinkled with hilarious caricatures cataloging his father’s alcoholism, his best friend’s abusive father, and his sister’s death. His self-deprecation and optimism in the cartoons pull the reader along through a thoroughly weighty and grievous narrative. And Junior says of his cartoons, "I take them seriously. I use them to understand the world…Sometimes I draw people because they're my friends and family. And I want to honor them." Words often fail him and cartoons don't.

Lately, my students have been coming to class early to draw pictures on the chalkboard. A colleague enlightened me recently by giving me a few Maxine Greene essays on "esthetic education" wherein the use of art as a means of expression, inspiration, and invigoration in a classroom is seen as instrumental to better and more holistic learning. So, I always let them draw. Yet again, my students (and Junior) teach me. They already knew that drawing- making pictures of narratives is essential to their learning.

We are reading Lord of the Flies. Of course they have some ideas to process through pictures: Jack just stuck a pig in last night's reading! Golding is forever alluding to the “essential human illness” that we all understand but can’t totally articulate-especially when suffering from heat stroke, or puberty. Lord of the Flies discussions have been markedly focused and engaged; the novel is moving them. How does the elusive and present human illness make sense to these 8th graders? They draw it.

Their drawings, which take up the full length of the board, are the boys-in tattered clothing (or naked-no sniggering!) and the pigs, and always a special focus on the boy with the "mulberry birthmark" on his face, whose only real mention in the novel is that he is noticed to have disappeared. He is a lost boy, gone, early on in the novel. My students can't seem to forget him; they draw him everyday. (And not just because he had a birthmark.) But, I think because they want him to be remembered in the midst of the maddening cries of the novel. Because they wouldn't want to be forgotten.

As Junior says, "I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me."

So I am thinking that a little madness in the spring on all absolutely true accounts is teaching me that my students are reflecting and processing this novel in their doodling. It means something to them, and they want to honor it, even if they can't necessarily write a thesis paper on it-yet. I am thankful that they are getting it out, and the antecedent of 'it' is madness, wholesome, and tremendous.

Unfinished Business

I am pretty lucky. I am a science writer who, from my home office not too far from Wooster Square, gets to write about topics like giant, gassy planets that would float in a bathtub—if only there existed a bathtub large enough. I recently felt the Nerd’s Elation—an internal, rising giddiness—when I asked an astronomer about how, exactly, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy ejected a gang of rogue stars from the Milky Way. My current fixation is graphene—one-atom-thick sheets of carbon that look like teeny tiny honeycombs and will profoundly influence the future of electronics in one way or another. All that to say, I usually write about things either far away—or very small. Last year, the good people at the New Haven Review let me take a welcome detour from the world of exoplanets, metamaterials and deep-space cannonballs. For Issue #3, I wrote about how Elm City artists responded to the demolition of the Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum, a colossal hulk that stood at one end of downtown New Haven like a neglected barbarian. I finished the story in the summer, and the issue was published in the fall.

Thus, the article was done. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The following sentence may be a tired truth, but it’s a truth nonetheless: most stories are never finished. You just stop working on them.

After I finished the piece about the Coliseum, I still had loads of information—bookmarks, postcards, pictures, tattered photocopies with illegible scribbles—I hadn’t used. I kept coming across architectural factoids and images that seemed interesting. Not all of these bits were Coliseum-centric. By the time Issue #3 went to press, the Coliseum had started to seem like one minor player in a long and complicated story about New Haven’s tangled relationship with architecture. But I was hooked: I had begun to pay attention.

In an effort to finally put this story and all of its tangents to rest, I’d like to offer just a few of these tidbits and highlight a couple more Elm City artists who have may or may not have had anything to do with the Coliseum.

• The firm of Roche Dinkeloo designed the Coliseum, and Archinect.com has an interview with Kevin Roche about his approach to architecture in general and the Coliseum in particular. Roche’s answers are heady but accessible. A photo essay about the Coliseum accompanies the interview. Under one of the photos of the gutted behemoth, there’s this lovely quote that I would have loved to include in my article: "Monsters are born too tall, too strong, too heavy: that is their tragedy." Ishirō Honda (Director of Gojira, 1954).

• Man oh man, do I like looking at pictures of the Elm City through the lens of Christopher Gardner's camera, and I’m sure he’s got pictures of the Coliseum somewhere. Karyn Gilvarg, New Haven’s city planner, tipped me off to his work while I was fact-gathering for the Coliseum story. Gardner’s pictures—some of which show up in the latest edition of Yale’s alumni magazine—are vivid and rich. On his web site, he’s got outtakes from that photo shoot, and they make New Haven look like a million bucks. The other thing I appreciate about Gardner’s site is his blog. He provides know-nothings like me a window into his process. He explains why that laptop is about to fly off Yale's Art and Architecture building, and why he later had to take that laptop apart.

• Painter Charles Santarpia exhibited some paintings at the Hull’s Framing store downtown, right where Church becomes Whitney, last summer. Santarpia’s paintings stopped me because they looked like the Elm City by way of Edward Hopper. And yeah, he’s got a Coliseum picture or two. On his web site, you can see his rendering of the Anchor Bar, the reflection of City Hall in the Chase Bank building, and the Smoothie underwear factory condos, among other local haunts. And I do mean haunts. Santarpia’s paintings are a little spooky—but hey, they’re familiar. Maybe I am one of those people who don’t dance if they don’t know who’s singing.

So that's what I've found. What/whom have I missed?

We Partied like It’s 2009

On Saturday night at the house of Debby Applegate and Bruce Tulgan we rolled out issue #4. It was a seriously good time, although I fear I made myself look like a dunce talking into John Spalding’s little Flip — I remember saying something about how the Paris Review may have more subscribers, but I have better hair than its editor. Which I don’t think is even true; from what I can tell in photographs, Philip Gourevitch actually has a nice head of hair. I think I can sum up the party by saying that both NY Times deputy editor Jill Abramson and Moira Darling, one of Brooklyn's premier knitters (she owns Advanced Knit-Design), were both there. Also spotted: gonzo science writer Carl Zimmer (also with good hair, salt-and-pepper), memoirist Roya Hakakian (fabulous hair), journalist and master writing pedagogue Fred Strebeigh (legendary beard), New Republic critic Alexander Nemser (precocious beard), award-winning science writer Jenny Blair, memoirist and NHR board member Pang-Mei Chang (her hair is the stuff of urban legend), NHR contributor Sarah Borden (her great hair is the least of her attributes).

Lest I forget: novelist Rudolph Delson, short-story writer Liz Edelglass, condom blogger Jonathan Oppenheimer, noted chemist Frank Torre, historian Kirk Swinehart, literature scholar Nicole Fluhr, Australian Lee Faulkner, and man-about-town Josh Safran.

At some point after the gin kicked in I was talking to somebody about Gay Talese’s essay about the Paris Review in its 1960s, Plimpton-edited glory days. As I remember the essay, Talese’s main point seems to be that while Plimpton, Mathiessen, and the others had some talent — especially for spotting other talent — their main genius was for creating community. Largely this was about parties at Plimpton’s place (where, Talese reports, women were treated like so much furniture), but more generally it was about using a magazine as the centerpiece of a world. As I was speaking these words last night, I realized — or hoped — that I could have been talking about NHR, right down to the middling talent of us editors.

Or such, at least, is the delusion-producing quality of gin.

A change is gonna come...

Hi all — No Monday review for the next week or two, while we refurbish the site with content from the forthcoming issue #4 (Laurie Colwin, Thisbe Nissen, Alice Quinn, David Orr, and many other elite types). Also, when we go back up, the site will have a new, group-bloggy-format, with far more frequent postings. We will still seek out unfairly neglected books, but we will also keep people posted on curios and sights seen in New Haven, and we'll have a dozen voices in the mix on a regular basis. Stay tuned...

Three Places to Go to Read About Neglected Books

We’re delighted that we’re not the only literary enterprise on the lookout for under-appreciated books and authors. We’re not even the best or most practiced at the hunt. Here are three places to go to find out about books that have probably flown below, around, or mysteriously through your radar: 1) The Neglected Books Page, http://neglectedbooks.com. If you’re a book lover and haven’t heard of this page, you really ought to be sore with yourself. Not only does it list recently neglected books (how’s that for a concept?), but it delves into neglect of years past, linking to lists like The American Scholar’s “Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years,” published in 1970. An old list like that one can be unexpectedly invigorating: it’s good to know that authors like Kate Chopin, Isaiah Berlin, and A.R. Ammons were once considered overlooked, since it means that time does remedy some injustices. It’s impossible to tell from the website who edits the Neglected Books Page, but it’s somebody judicious and industrious, and obviously not in it for the credit.

2) LeeSandlin.com. Many of our readers will know Lee Sandlin from our website’s effusive praise of him — praise that, we have reported before, helped him land a book deal with Pantheon. But Lee is not only a splendid essayist, he is also a champion of neglected books. Check out his list “Ten Novels That Not Enough People Have Read.” (Of the ten authors, we’d heard of one, and thought that maybe we’d heard of a second.) He annotates on the list here.

3) The Believer, annual award issue. This magazine, published by the same people responsible for McSweeney’s, reviews overlooked books in every issue, and once a year it gives out the Believer Book Award, the rubric for which is summed up here: “Each year the editors of the Believer generate a short list of the novels they thought were the strongest and, in their opinion, the most undervalued of the year.” Once again, we’d be surprised if you’d heard of any of the winners. Last year’s was Remainder, by Tom McCarthy.