Literature: June 2007 Archive Page

All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"

[...]

It isn't as if hug police patrol the Kilmer hallways, Hernandez said. Usually an askance look from a teacher or a reminder to move along is enough to stop girls who are holding hands and giggling in a huddle or a boy who pats a buddy on the back. Students won't get busted if they high-five in class after answering a difficult math problem.

Typically, she said, only repeat offenders or those breaking other rules are reprimanded. "You have to have an absolute rule with students, and wiggle room and good judgment on behalf of the staff," Hernandez said. --Maria Glod --Va. School's No-Contact Rule Is a Touchy Subject (Washington Post (will expire))

The article features the plight of a boy who got into trouble for giving his girlfriend a hug -- but it also notes that the hug was one of two infractions: the boy also got up from his assigned seat and went over to his girlfriend without permission.

I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with the principal's statement that students need to comply with an absolute rule, but that enforcers need wiggle room. If you call the rule absolute, doesn't that just teach students to think of rules -- even so-called absolute ones -- as a means of dishing out arbitrary punishment at the whim of an authority figure? If there is wiggle room, then the rule is not absolute. It might be appropriate to say that touching itself is not a problem, but to enforce rules against such things as bullying, loitering in the halls, distracting other students, and dress code, and noting that monitors will naturally be drawn to the activities of two students who are touching one another, and that any violation of the rules that really are disruptive can lead to a harsher penalty if touching is involved. But my solution may not work for a building housing 1100 tweenagers in a space designed for 850.

The article also refers to different cultural notions of what counts as acceptable personal space.

Still, the fact that these kids even have assigned spaces in the cafeteria suggests that maintaining crowd control is more important to the administrators than teaching socialization. I understand that there are only so many hours in the day and there are probably only a small number of kids who are causing the problems, but "what about socialization" is typically the first question that homeschooling families hear from people with kids in public or private schools.

I grew up in Vienna, and I was bussed right past Joyce Kilmer to a different school. The school's namesake is best known for his poem "Trees."

I haven't the energy to write much more than "I think that I shall never see / A rule so laughably PC."

See also "Fisher v. Lowe 1999."

Jorn Barger, a Joyce enthusiast whose many creative electronic endeavors include coining the term "weblog," offers this animated map of Dublin, showing the progress of Leopold Bloom and other characters from the "Wandering Rocks" chapter of Ulysses. The chapter takes place on June 16, which has of late been celebrated as Bloomsday.


Last week was the Feast of Corpus Christi, which in the medieval town of York, England was celebrated with a huge outdoor festival that included wagons that were the sets for short religious plays that dramatized Christian history from the creation of the world to the final judgment (also know as Doomsday). This 2D animated map showing the progress of pageant wagons through the streets of York was part of my first scholarly publication, in 1997. I wish I'd thought of adapting the existing code to the Ulysses scenario.From Bloomsday to Doomsday

I graduated from SHU this may and I took your American Literature course in Spring 2004. I just wanted to write you an e-mail because I came across my own blog while doing a search on the internet and I starting reading through them. I must admit, I HATED doing them during class because it was a lot of work, but what a final product. I was so impressed that I could have created something so technical and computer literate. I was astounded to see that people are still commenting on my entries, three years after the fact! How cool! I hope you are continuing to use blogs because it obviously gets out there and lets our thoughts at SHU be heard. I also would like to comment on my grade in the class and it being 1 of 2 Bs that I received throughout my college career. I still am confused about the grade, considering I had all As on my papers. I was unaware at the time it could have been a mistake and I did not want to challenge you. I just thought I must have failed the final miserably. O well. I enjoyed your class, even though I got a B! lol Keep up the good work!blogs [e-mail from a former student] (Jerz's LIteracy Weblog)

I got this note from a recent graduate, and have posted it here with permission. It's always a great feeling when a student says he or she worked hard, learned a lot, and enjoyed the class.

And this student is right -- entries that my students wrote as homework are still attracting attention, especially at the end of the semester as students are working on term papers. Sometimes the comments are simply requests like "This story is boring, will someone e-mail me what it's supposed to mean," but often a visitor will post a thoughtful comment that attempts to extend the discussion.

With all the gratuitous use of Shakespeare language and imagery in the series (including its four spin-offs, a successful franchise of feature films and a short-lived animated series), is there an underlying reason to the use of the Bard's works? Does the combination of classic literature and pop-culture sci-fi result in something greater than the sum of its parts? According to Stephen M. Buhler, the use of Shakespeare in the Star Trek universe, specifically the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, serves to define which characters are the villains. (Buhler 18) In general, he says the contemporary popular film use of characters who have the ability to quote Shakespeare is used as a device to establish moral ambiguity and to symbolize personal viciousness. (Buhler 18) Here he relies on the many quotes of the villain of the film, General Chang (Christopher Plummer) and the chameleon shapeshifter Martia (supermodel Iman). (Buhler 22)

However, not every Shakespeare-spewing character is evil and Mary Buhl Dutta argues that, instead, the use of Shakespeare in the original Star Trek series served as endorsement for the male-centric, Americanized ideal of a typical Shakespeare hero. (Dutta 38) Within the progress of the series, the lead character of Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) "becomes" Macbeth, Hamlet, Ferdinand, and Petruchio. Always the hero, he has the ability to defeat the villain, even when his Shakespearean counterpart could not. For example, Dutta points out that in the episode "Catspaw", Kirk is essentially Macbeth (Dutta 40), yet here he has the ability to resist the evil pressure of the Lady Macbeth figure of Sylvia, unlike the original Macbeth.

Marc Houlahan furthers this theory by arguing that the use of Shakespeare in Star Trek is not only an endorsement but rather a continuation of America's attempts to Americanize Shakespeare. (Houlahan 29) As the financing of BBC's official versions of Shakespeare, by four major American corporations (Time-Life, Exxon, Metropolitan Life Insurance and the Morgan Guarantee Trust Company) and the creation of the Folger's Shakespeare Library (located between the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress in Washington DC) serve to show America's attempt to claim Shakespeare as their own, so does Star Trek's use of the Bard's materials. (Houlahan 29) Thus he uses again the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to illustrate the assumption the Captain Kirk and the system of government that he works for, the United Federation of Planets, is a representation of the United States of America. Thus, Kirk's use of Shakespeare, as well as General Chang's serve as an attempt to mainstream Shakespeare for a primarily American audience. (Houlahan 30)

Going in a totally different direction, Emily Hegarty argues that the use of Shakespeare in Star Trek: The Next Generation serves as a symbol of high culture. (Hegarty 55) She writes, "It [the series] uses Shakespearean allusion to underwrite repressive and elitist ideological gestures within its populist format." (Hegarty 55) She uses the example of a Next Generation episode "The Perfect Mate", in which Captain Picard uses Shakespeare sonnets to express desire, confirming the ideology that Shakespeare is the quintessential symbol of love poetry in our culture. (Hegarty 56)

With all the use of Shakespeare in Star Trek, one might think that the symbolism would be lost and eventually become stale and, in fact, it arguably has. Fewer references to Shakespeare are found in the last three series spin-offs, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. However, within the framework of the original series, The Next Generation and the (at least early) films, Shakespeare has become an integral part of the universe that the show inhabits. It uses Shakespeare as a springboard to discuss new ideas and to maintain a connection with the future and the past. --Shakespare and Star Trek (Memory Alpha)

If I recall correctly, wasn't there an episode in which Picard had to pretend he was in love with a woman, possibly as part of a bluff? I seem to recall that he started off giving a very vague, unconvincing declaration of love, and then when he shifted into poetry, he started hamming it up. The subtext to the audience was clear -- he didn't love her at all, he was just drawing on his knowledge of Shakespeare to simulate love, and part of the point was that the aliens involved (the Ferengi -- depicted in The Next Generation as greedy and rather stupid caricatures, if it's possible to caricature a fictional race) weren't expected to recognize Shakespeare. I wonder if Hegarty takes that into account. (I just looked it up... the episode was Ménage à Troi.)

Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury's authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television's effect on substance in the news. --Amy E. Boyle Johnston --Ray Bradbury: Farehheit 451 Misinterpreted (LA Weekly)

I've never taught this book, but I've been thinking about it, and this is actually the approach I would have taken -- that it was a storyteller's response to the rise of storywatching.