Teaching with Tim

     I stuffed six copies of Saturday’s Los Angeles Times into my supermarket basket and marched up to the checkout line.  I got kind of jumpy when it was my turn to check out.  Would the checker ask why I was buying six copies?  Would she at least give me a funny look?  Could I still bring up the reason I was buying six copies even if she didn’t say anything?   

     “Hi,” she said, “how are you?”

     “Good, good,” I said.  She had no idea how good, and I eagerly awaited my opportunity to inform her.    

     She scanned the Newman’s Own lemonade.  She scanned the Yoplait yogurts.  She scanned the Fresh Express salad.  I casually entered my debit card information, surreptitiously watching her progress through my items until—the moment I had been waiting for—she reached that outrageous number of Los Angeles Times newspapers at the bottom of the basket.  Why, oh why, would anyone buy such an absurd number of copies?  Could her curiosity be contained?  Could she possibly refrain from asking the customer why he had purchased six copies of the same exact newspaper?    

     Without even a flicker of interest or surprise, she scanned one of the papers, tapped the button on her register to multiply the quantity by six, and gave me my total.

     Well, maybe she had had a long day.  Or maybe she thought I was just buying all those papers because I had a new puppy at home.  But this was probably the only opportunity I would ever have to make a statement like this at a grocery store check stand, and I couldn’t just let it go.

     “I have to buy a lot of copies,” I said, grinning stupidly.  “There’s an article about me in there.”

     A tight smile momentarily hovered on her face.  And then the knock-out blow:

     “You have to press the button again,” she said.

     I was dazed.  Too dazed to fully comprehend what she had said.  She gestured toward the debit card machine.  I needed to press “enter” again. 

     After I had done so, she began scanning the next customer’s groceries.  So much for my illusions of local celebrity. 

     Still, it has been an exciting week.  A journalist from the L.A. Times, Sandy Banks, offered to visit my class in response to emails from my journalism students, who were required to send messages to real journalists asking them what the job was like.  She came, answered their questions, and interviewed me afterwards.  Her column, which focuses on new teachers coming into the L.A. School system and uses my case as the main example, appeared in the “California” section of Saturday’s LA Times, and should be available for another week or so online    (http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-me-banks24-2008may24,1,4269140.column)  From my perspective, the whole thing seemed to materialize out of thin air, a product of blind luck—but, as my dad loves to say, “I’d rather be lucky than good.”  The column is very flattering, and it gives me way too much credit, but I am very grateful to the people who made it happen: Sandy Banks, my principal, and my journalism students. 

     And I promise that the next time I write I won’t sound so disgustingly self-satisfied.      

Contrary to the title of my blog, this entry has nothing to do with teaching, and I apologize for that in advance.  I went on a literary binge last week, starting with seeing Ray Bradbury and Sherman Alexie speak at the L.A. Book Festival.  It was an experience that screamed “Remember me!!”  So I’m writing some of it down in case my seizure-addled brain muddles the memory later on.  Alexie was speaking at an open-air pavilion on the UCLA campus, and I ran up just as he was being introduced after battling traffic for an hour and a half.  He was there to promote his new young adult book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  In his jacket photos and picture on my classroom wall, Alexie looks severe: a long-haired, traditional Native American man who’s got a bone to pick with the white Establishment.  And he certainly does have a bone to pick, but in person he also seemed warm, friendly, and absolutely hilarious.  He told us about being born with 42 teeth and having ten of them removed in one day because Indian health services would only fund major dental work once a year. The guy who did it was a white dentist who thought that Indians felt half the pain of white people, and so gave them half the Novocain.  “What a bastard, huh?” said Alexie.  He talked about being born with a head so big that his friends called him “orbit.”  He got beat up a lot. He said he belonged to both the “Black eye of the Month” club and the “Chronic masturbators club” in middle- and high-school.  These claims would later elicit memorable questions from the audience.  After about twenty minutes of both humorous and poignant childhood stories, he stepped back from the podium, held up The Absolutely True Diary, and said “And that’s how it starts.”  The crowd erupted in applause, realizing that he had been ad-libbing the first twenty pages of the novel (a fictionalized autobiography) from memory. 

The first question was long-winded and had something to do with wanting an analysis of the recent memoir scandals—Alexie laughed (“They didn’t ask Richard Price this shit!”) before giving his response.  He seemed a little taken aback by the next question, which was completely different.  A boy, maybe ten years old with a head of crazy black hair, stepped up to the microphone.  He had a serious speech impediment and had to repeat himself several times.  He said that he had Turret’s syndrome and wondered if Alexie could give him advice on how to deal with bullies.

“Oh man,” Alexie said, looking down at the floor.  He sounded uncertain when he started speaking.  “Well, I had to learn to fight.  I’m not advocating that.”  He smiled.  “Not publicly, anyway.”  Then he seemed to hit his stride: “You’ve got to find allies.  My oldest son has some special needs issues, and he found a nice librarian.  And I found allies, too—mine were sometimes in books.  Just remember that whenever someone bullies you, they’re the one with the problem.  It’s their problem, not yours.” 

He was asked about the most important influence on his work (“Emily Dickinson”), the current state of Indian reservations compared to when he was growing up (“The same, but with Meth”), his spiritual life (“I’m Catholic, but I don’t talk about that stuff—I believe in the separation of church and Sherman”), and what he liked to read: “I read almost everything.  I’m a fan boy. I’m in awe of the other authors here!  I got all jittery when I saw Richard Price.”  That made me feel a little better about being very nervous when my turn at the mike came.  My heart was thumping and my vision blurred a little—I’d never talked to someone like Alexie before.  Someone whose work had kept me up for hours in a sleeping bag on a camping trip, whose style I had tried to mimic in college, whose charisma seemed to fill the entire space.  I asked him about his creative process:

“What goes into writing a book like this?  I mean, it’s got art, autobiography, fiction…is this the kind of thing that you pound out in a couple of weeks?  Months?  How does it work?”

“Oh, it was easy. Novels just kind of fall off of me.  Like brushing dandruff off my shoulders.”  He was joking.  “No—this is the first young adult novel I’ve ever written, and man was it tough.  My first draft was twice as long as what you see in the book now.  My editor cut it up—HARD—and at first I just cursed at her and wouldn’t do it.  If you’ve read “Flight,” that whole book is actually me working out my frustration at having to write a young adult novel.  But in the end I realized my editor was right all along.  So I made the cuts and got all the credit.  Funny how that works out.”

I was happy with my answer—Alexie had made eye contact the whole time!  Be still, my beating heart!—but I had to run early if I was going to make the Bradbury speech at another location.  As I was leaving, I heard an elderly English teacher question the appropriateness of the lone “Masturbation Club” reference in Absolutely True Diary.  Alexie smiled.  “The book’s got best friends punching each other, alcoholism, people burning to death and getting run over by cars—but it’s the masturbation that always gets people!”

The Bradbury speech was something altogether different.  It was in this huge, ornate auditorium, Royce Hall, and Bradbury was on stage by himself in a wheelchair. He’s 88 years old now.  I would characterize his talk as a heady mix of magic and senility.  Much more magic than senility, but I’ll start with the strange stuff:

He says that his whole life has been lived as “an act of love” and an “act of remembrance” and that he clearly remembers being born.  Yes, being born.  Not only that, but he remembers being circumcised eight days later (“I can clearly see the doctor standing over me with a shining scalpel”).  He told us a long story about how he started writing.  I didn’t really follow the whole thing, but I think there was some guy called Mr. Electro at a carnival and Mr. Electro’s hair stood on end because he was continually touching an electric charge.  A young Bradbury asked Electro how to live forever and Electro told him to write so he would always be remembered.  “And from that moment on, I never stopped writing,” Bradbury said. 

This was all a little wacky, but the strangest moment came later on.  Bradbury had just finished giving a genuinely uplifting speech in which he exhorted everyone to go out and become themselves, to look up at the ceiling every night and ask themselves if they were doing what they really loved to do.  Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he said “And soon, we’re going to go back to the moon!”  The audience cheered uncertainly. “And soon, we will colonize Mars!”  The cheering became more hesitant. Some people exchanged glances. But Bradbury wasn’t done–his aging, high-octane Sci-Fi imagination was running away with him. “And your children’s children and their grandchildren will live among the satellites of Alpha Centauri!”

What??

But Bradbury just kept right on talking as if nothing had happened, and before we knew it we were laughing at some story about his pretending he was Herman Melville while writing the script for Moby Dick.   Yes, Bradbury was a little strange, but I don’t want to give you the wrong impression—I left that auditorium inspired.  The passion in the voice emerging from this hunched, 88-year-old genius was incredible.  “I believe in God,” he said.  “I believe that you and I are God.  We are totally improbable!  Totally impossible!  Totally beautiful!”  He told us that a few days before he had received an honorific title from the French government—Commander of Arts and Letters.  “So,” he said, holding up the medal around his neck, “as Commander of Arts and Letters, I hereby command you to go out and become yourselves.  I command you to dedicate yourself to the future.  And I command you to love all my books, plays, and poems!” 

When Bradbury finished, he got a long, loud standing ovation. 

I went back to the book fair the next day with my friend Craig (who originally suggested it) and we saw other notables like T.C. Boyle and Tobias Wolff.  Throughout the week, I kept thinking about Bradbury’s advice: “Now I want to tell you what to do with your lives,” he said.  “Forget about universities and colleges and teachers… they inspire you, but the library is all you need.  I went to the library non-stop between the ages of 20 and 28.  I graduated myself from the library at 28.  I want you to become human.  In the library, all your lovers are around you.  They make you who you are.  They teach you to become yourself.” 

But this blog is getting long.  I can’t believe you read this far—thanks! So, in a nutshell: teaching continues, L.A.’s getting way too hot, and summer is just around the corner.  Schlosser out.