Read the Book

Just before I moved to New Mexico, the film adaptation of The Hours came out. I should have known better than to see the movie, but a good friend of mine wanted to see it, and I wanted to spend time with her before I moved. Also, I hadn’t seen a movie adaptation of a book in a long while. And I do enjoy Nicole Kidman, though I’m not sure why.

When we left the theater, my friend swore she’d never go see another movie adaptation of a book with me. I spent the whole 2 hours drilling my foot into the floor and mumbling “This isn’t how it happened in the book.” When Nicole Kidman/Virginia Woolf had her meltdown at the train station, I had to suppress the urge to walk out of the theatre. There was no reason to invent that scene. To this day, I’ll argue that the movie version of The Hours takes the book’s subtle, rich, compelling female characters and reduces them to one-note emotional train-wrecks.

As you can guess, I will not be seeing the new Sean-Penn directed, mostly stunt-casted movie adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s near-brilliant Into the Wild. I hadn’t heard about this movie adaptation until my husband mentioned it to me in passing, and I’ve been Googling information on the movie all afternoon. I love Krakauer’s book—it’s one of the few books I’ve read multiple times. Every time I read the book, I’m struck anew by both the mystery of Chris McCandless—who was this man, and was he daring or crazy?—and also by the mystery of what he represents in our larger culture. The literary loner, the hero who rejects society for grander schemes, the zealot made largely in America—Krakauer’s exploration of these topics is near perfection.

Now, I understand (on some level) that movies are not meant to be mirrors of the book—that the different medium requires by its very nature changes to the original text. But when I stumbled across the following description on a page promoting the 2007 Live Wild Tour this morning, I began yelling at my computer. Here's how they describe the movie version of McCandless' journey:

"INTO THE WILD is based on a true story and the best selling book by Jon Krakauer. After graduating from Emory University in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) abandons his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life."

We'll skip over, for starters, the inattention to verb tense. There’s no mention here of the danger in what McCandless did. In fact, it would seem to make McCandless into that same literary loner hero that the real life Chris so misunderstood. Sure, the people he met "along the way... shape[d] his life"—but he was also on an ill-advised, ill-equipped trip that ultimately led to not only his death, but to deeper, more complicated losses for his family and friends. And now Paramount Vintage Films is turning this into the 2007 Live Wild Tour, and encouraging readers to share stories of their own adventures? Have they read the book? Do they know where “living wild” ultimately led Chris McCandless? Do they even want to touch upon the deeper questions inspired by the book? Let me answer that last question: no, they don’t, because there’s more money to be made from simplifying a moral into the story. And we all know how adventure sells these days! Chris went on an adventure and met people who changed his life=money in the bank. Chris as a complicated man guided by forces that can be speculated upon but not always entirely understood=not a very good marketing scheme.

Rather than go to the movie, I'm going to re-read the book. And I'm encouraging everyone I know to do the same.

Newbies

Last week, I began my 8^th semester of teaching college writing and composition courses. For the first time, I walked into the classroom feeling confident and ready. Maybe it’s because I’ll be teaching the course’s first topic for the third time, and have an ingrained sense of the material. Maybe it’s because this topic—visual argument—is one that I find compelling and relevant, and, dare I say it, fun to play with and discuss in class. Maybe it’s because I’m finding that talking about writing fuels my own work—dare I say it, my students, if they don’t teach me something new, at least force me to stop and think about what I’m saying. Maybe it’s because I’ve been teaching for four years now, minus one semester, and it’s about damn time I realize that I’m not exactly a novice.

One thing I don’t often stop to consider, though, is my student’s p.o.v. They shuffle in and out of my classrooms, girls in pony tails and pearls and boys in baseball caps, and I give them grades and (I hope) insights into how to write good essays. It’s not exactly that I see my students as all together homogenous—every class has its surprises, and I can still list the names and interests of kids I taught several semesters back. But the same themes seem to repeat themselves over and over: the students who fill out the crossword rather than take notes, the ones who tell jokes just loud enough to reach the six others around them, the ones who live in an inexplicable constant state of tragedy (Freshman English, my husband likes to joke, is fatal for some students’ families), the ones who stumble in hung over, the ones who can’t seem to follow what I think are very clear instructions. The past few semesters in particular, I’ve been on a mission to erase bad habits: every semester I add a new course policy meant to force them to pay more attention to ME. I’m like a two-year-old, only smarter about language.

This semester, there’s a small girl with cropped blond hair and dark-framed glasses who sits near the front of one of my afternoon classes. On the first day of class, I asked her class to get into small groups and create a visual argument. They had to answer questions about their design decisions, and define the context for the argument. I’d left that question about context deliberately vague, both to give them the freedom to be creative in their definition, and also to help me figure out how well they understood the concept.

The blond girl was the speaker for her group. She seemed more nervous than I would expect: as she spoke, she blushed and looked around the room between answers. While she spoke I focused on what I wanted to address—why they’d chosen the color red, how their font might work in other rhetorical situations. I almost missed her point about context.

“The context,” she explained, looking quickly at me and then at her fellow students, “is that this is the first assignment in this class, and we’re all kind of nervous. We don’t know what to expect.”

Because I do know what to expect—I know that within the next week, at least four of her classmates (maybe even she) will e-mail me & ask me to repeat something I’ve said in class. And I’ll get annoyed. I know that many of them will truly be confused about the first writing assignment, that few of those confused will ask questions, and so a large chunk of them will get the lowest grades they’ve ever gotten on a writing assignment. I know that they’ll try to argue those grades by explaining how their high school teacher gave them all “A”s. And I’ll get annoyed. I know that no matter how many times I go over the importance of formatting and provide them with examples, I’ll inevitably see papers in Comic Sans font, or with margins as wide as my hands, or without any proper heading. And I’ll get annoyed. Why haven’t they figured this out, I keep asking myself.

Because this for them is new, and that’s easy to forget when you’ve been encountering issues that never seem to change. It doesn’t matter that I’ve said this for eight semesters times who knows how many sections now, these kids haven’t been to college yet. For many of them, entering the college classroom is more akin to entering a foreign country. All the familiarity of high school—the teachers they knew, the kids they knew, the activities they knew—none of them are here. Everything that’s familiar may be hundreds of miles away. No wonder they can’t remember—hell, my freshman year is nothing but a foggy memory, and not because of alcohol. Beneath all of my excitement about finally getting out of my mother’s house and moving seven hours away from the kids that sang songs about my frizzy hair & mimicked my high-pitched high school giggle, I was scared shitless. Take care of myself? What was that about? Solve problems on my own? What? There are still problems to solve when you move away from a place you hate? College blew my eighteen-year-old mind.

I’m not saying I’m gonna go any easier on these kids—anyone who didn’t take notes in class last week just cashed in on lost quiz points—but maybe I’ll take a stab at being a bit more patient, and a bit less annoyed. For all my insistence that they consider me when evaluating the rhetorical situations for their papers, the least I might do is more deeply consider their context.