American Beauties, American Psychos

I finished teaching my highschool students today. Yipee! Though they were a fabulous bunch, I'm glad it's over as it made for a very hectic week. I also felt a bit sheepish about this morning's class as I had a bit of a "video clip" catastrophe. Here are the events leading up to the minor catastrophe. (is it possible to have a minor catastrophe?) Yesterday, I'd arranged to have my ten students work with two librarians in the research/training room. As usual, both of the librarians were fabulous and so helpful, finding books for my students, walking them through the use of the online databases and catalogue, etc. I'd asked students to define a particular genre by finding out information about its history and defining characteristics, creating a list of five films that are representative of the genre, etc. The final task asked the students to choose a film from our multimedia center that epitomizes that genre. One student wanted to include American Beauty as an example of melodrama. I agreed that it would be a good example, but also recognized that I'd have to choose the clip wisely given my rather young audience. Well, to make a long story short, I started the film only to realized a fraction of a second too late that the clip was starting just a moment too soon: there was Kevin Spacey, larger than life, jerking off in the shower. Ah well. Sure, his body is completely blurred behind glass and shower steam, but it's still pretty clear what he's doing. Luckily, we only caught the very end of that scene. Hopefully, none of my students will go running to their parents to complain as it might put the breaks on my plan to teach this class over the summer. Ah well. I'm sure they see and hear much worse things when hanging out with their friends.

What a difference from teaching my regular class where we read Charles Bukowski, watch American Psycho, and use terms like vagina dentata. This semester, my class seems to be more "vulgar" than usual, in large part because of the course content. I'm not normally afraid to swear in class but I usually keep it to a minium in order to stress the "seriousness" of the tasks at hand. This semester, that rule changed almost immediately. During the first week, we read the short story, "Thorazine Shuffle, by the director of Dialogues with Madwomen, Allie Light. One of my students referenced the scene where the doctor asks the narrator if she enjoys giving her husband blowjobs. All the other students looked shocked that he said "that word" outloud. They looked even more shocked when I repeated it a few minutes later and that seemed to set the tone for the course. Then again, how does one talk about narratives like these without swearing?

Ok. Back to reading Persepolis II. What a fantastic book. It's skillfully written, wonderfully illustrated, and has taught me so much about Iranian history. I read the first one in a single sitting--no great accomplishment really, given that it's a comic book. I had been avoiding the Persepolis books for months. I saw them as a distraction from my mountains of work. However, Aviva's prompting was slowly whittling away at my resolve. And I kept seeing the books in bookstores in San Francisco and London. The final straw was watching her parents fight over them when they visited briefly. In fact, they refused to leave town last Tuesday until they'd both finished the second installment. As I suspected, once I read the first few pages, it was impossible to set the book aside.