magic realism

Yesterday the Washington Post ran an article about a fascinating language-related development in, of all places, a police department.

In Nezahualcoyotl, a municipality on the outskirts of Mexico City, police supervisors have begun to translate great works of Spanish-language literature from Spanish ... into Cop Spanish. The idea originally came about when supervisors were bemoaning the lack of interest in the tutoring program they had established to help educate its officers, many of whom never even finished high school. At first, the program was the educational equivalent of pulling teeth. But then they got clever.

They decided to start incorporating local police code into the program. A regional chief translated Don Quixote, and, all of a sudden, there was a surge of interest in reading. Police officers began to ask for books. And by the time this article was researched, they were happily discussing One Hundred Years of Solitude - and participating in classes where phrases like "Destroy the narrative line!" were bandied about.

Read the full article here (registration may be required) - it's well worth it.

What particularly interests me about this story isn't, as you might think, the structure of Mexican Police Code, but rather the pedagogical strategy at work. Which is to say this: "Don't dumb it down; just make it accessible."

I mean, Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude aren't exactly pieces of proverbial cake. Hell, I don't think I could tell you what the hell even happened in One Hundred Years of Solitude - I remember a woman eating mud? Is that right?

The point is that these are gutsy choices. And the genius of it is that it sets a really important tone right from the start: "We think you're smart." So often I come across non-fiction that pretends to want to impart information but treats the reader as inferior right from the get-go. The tone in these cases is "I think I'm smarter than you, and I shall deign to acquaint you with my vast intelligence."

I'm thinking, of course, of language books. Specifically, books about advanced English usage. Even more specifically, a certain book that features pandas and punctuation.

While I thoroughly enjoyed Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, I was deeply unsettled by the tone. Although I'm sure it was exaggerated for comic effect, Truss's disdain for those unacquainted with proper punctuation really put me off. Because it seemed to me that she wasn't writing a book to instruct the uninitiated with regard to apostrophes, but rather that she was writing a book to instruct the initiated with regard to mocking the uninitiated.

And then, she complains that some people don't know any better - and, horror! - that these people don't know any better despite the presence of her book, which would obviously set them straight.

Well: duh. Who wants to read a book that belittles them? And let me say this: just because someone hasn't acquired a knack for commas doesn't mean that they're impossibly stupid. Jesus, people. I cringe at a punctuation error like many others, but that's because I work as a copyeditor. It is, from time to time, my job to cringe at punctuation errors. And if I see a sign that's been professionally error-ridden, I get mad, because one of my colleagues is out there doing a shitty job. But do I assume that just because someone slips an its/it's error into an email that they're somehow subhuman? No.

I have limited classroom experience, having formally taught in only two situations: last year I volunteered as a tutor, and during my brief stint in grad school, I was the TA in a course on Middle Eastern government and politics.

(Which was particularly absurd because I knew absolutely nothing about Middle Eastern government and politics - my focus was East Asia. But apparently for my departmental coordinator, one non-European culture was as good as the next. Plus ça change....)

So I can't say that I really understand first-hand the practicalities of teaching. But I am an overeducated swot who comes from a family of teachers, which means that I actually spend a great deal of time thinking about the mechanics of education. And this is what I believe: oftentimes there's an initial hurdle to learning, kind of a barrier to entry, if you will. Study, frankly, can be scary. However, the solution to that doesn't have to be bar-lowering. Instead, try enjoyment-raising - the metaphorical equivalent of setting up a trampoline. Make your teaching witty, make your teaching entertaining, but above all, make your teaching respectful. Because if you don't respect your students from the get-go, I guarantee that unless your students are the type who crave positive pedagogical feedback (in which case they probably don't need any encouragement to study, as this is a key trait of the classic teacher's pet), they will shut down and stop listening.

In fact, unless you're actually in a school, don't even think of your students as students at all - because they don't have to be there. And you don't have any authority over them, no matter how much of a megalomaniac you might be. Instead, think of them as customers - and you have to fight for them.

There's a difference between willfully stupid and willed-to-be stupid. I have nothing but contempt for one and compassion for the other. I leave it to you to figure out which is which.

play or get played

I'm finally emerging from a three-week cluster-fuck of publicity, international travel, and familial interaction, each of which exhaust me to a similar degree, which is to say completely. Next week I'll have belated dispatches from Budapest, thoughts on Hungarian, and a sneak peek at the awesomely cracked-out 2008 calendar I got from my local grocery store.

Nothing, however, deserves my first-post-of-the-new-year slot so much as this: The Best Show on Television. The fifth and final season of The Wire premieres this Sunday on HBO, and I feel that it's my duty as someone who typically watches upwards of 80 hours of television a week to do my own small grass-roots part and remind people to set their TiVos or DVRs or VCRs or even - gasp! - to make a note to actually sit down at 9pm and watch the thing like back in the old days. (And if you have HBO OnDemand, you'll find that the season premiere is already available for viewing.)

The Wire is so much better than anything else on television that some might consider it an insult to call it mere television. But I'm Midwestern, earnest, and full of a surprising amount of optimism after the results of last night's caucus (on the Democratic side, in any case), so I choose instead to think that The Wire is one of the few shows that actually does my idea of "television" justice.

Initially, I resisted The Wire as a starlet eschews sobriety. Which surprises even me, in retrospect, because the great Homicide: Life on the Street (another David Simon and Ed Burns project) was a defining show for me growing up. True story: I once wrote a short story for my freshman English class about an imagined interrogation between a serial killer and Andre Braugher's Detective Pembleton. But in the early years of The Wire's run, I was far too emotionally invested in Six Feet Under to consider trying out another of HBO's serial offerings, no matter how sentimental I might have been about the series creators.

Then, last year, the fourth season of The Wire really, finally started to garner some serious mainstream attention. Which, for me, had the opposite effect of that intended: I was just plain put off. I felt like I was being force-fed by ostentatiously liberal TV critics, the kind of critics who were just so thrilled to be championing a show about the inner city, because that made them so fucking real, yo. So many of those pieces felt to me like lady-doth-protests-too-much pleas by the super-white and super-privileged. Like, "We watch The Wire every week! With our black friends - of whom we have many, by the way!"

My response was something along the lines of "Fuck that, I already sat through Crash because of you motherfuckers - and I have me some Wife Swap to watch."

Then, this summer, something amazing happened: my beloved St. Louis Cardinals started sucking. Which opened up a lot of free time for me. So I finally picked up the first season of The Wire.

And: holy shit. When I say Best Show on Television, I am not using hyperbole.

Watching The Wire is like watching a 55-minute master class - in acting, in writing, and in the righteous fury of the disenfranchised. And it's not just watchable for its impeccably researched look into the nuts and bolts of the drug trade or law enforcement or city politics. What makes the show so uniquely compelling is its startling depth of human compassion coupled with its clear-eyed understanding of the inherent brutality of the system, a system that will grind you up and spit you out, no matter what your intentions, no matter what your excuses. You don't just watch the characters on The Wire, you love them - no matter how flawed they might be. And you will rage and rage against the forces that keep these characters so impossibly down.

Because this show is as real as it gets, and if you don't respond on a visceral level to that realness, then I might suggest that you double-check to make sure you're not some sort of early model replicant.

Case in point: my favorite character is Omar Little (no relation), a gay stick-up artist/legend/poet/assassin. The law would label him a murderer. And a lesser show would make him a villain. But on The Wire, Omar takes his mother to church every Sunday. He treats Butchie, the blind bar owner, like his own father. And he loves Honey Nut Cheerios. Every episode, I root for Omar. But I don't root for his redemption necessarily. Nor do I necessarily cheer him on in his more criminal behavior. I just want him alive and living free and honest. In season four he argues that the truth means something, telling Detective (The Bunk) Moreland that "a man's got to have a code." I want him to have the chance to keep on living by that code.

But, in the end, what The Wire has done for me is much more than turn me on to a bad-ass, brilliant homosexual. Which, since this is me we're talking about, is pretty much the definition of shooting fish in a barrel. (Related aside: I would argue that the privileged white version of Omar is Greg House. Discuss.) What the Wire has done for me is, in fact, the greatest gift I could ask for: it got me thinking again.

Let me explain, in the aforementioned earnest Midwestern style:

I grew up in St. Louis, which, along with Detroit, is right up there with Baltimore in the competition for most fucked-up urban environment. Whenever the year's crime stats come out, friends and acquaintances invariably ask me what it was like for me living in what the numbers seem to indicate is basically an out-and-out war zone. Here's the thing, though: I hardly saw that side of the city.

I was born and raised just outside the city limits, in a place called University City. Many might argue (and many have argued) that U-City isn't nearly as sheltered as other St. Louis suburbs. After all, it does abut the city proper, and it's also an area that seems to be a poster city for racial diversity - it's about half black and half white. In St. Louis county, it has a reputation for being progressive and open-minded and even a little bit dangerous. When I was in elementary school, the mother of a classmate once expressed concern to my mother that we lived in an area with so many potential "criminal elements." (I leave it to you to read between those lines.)

So usually, U-City residents are crown-to-toe top-full with pride for their vibrant, diverse community. President Clinton even came to speak in front of our city hall when I was in high school, praising all of us for coexisting so well. Yay, us!

Except for this one small detail. There are two main east-west corridors in U-City: Delmar and Olive boulevards. North of Olive, the white population falls to nearly nothing. South of Delmar, the same thing happens to the black population.

In other words - in honest words - U-City is in fact a poster city not for diverse coexistence, but instead for the country-wide trend of micro-segregation that county-level census data so cleanly covers up.

What I thought was better was actually worse: because I had no excuse, no excuse whatsoever for being so blind to the realities of my city. I thought that I understood the city because I was in a nominally diverse environment, because I had friends of many colors, because I played basketball with a bunch of girls from the city in some seriously shitty neighborhoods. But the truth is this: I lived a mile away from urban heartbreak for eighteen years and was able to pretty much ignore everything that was going on around me - the crime, the poverty, the drugs, the deteriorating schools.

And then - then! - I moved to New York. And once again praised myself for living in diverse areas, moving from nearly inner-city to outer-borough. And I was doing the exact same thing, keeping my head down while wrapping my progressive neighborhood identity around me like a complimentary PBS-pledge-drive muffler.

It took The Wire to give me a good, hard kick in the hypocrisy.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that I'm now, like, down with the thug life or whatever. I don't run a drug-outreach program or write about the institutional inequalities in the nation's schools or lobby for changes in the nation's foster-care programs. I write about language and books and television. Let's be honest: in the grand scheme of things, I'm just another sheltered, privileged asshole. But now I'm seeing things I wasn't seeing before. I'm a little more aware.

And I'm thinking more and more - which is what, in my heart of hearts, I believe the best television - the best art - should do.

Thinking isn't doing; thinking isn't changing. But it's a good first step.

So make a New Year's resolution and watch the goddamn show already. Because if you think being a mile away from the realities of the American City and still managing to ignore them is reprehensible, recalculate that equation based on the distance from your couch to your TV and see how you feel then.

everything bad is good for you

You know, there isn't much that pisses me off more than when intellectually superior types give me this look, like I've just told them I've been diagnosed with leprosy, and say "I just don't know how you can watch so much television!" Implication: I weep for your past, I weep for your present, and, most of all, I weep for your future, you sad, brainless, and possibly deformed excuse for a human being.

Don't get me wrong: I won't deny that there's a lot of crap out there. But you know what? There's a lot of crap everywhere. Crap literature. Crap opera. Crap nineteenth-century poetry. Pick any medium of expression, any area of study, and you'll find a nice long list of things that will annoy and disappoint you. If you want to dismiss television as intellectually irrelevant just because some of it sucks, well, then you're also going to have to dismiss all of that other inaccessible bullshit that you like to name-check at parties just to remind people of what a unique, beautiful little snowflake you are.

(And if you're shocked at my low opinion of Wordsworth, well, now you understand my reaction when people tell me that they don't like The Amazing Race.)

Obviously, I don't spend all of my time concocting sophisticated theories about the relationship between, say, improvements in modern fertility treatments and the cancellation of Punky Brewster. Although if I do, rest assured that I'll post it here. But that doesn't mean that watching television is any sort of passive, mindless act. One of television's great pleasures is pulling apart its tangles of allusion, in-joke, and industry connection. When I watch a show, I imdb the living fuck out of it, chasing down the lead actors, the guest stars, the executive producers, the competition in its time slot. I read related criticism and commentary. I sign up for TWoP recap notification.

Is this substantially different from the work of a great reader or art appreciator? They read the text or walk the galleries, mentally cataloguing exactly the same things: reference and context and influence. And yet those with arcane knowledge of literature or the visual arts get to be called "intellectuals." But those of us with encyclopedic knowledge of modern media? Geeks. Nerds. Game-show novelties. If you're really lucky and happen to be a particularly telegenic geek, well, you might score a gig as a VH1 commentator. That's right: the best we can fucking hope is to have the respectability of Hal Sparks.

The compulsion among trend-setters, taste-makers, and pseudo-intellectuals to vilify the commercial or commonly enjoyed is like a Saturday-afternoon trip to IKEA: intensely frustrating and a little bit retarded. Chuck Klosterman, in one of his characteristic (and characteristically passing) fits of awesome, wrote the following: "Commercial success does not legitimize musical consequence, but it does legitimize cultural consequence." The fact that he was writing about Guns 'N Roses at the time should not detract from how fucking obvious this should be, not just for music, but for all forms of entertainment. According to recent studies, the average American watches 30 hours of television a week. 30 hours a week. Don't tell me that TV is inconsequential, a technological trifle. Even if you don't deem television worthwhile enough to wrest your fine eyes away from Talk of the Town, it is impossible to deny that television is culturally significant, and maybe - just maybe - an interest in television might have some academic or even - dare I say it - intellectual merit.

I'm not saying that television will provide the answers to all of our grand sociological questions. I'm not saying that the West Wing clarifies Locke or that the subtext of Smallville provides necessary and illuminating insight into the later works of Foucault. I'm not even saying that the Democrats really should have bothered to think a bit more critically about media in Middle America instead of trading insults with Fox News, all "whatever, dude, we've got Tim Robbins and Janeane Garofolo." Well, okay, maybe I am. But my point is this: we should all get off our elitist, highly educated high horses and stop equating "low brow" with low quality and low worth.

Be a connoisseur, be an authority, be a geek. But don't be a snob, asshole. It just makes you look stupid.