I Read The Pornography Wars and Now It's My Least Crowd-Friendly Special Interest

The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America's Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a world we live in! The other day, I sincerely told my teenager that if I’d known, at her age, that one day I’d live in a future in which Spotify Premium* exists--nearly all the world’s music at my fingertips for just eleven bucks a month!--it would have literally been my own personal “It gets better” moment. Seriously, all. That. Music! And every day I find something new! I’m still low-key in my deep dive of comparing different versions of “The Nutcracker” as played by different professional orchestras, and yesterday, I found a cover of “Life on Mars” sung by Sophia Anne Caruso. What a world!

*This is not an ad for Spotify Premium.

Simultaneously, the fact that you can also now find nearly all the world’s porn at one’s fingertips has gone mostly unnoticed by me, but I love myself a social history, so I was interested enough to dip into this book… and now I might possibly have found myself obsessed with the history of pornography?

But to be fair, Burke drew me in right from the start with a history/analysis of the Venus of Hohle Fels, the earliest figurative depiction of a human yet discovered, and y’all KNOW how I feel about the art and artifacts of early peoples!

Just by looking at it, the Venus of Hohle Fels is pretty porny… and off we go into the history of porn!

There wasn’t as much history of bygone eras as I’d wanted--I wanted to read about Victorian porn!--but I was very interested in Burke’s analysis of a few more contemporary key historical moments that changed how we make and consume pornography. There’s the internet, of course, which made commercial porn shoots less viable because nobody really needs to rent backroom DVDs anymore, and the Pornhub monopoly, which made those shoots now nearly worthless, because why buy a website subscription when you can get raunchy clips for free? It was enlightening to see interviews in which sex workers who said that they could once upon a time earn a living filming porn on contract now have to operate more like gig workers, with porn shoots, camming, public appearances, and escorting. Apparently not even OnlyFans is a one-stop solution for most sex workers, especially when it can’t ever seem to decide if it will take major credit cards or not.

There is actually less history overall in this book than I’d been anticipating. I guess I’d expected a timeline/analysis of seminal works (lol!) and their various historical impacts, and we do get some of that, from the Venus of Hohls Fe to Deep Throat (you should read Roger Ebert’s review of that film!) to the Girls Gone Wild franchise that I remember from my own misspent 20s… but also with a lot of present-day first-person narrative of what it’s like to attend an ethical feminist porn shoot or an anti-porn convention or a sex workers conference, etc. I never could quite nail down (lol!) the author’s thesis, I guess, or even really how she wanted her analysis to flow, which often left me confused about the purpose of what I was reading and/or weirdly displaced in time--there was a very long passage about commercial shoots, for instance, that I was very interested in, but I could not for the life of me figure out if this was a contemporary shoot or something from, say, the early 00s? Based on Burke’s later discussion of the ways that MindGeek/Pornhub has made commercial shoots obsolete, I’m guessing it was the early 00s.

I was also less interested in the lengthy discussions of the various contemporary anti-porn movements. Historical anti-porn movements, sure--the California Measure B legislation in 2012-2017ish is super interesting, and to my mind has a lot of connections with ongoing legislation across the country to limit/determine what public school teachers can do--but the discussions of the contemporary stances against porn just went round and round: feminists are against porn for these reasons, religious conservatives are against porn for these reasons, etc. The feminists who are opposed to porn have a point, at least, but so do the feminists who are okay with porn, as do the sex workers involved in creating it, as do the free speech laws. I did have a fun time looking up an author’s reading of Good Pictures Bad Pictures Jr.: A Simple Plan to Protect Young Minds and snickering over it, though--my teenager, who was also watching this reading with me, kept shortening Jenson’s call to arms of “Turn, Run, and Tell” to “Turnt,” which… snicker! But what I really wanted, and didn’t get, was Burke’s final conclusion and stance; after all, she’s the one who just wrote a book about it! She must have opinions!

Instead, you are not going to BELIEVE what she does in the final paragraph of her book: she spoils the series finale of The Good Place?!?!? I mean, yes, fine, the show has been out for a few years, but still: it was a big twist! And she didn’t even give a spoiler warning first!

Although I got frustrated with the various philosophical stances since they were portrayed as, and seem to remain, unrectifiable (lol!), I was very interested in Burke’s references to a few cultural artifacts that seem like they could be more revealing, notably Rashida Jones’ documentary, Hot Girls Wanted, that seems to portray porn’s incessant acquisition of 18-year-old talent as VERY close to human trafficking, and the Twitter controversy involving August Ames, which seems to have as much to say about mental health as it does homophobia. As well, there’s a short mention of Dan Savage’s amateur porn film festival, Hump, and of a few performers who’ve done some compelling advocacy (including TEDTalks!) that I would have loved to have seen entire chapters on; this feels like the closest society has come (lol!) so far to true feminist, ethical porn.

I left the book with a lot of topics in mind that I’m still curious about: IS feminist ethical porn possible? Is there an ethical way to legitimize sex work? What do popular trends in porn say about the society that creates/consumes it? How has the takeover of “indie”/”pro-am” porn affected the marked sizeism, colorism, and racism clearly evident in most commercial porn? Burke did a little bit of semiotic analysis of a couple of commercial films that have historical resonance, primarily in her discussion of racism and pornography, but I’d love to read more about that. I mean, she barely touched (lol!) 50 Shades of Grey!!!

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I Read Our War and I'm Pretty Sure It's Non-Fiction

Our War by Craig DiLouie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am so unnerved by how plausible this book seems. A second American Civil War caused by Trumpers (in this universe they probably refer to themselves as “Marsh-ans” or something, but we all know they’re Trumpers), a post-apocalyptic future in which big cities exist more like third-world countries, and a world in which the most unrealistic aspect is the fact that apparently nobody’s dropped a nuclear bomb yet? Yeah, DiLouie is basically just saying the quiet part of my constant feeling of impending doom out loud.

If you didn’t feel the same level of, like, deja vu for the future I won’t be surprised, because for me, the most unnervingly plausible part of this book is DiLouie’s street-level knowledge of Google Maps. A couple of chapters in, I actually Googled him to see if, like John Green with his Funky Bones reference that first tipped me off to his own locality, DiLouie is also a Hoosier… and he’s actually from New Jersey? Well, his Google Earth skills are marvelous, because I could mentally follow one of the main characters, Hannah, from the refugee camp to the Free Women headquarters to the Brickyard Crossing golf course--the only thing missing was a Children’s Museum of Indianapolis sighting. Imagine the pathos DiLouie could have packed into an image of the life-sized dinosaur statues bombed and broken!

But even without the reality boost of a setting that is my closest big city (and a name-drop of my own hometown… we tried, but alas, the rebels got us), I think this book would have been unsettlingly real. I mean, deep down aren’t we all surprised that January 6 didn’t end up in a full-on Civil War? Deep down, don’t we all think that Civil War was just postponed, not completely staved off?

With that realistic setting, DiLouie’s main premise--the use of child soldiers by all sides of the war, at all levels of the conflict--was vivid and disturbing. Here's the UNICEF definition of children recruited by armed groups, and one of the main characters in Our War is a UNICEF official who's come to evaluate the needs of America's children during this war. In Our War, the rebels had the more predictable, stereotypical uses for their child soldiers, terrible but nothing I’ve not read about before, but what really got me was how the “good guys” also used children. It was devious and compelling, manipulative and awful, and yeah, I totally buy how it went down. One day, you’re telling an orphaned child that everyone in the militia is her mother now and you’re feeding her and praising her and giving her a home, and the next day, you’re putting a suicide bomb in her backpack and sending her over the wall to the enemy encampment.

The only part of the book that didn’t really ring true to me was Hannah’s final chapter. DiLouie doesn’t usually pull his punches, so I kind of think that he just bummed himself out too much and was all, “Dang, I’ve got to give this kid a redemption arc or I’ll never have another good night’s sleep!” I know kids are resilient, and this kid got a LOT of therapy, but I just don’t think she’s pulling out of that level of trauma.

Speaking of deja vu for the future… if The Handmaid’s Tale didn’t already have you planning out your overland, on-foot route to Canada, this book will get you motivated to figure that out. Remember: stay off the main roads and highways!

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I Read The Emotional Lives of Teenagers and Now I'm Not Quite as Emotionally Illiterate (Although I Am Still PLENTY Emotionally Illiterate...)

The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents by Lisa Damour
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book has been a running joke around the house this Thanksgiving break. Both teenagers are home for the holiday, and the college student, seeing the book on the coffee table, turned to her younger sister and said, laughing, “OMG is this for YOU?!?”

“It is for ME!” I retorted.

Just between us, it *was* originally for her, ahem, but I was less than a chapter into the book before I realized that it actually *is* for me. There’s not much that I actually do need to change about the way that my teenager handles her emotions, but there’s a LOT that I, as her parent, could be doing to better help her learn to manage them.

My biggest takeaways are as follows:

1) The goal is to help teenagers have reasonable emotional responses, not just help them be less sad. Sad things and stressful things are SUPPOSED to make you sad and anxious! So even though it’s uncomfortable to witness and I know it’s even more uncomfortable to feel, I shouldn’t try to rescue my teenagers from their anxiety about college applications or their nervousness before a big test or their sadness after losing out on a cool opportunity, etc. I mean, I don’t rescue them from stuff like that, but I DO feel helpless and anxious and guilty as hell about their negative emotions. But Damour writes, “Feeling the emotional impact of difficult experiences helps us grow up.” Apparently, learning to manage those emotions is an important part of the learning process, which is of course not news to me, but it actually also kind of is news? I… should probably learn how to do that for myself, tbh, because managing my painful emotions for me probably isn’t why God invented Delta-8…

2) A lot of the time, you don’t need to fix your kid; you need to fix YOU. One of Damour’s pieces of advice is literally to every now and then apologize to your kid for whatever mean things you might have done to them lately that they were too polite to call you out on at the time. I actually tried that one the other day, using those words almost exactly. My kid blinked, thought for a beat, then smiled and said, “Okay”--y’all, I think there actually was something I had just apologized for! I followed up, of course, with the usual litany that she should always feel free to let me know when I’d overstepped, but I remember enough about being a teenager to also remember that adults are terrible pretty often and how exhausting would it be to have to call out every one of them every time? Blech. I’ll just go ahead and keep a monthly blanket apology on my calendar, thank you very much.

On a related note, Damour writes the following passage that I thought was very interesting, because I have noticed this, especially with my college-aged kid:

“And, like me, you may have noticed that our teenagers also tend to be many steps ahead of us on topics related to social fairness and quick to point out our blind spots or narrow-minded thinking.”

I definitely get salty when my child tells me something that I said is narrow-minded, but yikes, who wants to be a bigot? Thank goodness for these kids who can save me from my Gen X Southern grossness (although I’m still not sure why they also want to save me from open-toed shoes?).

When the kids aren’t chastising me and I get a turn to parent them, I thought that this statement was reassuring: “Studies show that teenagers benefit from having high standards set for their behavior.” That one’s easy money, of course, since I already do that, but this was a perspective that I hadn’t thought of before: “These conversations often go best when they’re less about what we want for our teens and more about the priorities teens usually have for themselves.” That makes a lot of sense, and I can see how it also helps build self-motivation. It’s a good perspective shift for me to have to rearrange my thinking from why *I* want my kids to behave a certain way to why *they* should want that for themselves.

Damour discusses numerous mistaken ways in which parents think they’re helping their kid but are actually doing them harm. I pricked up my ears at this note that speaks to the ongoing--and especially current--censorship attempts in many school libraries:

“[S]everal psychological studies have confirmed that reading helps to foster empathy. Far from being harmful to teenagers, reading compelling narratives of lived experiences builds compassion and the ability to take another person’s perspective.”

I find this information really helpful! My kids have always read widely and at will, but I sometimes feel hesitant about the books that I assign them as schoolwork. Not only do they STILL both rag me about Bridge to Terabithia, which broke both their hearts that time that we all listened to it together on a long road trip, but I can easily think of numerous book passages that I personally find upsetting, and I always sort of thought that, well, who am I to deliberately put something upsetting into their young minds? They’re already empathetic; must I really make them also experience, say, the depths of dehumanization suffered by the Jewish people in Night, or the scenes of sexual assault in The Kite Runner or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?

But this month my teenager and I are actually listening to the audiobook of Twelve Years a Slave, a book I’ve never read before and only suggested because I wanted a narrative depicting the lives of enslaved people in pre-Civil War America and the teenager balked at the runtime of Uncle Tom's Cabin (20+ hours!!!). It is harrowing, and upsetting, and there’s a part in which a slave owner is openly discussing sex trafficking a small child that really disturbs me, but it also humanizes these concepts that seem historical and abstract, and makes them real and immediate. I get, now, why we shouldn’t try to shelter our teenagers from material like that.

And yes, 12 Years a Slave is banned in some places.

Another part that I found very helpful was Damour’s discussion of how/why parents should talk to their kids about suicide. Previously, I think I’d gotten the idea that we shouldn’t talk about suicide, I guess because it might encourage someone considering it, or promote a suicide cluster, or otherwise put the idea into someone’s head? Fortunately, earlier this year I earned a certification in Youth Mental Health First Aid, during which we were explicitly instructed to openly discuss and ask about suicidal ideation with our kids. So now that’s something that I do. Damour also gives this explicit instruction, and accompanies it with these reassuring words: “[R]esearch show that asking nonsuicidal teens about suicide does not leave them feeling worse, but for teens who are feeling suicidal, it relieves distress.” That’s hugely helpful to hear, and I think probably a lot of parents would find it to be new information.

Damour has caused me to think about children’s emotions in ways that I hadn’t previously. Like, I haven’t been spending my entire parenting journey encouraging my children into emotional numbness or anything (I hope?!?), but I’d sort of thought that my job was to help them calm down when they were upset, all that “Take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth” stuff. But I guess that immediately calming down isn’t the goal; the goal is processing, and Damour encourages us to engage with our children about their painful emotions. She writes (about girls in this particular quote, but also about all kids), “[W]e want to reinforce her right to express her anger by giving it our attention.” I love that. Supernanny and the naughty step and time-out corner, etc., were big deals in my very, very early parenting years, and they didn’t really work for my kids, and now I feel pretty shitty about all that time they spent shrieking in the corner while I sat across the room and pretended to ignore them. They were in pain, and leaving them alone to sort it out themselves probably wasn’t actually very helpful or healthy. I like much better this advice to engage with my older kids about whatever is distressing them.

I also really like two other pieces of advice: that teenagers find regular ways to be of service to others, and that teenagers make time for pursuits that are “meaningful and important to them and are not done for the sake of a grade, a credit, or their college applications.” Happily, this isn’t a parenting issue that I struggle with (yay for not feeling like a failure!), but it’s good to be reminded of its importance and reassured that I’m not on the wrong track for making volunteer work mandatory and encouraging my teenager to spend as much time on her art as she does on her homework.

Overall, this work is probably the most interesting and pragmatically helpful parenting book I’ve ever read, so much so that I’ve already enacted numerous takeaways. I’m also thinking a little bit more about increasing my own capacity to accept and manage emotional discomfort, while I guide my teenagers through developing these skills in themselves.

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A Snarky Frankenstein Unit Study Appropriate for Snarky High Schoolers

Listening to audiobooks with my teenager is just about my current favorite thing about homeschooling. So far this semester, we've listened to History of the Kings of Britain, The Haunting of Hill House, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and we're currently one hour and 40 minutes into 12 Years a Slave, and we're VERY into it.

Frankenstein is a book study that we did last year, but somehow I never got around to writing about it even though it was AWESOME! I don't know if you know this, but a teenager is the best companion to have when reading a book. We speculate on every character's sexuality (*cough, cough* Walton was IN LOVE with Victor *cough, cough*), mercilessly roast every character (but mostly Victor), gasp in shock and horror at the kinds of behavior that was apparently normal at the time but is 100% taboo now (I'm sorry, but Victor and Elizabeth were raised as siblings!), and cheer at all the murders...

... and we sneak in some literary and cultural analyses, maybe a bit of creative writing, definitely some comparative analysis with other books and films. Book studies somehow always manages to feel low-stakes while being quite rigorous academically. It's some of the best schoolwork that we do together, and whatever we're studying, I tend to always have a book unit going.

Here's some of what we did for Frankenstein, and some other stuff that we could have done but didn't.

Pre-Reading

I wouldn't want to do anything that would give away any spoilers for a book, even a book as iconic as Frankenstein. I work with teenagers pretty often, and I am equally as often surprised at the background knowledge that they can lack--I would never assume that a kid who hadn't read Frankenstein knows ANYTHING, no matter how basic, about the plot!

That being said, a good video can often be a good, evocative setup for a book, especially a book with as interesting an origin as Frankenstein! This TED-Ed video sets the scene without giving away too much:

We've spoken about Lord Byron before back when we were studying Ada Lovelace, so mentioning that he was there did quite a lot to explain the setting of the creation of Shelley's novel to my teenager, ahem. Other good pieces of background info could include brief bios of Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, alchemy, the Gothic and Romantic movements, etc.

While Reading

Whatever you do, don't incorporate ALL of this into your literature study. I like to see what's intriguing my kids and expand on that, or encourage projects that build up skills I want them to learn, that follow their interests, or that could add a cross-curricular component that I could also count for a different subject.

• discussion questions/essay topics: A nice thing about homeschooling is that we can talk day and night about the books we're reading. We roast main characters over dinner, gossip about who's into who in the car, rewrite minor plot points via late-night texts across the house, and revisit our favorite bits years later--we're still cackling about our recurring joke involving Gandalf's favorite horse, and we finished that book five years ago! I don't usually use discussion questions or talking points to inspire our conversations, but I can see how they'd be useful, especially to set an essay topic.
• family tree/cast of characters. There's not a giant cast of characters in Frankenstein, but enough that it's easy to forget who someone is by the time they wander back into the picture. We do NOT want to forget how Victor and Elizabeth know each other, for instance (barf!), nor who our delightful little William is. There are tons of ways to create family trees and graphic character lists, and I do like to have kids create their own from scratch, illustrations and all... but here's a cheat sheet. 
• food. We usually enjoy cooking recipes themed on what we're reading or watching, but Frankenstein doesn't give one a lot to work with, ahem. Ah, well... perhaps a picnic while we read out loud to each other!
• geography. I LOVE using maps in my homeschool. I think it's so important to be able to visualize places from history and literature, and to build geographic context. Here's a Google Earth tour of the many geographic settings in Frankenstein, but I feel like my own kids don't always look hard enough at already-created maps to absorb the information; I'd rather show them a Google Earth tour of a different book, then have them create one for Frankenstein from scratch, or go completely old-school and create it with a printed map. This Smithsonian article about places that inspired Mary Shelley is another good resource. 
• practice using quotes as evidence: The year that my teenager went to public school, her English teacher had a terrific technique to teach the kids how to respond to a text. She'd give them a text, then ask them to 1) highlight claims, and 2) for each claim, respond with a sentence that agreed and gave a reason, or disagreed and gave a reason, or expanded on/qualified the claim. It was a great way to remind the kids that they did need to have their own opinions about texts, and to model for them how it works. This worksheet encourages the same strategy; when responding, encourage the student to find textual evidence for their response, and then you have a natural entry point for teaching them how to incorporate quotes into their writing. 
• supplemental texts. We do a lot of cross-curricular work in our homeschool, and one of my favorite ways to incorporate that kind of work is a supplementary reading that also applies to a separate study. For a novel like Frankenstein, supplemental texts in the fields of science, history, and mythology would all be easy to source. Or go in a different direction and offer supplemental pieces of artwork!
• travel. I really like to incorporate field trips, day trips, and other types of travel into our homeschool studies. Alas, for my final homeschooling teen haaaates to travel, but I still insist more often than she'd like... but a lot less often than I'd like! Travel to Bath, England, to visit the Frankenstein museum isn't exactly feasible, but I'm always on the lookout for traveling museum exhibitions, festivals, academic presentations at our local university, or high-quality live theater experiences.

After Reading

After finishing a book is when I like to incorporate comparative analysis. With Frankenstein, there are a lot of different directions you could go with this!

• Frankenstein films. With these, you can illustrate the growth and development of the Frankenstein trope, and critique its various manifestations. In our homeschool, we usually do at least one of these as an official Family Movie Night, with everyone contributing cheezy novelty recipes to a themed meal that we can eat while we watch. Here are a few of my favorite Frankenstein films that go quite well with Frankenstein meatloaf and Frankenstein broccoli florets and Frankenstein pudding cups and a Frankenstein cocktail/mocktail:

• children's books. Usually, the Frankenstein in a picture book is just a goofy-looking Halloween character that doesn't make any particular literary references. For an artistic kid, though, it's interesting to compare and analyze the various kid-friendly depictions of the monster, then create their own in response. Kids who are interested in folklore, anthropology, the organization of information, or books in general can enjoy logging the characteristics of each kid-friendly character and seeing if they can figure out the stereotypes or analyze what the representations are meant to imply. Here are a few of my favorite kid books that feature Frankenstein:

• other Frankenstein retellings. You can make thoughtful comparisons with versions of the story told in different times and places; they highlight different values and fears in our changing cultures, and often speak to the original version in important ways. Here are a few of my favorite Frankenstein retellings:

• secondary sources. I don't always incorporate these, but if a book has really struck a kid's fancy (as with the huge hit that Le Morte d'Arthur turned out to be!), I'll keep those good vibes going, perhaps with a bit of long-form non-fiction! Histories, biographies, and cultural analyses are always a good bet with books. Here are a few good ones for Frankenstein:

While supplementary activities can add a lot of content and rigor to a book study, keep in mind that it's also perfectly okay, and perfectly at-level, to simply read the book, talk about it, and move on with your lives! Discussion is a great way to address the content and themes of a book, so that even if you don't write an essay, if you've have lots of conversations about it you HAVE formed opinions, made claims, supported them with evidence, responded to another's claim with your own thoughts, and essentially performed quite a lot of analytical work. 

You should definitely make thematically-appropriate novelty foods and eat them while watching a related movie, though. that's a very important part of the process! 

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I Read The Water Will Come Because I Wasn't Afraid Enough of Drowning (JK I Am The MOST Afraid of Drowning!)

Found a new-to-us creek access (and soooo many snakes) on the kid's college break!

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I actually read The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet first, and loved it so much that I immediately checked out another of Goodell’s books-and two weeks later, I’m reviewing this one, too!

I don’t love this book, at least not for its writing style. In The Heat Will Kill You First, I feel like Goodell really cracked the pattern of vivid anecdote followed by elucidating science. The anecdotes WERE very vivid, which drew me into the science, which gave me the information, and then off I went to the next chapter. This book still has the science, but the anecdotes are a little less vivid and less interesting, or maybe I’m just less interested and don’t feel as much of a call to action reading about real estate as I was reading about migrant laborers dying in the fields. I don’t really feel sorry for the people who live on a narrow spit of land in Florida and want their shitty gravel road maintained AND I don’t feel sorry for the county government that has to spend all the county’s money yearly rebuilding a road that serves a whopping twenty people. 

Okay, I feel a little sorry for the county that raised its roads and got sued, anyway...

Other times, though, the real estate anecdotes worked. I’ve been interested in the Marshall Islands since my older kid studied it in AP Human Geography. My entrypoint was how cool stick maps are (I’ve since seen a real Marshall Islands stick map in a museum, and it’s just as cool in person!), and that same class also covered how the islands are being affected by global warming, but not in the vivid, anecdotal detail here. Goodell also showed me another unexpected point of connection to the Marshall Islands: many of the people there are leaving for my home state of Arkansas, of all places! I don’t love that for them, since they’re apparently mostly working at the chicken plant there. Fun fact: my high school chemistry teacher would threaten us with future employment at the chicken plant if we weren’t studying hard enough. The chicken plant is the WORST work, and I don’t wish that on anyone, much less people forced to leave paradise due in quite a large part to America’s actions.

On the trail down to the new-to-us creek access, we also found a lovely spot for a portrait!

This would have been a great book to read with my teenager when she was studying AP Environmental Science and AP Human Geography, and it’s also interesting to read it in today’s political landscape, when I can see connections between climate change and the COVID pandemic, Israel’s attempted genocide of the Palestinians, and Russia’s war on the Ukraine. Mostly, though, it makes me want to take a trip to Miami Beach. I’ve never been there, and it doesn’t seem like IT’s going to be there for very much longer, either…

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A Snarky Dracula Literature Study Appropriate for Snarky High Schoolers

Out of all of the hundreds of audiobooks that my kids and I have listened to together, I think Dracula might be our favorite. It's got so much to offer, from its status as a classic of literature to its Gothic horror vibes to its vampire creation mythology to its depiction of some of the best characters ever to grace the pages of a novel, particularly my personal badass heroine, Mina Harker, a woman who can write shorthand, has memorized London's entire train schedule, is a loyal friend and wife, and is the only one of Dracula's victims who lived to tell the tale.

Here are some of the things that my teenagers and I did during our brief Dracula unit study. This was part of their high school English credits, although the cross-curricular art activities were also recorded as part of their Studio Art credits.

Audiobook Narrated by Gildart Jackson

The kids and I loved Gildart Jackson's narration, so much so that we've specifically looked for him when picking other audiobooks (he also does an awesome Frankenstein!). 

We also loved Dracula!

The trick when you read Dracula with kids, or really probably any iconic work of literature, is to remind them that once upon a time, Dracula wasn't iconic--it was just Stoker's newly-published book! There weren't a ton of vampire tropes or cliches to tap into, because he'd mostly just invented them. You literally start the novel thinking that you're going along on one of Jonathan Harker's boring work trips. Probably, you're just going to be reading an epistolary travel novel about the wonders of verdant Transylvania. I love imagining it, how the Victorian reader must have grown ever more suspicious of the mysterious Dracula, how they'd gasp in shock at the big reveal: Dracula is a VAMPYRE!!!

Other semiotically rich elements worth much discussion include everyone's shitty, misogynistic treatment of Mina, how even with her misogynistic depiction Mina is still the most badass of all the Dracula characters (how/why did Stoker write her to be completely disregarded but also the most efficient, practical, and intelligent?!? Did he do it on purpose or by accident?), and the absolutely hilariously bonkers depiction of Quincy, the "American." Like, he literally carries a Bowie knife--had Stoker ever seen one of those to know how impractical that is? The kids and I howled with laughter every time he had a line of dialogue.

To make some comparative literature analyses, pair with any other vampire novel ever written. Excerpts from the Twilight novels are fun because they're just so corny, or you could do something well-written like Interview with the Vampire or 'Salem's Lot. I'm currently reading The Historian, and I am VERY into it! For a quicker project, go for a Goosebumps book or even a picture book, or do a sub-genre like paranormal romance with Dead Until Dark. So many semiotically rich vampires!

1931 Dracula Film

This first (and best!) Dracula film has a lot to add to the study, and everything about it is ICONIC. 

I mean, come on: Bela Lugosi? Iconic!

This 1931 movie introduced conceits that you don't even realize are conceits, they're so ingrained. The "Transylvanian" dialect that Dracula speaks in? That's from here! Turning into a bat that talks in squeaks, and the vampire's subjects can understand those squeaks? Yep, that's from here, too. It's super funny to watch this film, then turn on just, like, the first ten minutes of Hotel Transylvania. 

For a deeper analysis, pair with any vampire movie that came afterwards. We watched The Hunger for a recent Family Movie Night, because David Bowie, and it had some interesting things to say about age, sexuality, and the power dynamics of romantic love. Funnily enough, Dracula ALSO has interesting things to say about age, sexuality, and the power dynamics of romantic love!

Art Experiences

I used to get the Dover Publications free samples weekly, and the kids LOVED them! These Dracula paper dolls from Dover are a good inspiration for artistic response, because kids can then create the costumes for them. They can go old-school vampire tropes, or Victorian fashions, or make modern reimaginings of the novel's characters. I want to see Mina Harker as a steampunk heroine!

My younger teenager is very into the art of the book, so I've been encouraging her to create book cover images and design book jackets for the books we read together. You can actually get those printed to fit your favorite books, you know!

Artistic kids who want to use the book for more cross-curricular explorations can also illustrate memorable scenes or quotations. If they need some inspiration, check out my favorite edition of Dracula, this one illustrated by Edward Gorey (there's also an Edward Gorey Dracula toy theater that I covet). Even kids who don't see themselves as super artistic can create memes; memes are one of my favorite student creations, because kids love them, they get to show off how witty and sarcastic they are, and the most successful memes show natural evidence of a sophisticated understanding of the book.

Place-based Studies

I'm not very excited about Romania or Bran Castle when it comes to a Dracula study, because I'm not convinced that Bram Stoker even knew of those places, or of Vlad the Impaler. He liked the name "Dracula" when he read it somewhere, and his inspiration for the novel was Whitby, England. We didn't visit there when we went to England this summer, but we DID make a point of collecting ourselves some Gothic vibes. Next time I visit England, which I hope will be soon, I want to go north and see Whitby!

But I mean, you know, if I was IN Romania I'd definitely go to all the Vlad the Impaler sites.

To add rigor and more composition practice to any of these activities, just tack on a writing assignment! Write an opinion piece about Stoker's depiction of one of these now-iconic characters. Write a compare/contrast essay with another vampire book or film. Write Dracula fanfiction that changes the ending or the setting or a key plot detail. Write a research paper on the history of the vampire myth, or Gothic horror, or Whitby Abbey. Write an essay explaining your artistic process and decision-making when creating the book cover or illustrations. Create a travel brochure for Dracula's Transylvania. There are so many ways to make high schoolers suffer!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, confrontations with gross men, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Heaven Will Be an Eternal Game of Bananagrams

 

There's this unschooling tactic called "strewing" that I started to follow when the kids were little. Basically, if there's a material you'd like a kid to explore, you don't hand it to the kid, or direct the kid to it--instead, you just leave it temptingly out on a shelf or a table for them to discover for themselves. And it's supposed to be okay if it takes days, weeks, even months for them to pick up that material, because when they do, it will be self-directed and self-motivated, and following their interests is how kids best learn.

Until I really discovered the true dimensions of our local university's library (Hint: filtering for Three-Dimensional, Mixed-Media gets you all the puzzles and toys and manipulatives!), this was mostly just a way for me to waste my homeschool budget on stuff the kids didn't touch. I mean, sure, they became obsessed with the Geomags and the Kapla blocks, eventually they spent entire weeks with the Perler beads and the Sculpey clay, listened to so many books on cassette tapes that I worried they would never do anything else, but the 3D pen? Nope. Nope to the Zometools for free play. Nope to the crystal growing set and the build-your-own maze set and the Snap Circuits and the Turing Tumble and the balloon animals kit and probably over a thousand dollars more of awesome kid crap over the years that I would have given a year off my life to have played with when I was their ages, ahem.

Anyway, became much cheaper to strew when what I strewed came from my local university's library, and since then, over the years, we've had logic puzzles and board games and STEM toys and math manipulatives and scientific instruments all enticingly placed on our family room bookshelves ready to be explored and easy to return.

Thanks to the library's infinite renewals, I can't even tell you how long we've had Bananagrams. I think we got it around the time we also got the giant poster of the Greek mythology family tree and the giant map of the Moon, and those have both gone back to the library, but Senet and the leaf identification kit are also still here, so maybe it hasn't been too ridiculously long. Although I'm pretty sure several sets of tessellation puzzles have come and gone in that time, as have the Proofs of Pythagoras kit and the French vocabulary flash cards, sooo...

Now that the kids are grown or nearly grown, though, it turns out that the person I'm maybe actually strewing for is myself. I was wandering around the family room the other day, aimlessly tidying while the teenager and I listened to The Haunting of Hill House (it's not translating as well as I'd hoped to audiobook; we're going to finish it, but we don't love it, whereas I LOVED this book when I read it a couple of Halloweens ago), when I noticed, for the first time in ages, the Bananagrams game sitting on the shelves where we keep our library materials, and thought, "Huh. I should play that and see if it's fun."

So I rallied the teenager, and we did play it:

And it IS fun!

You know how Scrabble is generally really fun, but it's also boring waiting for other people to take their turns, and it's terrible when you have a terrific plan for an awesome word to play but before you can do it another person takes your spot?

Bananagrams solves ALL of that. There is never any downtime. You make your own crossword grid that's all for you, so nobody can ever mess it up, and when you see a better play you can rearrange your own crossword however you like:

Teenager peeled an "I" and decided to turn "DOPE" and "DAMN" into "DOPAMINE." 

So, everyone draws the same number of letter tiles (every time I've played it's been with 2 or 3 players, and we always draw 21 tiles), and you each work on your own individual crossword grid.

Matt, our college student home for Fall Break, and I are playing at the kitchen table on a Saturday night, listening to the drive-in's broadcast of the Taylor Swift concert like a good old-timey family.

When you've all of your own letters in your own crossword, you say "Peel," and everyone takes a new tile from the pile and continues playing.

Sometimes you get a new tile and it's like an S or something, so you can just pop it onto the end of a noun. But sometimes you get a Q and you realize that your only U is already busy, so you have to disassemble half your grid to get it back and then figure out how to rebuild while continuing to take a new tile every time someone else says "Peel."

The game continues that way, with occasional breaks to look weird words up as a family or neg someone else's word choice or lore dump about Scrabble games of old, etc., until there are fewer tiles left in the pile than there are players. At that point, we declare that the next person to use up all their letters wins, and then we get in everyone else's business to "help" them finish their own crosswords, but you could also go by Scrabble points.

I think you could also play Bananagrams as a solitaire game, going by how much fun the teenager and I had one time simply turning all our tiles face-up and using them all to make one giant grid. We started off just trying to build the most emotionally unhealthy words we could, as a "joke," so maybe it's also a little bit therapeutic, as well!

Or you could just build words representing the biggest thing on your mind these days...

I'm now officially on thrift store/garage sale lookout for a set of my very own, although I'm also toying with the idea of DIYing a set. They're literally just letter tiles in a zippered bag, and the only requirements are that the letter tiles have enough chonk to be able to pick them up easily, and that they have two sides for facing them up or down.

I think it would be fun to take a set of blank wooden tiles and handpaint each one, maybe with little background decorations like an illuminated manuscript. Think how pretty your crossword grid would be!

I Read The Heat Will Kill You First, and We're Definitely All Going to Die of Hyperthermia

It was an eclectic week!

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My way into The Heat Will Kill You First was the author's discussion of the 2021 deaths of a family, including their dog, during a hike in the Sierra National Forest. I am high-key obsessed with the topic of People Dying on Public Lands, and when the news hit, I followed it for a couple of weeks, reading theories ranging from algae poisoning to the mafia, before the next crazy news story hit and I forgot about it.

Turns out, that family died of hyperthermia, and Goodell’s vivid description of how it happened was the perfect segue into the longer, more detailed topic of We Are All Going To Die From This Heat.

You guys, we are all going to die from this heat!

I often apologize to my kids about the state of the planet that I’ll be leaving them, as often as I irritatedly lecture them that it's the giant corporations killing the sea turtles, not plastic straws... but we still don't use plastic straws. Also, plastic recycling in general is a myth. 

The blogger's child, age five, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium

I think about the state of the planet that I'll be leaving them even more than that, how those fun, special activities that I've taken them on, all those trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, will one day have become once-upon-a-time adventures, never again to be repeated, since much of Monterey Bay has already died off due to warming temperatures.

Even corn, the roach plant of the Heartlands, will be negatively affected. I’ve been obsessed with how hateful corn is ever since reading The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (EVERYTHING is made from it! It has very little nutritional value! Cows aren’t even built to digest it, and that’s why they have to give them so many antibiotics!), so maybe it’s not the worst thing that rising temperatures will eventually kill it off... except that, you know, by the time corn is killed off, most of the good stuff will have been LONG extinct.

It’s especially horrifying that, even in these ever-worsening conditions, America’s agriculture economy is still based primarily on individual manual field labor. It’s not quite as underpaid as it was when landowners literally enslaved people and forced them to do the work, but it’s still much closer to slave wages than it is to pay commensurate with skill, value, and experience. And just like when people were enslaved to do it, manual field labor is still causing heat-related deaths, just so we can have our strawberries and cabbages and almonds whenever we want them.

One of Goodell’s most interesting claims is that one reason why ever-worsening heat, particularly deadly heat waves, isn’t taken more seriously is that it’s invisible. The world has agreed on a Richter Scale, an EF rating, hurricane categories, etc., but the world hasn’t agreed on a scale upon which one can identify the danger level of a heat wave, nor is there a good universal graphic to illustrate one on a weather map. Part of that is that one’s experience of heat is somewhat subjective, so it’s less obvious when a heat wave strikes a place that isn’t prepared for it compared to the “normal” hot temperatures of a place where people know how to live with it--or at least have air-conditioning to avoid most of it.

Goodell also makes the point that part of the subjectivity of heat is its classism. Unlike tornadoes and, to a lesser extent, hurricanes, which strike where they will (it’s still a LOT better to be rich when there’s a hurricane coming, though!), heat affects the economically disenfranchised more than those with wealth and power. If a tornado hits, you’ve got to do something, but if a heat wave hits and you’re rich, you can just turn up the air-conditioning, or take a bonus vacation north.

 
In conclusion, maybe I should buy property in northern Canada so my descendants can perhaps eke out a few more generations on our greenhouse planet. Or plant some more trees on my back forty. Or maybe just take my kids to see a glacier so they’ll have a crazy-sounding, half-believed story to tell the orphans they help chaperone in the Survival Camp.

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