Silver Linings Playbook and Building My Own Syllabus

Last week I was putting together my syllabus for a year-long American literature course I'll be teaching to ninth and tenth graders at a homeschool co-op starting in the fall, my favorite genre. There are so many wonderful things I've considered including that I needed advice and perspective from others to help me make sure I wasn't overloading the class. So I tossed the question out on Facebook to find out people's favorite and least favorite books they read in high school. For my purposes this time I threw out everything that wasn't American lit and made my choices from the feedback I got.

Did you see Silver Linings Playbook a few months ago when it was out? I loved the complex characters, plot and the balance between funny and serious moments throughout the film. I thought Bradley Cooper as the main character Pat was wonderful. While I liked him just fine in The Hangover and Wedding Crashers, I loved seeing what else he could do.

I just read the book version by Matthew Quick earlier this week. There are some big differences between the book and the movie, but I liked each of them for different reasons. In both the book and the movie Pat is trying to win back his ex-wife by getting in shape and reading everything she has put on the syllabus for her high school English students. Though he doesn't love what she's selected, he plows through them, looking forward to the day when he'll be reunited with his ex-wife and they can discuss the novels.

Two-thirds of the books Pat reads are ones I've chosen for my syllabus: The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn. The two Pat read that I didn't pick are The Catcher in the Rye (which almost made it on to the syllabus. If I teach this class again I might teach this one.) and The Bell Jar. 

Here are the rest of the novels that made it in: My Antonia, Of Mice and Men and The Color Purple. We'll also read A Streetcar Named Desire and bits and pieces of Phyllis Wheatley, Anne Bradstreet, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, Sandburg and Dickinson. I'm looking forward to rereading all these classics myself to prepare.

Have I missed anything What other books do you consider to be important to American literature?

Rereading

The other day on Twitter I came across an article published in the Mail called "Reading a book really is better the second time round - and can even offer mental health benefits." I completely agree! I've reread several things in the past several years for the second time, and found those stories to be much more wonderful the second time around.

Here are a few of my favorite rereads:

Lord of the Flies (blog post coming soon on this one) by William Golding
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Pride and Prejudice (OK, anything Jane Austen)
The Color Purple (turning 30 this year, by the way) by Alice Walker
A Wrinkle in Time (my most recent reread) by Madeleine L'Engle
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Diary of Anne Frank
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

What are your favorite rereads?

Rereading a classic: Their Eyes Were Watching God

I read Zora Neale Hurston's masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, for the first time as a junior in high school. I read it for the second time last weekend as a participant in the National Endowment for the Arts' program, The Big Read (see my post on last year's - The Great Gatsby - here). It's the largest reading program in the country. I enjoyed it very much 14 years ago, and so much more this time. This novel has several good things wrapped into one story: coming of age, a journey for love, a woman's struggle for independence, strong family relationships and female friendship.

What resonated with me the most during this reading is that most of the book is Janie Crawford's attempt to catch her friend, Pheoby, up on where she's been since they last saw each other. I could identify so well with this.

I'm lucky in that I have five very best friends: one from childhood and four more from college. None of them lives in Atlanta like I do, so we email each other daily, talk on the phone some and are connected on Facebook. We always save our best and longest stories for when we see each other in person. Isn't a story from an old friend always told best in person? When we get together, a lot of what we do is catch up, and it's usually over a cup of tea or a glass of wine. Like Janie, I've gotten accustomed to condensing a lot of information into a story told to an audience of from one to four girlfriends. I can imagine that Janie felt, as I often do, that telling stories in such a setting gives the storyteller both relief and perspective. Thank goodness for girlfriends.

Alice Walker is one of the few people who deserve credit for a resurgence in Hurston's popularity. You can read more about what I've written about Walker here and here.

Celebrate Black History Month by Reading

February is Black History Month, and what better way to celebrate than to read or reread books written by African American authors. Here are a few suggestions:

The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
Langston Hughes' poetry
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Anything by Toni Morrison
The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of the start of the Civil Rights Movement with the staging of the country's first sit-ins in Woolworth's in Greensboro, NC. That's where I was born (a few years later, mind you). Yesterday, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum opened to the public in this historic spot. I can't wait to make a visit.

February is also American Heart Month. Don't forget to wear red on each Friday in February, and take control of your own heart health.

Alice Walker Exhibit

“People are known by the records they keep. If it isn’t in the records, it will be said it didn’t happen. That is what history is: a keeping of records.” – Alice Walker

In 2007, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alice Walker chose Atlanta’s Emory University to house her papers, photographs and other items. It is all part of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library’s (MARBL) African American Collection. To highlight Walker’s gift, the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory displayed an exhibit called “A Keeping of Records: The Art and Life of Alice Walker,” which ended September 27. The exhibit highlights Walker as a poet, short story writer, novelist, activist, essayist, children’s book writer, and lover of African American art and literature (especially by Zora Neale Hurston). Such items are exhibited as enlarged pages from a draft of The Color Purple, playbills from the Tony Award-winning musical, props and a directors clapboard from the film production, photographs of Walker at all ages, letters from Quincy Jones, Steven Spielberg and Langston Hughes, and pages from her Spelman College scrapbook.

I was happy to have done the Alice Walker Driving Tour in Eatonton, Georgia, prior to visiting the exhibit because it answered a couple of my questions. For instance, Walker’s mother, Minnie Lou Grant Walker was photographed standing in front of their simple church, Wards Chapel A.M.E. Church, and the church was whitewashed and in great condition, so unlike its current state. Also, there were two pictures of Walker’s childhood home, which I can say must no longer exist on the property¸ where it seems picnic grounds of some sort are now.

It is truly a wonderful gift that Walker chose to house her archives at Emory University. Though the exhibit is now closed, Walker’s materials are open to the public and are housed on the 10th floor of Emory’s Woodruff Library, “a place,” Walker said, “where my archive can rest with joy in the company it keeps.”

Here are a few more links of interest to admirers of Walker’s work:

http://www.alicewalkersgarden.com/alice_walker_welcom.html
http://www.emory.edu/alicewalker/
http://www.emory.edu/home/academics/libraries/alice-walker.html

Andalusia

As a follow up to Flannery O’Connor’s Childhood Home in Savannah, during my recent jaunt through Middle Georgia, I was most looking forward to visiting Andalusia, home to O’Connor for the last 13 years of her life, and where she wrote many of her most important works. O’Connor joined her mother at the farm in Milledgeville after being diagnosed with lupus, the disease that also took her father’s life. Living on the farm turned out to inspire many of the settings and characters in her novels and short stories.

Though she did take time out to eat lunch in town with her mother, attend church and social events, and give speeches, O’Connor focused a great deal of her time writing stories on her typewriter at her desk in her front parlor-turned bedroom. It’s almost like her diagnosis made her focus on what was most important, her writing. Aren’t we lucky because of that?


I was so struck by my surroundings that it was hard to imagine that O’Connor fought a terrible disease here. If it weren’t for her crutches propped up in her bedroom, I might have almost forgotten.

I think Alice Walker put it best when she described her visit to Andalusia in her essay, “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor.” She wrote, “Standing there knocking on Flannery O’Connor’s door, I do not think of her illness, her magnificent work in spite of it; I think: it all comes back to houses. To how people live.”

Andalusia is still peaceful and beautiful today, all 544 acres of it. The first floor of the home has been left much like it was when O’Connor and her mother, Regina, lived there. There’s a wide screened in porch on the front of the house and trees that shade most of the yard. A conversation with the director indicated, though, that keeping up Andalusia is a financial struggle. Admission is free, though they appreciate a donation of $5 per adult. There is a small but nice gift shop. (I couldn’t resist buying the bumper sticker that said, “A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor said it best”). If Andalusia isn’t in better financial shape soon, its governing foundation may have to start selling off some of the land to keep the house running. To find out more about how you can help, visit www.andalusiafarm.org.

Finding Alice Walker

In 1972, Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple and other works, came back to her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, for a visit. She, her parents, and her seven brothers and sisters had lived in this Middle Georgia town for about a year. Walker was born in nearby Eatonton and grew up there, minus the year in Milledgeville.

The Walker home in Milledgeville was just a short distance away from Andalusia, a dairy farm and home to novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor from 1951-64.

Walker enjoyed O’Connor’s fiction and the fiction of other American writers, but was frustrated that in her literature classes, she wasn’t learning the works of the African American writers who came before her.

Walker and her mother went by the site of their former home to find it rotting away. At Andalusia, Walker found O’Connor’s family home to be very much intact. Though vacant, a caretaker lived on the property. Walker described the experience in her essay, “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor.” She wrote:

“My bitterness comes from a deeper source than my knowledge of the difference, historically, race has made in the lives of white and black artists. The fact that in Mississippi no one even remembers where Richard Wright lived, while Faulkner’s house is maintained by a black caretaker is painful, but not unbearable. What comes close to being unbearable is that I know how damaging to my own psyche such injustice is. In an unjust society the soul of the sensitive person is in danger of deformity from just such weights as this. For a long time I will feel Faulkner’s house, O’Connor’s house, crushing me. To fight back will require a certain amount of energy, energy better used doing something else.”

On a recent trip through Middle Georgia, I also tried to find Walker’s stomping ground. Eatonton’s Chamber of Commerce web site offers up an Alice Walker Driving Tour, with all stops being on Wards Chapel Road a few miles out from town.

The first stop was Wards Chapel A.M.E. Church, where Walker attended with her family and was baptized. Before I pulled up, I was envisioning it to be a nearly exact replica of the church in movie version of The Color Purple. Instead, I found a building in sad dilapidation, but with a sign out front announcing efforts to restore it.


Down the road were the sites of two homes, one where Walker was born and one where she grew up. Where she grew up had a structure that looked like a picnic shelter and gold panning set up than it did the home of a family of sharecroppers. No sign marked what it really is.

No house stood on the lot where she was born.

Years ago, Walker expressed anger at the disrepair of her former home, so I wonder what she thinks about her old home places now. Nearly four decades after she wrote “Beyond the Peacock,” signs mark the important places in her early life, but the same holds true for the buildings as during her visit in 1972. Unfortunately, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

If you’d like to contribute to the restoration of Wards Chapel A.M.E. Church, call 706-473-1781.