one of my nemeses among English teachers, made us skip the
first three pages of Romeo and Juliet - the part about the maidenheads - only to read aloud Juliet herself throughout the rest of
24
Plato
the play, partnered with the captain of the footbal team as
Romeo. Stereotypes aside, his reading was not delightful. And
yet we al had to sit there and wait while he tried manfully, as
it were, to sound out words. Her pedagogy was to encourage
him while let ing the rest of us rot.
I, true to form, wanted to know what a maidenhead was,
and to say that I was relentless on the subject would be to understate. Miss Fox’s retaliation was authoritarian and extreme. I had been out of class sick and had to take a makeup vocabulary test, multiple choice. I failed. I did not just fail: I got a zero. I was pained but respectful on my first five or ten trips
up to her desk to ask her how it was possible to get a zero on
a multiple-choice test, even if one did not know the meaning
of one word on the test. Final y, exhausted, I just asked her to
regrade the test. Since she was sure of her rightness in al things
English, we struck a deal: she’d regrade the test and whatever
the outcome I’d shut up. She glistened with superiority, Eve
the second after biting into the apple; I was tense now that the
challenge had been taken up. It turned out that she had used
the wrong key in grading the test; the answers she wanted me to
give were for some other test. I was good but not that good.
I wanted out, Tangerine lipstick notwithstanding. I wanted
smart people whether or not their noses shined enough to
illuminate a room or a house or a city. I wanted someone who
cared about me in particular, as an individual, enough to
notice that I could not get a zero on a vocabulary test because
25
Heartbreak
I had too big a vocabulary. I was so worn out by Miss Fox that
when she graded an essay on contemporary education a B
because, as she said to me, some commas were wrong and it
wasn’t anything personal, after a halfhearted and utterly futile
argument I accepted the B. She even put her arm around me,
genuinely adding insult to injury. I knew I’d get her someday
and this is it: eat shit, bitch. No one said that sisterhood was
easy.
26
The High School
Library
Nowadays librarians actively try to get students Internet access
to pornography, at least in the United States. Organized as a
First Amendment lobby group, librarians go to court - or their
professional organizations do - to defend pornographers and
pornography. Truly, this does not happen because James Joyce
and Henry Miller were banned as obscene a hundred years
ago; I once wrote an affidavit for a court on the differences
between Nabokov’s Lolita and a pimp’s pictorial with words,
“Lolita Pissing. ” These are some of life’s easier distinctions. I
used to ask groups of folks how the retailers of pornography
could tell the difference between Joyce and hard-core visual
pornography. I noted that although, generally speaking, they
weren’t the best and the brightest, they managed never to
stock Ulysses. If they could do it, I thought, so could the rest
of us. Instead, the idea seems to be that keeping a child -
someone underaged - away from anything is akin to treason.
One is violating sacred constitutional rights and assassinating
Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln (for the second time).
27
Heartbreak
In my high school days, librarians were the militia, the first
line of defense in keeping the underaged away from books, al
sorts of books in every field.
My high school library was tall, I remember, as if piles of
books held up the ceiling; it was dense with books organized
according to the Dewey decimal system. I liked to look at and
to touch the books. I believed I could feel the heat emanating
from them, and no heat meant no light. My father had told
me I had to read everything, that to read books of only one
view was the equivalent of a moral wrong. When I asked why,
he uttered the incomprehensible words: “Sometimes writers
lie.” In my early years, my parents made up for the latitude
they gave me in reading by seeing to it that I read on a continuum, both political and literary. When I went weak in the knees for Dostoyevsky, my dad gave me some Mark Twain or
my mother one of Eric Bentley’s books on the theater. I just
wanted to read everything; there was never enough. It wasn’t
quite as simple as it sounds. My mother was more tense about
what I read than my father, but then, she was in the thick of
it: my bad attitudes, bad habits, and bad behavior. I did get
ideas from books: that’s what they’re for. I’ve been astonished
by the pro-pornography argument that people are not influenced by what they read or see. Why, then, bother writing or making films? One wants to persuade. One wants to knock
the reader senseless with the shock of the new or the old
reconceived. Rimbaud articulated the writing ambition when
28
The High School Library
he wanted to derange the senses, though he meant his own.
Sometimes it’s the rawness of the writing that makes everything inside shake and break; sometimes it’s the delicacy of the writing that makes everything inside simply recognize a reality
different from the known one or experience a lyricism heretofore unknown. For me, subtle writing was almost always anti-urban; it took me to the steppes of Russia or Huck Finn*s
South.
The library brought the world to me: I went with Darwin
on the HMS Beagle and I dived with Freud into the mind and
I plot ed with Marx about how to end poverty. I had read
most of Freud, al of Darwin, and most of Marx before I graduated from high school. This was not with the help of the high school librarians.
Instead, I learned their work schedules, because we were not
allowed to take out more than two books a day and I needed
a bigger fix than that. Al records were kept by hand. So if I
went into the library during a new shift, I could get two more
books, then two more, then two more. The librarians treated
the books like contraband, and so did I. My friends and I had
a commitment to Catcher in the Rye, which was not allowed
in the library. We bought a lot of copies over time. We shelved
them. Each time it would be a different one of us who had
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