This is me learning colored-pencil technique in the 1970’s. Does it show promise? Have I improved? Or gotten worse? Fear not, I don’t expect you to answer the questions. Just help me figure out… Is the house about to fall down? Why are the kid’s feet in the goldfish pond? And what sort of silly little fairy is that, anyway?
Okay, I know it’s creepy. I know it is only a little bit funny. But I like to think it’s good colored pencil work, and it does seem to stand up well over time even though it was created back in 1980. I wrote this hoping to break into the cartoonist world in the 1980’s. I only managed to get rejection letters and form letters back then. Big dreams and no real breaks. But if you are goofy long enough and cartoon up a storm with enough lightning and hailstones in it, somebody will invent the internet (Thanks, AL Gore) and digital photography and WordPress Blogging so I can share it all with you.
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When I was 12, my favorite novel was Rudyard Kipling’s First Jungle Book. I loved it. From page one to the last sentence of the story about the White Seal. I owned a paperback copy that I still have 45 years later. I bought it from the school book order form, Scholastic, I think. I used my allowance money, earned at a nickel a week. Along with the chapter books I had read previously, The Swiss Family Robinson, the White Stag, and Treasure Island, it guided my view of life. Every grove and forest in Iowa became the jungle in the summer of 1968. The windswept fields of corn and soy beans easily transformed into tropical seas. I imagined pirates, natives, and buried treasures everywhere. When I found a piece of a brass candlestick with the necessary curved part, which became the cursed Ahnk from The Jungle Book. Midnight, Grandma Aldrich’s blue-eyed black cat, became my Bagheera. I traveled with an invisible Baloo. You know, it was only a year or so before that when I saw the Disney movie. So, of course, dancing and singing was a part of being a jungle boy.
In the book, unlike the movie, Mowgli was naked in the jungle. He didn’t wear clothes until the first time he submitted himself to the man village. He took them off again when he escaped. I had to try that too. I went to the BinghamPark woods down by the Iowa River. I found a tree where I could put my clothes, and I took everything off. I figured roaming the woods like Mowgli would be great. Boy, I was a stupid child. Problem number one struck with my first naked step in the forest. Dang! There must not be any twigs or nettles in Mowgli’s jungle. I tried hopping from place to place, but in minutes I was wearing at least my socks and shoes. Hanging branches and brambles were a problem, too. They clutched at me, striping me with welts and scrapes. Certain parts you just don’t want pricked by a bramble bush. It was like God suddenly planted those pointed things everywhere. Okay, shoes and socks and shorts. Well, then I began to get cold. Iowa is never very warm even in the height of summer. I had already defeated the whole naked in the forest thing when I put my shorts back on, so, what the heck! It just didn’t work like I thought.
I still believed that the ways of the jungle were an essential part of my young life. I read and reread what the Jungle Book says about the “Law of the Jungle”. I tried to make sense of it as a credo to live by. Of course, at twelve we are always among the wisest and all-knowing of God’s creatures. We can make sense of the world in our own weird little way, and no one will ever be able to sway us from the philosophy we live by, no matter how silly it is. I still think about my “Jungle Book Period” as an important part of my young life. There are things about young Mowgli and Jim Hawkins and the Robinsons that formed a significant part of my character. I would one day make use of those determined and resourceful qualities to stay alive in the classroom jungles of South Texas. I tried to make others see it. I shared Kipling and Stevenson with kids and hoped that I could make them learn, as I did, how to be that little boy facing and succeeding against the dangerous jungle around him.
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This is an old 1980 Paffooney. I had no particular reason for creating it. I just did it on a whim. It is very Disney inspired and simply silly.
This is cartoon that I actually got published in a comic book from Ben Dunn’s Ninja High School comic book series. You could look it up. Nobody paid me anything, but maybe it will be a collector’s item some day.
I have been married to a beautiful Filipina for nineteen years now. We have two handsome sons and a beautiful little girl. I am going so far in learning a new culture that I have chosen to learn how to speak that gawd-awful language Tagalog. Salamat. If you gave a chicken monkey-lips and set him to caterwauling, you’d have some idea how Tagalog sounds to a jaded old English ear like mine. I love it. “Flowers” would be “mga blklk” in Tagalog. How beautiful is that? I don’t have to worry about having a sense of humor. They will laugh at me just for my pronunciation.
I am quickly learning also to take part in the most important ritual in Filipino culture. Karaoke. It’s a uniquely oriental thing. Friends and family gather around the TV and start passing around the “magic microphone”, “Magic Mike” for short. Dang! That’ll be my name from now on. Just call me “Magic Mike”! The words appear on the screen in front of rotating still pictures that vary from the aerial view of Mad Ludwig’s German Castle to a beach in Hawaii. The words themselves have been placed there by some Japanese or Korean guy who barely knows how to speak English. He apparently sits in his Tokyo apartment all day listening to American CD’s and trying to write the words down exactly as his Samurai brain slowly processes them. The grammar is always twisted and goofy, many of the words are wrong. The mistakes on the screen can throw me way off singing one of my favorite songs when it gets to the part about “birds is flying over the rainbow, so why won’t I?” Ah! The total comic artistry! And get this, the machine scores the performance. You can hit the most cat-strangling, nails on blackboards sort of notes, and if you hit the beat right, it gives you a 94 and calls you a star singer. Sinatra is turning over in his grave. Barbara Streisand will be turning over in her grave too as soon as my singing kills her.
Don’t get me wrong. As silly a thing as karaoke is, I love it. It makes me feel good to belt out a round of “I did it my way”. I sing better than some of our friends. But, we have some real singing talent join us on occasion. James is smoother and more polished singing a Beatles tune than the Beatles themselves. Ernie sings “Beautiful Sunday” so well it brings a tear to my eye. And of course, there’s nothing that tickles me more than hearing a Filipino tenor putting his all into “My Wild Irish Rose”.
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I have spent the majority of my teaching career teaching Spanish speakers in South Texas. So, believe me when I say that for a gringo like me, there has to be some kind of art to it. I have taught so many surly, excessively macho boys and very feminine, but definitely aggressive girls, that I think I may have found an insight or two on how to do it.
First, you must be brave. And you must recognize that bravery means remaining outwardly calm while on the inside your heart is pounding wildly and you are fighting not to wet your pants. My first year we had to walk our eighth grade boys to and from the cafeteria four blocks away on another campus. I, being a rookie teacher, was given the delightful job of forcing the two most evil vato locos (crazy dudes) to return to classes and schoolwork after lunch instead of wandering off for the afternoon. I had to face down El Mouse and El Talan and convince them to catch up to the rest of the class without killing me. I have to say, at that point I did not have a forceful personality and could not give the laser eye of death that all South Texas teachers need to develop. I didn’t make the mistake of saying please, but implied I could actually do something to them to make their lives more miserable if they didn’t let themselves be herded along like cattle. El Talan picked up a metal fence post as if it was a baseball bat, and I got the chance to review my whole short life for a few tense seconds. But they relented. I didn’t show fear, and they put down the post and sauntered on with their lives. I got them back to the corral for afternoon classes. Both of them went to prison after dropping out of school. Both of them are dead now. One was killed by a rival drug dealer. I made the mistake of telling that tale to my mother. At the time, she nearly submitted my resignation for me.
Second, I learned you must have a heart. Veteran teachers told me that I should not smile before winter break, and even then, I should only smile at students’ misfortunes. That advice turned out to be a vat of puppy doo. I learned early on that students are people. They have feelings. They will return what they get. Unfortunately they often dish out what they get from other teachers, from parents, and even from local law enforcement. But more than once I was given a kid that everyone else said was a bad kid, and I treated that kid like a human bean… er, I mean being… and was forever after that kid’s favorite teacher, and someone that they would do anything for. I was one of those teachers who kids return to visit. Faces would appear in my doorway often like so many blooming flowers, blossoms lit up with sunshine. They would be high school kids who came back to get an encouraging word, or graduates coming by to tell me how successful they were. Often they came because of something they remembered from class. They felt they had to share their sunshine. Believe me, sometimes it was vital to me to be able to continue to get a little of that sunlight in the midst of daily darkness.
I have to confess, I did not reach every kid. Some have made poor choices and died from them. Some have turned to the dark side of the force and are unrepentantly Darth Vader. Some I could not stand and did everything in my power to extinguish their bad behaviors with punishments that never worked. Some that I could not stand were among the ones that came back to visit too. Funny how you can do everything you possibly can to defeat a kid, and they will still come around, still tell you that you were their favorite teacher, and the only thing they remembered about middle school was something that happened in your classroom. It’s not even always something you want them to remember.
The kid in today’s Paffooney was not one of the bad ones. Manuel was the son of a border patrol agent. He was smart. He knew what was right and what was wrong. I don’t know where he is now, or what he is doing, but I believe in him, and I know he was worth every effort I ever put into teaching him.
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Today’s Paffooney is an oil painting I did in the 1980’s. It is an attempt to prove to myself that I could paint realistically enough to call myself a surrealist. I know you may think that last sentence is a mix of oxymoron and just plain moron, but it is necessary to have the REAL in place in the middle of the surrealism. I chose to make it from photographs. I used a picture of myself and David (a child who was my student, but taught me more than I taught him) with another photo of a building that my grandparents had taken a vacation picture in front of from Tombstone, Arizona. It was important to get the light right. I wanted to establish a dramatic light source in the upper right of the picture and bathe the scene in sunlight.
As a self portrait this works because it shows a lot of what I am as a teacher. I willingly wear the black hat. I am a cowboy. I shoot from the hip, in the sense that I actually teach stuff that’s in the literature book instead of doing test-preparation worksheets. I teach because I actually care about kids, not because I’m greedy for the fantastic salary they offer to Texas teachers, especially one that is willing to teach in a poor rural community where most of the kids are Hispanic, under-fed, and under-loved by the people who run this lovely business-friendly State.
The boy in the picture is one who didn’t have a father living at home, whose mother was always working, and who never got a break from the social workers, police, and other school personnel. I had a very progressive and wonderful principal at the time who knew I’d studied to be a foster parent in case of need and knew that other boys had been successfully mentored by me. He suggested I keep an eye on David and help him out when no one else could. It was David who taught me that if you feed a child like him (I was a lousy cook but I could make hamburgers and mashed potatoes) they will continually show up at your door like a stray cat. I was single at the time. It was a bit risky to let a child into my home where people might think I was some kind of child-molester. But I kept the apartment windows open, hid nothing from anybody, helped him with homework (if I could get him to do any), and played computer games and role-playing games with him. I took him to the doctor a couple of times. I listened when he needed to talk about things, and he was my friend until he graduated high school. Now he is married with children of his own. I haven’t seen him in over sixteen years, but I know that skinny little mosquito-sized boy has grown into a big healthy, well-fed man. It is important in life, and in oil paintings, to make a difference for someone else. He made a difference for me. Notice how he uses his rabbit-ear fingers to keep me humble in my self-portrait.
As a composition, even though this is a realistic picture, it works because of numerous rectangles that stack and pile and lead the eye into the depths of the background while the strong diagonals made by shadows, arms, and edges not only draw you to the center of the picture, but bring the figure of the boy and I closer together than we are in the actual image. Layers of reality, carefully composed, to capture and portray… That last sentence is a three line poem to explain what an oil painting really is… or maybe what it SURreally is.
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In this week’s Paffooney remix, I have pictured the little boy crooner Francois Martin on the main street of Norwall. Why have I done such a foolish thing? Why have I drawn a boy singing silently a song that only I can hear in my silly old head? In fact, why do I label them Cantos instead of Chapters? Of course, the answer to these rhetorical questions is metaphorical. I look at my writing as being poetry, or, more accurately, as music rather than mere prose. It is a metaphor central to my being, writing is putting the inner music of my mind down on paper.
Here is a secret to powerful writing. Connect ideas with metaphors. A metaphor is a direct comparison of two unlike things to create an analogy, an echo of an idea that gives resonance to a notion. Sorry, I’m an English teacher. It’s in my genes. But metaphors can serve as the essential connections, as glue to put paragraphs and scenes together.
Let me show you a metaphor. Here is a short poem, the natural environment where many metaphors live;
The Cookie
Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…
With each bite I had less and less cookie left.
But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…
Lingered on… as memory.
The central metaphor of this poem is comparing the cookie to my life. I am getting older. I have six incurable diseases, some of them life threatening. I have been thinking about mortality a lot lately. So what is the point of the poem? That even when the last bite is taken, and there is no more cookie… when I am dead, there is the memory of me. Not my memory. The memory of me in the minds of my family, my children, my students, and other people who have come to know me. That memory makes whatever goodness that is in me worth living for.
Okay, a metaphor explained is kinda like a bug that’s been dissected for a science fair. Its innards are revealed and labeled. The beauty is gone. It’s kinda icky.
What works better, is a metaphor that the readers can readily grasp on their own. The beauty has to be discovered, not dissected and explained. Let me try again;
The Boy and the Boat
The boy looked to the horizon where wild and wooly white-caps roiled upon the sea.
“Lord help me,” he said, “the sea is so large, and my boat is so small…”
I can hear what you are thinking. “That’s too simple and ordinary. If it’s a metaphor, then it’s a really stupid one.” Well, I heard someone thinking that, even if it was not you.
Let me add a bit of information to help you connect things as I do. When I was ten years old, a fifteen-year-old neighbor boy sexually assaulted me. I told no one. I was so devasted by the event that I repressed the memory until I reached the age of twenty two. In high school, my suicidal thoughts and darkest depressions were caused by this event even though I couldn’t even recall. To this day I have not explained to mother and father what happened. I can only bring myself to tell you now because my abuser died of heart failure last summer. It was a life event of overwhelming darkness, pain, and soul scorching. Now look at “The Boy and the Boat” again. Has the meaning changed for you the way it does for me?
Now, I know that the last paragraph was a totally unfair use of harsh reality to make a point about metaphor and meaning. So let me give you one last poem… a sillier one. You can make of it whatever you will;
The Grin
The wrinkly, bewhiskered old man
Had a smile like a plate of moldy spaghetti
In the afternoon sun.
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My novel Snow Babies that I submitted to Chanticleer Book Reviews for the Dante Rossetti Awards for Young Adult Fiction has been awarded a place among thirty-one finalists. Here is the link; http://chantireviews.com/chanticleer-contest-deadlines-and-announcement-projections/finalists-for-the-dante-rossetti-awards-for-young-adult-fiction/
I should know by the end of January if I win or not, but the fact that I made the finals feels like vindication!
Above you see the mock-up cover that I drew for myself. (The novel was submitted as an unpublished manuscript). Here is another Paffooney with the main character of Snow Babies, Valerie Clarke.
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At school today the principal asked us to come up with one word that we wanted to apply to our own lives as teachers. You know how the teaching game is. You start a new semester; you have to be subjected to eight hours of blah-blah-blah. It is required blah-blah-blah mandated by Texas education laws. My magic word was wisdom.
So, what does wisdom imply? Well, I am old. I should have some of that thing in one pocket or another. So I search my pockets. As a kid I vowed to become a wizard. What is a wizard if not a wise man? A wise guy. How, then, do you acquire wisdom?
In the movie Mystery Men, Ben Stiller tells us that mystical wisdom from the wise guy mystical sage is only saying a thing is its opposite. Thus true wisdom comes from learning how foolish you really are. It’s a good joke, but it’s also true. You can’t be wise unless you realize how little you actually know out of all the things that there are.
Why would I want to be wise? Well, I have the fool thing down pretty well already. As fools go, I’m a humble fool who trades in foolishness and calls it humor and young adult novels. So it follows, by logic, an advanced form of foolishness, that I must be wise.
Okay, wise guy, time to say something wise in the conclusion… Doh!
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Catch a Falling Star 