Love poetry is basically nonsense. Fueled by hormones and lust, dreams and assumptions, it is never real. It is only a vision, an apparition, and fools you into believing what could never be real. So why write it? Because it is in our nature, in our stars, to love. Just because something is foolish, or impossible to pin down, there is no reason to give up on it. That’s what the Paffooney faeries are for. They cast faery light on what you should never believe, but always, always do.
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.
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.
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.
I told you before about a cartoonist from ancient ‘Toon Times” named Fontaine Fox. He was a master, and I acknowledge him as one of my greatest inspirations. But he was not the original master mentor for my teenage ‘Toon Training”. That honor goes to the inestimable George Herriman. He was the Krazy Kartoonist who died more than a decade before I was born, yet, through his Kreation, Krazy Kat, did more to warp my artistic bent into Krazy Kartooniana Mania than anybody else. I discovered him first. I found him through Komic books and the Kard Katalog at the local library. I own a copy of the book I pictured first in this post. It is the first Kartoon book I ever bought. I couldn’t post a picture of my actual book here because I have read it so often in the past forty years that the Kover has Kome off. It is now more of folder of loose pages than a book.
Krazy Kat is a newspaper Komic strip that ran all around the world from 1913 to 1944. Comics Journal would rate Krazy Kat as the greatest work of Komic art of the 20th Century. Art critics hailed it as serious art, and it fits snugly into the surrealist movement of Salvador Dali and others. It has been cited as a major influence on the work of other artists such as Will Eisner, Charles M. Schulz, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Bill Watterson, and Chris Ware.
The centerpiece of the strip is a love triangle. Krazy Kat the Kharacter is a feline who may be female or may be male but is definitely deeply in love with Ignatz Mouse. The Krazed rodent hopped up on seriously stinky fromage (cheese to us non-French speakers), is Konstantly throwing bricks at Krazy’s head… obviously out of serious disdain, however, Krazy sees it as a confession of love. Offisa Pup, the police watchdog, wants to jail the malevolent mouse for battery and protect the precious Kat, whom he obviously loves with an unrequited love. Explanations are superfluous in the weird world of Krazy Kat. How can I explain the charm, the humor, the good-natured violence of a strip such as this? There are echoes of it in Tom and Jerry animated cartoons, but nothing like it really exists anywhere else. Krazy has her own unique language, a language that you naturally learn to interpret as you read the strip. Ignatz exhibits psychotic frustrations that he takes out on the world around him in our name, that we might experience hubris at his expense. And what’s with that mysterious sack of “Tiger Tea” that Krazy carries about and keeps a Klosely guarded “sekrit”?
I honestly hope you will give Krazy Kat a thorough “look-see”. Because if you like Kartoons at all… and it doesn’t have to be the Krazy Kooky love of a seriously overdosed addict like me… you will fall desperately in love with this one. It is a world of its own, a superbly superfluous abstract anachronism. It is a surrealist’s dream of fun with puns and tons of buns… or something like that. Simply put… read it and don’t like it… I dare you!
On days when I am still recovering from life-altering blows, I often try to find new realms, alternate realities to live in. (Retreating into a fantasy world is one of the reasons she gave for leaving.) And since, as a youth in Iowa, I raised rabbits for a 4-H project, I know rabbits better than I do human people. Rabbits are people too. So, I have been walking among the rabbit people. Seriously, bunnies are better people than most human people. They are not trying to profit off you. They are not trying to get everything they can off you. They are merely there to wiggle their whiskers, sniff for food, poop, gnaw on stuff, and make more bunnies.
I often see myself as a rabbit person. In cartoon form, I am the bunny-man teacher known to the Animal Town School System as Mr. Reluctant Rabbit.
As a teacher, I am always pulling out carrots of irony and gnawing on the ends of them in front of students. If they complain that eating food in class is supposed to be against the rules, I ask them, “Do you want a carrot of irony?”
“Oh, no, thank you sir.”
“They are good for your eyesight as well as your insight. You really ought to chew on healthier things like that.”
“Oh, no sir,” they say. “We prefer Hot Cheetos.”
And so, I taught on like that… like a rabbit, fast and frumious (a Jabberwocky sort of word), and never really bit anybody. Teaching is like that. You offer the good healthy stuff to nourish their little animal minds, and they always choose the junk food instead.
And so life goes on like that. Looking to rabbit people to ease my pain and need for good, wholesome carrots of irony.
I have recently run a free-book promotion on The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.One of the main characters in the book is Tommy Bircher’s pet rabbit Millis. During the course of the story about invading aliens, Secret Agent Robots from the CIA, and making friends when you need friends, Millis is turned into a rabbit-man by a lab accident. He teaches Tommy that you don’t have to be human to be a good, caring, self-sacrificing person. He also teaches him to eat his carrots and greens like a good boy should.
So, I will spend more time with the rabbit people and heal a little bit. That is what you do with the tragedy that life brings you. You spin it into whole cloth, making humor and poetry out of everything bad that happens… wrapping yourself up in a comforting blanket of lies (you can also call those fiction stories), and eating a little chicken soup on a cold day to heal your soul. (Oh, I forget, rabbits often gag on chicken soup. Let’s make that bean soup with carrot chunks.)
**This is a classic post from January, 2015 that is still somewhat relevant… Unless I’m lying.**
There are limits to what people will believe. No really, there are, I promise. You can believe me because I’m a fiction writer, a story-teller, and I therefore tell lies all the time. I was a teacher for thirty-one years, so I not only tell kids how wonderful they are in order to get good behavior and real learning out of them, but I have been told some of the most convoluted, inside-out, purple-in-the-face hoo-haws that are ever told anywhere in human culture throughout human history, and told them by a child with a straight face, perfectly seriously, and with little red horns holding up their crooked golden halos. We are taught to misrepresent the truth from early childhood on.
“Do you have to go potty, sweetheart?”
“No, mommy, I jest like to dance.”
“Do you love me, Mortimer? Or do you just want to get me alone in a car after the prom?”
“Oh, I love you, Alicia. Really I do!”
“So are you in favor of taxing the oil companies at a fair and balanced rate, Senator, so we have more money to spend on Education and public works?”
“Why, I most certainly do, young voter. Ignore that man with the “I Love Exxon” button trying to bash me over the head with that Tea Party campaign sign. Let me kiss that darling little baby of yours.”
This post was inspired by all the lies told in the State of the Union speech last night by President O’Bama (He’s Irish and a conservative like Bill O’Reilly, isn’t he?) Now, I am well aware of the white lies the President buttered our bread with. The economy has actually improved, but not nearly as much as was claimed. And not nearly enough for someone like me, a white male retired educator with significant health problems living in a Red State under Republican-Nazi governor/emperors who want to privatize education and spend my pension money on tax breaks for billionaires. But those lies are nothing compared to the damn lies told by the Republican response lady, Ernst from Iowa. She laid out a plan for undoing everything that’s been done to improve my life by the government since 2008. The Affordable Care Act is to be repealed. Tax breaks for “job creators” are going to be re-instituted. We are going to heal the middle class by deregulating industry and predatory banks and by giving more benefits and goodies to the rich folks who will treat us better than those horrible Democratic liberals who want to turn us all into socialists. This is coming from the Iowa Senator who won her seat by promising your average pork-eating Iowan to use her “hog-castrating skills” to motivate Democrats in congress to see things her way. Iowans (of which I once was one of) know good fertilizer when they smell it. It makes you want to shout, “Hoo-Haw!” (Yes, it’s true, I once knew an old farm hand that, when he heard a ridiculously contorted lie, would shout “Hoo-Haw!” as a sort of derisive laughter to hear such a funny truth-twister.)
Lies are our way of life. We lie about what we think. We lie about what we feel. We lie about how we view the world. We lie about whether or not we tell lies. Could we live a life without ever lying? I hate to tell you this, but if I say, “yes”, then it might not be entirely truthful of me.
It has been more than a semester now that I have not been a teacher. I am missing it mightily. I even miss the yelling and screaming, the name-calling and the crazy-eyed threats against life and limb. And that’s just me. I miss what the kids always did too. This was driven home to me as I tried to move my middle child from one school to another. We were hoping to get a bit of a break on his placement. He is a gifted child with a penchant for bizarre and long-lasting obsessions. He has a talent for building huge, monumental structures in Minecraft. He is very computer-nerd and history-wonk. (Yes, I know those are not pure predicate adjectives, but I am a retired English teacher and just don’t care any more.) I was hoping they could overlook his burnout/blowout eighth-grade brain meltdown from the previous year and give him the chance to be a ninth grader for at least half a year. No. Arbitrary rules must be obeyed. (That isn’t even how she said it. More like, arbitrary rules MUST be obeyed). That meant of course that he has to continue to repeat the mindless indoctrination of year number 9, (eight numbered grades plus K), (And Pre-K, come to think of it.) Make that year number 10. No high school yet, though he is more than mature enough, intelligent enough, motivated enough, and sweet-natured enough. We are not loving and forgiving people. We are strict and by-the-book people! Forgive me, Lord. I am writing my own book. (In more ways than one.)
This is what we are doing wrong in Education;
1. We are putting people in boxes. (Little people. Kids mostly. We are calling those boxes things like ADHD, Special Education, trouble-maker, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, disobedient, truant, and “in need of alternative education”… here meaning kid-prison.)
2. We are sealing those boxes with heavy-duty red tape. (Read special or remedial classes as waste-baskets for keeping the rabble and the riff-raff out of the good teachers’ hair.)
3. We are routinely handing those boxes to the box-bangers and package manglers. (The semi-incompetent teachers who have discipline problems because in teacher college nobody tells you what to do with the kid who sits in the corner and sings to himself instead of paying attention, or the girl who gets out of her seat every time the teacher turns his back to go flitting around the room like a bumble bee going flower to flower (except that it is a more hormonal attraction and goes boy to boy); or the competent teacher like me who incurs the principal’s disfavor for having classes that always make noise and are given such classes in boxes as a punishment because that kind of principal is too limited in intelligence to understand that those kinds of boxes are not really a punishment if you merely take a moment to examine the treasures they contain.)
4. We keep the boxes air-tight so that no oxygen or light gets in. (To suffocate learners under piles of worksheets and endless drill and practice is murder. We are killing the precious learners with boring stuff and teaching them to be zombies who all act alike and hate learning because their brains are rotted masses of goo.)
This is what we must do instead;
1. Open the boxes up again and thoroughly mix the contents. (The rich suburban parents will resent the heck out of having their precious honors student sitting in class next to the poor black kid from the projects, but studies show that both kinds of learners do better when they are mixed together.)
2. Notice, we don’t need two any more, because learners are already distributed to different and diverse boxes based on what they individually need and want to learn about and have talent for. Groups should be more like the Shakespeare-loving group or the talkative-socializing group or the Tinker-toy builders group or the vampire-literature-writing group and less like groups of kids all the same color or all the same culture or all the same age.
3. All the teachers need to be trained to handle all the possible… no, make that probable problems that may come up in the classroom. Every classroom needs a proven veteran teacher and an enthusiastic young apprentice teacher. Neither one should have to face the evil hordes alone. And most important of all, any teacher who doesn’t love working with kids (and doesn’t love the kids in a way that will not lead to a prison term) needs be utilized in some way other than as a classroom teacher.
4. Every classroom is a laboratory and every teacher is a creative and daring mad-scientist-type intent on trying new things and only re-doing things that really work well. Forget this nonsense about standard curriculum goals and common core curriculum. Those are only buzz words for suffocating learners and being too lazy to think on your feet in the middle of the every-day classroom battle in the on-going War on Ignorance.
Now you see… I have all the answers and I know everything. The only mystery is… why don’t more people listen to me?
This is an art exercise, making a drawing imitating the manga style of Rumiko Takahashi, the greatest female comics artist of all time.
This is a second shameless plagiarism and imitation of Rumiko Takahashi by Mickey the Manga Wannabee.
Yesterday I used a Paffooney I had stolen to illustrate my gymnasium adventures, and in the caption I gave credit to the wonderful comic artist I shamelessly copied it from. The second imitation Takahashi that I did yesterday is now displayed next to it above. I am now compelled to explain about my goofy, sideways obsession with Anime and Manga, the cartoons from Japan. I love the art style. I have since I fell in love with Astroboy Anime as a child in Iowa. Rumiko Takahashi is almost exactly one year younger than me. As a cartoonist she is light years more successful than me. She has been crafting pen and ink masterpieces of goofy story-telling longer than I have been a teacher.
Her artwork is a primary reason I have been so overly-enamored of the Japanese Manga-cartoon style. I love the big eyes, the child-like features of even adult characters, the weird poses and still-weirder comic art conventions of this culture from practically a different planet. She has created comic series that are immensely popular in Japan, and have even put down sturdy roots in this country, especially with young adults since the 80’s. She is the world’s number one best-selling female comics artist.
Just as we Westerners have to accept numerous ridiculous things to appreciate the stories told in American comics (for instance, brawny heroes running around in tights with their underwear on the outside of their pants, nearly naked ladies with super powers diving into battle next to men encased in armored suits, and talking animals), the Manga-minded must also practice a bizarre form of the willing suspension of disbelief. In Ranma 1/2, the main character is a boy marshal artist who turns into a girl when splashed with cold water. Much of the romantic comedy of that work revolves around boys and old men finding themselves in the bath house next to naked young girls. For some reason that sort of naked surprise causes the boys to spout fountain-like nosebleeds. In Inu-Yasha the whole thing is about fighting demons with swords. Inu-Yasha himself is part demon. Apparently part-demon is a good thing to be. Japanese villains are spectacularly susceptible to fits of crying rage and tantrums. And everybody looks more like American white people than orientals. Oh, and there are talking animals.
Rumiko is a master of pen and ink. Here is a sample of of her black and white work.
And she does color well too.
The little people are a special style of Manga character called a Chibi, and all regular Manga characters can turn into one at any moment.
And, of course, to read actual Manga you have to master reading backwards. Americans read left to right. The Japanese read right to left. You have to open a Japanese book in a manner that seems both backwards and upside down.
This illustration shows how American publishers flip Japanese comics to make them more accessible to American audiences.
So now, by uncovering the fact that I am addicted to and seriously affected by Japanese cartoons, you have one more bit of evidence to present to a jury in case you decide Mickey needs to be locked up and medicated for a while. Japanese comics are a world of great beauty, but also a world unto themselves. It is an acquired taste that has to be considered carefully. And of all the many marvelous Manga makers, Rumiko Takahashi is the one I love the best.
“Dad?” asked the Princess, “I heard a funny word in school today. What does Fuddy-Duddy mean?”
“Oh, that’s a good word,” I said. “It means an old fogey… a stick-in-the-mud.”
“A what?”
“A fussy old guy who likes to have everything his way. Like, if you accuse your father of being one… which you often do… he’s a fuddy-duddy daddy.”
“Ooh! I get it!” said Henry, chiming in. “And if your father is evil, then he’s a fuddy-duddy baddie daddy!“
“Yes,” I said, “and if it makes him sad to be evil, he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie daddy!“
“If you are not sure he’s really your father,” said the Princess adding a one-up, “he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe daddy!“
“Yeah!” said Henry. “And if you suspect he may have fallen into a time machine and been turned back into an infant, he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe baby daddy!“
“Now that he’s a baby again he will surely want to watch his favorite TV show again,” I said with a tear of nostalgia in my eye, “he’ll be a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe baby Howdy Doody daddy!“
“What’s Howdy Doody, Daddy?” asked the Princess.
“No,” said Henry, “now you’ve spoiled it. It just ain’t funny any more.”
“Yes it is! He’s become a funny bunny fuddy-duddy hoo-dad doo-dad saddie baddie maybe rabies hoo-dah doo-dah…”
“Just stop,” said Henry. “You always carry things too far.”
“Right you are!” I said. “See this grin? It means I win!”
Catch a Falling Star 