A Comedy & A Tragedy: A Memoir of Learning How to Read and Write - Hardcover

Culley, Travis Hugh

 
9780345506160: A Comedy & A Tragedy: A Memoir of Learning How to Read and Write
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0345506162 ISBN 13: 9780345506160
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In this powerful memoir, former bicycle messenger and acclaimed author of The Immortal Class recounts his difficult journey to literacy.
 
A Comedy & A Tragedy is the story of one young man’s effort to teach himself to read. Complex and many-leveled, this book is also a manifesto about the acquisition of intellectual independence. It is a plea for better understanding of the impact of dysfunctional family dynamics in education, and a passionate indictment of a broken school system that lets so-called problem kids slip through the cracks.

When Travis Hugh Culley moves with his family to Miami in the spring of 1980, the bright six-year-old hopes things will be easier for him. Instead, he is dubbed “Birdbrain” by his older brother and classified by his new teachers as a discipline problem. Travis fakes his way through tests and homework assignments, mimicking his fellow students and pretending to know how to read. When his music teacher suggests that he audition for an acting program, Travis begins an unlikely path toward literacy.

The moment Travis begins to perform, he is confronted by his angry father, who is threatened by the transformation in his son. Unsure of how to make sense of what has happened, Travis grabs a pen and writes his experience down. Suddenly, everything can be seen in a new light. Having written, he begins to understand in a new way the relationship between words and actions.

When his parents separate and his grades fall, Travis clings to a journal in which he notes the details of his changing life. Having no place else to turn to process his emotions, Travis lays claim to the project of his own emancipation. This troubled student runs away from home but does not drop out of school. With pen in hand, he commits to an education in the theater and begins to fully realize the power and importance of literacy. Travis discovers that only through the mastery of writing can he determine his place in the world. Eventually, he will become an accomplished author—with a triumphant story to tell.

A Comedy & A Tragedy is an important and inspired memoir that will touch the hearts of parents, teachers, students, and anyone who has struggled with traumatic experiences in education. It is a work of love, of friendship, and of confidence in one young scholar’s infinite belief in language.

Advance praise for A Comedy & A Tragedy

“This tale of struggle, survival, and triumph addresses the inner lives of children and the grave responsibility of adults to ensure that their voices are heard. Readers will readily warm to the story of a bright, illiterate boy who is destined to become a lauded writer.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“The story of how writing became a means of healing . . . a testimony to the liberating power of art.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A starkly unusual and unusually compelling story.”—Booklist

Praise for Travis Hugh Culley’s The Immortal Class

“An important new critical voice.”—Library Journal

“A truly stunning book, completely original, a mixture of autobiography and philosophical treatise.”—Booklist

“An ever-kinetic prose straddling narrative and polemic, with an ear all the while for the small pebbles slipping beneath its feet.”—The Seattle Times

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Travis Hugh Culley is the author of The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power. He holds an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2006, he was a recipient of the Ox-Bow Fellowship in Saugatuck, Michigan.

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Chapter One

Birdbrain

I looked out the window of my dad’s brown van, watching trees pass by. My mom and brother, Joe, were strapped in behind their seat belts, waving goodbye to the mountains in the rearview mirror. It was the spring of 1980, and we were driving from Denver, Colorado, to Miami, Florida. A truck filled with furniture and clothes drove east a few hours ahead of us.

Feeling the van rock side to side, I caught myself staring at miles of wheat and corn, barbed-wire fences, and occasional barrels of hay. Looking ahead, smelling the pine and horses, feeling the wind carry, I felt that my life was changing. Houses peered out at us and vanished. Once fascinated, I had to wonder where they went. Whole towns disappeared, never to be seen again. One moment I saw cabbages, radio towers, farms, and then empty stretches of road.

Weeks before, Joe and I had been taken out of school to prepare for our move back east. Joe was in the third grade. I was in the first. Before our move I asked him, thinking he knew better, how things would be different in Florida. He looked around at the schoolyard where we stood:

“Everything will be different.”

We moved into a neighborhood house with an acre yard that sat back from the shoulder of a busy two-lane street in North Miami. The house was spacious and open. The walls were paneled with stained wood. The hall creaked and moaned. There was a porch at the front of the house and an enclosed swimming pool in the back. The screens whistled differently in the warm wind. The windows were glass venetian-style shutters, thin plates that we opened and closed with little metal dials. Each window was covered by an awning, and so the house was always dark within, even when we had every light on. Dad thought we had no room to complain. With a pool and a backyard like ours, he was sure Joe and I had everything we should need.

Dad warned us that we would soon be going to a bigger school, and that we’d need to prepare ourselves. First of all, Miami was nothing like the suburbs of Denver. Here, we’d be taking classes with people from all over the world. We’d have to learn to talk with different kinds of people, and even deal with the sense of being a minority in some of our classrooms, although this, he suggested, wasn’t really true and would in time wear off. Passing tests and turning in assignments should be easy. The problem would be the jealousy of other boys, he said. At school, kids would envy us because we were luckier than they. He had this phrase: most likely to succeed.

Here began two very different journeys in education. My brother would become an honors student, earning high marks and graduating easily. I would be called a discipline problem. My path would be beset with many obstacles, and I would remain illiterate until high school.

When our mother brought us in to register for classes, it was March, only nine weeks from the end of the school year. She parked the Pinto on the street and led us into Biscayne Gardens Elementary through a side door. Together, we found ourselves in a desolate hall that seemed to have no end and, for the moment, only one boy standing halfway down the expanse of classrooms, facing the wall. Mom walked up to the boy and asked him where the principal’s office was. The boy spun but did not answer. Instead, he held his breath, blowing his cheeks out like a blowfish, and pointed farther up the hall.

“Why are you holding your breath?” I asked him. He was my age.

“I’m in trouble,” he said, inflating.

“What for?”

“Talking in class,” he peeped, his shoulders high.

I looked to my mom: You can’t talk in these classrooms? But then he laughed and I laughed and we were friends. This was Bruce Melvin Woolever, Jr. As luck would have it, I would be placed in his first-grade class. He and I would follow each other, hopscotch, through the next ten years, depending on each other at some of the hardest turns.

Bruce and I were nothing alike. He came from a busy home with three younger sisters. His father was Italian, his mother Guatemalan. He was mixed, he said, in quotes. At home they spoke Spanish and English interchangeably, and were probably more literate in each language than I was in my own. Bruce didn’t feel superior about this. The world was big enough for all kinds of people. His perspective was admirable. He said that everyone had something to laugh about. Even those people who don’t want to laugh at all or find any joke funny ever—even they have something to laugh about. He laughed himself silly saying this.

Unlike me, Bruce had little shame getting attention. Unlike my brother, he was gentle and motivated by sympathy. Bruce was never hurtful. He did not see stereotypes or respond to clichés. To him, things were funny in themselves. I could give some turn to a phrase and he would take it straight: “My brother is going to get it someday, I swear.”

“Get it? Get what? Oh! I get it—I got it!” Then he’d fake like I’d hit him and stagger back. He always cheered me up. Over lunch, he’d try to trade food. Once, he stuck a finger in my cornbread and asked if I wanted to eat it.

“That’s gross!”

“Aren’t you touchy?” He chortled, his mouth full of my cornbread.

I let it go. I needed Bruce’s friendship more than he needed mine. I was the younger brother of Joe Culley, a bully, twice my size, who had taken up the art of condescension. Compared to Bruce’s, my brother’s sense of humor consisted only of potshots and double crossings, inspired by Spy vs Spy. Joe defended himself. He wasn’t being cruel; he was only exhibiting his knack for competition. Joe loved competition because it established unarguable authority—but then there he was, my older brother, parading his authority through the house. Joe brought home perfect report cards, 4.0 averages. He gloated about being superior to me in every aspect, even over the two inches he maintained above me as Mom marked our heights up on the pantry door. There it was: Black spy—wins again!

Joe was also the senior book lover in the family. I think that by nine years old, he’d read more books than both of our parents combined. He wasn’t dumb, but mean. He enjoyed mysteries, fantasies, especially the sci-fi and horror genres. As a boy, he’d read the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie. Now he was reading Stephen King and Ian Fleming. It seemed he didn’t read these books for any virtuous reason, but only to deepen his twisted mind—to see what he could get away with. He wanted facts, science, information he could use or take advantage of. I didn’t want to be anything like him. I think it bruised his ego.

At home, Joe let it be known that I was the gullible one, the dummy. He called me know-nothing, nitwit, dork. He called me Birdbrain so often that I eventually flew into a fit, and the name stuck. Joe earned his nickname when he pinned me to the ground in the backyard and sat on my head like King Kong. He was trying to impress a friend from the football league who was standing right there, speechless. Mom and Dad couldn’t hear me calling for help. I started yelling, “You’re a butt! Nothing but a fat butt!” Afterward, every time he called me one name I called him the other.

“Birdbrain.”

“Yes, Butt?”

“Don’t call me that!”

To me, it didn’t matter that he could read books. In my mind, he was just getting fat behind those stubby, gray paperbacks. I mean, books were for lazy people, obviously, and people who didn’t have better things to do. I...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345506162
ISBN 13 
9780345506160
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
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