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(TOUGHILOVING THE ALIEN
Here's Looking at You, Kid: I came home from
work the other day to find my 13-year-old
son doing the dishes, voluntarily, to give his
mother a break. As I went to him to give him
kudos on his act of industry and kindness, I
was stunned to notice that the top of his head
was no longer at eye level. It's one of those
moments I've been having a lot lately, the
realization that I no longer have a little boy
living in my house but a budding man, with
a whole new world of trials ahead for both of
us. He's gotten to an age where he's vibrating
with the need to go and do on his own, but
without a clear sense
of which of the infi
nite paths before him
to choose. It’s a deli
cate, dangerous junc
ture, and as his dad I
must be very careful
from here on out.
In this place I feel
for David Gilmour
(the Canadian novel
ist and film critic,
not the overrated
British guitarist)
as he looked across
the dinner table at
his 15-year-old son
Jesse, flunking out
of school and getting
into all the worst
kinds of teenage
trouble. Realizing
that the wrong
course could well
drive his son out the
door, Gilmour made
him a deal: no school, no work, free rent, in
exchange for watching three movies a week
of Gilmour's choosing. It was a risky plan but
Gilmour reasoned that if he could not speak
to Jesse in Jesse's language—teen angst,
rampaging hormones, depression and self-
destruction—then he would use his own, the
universal language of film with its capacity
to illustrate the wide spectrum of the human
condition. This bold experiment is chronicled
in Gilmour's memoir The Film Club (Twelve
Books, 2008).
I'm going to drop my usual snarky
pseudointellectual pose here and just say it:
I loved this book, every word of it, unreserv
edly. As the weeks roll on and Gilmour shares
the richness of the cinematic universe in all
its hues with his son, from French New Wave
to Kurosawa samurai epics, from spaghetti
westerns to goofy pure-Hollywood comedies,
the two men begin to form bonds of commu
nication and wisdom thdt so-called parenting
experts can o*nly wet-dream about having.
Gilmour writes in unflinching terms about the
perils of navigating the treacherous waters of
his son's life—drinking and drugs, his risky
foray into white-boy hip-hop, his obsession
wiih a particularly manipulative 16-year-old
femme fatale—with patience and firmness
and, hardest of all
but most importantly,
trust in Jesse to do
the right thing.
This is not to say
that Gilmour makes
himself out to be
Ward Cleaver with a
DVD player. During
this period Gilmour
struggles with his
own demons, out of
work and anxious,
desperate to save his
boy, and always ter
rified of making that
fatal mistake that
drives Jesse away.
But while Gilmour
educates his son,
Jesse educates his
father in the cru
cial balancing act
between being the
child's friend and
being his parent. As
so many of us who were raised in the post-Dr.
Spock era can attest, that balance is the most
difficult stunt to pull off, but the most neces
sary. The Film Club shows that it can be done,
maybe not with a feel-good Hollywood ending,
but with something far more substantial.
(Also highly recommended, if you can
find it, is Dennis Hensley's remarkable book
Screening Party [Alyson Books, 2002], the
story of six diverse friends brought together
by their monthly movie gatherings. Poignant,
both sad and hopeful, and spank-me funny,
it's worth combing the Internet to find.)
Here There Be Dragons: Jesse Gilmour's jour
ney through late adolescence may have been
an ass-over-teakettle tumble toward the gap
ing maw of teenage oblivion, but at least
he wasn't a nerd. In our postmodern age of
(slowly) growing tolerance for all races, eth
nicities, religions, and various orientations,
nerds—our catch-all term for the cerebrally
gifted but socially awkward, with their fur
tive cliquishness and retreats into realms of
various forms of fantasy—remain a heavily
marginalized subset of society, even as we've
evolved into a global technocracy largely
through their efforts. As author Benjamin
Nugent puts it, Bill Gates is the wealthiest
man on Earth and he's still considered a loser.
Nugent attempts a hard critical look at
nerd culture, its evolution and various per
mutations, in his new book American Nerd:
The Story of My People (Simon & Schuster,
2008). Describing him
self as a former nerd
who grew out of it,
but asserting that his
view is non-judgmental,
Nugent offers up several
examples of the nerd
as a character in clas
sic literature—Victor
Frankenstein, Mary
Bennet in Pride and
Prejudice—the objects
of derision because of
their willful separation
from healthier human
passions. He then traces
the archetypal chasm
between nerds and jocks
that occurred with the
growth of "Muscular
Christianity," the Teddy
Roosevelt-era doctrine
that God's men are ath
letes and adventurers
and empire-builders, not bookish intellectuals
with a disdain for direct sunlight.
The rest of the book is a seemingly ran
dom series of glimpses into various nerd
subcultures. Here is a chapter on the activi
ties of the Society for Creative Anachronism,
whose members recreate the structures and
artisanship of medieval feudalism (but not
the plagues and infant mortality rates).
Here is a look at the Church of All Worlds, a
philosophical mashup of Ayn Rand and Robert
Heinlein that espouses polyamory. Here is a
videogaming convention that demonstrates a
stark difference between the communal bonds
of Halo 2 players and those who play Super
Smash Bros. Melee. Here is a meeting of the
Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, divided
between aging old-school sci-fi readers and
young otakus too busy gaming to read.
Interspersed with these chapters are
Nugent's sociological observations that par
allel nerd culture—with its emphases on
bookishness and machinelike behavior—with
similar traits in Jewish and Asian cultures, and
that posit an overlap between the seeming
dysfunctionalism of nerds with that of people
with Asperger's Syndrome (note: as the par
ent of an autistic-spectrum child I emphasize
the word "seeming"). In still another chapter,
Nugent examines the assimilation of typical
nerd traits (disaffectedness, an obsession
with cultural minutiae) into the hipster profile
(who bought all those "Vote for Pedro" ringer
tees?). And he brings it home with autobio
graphical peeks into his own childhood and
the extremely unhappy homes that drove him
and his friends into the relatively safe world
of Dungeons & Dragons.
With his scattershot approach Nugent tries
to take what is, in fact, an incredibly complex
topic (I can think of at
least five major nerd
subcultures he neglects
here) and boil it down
to a Unified Field Theory
of Geekdom. In this he
is largely unsuccess
ful, but what he does
manage is a sort of
apologia, an attempt
at least to open up this
traditionally airtight
social ghetto. He may
claim to have rejected
nerd culture but he
clearly still has sympa
thy and affection for it,
and if anyone could use
sympathy and affection,
it's nerds.
In Case Someone Forgot
to Mention It: Sorry,
kids. I've got to rat you
out. Although local bookstores have acquired
the summer reading lists for all area schools
and stocked their shelves accordingly, every
August there is a frenzied rush of harried par
ents whose kids have neglected to tell them
they had books to read. I recently overheard
a bookseller giving her favorite anecdote
from the Friday before the start of last school
year: "I need The Great Gatsby and The Iliad.
I have to have them both read by Monday."
Now, while I personally find it unrealistic to
expect kids to spend their summer slogging
through A Separate Peace or Lord of the Flies.
and while it sucks large to force parents to
shell out of pocket, the fact remains that your
children almost certainly have some reading to
do. Better to catch it now than in August.
(And because they're going to ask, Animal
Farm. Of Mice and Men, and The Old Man and
the Sea are the shortest books on the list.)
John G. Nettles
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