Fox Spreads Herpes

I'm not a huge fan of the Colbert Report, but last night I was waiting to take my next dose of cough medicine and watched part of an episode. I probably would have changed the channel, but Colbert was doing a story on how herpes was being spread quickly on college campuses due to the prevalence of playing beer pong. Colbert's "report" was actually not about herpes or beer pong, but really about how the whole story was a college newspaper joke that got picked up and spread by the national media (aka primarily Fox News). Here is Colbert's take...

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Beer Pong Herpes Outbreak

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I'm always a sucker for ways of using pop culture to "teach" source evaluation, but I'm also really interested in the ways that some stories get spread while others don't. One blogger who talked about the spread of the article notes that it is probably the combination of adolescent, sexuality, and alcohol. He correctly points out that these three things are included in many urban legends, but are also strong enough social concerns that can lead people to miss the urban legend in badly written satire.

Sadly, Fox News won't allow me to embedded their original newscast, but thanks to the miracle of Youtube, here's their story. My favorite part of this is that they offer tips for "safe beer pong" while on Spring Break.



In addition to being a much funnier and more current example of evaluating sources,* I really like it as an example of the anxiety we have over adolescent sexuality, specifically as it relates to travel. You'll note that Fox News seems to be working under the assumption that beer pong is something that only happens in the tropical, debauchedness of Cancun or Daytona Beach. This story is in fact not much different than the numerous warning of violence linked to drugs and prostitution threatening Spring Breakers in Mexico. The original State Department advisory warns primarily of drug related violence, although when discussed by the media this story generally takes an advisory against frequenting areas of known for prostitution and morphs it into a warning about females being sold into prostitution.

I'm really intrigued with the ways that both the beer pong and Mexico warnings place risky adolescent behavior in remote locations and use the "holiday" to talk about taboos that are clearly issues the other 51 weeks out of year. I write a lot about how these taboos are so strong that they often have to be dealt with in the adolescent road trip novel in order to physically, geographically, and emotionally distance the behavior from adolescence, but I find it even more interesting that this pattern seems to becoming common for the media as well.

*My previous example is a series of stories about Al Gore inventing the internet and the ways that narrative was spread and expanded by "reputable" sources. Sadly, for most of my composition students, this example is too dated for it to be funny.

Road Trip: The Musical(s)

R told me about NPR's segment "9 Minute Road Trip" this morning. While Stephen Thompson gives you nine minutes worth of music that makes up for the fact that gas prices don't allow for longer road trips at the moment, I would also encourage you to listen to the five minute description of the nine minute road trip. I can't figure out how to embedded everything in this post, but you can listen to the story and the five songs here. It turns out that NPR has been taking musical road trips all summer.

LOST Road Trip

‘Lost’ creators know how series will end

Stephanie will be here any minute, but I was quickly scanning my reader and the following caught my eye.

They compared the process to a road trip, which can often include alternate routes and unexpected stops.

More to come on this later, but I love that Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof are theorizing the show in terms of road trips. I hadn't thought about the anti-road trip plot, but I'll see where that take me. :)

The Associated Press: Study: As gas prices go up, auto deaths decline

The Associated Press: Study: As gas prices go up, auto deaths decline

Last week, I was theorizing on the changes that I've seen in ya road trip novels. One theory that I posited was that the rising cost of gas is making the car less accessible to teens, therefore while the car was once the metaphor for economic growth, it is now being replaced by other things. M suggested this might be a shift toward digital mobility rather than physical mobility, and I think she may be right. Recently there was a study that said that the rising gas prices are helping to cut traffic deaths

with the most dramatic drop likely to be among teen drivers.

I find this interesting for a number of reasons. In terms of actual teen drivers, central Illinois has had a really rough couple of years with teen deaths. Illinois has enacted a graduated driver's license program which hardly makes 16 the target year anymore.

Such a program is really interesting to me because of the ways that it mirrors the trend toward an extended adolescence. Most of my undergraduate students still identify themselves as adolescents on some level and the graduated licensing law seems to reflect such a perception of delayed adulthood.

What I find most intriguing about the study, however, is the fact that teen deaths are the most marked decrease. In ya lit cars are often used as punishment for non-adult behavior. You get pregnant, you instantly lose you car. You have sex, you (or your partner) are in a horrible car wreck. You fail to get/keep a summer job the car is taken away. Then of course we have the car removed for drug/alcohol/other anti-social behavior books a well. Cars do two things in ya lit: they enable adult behaviors (sex, jobs, mobility) and they serve as reminders for the ways in which adolescents must concede to growing up and to abiding by the rules of grown ups.

If actual teen deaths from automobile accidents are dropping, I would assume that authors will begin to find a new metaphor for the need to grow up (economically) and the consequences for unsanctioned behavior. Will this be cell phones or computers? I'm curious how this change will resonate in ya lit.

Two-Way Street: Or Three Theories on Recent Road Trip Novels

Right now I'm reading Lauren Barnholdt's Two Way Street. Although my dissertation is not exclusively about roadtrips, everything I do looks at how adolescence is economically defined. This is not to say that I think it should be economically defined, but rather that ya lit again and again seems to define it in those terms. The car tends to be the metaphor that most often represents this economic definition of adolescence and the movement from child to adult. Because of that, I read a lot of road trip novels. Lately I've noticed some things that I'm not quite sure what to do with.

The classic YA roadtrip novel is Joan Bauer's Rules of the Road. It's not necessarily a classic because of age, but is one of the first that was a) popular and b) was about a teen driving across the country. Bauer's novel doesn't specify the year that the story takes places, but it reads as a look back at an adolescence of an earlier generation. Bauer concentrates on the characters and their development and doesn't spend much time describing the ephemeral conditions of adolescence in Jenna's life. Her novel is about the growth from adolescence, and not surprisingly moves along a north/south trajectory.

In the last 4-5 years, however, there seem to be lots of YA novels that do the exact opposite. Barnholdt's novel reads more like two people in a small space who talk about pop culture (okay, I get that that is probably would a adolescent road trip would look like) who just happen to be moving across the country (north, for those who are interested in my map theory). Jordan's SUV is really just a means of keeping the pair in a small space for a prolonged period of time in which they concentrate mostly on how many pieces of popular culture they can consume simultaneously. This novel will be out of date within a couple of years. For example, Courtney and Jordan spent most of their relationship debating whether Laguna Beach or OC is better. I know teens like it, or at least those pretending to be teens on Amazon's reviews say things like:

this book has the modern twist of what it is really like to be a teen now a days. i like how it goes from the past to the actual trip.

Bernholdt's not alone in this ephemeral move. Andy Behren's All the Way is full of pop culture references and has been made into a MTV movie (with quite possibly the most offensive movie poster I've seen in a very long time) to be released this October. The upside of this production is that it proves my point that in adolescent literature cars are often metaphors for sex because we can't talk about sex and adolescents without getting into censorship issues. The weird side is that the road trip is becoming less and less of a "classic" tradition and more and more of a pop culture plot.

The comment that the trip doesn't become the focus is particularly interesting to me. In some ways that Amazon reader made me think about something that I hadn't realized before--it's becoming less and less about the car. I have three theories about this

1. My theory based on no evidence at the moment: Cars are becoming less and less accessible due to rising gas prices. Pop culture is now more of a solid aspect than the car. YouTube keeps everything accessible, gas prices don't keep cars accessible.
   
2. My more supported theory: the road trip at one time showed literal movement, but now the car itself has become such an accepted metaphor that authors can spend the novel on the pop culture that their readers would be familiar with. Bauer couldn't do this because she was already setting up something new.
3. My cynical theory: more recent road trip novels are written by authors who don't really care about what their novels do in the long term and only care about how many books they will sell this summer. The OC will sell books.
   

That doesn't mean, however, that the vehicle is disappearing. In fact the vehicle seems to becoming present in a variety of novels. Even Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy associates the official sanctioning of hoverboards with the movement into the adult realm. I'm not sure what to do with all of this. I think that there is something going on here, and I'm not sure what it is.

Road Trip with Peter Dickinson

On my to do list for this week was to finish revising my paper for the ChLA conference next week. I'm notoriously bad about revising (generally cutting a 20 page paper into 8) at the last minute (plane ride to the conference, in the hotel the night before or morning of, etc). This year is different for a couple of reasons. 1) the conference is in Normal, so I can exactly edit while driving the 5 minutes to the conference. Not to mention the fact that since we are hosting, the time I would generally spend editing will likely be spent at the registration table. 2) The more important reason that I can't procrastinate this year is that I am presenting on Peter Dickinson's Eva, which is the winner of the Phoenix Award this year. Dickinson is coming to the conference, so this makes the pressure *slightly* higher.

In the midst of working on the paper, I also found out that there was an opportunity to travel with a professor who was returning Dickinson to O'Hare. I volunteered and made a mental note to then add "reading more Peter Dickinson" to my to do list. Last night I received an email that asked if I would be willing to drive Dickinson myself because of a timing conflict. Now I really must read more Dickinson before next week (or find someone to accompany me who has read more). Those of you have read more of his stuff, suggestions on where to start?

On a related note, I was really nervous about presenting on the work of an author who was going to be present for the conference. I had a very bad experience when I wrote to an author whose work was the subject of my thesis and she responded with a very nasty "you've missed the point entirely" and then proceeded to tell me that academics were ruining the art. Since the Phoenix Award is given to books that were not as well received when they were first published, but have since been highly regarded, I was a little leary of what I would find in the reviews of Eva and how Dickinson feels about critical discussions of his texts. Thankfully, I found the following letter on his website and now feel much better.

Back to reading and revising.