If I had a theme song

London Town Below

I have a little music supervisor in my head that plays music while I read books.  The first book I really remember this happening for was The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the album Teaser and the Firecat by Cat Stevens played in my room and my head, and to this day I hear that music when I reread those books.  So when we read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman I asked the class to think about the characters in the novel.  Who would have a theme song, and what would it be?  I gave them some suggestions:

Serious Tones

Somewhere Only We Know - by Keane for Door and Richard

I Will Follow You  Into the Dark – by Death Cab for Cutie for Anaesthesia

A Thousand Years by Vanessa Carlton – Richard near the end of the novel

Better Days by Goo Goo Dolls for Richard

Red Shoes by Elvis Costello for the Marquis de Carabas (because he used to be disgusted, and now he tries to be amused).

Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears for many of the denizens of London Below

Serious but with a wink

Rat in Me Kitchen by UB40 for Richard

Psycho Killer by Talking Heads for Croup and Vandermar

Bad to the Bone by George Thorogood and & Destroyers for Croup and Vandemar

Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon for Croup and Vandemar

I’m Looking Through You by (The Beatles) and The Wallflowers for Jessica

Bad Reputation by Joan Jett for Hunter

Break on Through to The Other Side by The Doors for the Portico family

Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon for London Above and Below

I Can See Clearly Now by Johnny Nash for Richard

Student Music Supervisors

So the students brought in their selections.  Richard has the most choices for a theme song:

Upside Down by A Teens (obvious call if Richard were into pop and you didn’t really listen to the lyrics)

Freefalling by Tom Petty (okay, this is a straight ahead pitch)

Talk by Coldplay

Oh brother I can’t,
I can’t get through
I’ve been trying hard to reach you,
cause I don’t know what to do
Oh brother I can’t believe it’s true
I’m so scared about the future and I wanna talk to you
Oh I wanna talk to you

Disturbia by Rhianna

What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?  I’m going crazy…

These Streets by Paulo Nutini

Cross the border,
Into the big bad world
Where it takes you ’bout an hour
Just to cross the road

Single Ladies by Beyonce (I guess he should have married that Jessica girl earlier if he really liked her – according to one student)

Warlocks by Red Hot Chili Peppers

A little pocket of something kind
To find your reason
coming up on it everyday for
Look at me and it’s what I stay for
A little locket of fantasy
That we believe in

I’m Yours by Jason Mraz

I fell right through the cracks
Now I’m trying to get back
Before the cool done run out
I’ll be giving it my bestest
And nothing’s going to stop me but divine intervention
I reckon it’s again my turn to win some or learn some
I won’t hesitate no more, no more
It cannot wait, I’m yours

and Hang Me Up to Dry by Cold War Kids

Followed closely by Croup and Vandemar

Bad Boys for Life by P. Diddy

Swagger Like Us by MIA

Thriller by Michael Jackson (yeah, I know – kind of lame)

Beyond Richard and the Scary Guys

For Door they only had one suggestion: Open Up by Dispatch.

The Velvets might use Heartless by Kanye West.

The Marquis might think about using Ladies & Gentlemen by Saliva.

And for the general London Above/London Below gestalt – Take a Walk by Masta Ace

What songs do you you associate with which books?

photo by flickr member Daniel Voyager

 

Neverwhere

Below

I’m teaching a class on the Science Fiction/Fantasy novel.  I’m really just acting as placeholder teacher this year.  Even though this is a genre I love, I won’t ever teach it again because it is not a class I created and because I am returning to the middle school next year to teach 7th grade.

Fantasy

The teacher who designed this class two years ago wanted to keep teaching it, but an elective mishap made everyone’s schedules messy and left him with two American Lit, two World Lit classes but no senior electives.  I am the teacher of record, but Mike is also there everyday for class, and we created the reading list together.  I got to add Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and he got to keep Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, a sort of quid pro quo.

The Set Up

I thought we had a great set up for the start of the novel.  We had started by looking at doors in fantasy, how they can lead us to the unexpected and the unexplained.  Short video excepts from a handful of films got us started:  The Seeker based on Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising novels; The Wizard of Oz; Narnia: the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Alice in Wonderland; and Monsters, Inc.  All of these are based on books (except the last.)

Not Off to a Great Start

I’ve never taught Neverwhere before and Mike hadn’t finished reading it, so it was not an auspicious beginning when one of our students, on Day 1 of discussion, said this would be a book that a twelve year old would read.  Okay.  So, where do I go with that?  This is a great story, and I didn’t want them to give up without giving it time.  I brought the discussion around to Jung and archetype theory and the tropes that are part of the classic fantasy novel: the hapless Everyguy who blunders unwillingly into the adventure, the (generally) three tasks that await him, the Big Bad, the double cross, the parallel worlds (London Above and London Below), the  zany band of supernatural folk, metaphor all around.

My weird dream of showing Buffy the Vampire Slayer in class

Yes, I’ve always wanted to find a reason to show parts of BtVS, and Buffy helped me get our students thinking about fear and allegory.  We watched sections of the much lauded episode from season 4 – “Hush” where the set up is all about talking and the scary monsters in the episode steal everyone’s voices.  Okay, so the things that we are afraid of make good reading, and the students were getting pulled into the text.

But it was Gaiman

And they read it.  Second semester seniors read the book.  The same student that said this was a book for his little sister looked at me across the top of the computer in the lab one day when we were both working on other things and said, “Mrs. Tabor? I finished the book.”  I asked him what he thought of how it ended, and he replied, “I got totally sucked into it.”   We talked about lots of different aspects of the end – decisions the hero makes, whether or not he gets the girl, what it means for us, other Gaiman to read…  I don’t know that I had anything to do with the student liking or disliking the book, but I’m glad that he did enjoy it.

Our students are going to write their own fantasy fiction now.  Chicago has a rich underground landscape and is a fertile spot for narrative.  I’ll be anxious to see what they come up with and what archetypes they use.  Thanks for a delicious book to teach, Mr. G.

“Now: onward. Things to do. People to damage.”
— Mr. Croup in Neverwhere

Image by Flickr member Jenny Downing