Growing up in a house full of books was the best preparation for my profession. My parents were both teachers and avid readers, so I went to school with a huge advantage. I knew of Shakespeare and Jack London before I was ever assigned to read them.  These authors had all been sitting on the living room shelves.  For me, reading became a natural part of life.  For example,  while my friends often drank it up all night in their driveways, I’m sure I fell asleep with a book over my face.  When the time came for intense, heavy reading in college, I was more than ready.  I don’t think I can say I had a really happy childhood, but it was an intelligent one.  In fact, I still have many of the books I read as a child – they are sitting on my shelves in Mexicali.

I share this information about my books because I’m introducing Jay's Classification Essay Project to my students to finish out Spring Semester.  I haven’t mentioned this yet, but my parents were products of the Great Depression.  They taught me never to throw anything away.  My mother is a hoarder.  When my father died a few years back, I took his books with me to Mexico.  Today my house resembles a small library.  I have books in every room – including the bathrooms.  I don’t know where to put them all.  Jaja.  My idea to initiate my Classification Essay Project was to CLASSIFY my books, but now, I believe it might be too confusing a share with my students.  I have too many.  I still have the novels I read in college.  I’ve amassed a Spanish-language section in my living room.  I have shelves of author memoirs, Jewish books.  A Marilyn Monroe Corner!  Too  many categories. Too many books.  More than a few times I’ve stumbled into a bookcase to have everything tumble down over my head.

I was so excited for this classification idea, too.   I have something I know that could inspire student imagination – My collection of Black Lizard books.  (See The Hot Spot above.)  When I was the age of my students are now, I read all the Black Lizard books I could get my hands on. The Black Lizard series was started my one of my favorite authors, Barry Gifford.  Early into his professional writing career,  Barry began tracking down pulp fiction authors from the Fifties and Sixties -  Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, Charles Williams – and publishing their works.  These were hard-boiled writers that created sad, angry characters,  nightmarish settings,  weird dialogue.  I read them all.   Nearing the end of one of these novels, I was already worrying about where I was going to find the next one.  I was hooked,  and, it wasn’t   like you were going to find any of these at Walmart, either.   You had to scour the backrooms of used bookstores.  Most of the titles were way out of print.  I just may like them most for their cover designs.  Some of them featured the lewd pulp- style art you may associate from book racks of the 50s and 60s.  Others introduce new modernized covers, but the message and/or feeling is the same:  Someone is going to get hurt.   I still have them on my shelves here in Mexicali.   I just can’t allow myself to give them up. 

This week, I found a Charles Williams novel to read.  I knew where to find it. Jaja.  The title is The Hot Spot, but in it was originally published under the name Hell Hath No Fury.  Either way, it’s a GREAT READ.  I’m not going to write a book report here, but the story revolves around tough-guy Harry Madox, who has just arrived in a small Texas town with a shady past.  We know he’s a troublemaker from the impulsive way he moves.  On the first day, he talks his way into a used-cars sales job.  Clearly, he’s a good liar.  He wastes no time going after a young, innocent girl – ten years younger than he is – working in a loan office.  Is this before he sleeps with the boss’s wife?  Things happen so fast, I can’t remember.  What I remember most is Harry walking into bank at the same time a nearby building is burning to the ground.  This is a small town; most of the bank employees are members of the Volunteer Fire Department, and they have all left minutes before.   This leaves Harry alone with an old, feeble manager and an empty bank.  It doesn’t take Harry long to figure out his next move.  He knows he shouldn’t be thinking about it, but the wheels are turning.  Before he completes the transaction he came for, he knows he’s going to do it.  He’s going  to rob the bank.  I say, Wait!  Harry.  Think about what you are doing!  You have now have a solid job.  You appear to be in love with a beautiful girl.  Think about your future!  If you get caught, you will spend hard time in  prison.  Harry knows this, but this is what Harry thinks:  “Well….Go on selling second-hand jalopies for another forty years and maybe somebody’ll give a a testimonial and a forty-dollar watch.  For Harry, there was nothing to think about.  Harry is a Black Lizard Guy.  He’s bent on self-destruction.  There is no other way.  This is a GREAT BOOK!

I spend a lot of time reading about famous, and not-so-famous authors.  Many of them share intimate stories about getting started in the writing business. Often, a mention of typewriters find its way into their novels.  I mean, when people get started writing, no one has any money. Many writers will not have connections.  Writing is a lonely occupation.  But back in the day, almost everyone had access to a typewriter.  You could go to your public library an use one.  Ray Bradbury had no place to write until he found out that his public library rented typewriters out for ten cents on the half-hour,  so with a roll of dimes, he wrote Farenheit 451 in nine days for $9.80   Rachel Carson completed her famous Silent Spring with a frozen shoulder.  The cancer that was overtaking her body limited her to type with one finger.  These stories about writing ona typewriter inspire me much more than people copying and pasting things from the internet.

I offer Jay’s Classification Essay Project to my students as an opportunity to write about their own interests.  I imagine a lot of them will write about their music or their shoes or their pets, which I will know little about, but that’s cool.  Currently, I teach Zoom classes.  My students have little interaction with each other.   For the most part, our computer screens during class time remain BLACK. The icebreaking activities that I pick up in distance education workshops or on Youtube are FAKE.  I want to tell my students they will remember their first years in college for the rest of their lives.  It’s a time/environment for meeting new people and sharing interests that will never be duplicated in their lifetimes.   I encourage my students to make The Classification Essay  PERSONAL.  I hold my Black Lizard books in my hands.  I type with my fingers.  Apparently Black Lizard author Charles Williams drew upon his own personal hardship and desperation to write his novels. Between 1951 and 1960, he wrote seventeen of them.  His stories are bleak.  His characters are trapped.  The sound of the Click Clack DING! from his typewriter set him FREE.