{"id":443,"date":"2020-12-06T11:43:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-06T11:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gcolemanmn.wordpress.com\/?p=443"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:18:34","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:18:34","slug":"the-very-mixed-up-and-peculiar-case-of-the-unfortunate-academy-for-mysteriously-quirky-orphans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/2020\/12\/06\/the-very-mixed-up-and-peculiar-case-of-the-unfortunate-academy-for-mysteriously-quirky-orphans\/","title":{"rendered":"The Very Mixed-Up and Peculiar Case of the Unfortunate Academy for Mysteriously Quirky Orphans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally published as part of the\u00a0Digestable<\/a>\u00a0newsletter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first time I came to New York I rented a copy of\u00a0From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler<\/em><\/a>\u00a0from the library to read while riding the Greyhound there.\u00a0\u00a0The book follows a pair of siblings from Greenwich, Connecticut who stow their clothes and toiletries in their musical instrument cases and run away from home to go live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.\u00a0\u00a0I vividly remembered the descriptions of the period bedrooms where the kids slept, the bathrooms where they hid, and the fountain where they bathed and scrounged for change from reading the book as a kid and I wanted to wanted to refresh this fictional memory of the city before I experienced it in person for the first time.\u00a0\u00a0The Met wasn\u2019t as enchanting as I imagined it as a kid reading\u00a0Mixed-Up FIles<\/em>, but the city still charmed me enough for me to run away from my own home in Minnesota a year later to make a new home there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I read a lot of books like this growing up. My mom is a children\u2019s librarian so I have excellent taste.\u00a0\u00a0I liked fantasy stories but more than that I Ioved books where brainy quirky kids encountered situations that were fantastical without being outright fantasy.\u00a0\u00a0Blue Balleitt\u2019s art-centered mysteries including\u00a0The Wright 3<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Chasing Vermeer<\/em><\/a>\u00a0are a good example: a group of plucky youngsters breaking into Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s Robie House and the Art Institute of Chicago to solve puzzles and collect clues.\u00a0\u00a0Miss Peregrine\u2019s Home for Peculiar Children<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is another, centering on a secret foster home for children with different superpowers.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back at my childhood self, the fantasy I enjoyed in these books had less to do with art or magic than class.\u00a0\u00a0The main characters in these books are almost always orphans, which as a kid I read as being both destitute and liberated, that are inducted into a very elite and often secret society because of some inborn wit or unique ability.\u00a0\u00a0Despite their secrecy, these societies bear a lot of the marks of aristocracy \u2013 like the giant feasts, ancient castles, and always overstuffed armchairs of the\u00a0Harry Potter<\/a><\/em> series.\u00a0\u00a0The Mysterious Benedict Society,\u00a0<\/em>currently being adapted by Hulu<\/a>, gives us a double dose of this elitism: the main characters are inducted into the titular society, located in an old creaky mansion, and are then sent on a mission to investigate a\u00a0different<\/em> elite academy, the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened. (As an aside,\u00a0The Umbrella Academy<\/em><\/a>\u00a0does a pretty good job at picking apart this secret orphan academy trope.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Series of Unfortunate Events<\/em><\/a>, my absolute favorite series as a kid, follows the same framework: the Baudelaire orphans, who are rich but can\u2019t access their fortune directly for now, are shuttled between the presumably-not-quite-as-rich members of their late parents\u2019 inner circle \u2013 who are of course also part of the secret society known as V.F.D.\u00a0\u00a0The events are all tinged in darkness, but the siblings still spend most of the series in beautiful homes, reptile sanctuaries, fancy apartments, a fancier hotel, prep schools, and countless private<\/em>\u00a0libraries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m thinking back on all this now because I just finished the YA romance\u00a0Red, White, and Royal Blue<\/em><\/a>\u00a0which follows the love story between the first son of the (alternate reality female democratic) 45th<\/sup>\u00a0president, and the prince of England.\u00a0\u00a0As much as I loved living vicariously through their steamy-yet-YA-appropriate sex scenes and their romantic but carbon intensive flitting back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, in a lot of ways I couldn\u2019t and don\u2019t really want to relate.\u00a0\u00a0Especially when the novel would take them to a wild West Hollywood karaoke night, a Texas summer home, or a covert night visit to the V&A museum, I felt alienated by the fantasy.\u00a0\u00a0Sure, the author writes the characters as being frustrated with the families they were born into and critical of the colonial legacy of their respective empires, but it\u2019s still hard to see myself in two of the most powerful people on the planet, even if they do like to kiss boys.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I felt this same alienation watching the BBC adaptation of\u00a0Normal People<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019m thankful to the series for its\u00a0Futura-y<\/a>\u00a0title cards and for giving us as good an analysis of class inequity as a prime network has ever done through the relationship between working class Connell and wealthy Marianne, but Connell\u2019s trajectory does still smack of this same rags-to-riches fantasy.\u00a0\u00a0Connell works his way through high school to get into Trinity College and then alternates late shifts at a grocery store with late nights studying in the Berkeley Library, which I\u2019m sad to report is far too echoey to be as good a study spot as the show would have you believe.\u00a0\u00a0But then after the difficult first year he\u2019s given a full ride scholarship and can spend all of the show’s second season gallivanting with friends to Marianne\u2019s family estate in Italy because of course Marianne\u2019s family has a Italian estate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As much as these narratives frustrate me and as much as I know that this system of wealth inequality and massively unequal resource use, the system all these stories reflect and reinforce, is the cause of the pain and harm surrounding us \u2013 I still catch myself longing for it.\u00a0\u00a0Part of me, and not a small part, thinks there\u2019s something in me that is special, that merits my induction into the secret society of the elite and once I\u2019m there, once I enter into its ranks,\u00a0then<\/em>\u00a0I can do my part to fix things.\u00a0\u00a0And here I am, at Trinity College, walking cobbled paths and reading old books surrounded by old walls and plaques that say things like \u201cPLEASE DO NOT SMOKE OR LOITER IN THE HALL OF HONOR.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Here I am leveraging my future in the form of more student loans to engage with a system I know must die before it kills us all.\u00a0\u00a0I ran away from home a while ago and I\u2019ve been sleeping in the museum ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Originally published as part of the\u00a0Digestable\u00a0newsletter The first time I came to New York I rented a copy of\u00a0From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler\u00a0from the library to read while riding the Greyhound there.\u00a0\u00a0The book follows a pair of siblings from Greenwich, Connecticut who stow their clothes and toiletries in their musical instrument… Continue reading The Very Mixed-Up and Peculiar Case of the Unfortunate Academy for Mysteriously Quirky Orphans<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,17],"class_list":["post-443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture","tag-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":742,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions\/742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}