35 years ago our parents began a dream vacation together. The opportunity to cruise the Hawaiian islands with other romance novelists was a dream come true for my mother. According to my dad she was bouncing off the walls weeks before the trip, and had her head buried in her notebook the first couple days of the cruise. As we all know things didn’t go as planned.
Tough decisions were made that day, and they had to be made fast. As the world crumbled around them, our parents and the surviving crew decided to keep cruising, and try to ignore what was happening outside the ship. That lasted for a while, but reality eventually started to beat out romance. My mom said that civility and the midnight buffet were among the first casualties. They put off the inevitable for almost 6 months, but then the fuel ran out and so did the dream.
They were a resilient lot however, and soon their talents as wordsmiths was put to use. Fate and circumstance had left them the greatest collection of living authors in the world. Their love of language was apparent to the survivors on the island, and soon they had made agreements with many different factions. Slowly, they courted the various Kānaka groups until a lasting bond through literature was formed, and at night they would go up the hill and teach the Thrivers reading and romance.
With my mom at the helm, the “Love, Life, and Literacy” program was born to our very excited parents. They raised it to be the most comprehensive post-apocalypse college of arts and letters available (as far we know). Their love affair with words turned their fantasy to reality, and they passed it on to us. It is our job to keep the school and relationships on the island fresh and exciting. For the most part, I think we’ve done a good job. Nonetheless, there have been a few indiscretions that I feel need to be addressed honestly and out in the open.
There has always been talk of expanding the curriculum to cover topics other than literature and the human condition. Science and math have always been the most popular suggestions, but recently history has been batted around, (because of the “doomed to repeat it” trope I suppose).
To all those who are pushing for expanded classes I have only one thing to say, NO!
Pursuing science and math is what got us here. Love didn’t poison the land and water. Romance didn’t cause the collapse of civilization. Billions of lives weren’t lost because of an excess of tenderness. It was an overzealous need to understand the world before we truly understood ourselves that was almost our downfall. When my mother first began this journey you couldn’t even trade a well-crafted romance novel for a salted fish. You can get a good meal in some places for a mediocre poem now. That is the kind of progress that we need to focus on.
Speaking of focus it has come to my attention that many of you have been selling books personally, and not in conjunction with our store. I know that the practice has been going on for a long time and I generally turn a blind eye. Two recent events make that practice impossible now. First, according to our inventory fantasy and thriller novels are outselling romance by almost 3:1. That is unacceptable. Catering to the Kānaka’s baser instincts with tales of violence and explosions instead of cultivating more mature emotions goes against everything we are working for. No more selling tales of swords and sorcerers on the side. Don’t make me go medieval on you! Second, and most disturbing it has come to my attention that someone who shall remain nameless has been passing off two classics as his own. Plagiarism is a vile practice and the next time I ask a student who wrote “Treasure Island” I better hear Robert Louis Stevenson.
Lastly, we come to what might be the most troubling issue facing us. It is important that the education we provide is of a quality that we can be proud of, and that means standards. From the very beginning my mother’s seminal work, “Aloha! Mark Aloha! Love” has been the cornerstone of our curriculum. According to our syllabus it is the novel that our capstone class, “Understanding Love” is based on. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Alexis Green was trying to use her mother’s novel, “Love Lahaina Style” to teach the class. With its run-on sentences and sloppy metaphors it’s no wonder that it’s left some students tired and confused. LLS is a perfectly reasonable starter book for our remedial classes, but falls flat when compared to the symphony of seduction that is “Aloha! Mark”. Let’s respect the high bar we’ve set for ourselves and the education we provide. We owe it to our parents and our students.
