I try a CD of a local band that someone gave me, but I don't like it. Switch to the radio. Surf a long time, nothing fun. At last I find a pop song I like. Mostly storytelling--folk plus rap? Poetry slam? Anyway... a high school student in Marin County, California, who styles herself Miss Julie Brown, tells us:

The yuplings here at Austen High Think I never read, but I Just avoid our school librar- y cuz there's just candy there Popstar bios fill the stacks: No room for new, so our school whacks a book for every one they buy! How do they choose what books'll die?   Stamp them DISCARD for the crime   of unpopularity. Pulled from cir-   culation to keep our nation pure   of thought and other wastes of time. Got no pop appeal, can't mix? you get stamped, and all the cliques just avoid you, call you lame-- people, books, it's all the same. So I'm a Discard! Read, live, be, hang with Discards. Teeth will gnash! But rejection sets you free from so... much... trash!   Stamp us DISCARD...

I wish I could remember her rap word for word--it was flowing and funny and just plain better than this. But this was the gist.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Discard: I got a book stamped DISCARD dirt-cheap at a library sale: Ghost Paddle by James Houston. It inspired a vivid dream a couple days ago: Mayan Door.
• Marin County, cliques: Partly inspired by Lick The Star, Sophia Coppola's first (short) film--all about cliques and loners, set in a Marin school. Partly it's the brilliant book She's Such A Geek!, which claims to be short autobios by women in science, but is really not about science but brains. The stigma of having brains in America. With or without tits.
• Diagnosis of high school snobs: felt true. And I liked her prescription: Why waste time waiting for others to do it? Discard yourself!
• Julie Brown: a real singer, though she's not a black teen from Marin. But she anticipated the movie Clueless in her bimbo anthem "Cuz I'm a Blonde".
• Austen High: My dream thinks the movie Clueless really got Jane Austen right by setting her novel Emma among American teens now, not English adults 200 years ago. Emma is a meddler and snob in a world of cliques and social rankings--and that means high school! It's a developmental stage--not just of teens, of society. High schoolers retain the social structure of pre-industrial society! Royal courts then had about the same educational level and social structure as high schools now. Shouldn't surprise us: don't preschoolers act tribal? School recapitulates history!
• Let's reverse that! Jane Austen's adults (despite their verbal sophistication) are often less socially aware than today's high schoolers, since they don't question their society's assumptions, and some (not all) students do. We accept Austen-era behavior in teens, but expect adults to grow out of it--and that's evidence society really has evolved! In 1800, for most people, high school hell never ended. Cliques ruled the world. Your status defined you. For life.
• ACTION: Well, if I were Miss Julie Brown I'd rap it. But I'm shy, so I... dream it.

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