Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
Is there a book you return to again and again, a work that would make life on a desert island bearable? Each weekend, until Labour Day, Globe writers will share their go-to tomes – be it novel, poetry collection, cookbook – and why the world is just a little better for them.
Have you heard of ASMR? Autonomous sensory meridian response – not everyone experiences it, but it's wonderful if you do. It's a tingling, deeply relaxing feeling in your brain or the back of your neck brought on by some sort of stimulus. Science has hardly explored the phenomenon, but the Internet has been bringing together people who experience it through soundscapes, haircuts, even multilayered performance art.
For me, it usually happens when reading. The triggering material varies widely: a friend's well-written news story, a notice from Canada Student Loans, engaging fiction – with the only common trait being text that tackles a subject from an unfamiliar angle. My first memory of ASMR can be traced back to a single piece of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lore. School Daze is a 32-page, CD-case-sized "storybook" – a comic, really – that sees the Ninja Turtles wage war against a force unlike any they'd ever seen: wild caricatures of punks selling used homework for three bucks a pop.
A product of the race to mass-commodify pop culture that came about in the 1980s – a movement the Ninja Turtles still endure through, thanks to Michael Bay – 1991's School Daze cost $1.50 (U.S.) and was at best an afterthought to anyone explicitly responsible for the Turtles' original intellectual property rights. Against the odds, it moved me. It still moves me 26 years later, even as a grown man who writes more words on a given weekday than appear in the entire book.
I've never cared much for the division between high and low culture. I grew up working-class in the eighties and nineties, consuming everything that cable TV, dial-up Internet and Goosebumps delivered to my optic nerves; School Daze, in that context, felt like book full of fine lessons. It introduced me to the concept of ethical decision-making. It also made my head feel tingly.
Written by Astrid Holm and illustrated by Franc Mateu, the book finds our half-shelled heroes in a pizza parlour spouting envy over their human analogs, as if the Turtles' very existence wasn't itself a miracle of modern sewer science. Wearing Technicolor trench coats but nothing to obscure their green, bulbous faces, the Turtles draw no suspicion when they board a "mondo" school bus and head to the local high school, dropping in on classes ranging from shop to gym.
"Leonardo wanted some brain exercise," Holm writes, and if you can imagine you're 5 and it's being read to you in the slow, patient way adults read to kids, maybe you'll get a spark of ASMR. Despite the dollar-bin price point, if you make your way through the book in that voice, School Daze keeps an engaging rhythm. The English teacher reads a short story to the class, and the followup line has clearly stuck with me, since it's literally what I'm doing right now: "I want you to write me a page about what you did or did not like about this story."
A pony-tailed punk turns to Leonardo. "I can sell you that homework for three dollars," he whispers.
"You can what?"
"Shh. Let's talk about it at lunch."
In the combination gym-cafeteria, the illicit homework supply chain is revealed – okay, it's just from last year's grads – and Leonardo takes a stand. "It's wrong!" he declares, casting away his trench coat to reveal his true identity. He braces for action, surrounded by punks in knockoff Doc Martens, wedge sneakers and astounding haircuts. (Published 15 years after the Ramones' self-titled debut, School Daze could be used to critique society's ongoing commodification of punk's aesthetics, too.) Before violence escalates, Donatello pops up from a table and reveals he's been tape-recording the conversation. The "homework gang" gets sent to the principal's office; the Turtles go home to enjoy pizza dipped in melted chocolate courtesy of Michelangelo's home economics class.
Reading School Daze now, I know both the book's confrontation and its moral lesson are middling at best. Leonardo never explains why selling homework is wrong. This could explain why I went on to sell my homework in grad school – but since that was selling news stories to journalism outlets, I prefer to take the perspective that, like Michelangelo did with chocolate-dipped pizza, I was maximizing the value of what I learned in the classroom.
But really, the book planted an important, if absurd, question in me: Why was selling homework wrong? That, too, fired off the ASMR in my brain. I was 6; at that age, usually, things just were. I'd never really before explored the reasons behind what made behaviour good or bad. In this case, the answer was something like "hard work builds character," which I'm sure I figured out some time in my first few dozen lazy summer reads of School Daze.
The broader question, too – why are things the way they are? – stuck with me. It has a lot to do with how I fell into journalism. For a $1.50 booklet that almost certainly only exists to maximize value from a highly popular television, film and video-game franchise, I've wrung a lot of value out of School Daze. Whatever happens next with the ever-mutating Ninja Turtles cash cow, you can't take that away.
Josh O’Kane