Cheesy with a chance of Sleestaks

I may have reached a new low yesterday when I showed my upper-level literature students a clip from the 1970s Saturday-morning children's show Land of the Lost. One moment we're engaging in deep philosophical discussion of solipsism and whether unmediated experience exists, and the next we're watching Will and Holly encountering Chaka for the first time. How many Saturday mornings did I spend slavering over those cheesy special effects and terrible actors? And I wasn't even a child at the time--the show debuted when I was 13. It was kind of embarrassing to admit to my students how much I loved Land of the Lost even after I was old enough to know better, but at least there were no Sleestaks involved. I draw the line at Sleestaks in the classroom.

My special topics class Between Fact and Fiction is nearing the end--finally!--of the book that never ends: Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. They found the book amusing and engaging at first but they've reached the point when the narrator is just annoying, which prompts the question: why would he portray himself as annoying when he could have assumed a more heroic persona? Or is his willingness to portray his own annoyingness somehow heroic in itself? 

Yesterday we tried to unravel the process Eggers experiences (or says he experiences) while his friend John (not his real name) is admitted to the hospital after a suicide attempt. John is in the next room getting his stomach pumped while Dave agonizes over how best to turn his close friend's pain into narrative:

So there is first the experience, the friend and the threatened suicide, then there are the echoes from these things having been done before, then the awareness of echoes, the anger at the presence of echoes, then the acceptance, embracing of presence of echoes--as enrichment--and above all the recognition of the value of the friend threatening suicide and having stomach pumped, as both life experience and also as fodder for experimental short story or passage in novel, not to mention more reason to feel experientially superior to others one's age, especially those who have not seen what I have seen, all the things I have seen....So I could be aware of the dangers of the self-consciousness, but at the same time, I'll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can't be articulated.  

It's kind of a lot to unpack, as you would expect from a book trying to articulate what can't be articulate, narrate what most resists narrative, eff the ineffable. In the end we agree that the book (novel/memoir/experimental whatever-it-is) is a self-consuming black hole, a monument to solipsism consuming itself and everything it encounters--but not before we've had a chance to visit the Land of the Lost so my students can understand just one in a vast array of allusions to works outside their awareness. One of my students informed me that the TV show was made into a film starring Will Ferrell in the early 2000s, and all I can do is be thankful at having escaped that particular echo.

Baseball therapy

A beautiful day for baseball.

 

The big question at the baseball game on Saturday was Which team is the wind playing for? Sometimes the wind worked in my team's favor, pushing a fly ball over the fence for a three-run wind-assisted home run. Sometimes the wind worked against us, blowing the pitcher right off the mound for a wind-assisted wild pitch. High winds roared past the light poles, drowning out all chatter and making the poles sway menacingly; outfielders spent as much time chasing their own hats as they did catching balls--or trying to catch balls that often took wild detours, shoved by gusts of wind into unexpected places. 

Fans in the stands had to hold on to their hats--and everything else. Napkins, popcorn, loose bits of paper flew up and plastered themselves against the protective netting. Every time the guy in front of me stood up, his seat-cushion went skittering off on its own. The rain had stopped before the game started but the parking area remained a sopping mud-pit, so I drove home with soaking feet and a wind-burned face after my team lost--but I enjoyed every single minute of it. 

This was my third baseball game of the season. I missed one home game because of a meeting and a whole weekend of tournament play because I was sick, but aside from that, I've attended every home game, even though I don't even have any students on the team this year.

I generally try to support my students by attending their art shows, theatre performances, concerts, and poetry readings; I always find out what sports my students are playing and I attend a few home games. This semester I ought to be watching my students play softball, lacrosse, or soccer, but instead I'm going to as many baseball games as I can manage.

It's a mental health thing, I tell myself. Watching soccer or lacross feels like work, and the limited seating at softball games makes viewing difficult. But baseball makes me happy, whether I have to sit huddled in a blanket or sweating in the sun or holding onto my hat in the wind. Except I forgot to wear a hat Saturday so my hair was at the mercy of 50-mile-an-hour gusts, but I don't even care how ridiculous I looked because baseball makes me happy.

After the stressful year we've had, with all those long, tense meetings bubbling with bad news, I decided this spring that I would do what I could to maximize my happiness. Is this selfish? Maybe so, but at the moment I don't care. I sit in the stands behind home plate so I can see the pitches, and I end every game with a smile, even when my team loses. I carry that smile home, where I grade papers or prep classes or work on my taxes or do household chores, none of which seem onerous in the afterglow of a baseball game.   

If spending a couple of hours sitting in the wind watching my team play baseball can blow the cobwebs out of my brain and release the stress of a three-hour meeting, that's better than therapy. Cheaper, too, even after I pay for a bag of popcorn and a bottle of water--which I'd better hold on to even after it's empty lest the wind carry it away.     

Who's in the time-out box now?

I arrived on campus this morning to find this poor guy facing the wall, as if he'd been sent to the time-out box to think about his transgressions. What did Mr. Statue do to deserve such treatment? All he ever does is stand in his big glass box near the back entrance to my building, but now he's been facing a blank wall for hours and hours and hours. Cruel and unusual punishment!

It's a maintenance issue, of course. Loose tiles near the back entrance need replacement and Mr. Statue was standing in the way of progress. Still, the maintenance dudes didn't have to place him facing the wall. That wall doesn't require guarding--but then again, neither does the place where he usually stands guard. Against what? That door is almost always locked, and the area isn't generally subject to hordes of marauders--and even if it were, Mr. Statue is hardly a threat. All he does is stand there looking constipated.

Maybe that's why he's in the time-out box: You want something to frown about? I'll give you something to frown about!  I want to see some gratitude for everything we've done for you! You'll stand there until I see a big happy smile on your face--or else!

If that's the case, he'll be standing there a very long time.  

How to deal with the Glaring Student

Lately I've been tempted to distribute dark glasses in my American Lit Survey class so I'll be oblivious whenever the Glaring Student beams Hostility Rays in my direction.

I have this student every spring--the names and genders change but the behavior remains constant. The Glaring Student will discuss Walt Whitman or T.S. Eliot or William Faulkner without a problem, but the moment we focus on an author who's not some dead white guy, the student's behavior changes: they cross their arms and glare at me as if I'm forcing them to murder their grandmothers. Later they'll write hostile comments on my course evaluations, angry at being made to read Toni Morrison or Zora Neale Hurston or Maxine Hong Kingston or Langston Hughes--only some of the greatest authors of the twentieth century! What, you'd rather read more Hemingway?

Even though the Hostility Rays appear predictably, I never know how to react in the moment. I could challenge the student (Why are you glaring at me?) but that would lead to either flat denial or distracting defensiveness. I don't want to spend valuable class time defending my syllabus for the benefit of one openly hostile student.

I've had some outside-of-class conferences with previous Glaring Students, but they don't resolve anything. I try to gently suss out the source of the student's hostility, but the response is denial or deflection. Maybe I'm imagining things? But no: I can see the body language, feel the Hostility Rays, and read the comments on course evaluations. Some students just resent reading non-white authors and don't want to talk about why.

So maybe sunglasses are the answer. Dark glasses could deflect the Hostility Rays or at least make them less obvious. But then I'd also need a way to mask the body language--the leaning back in the chair with arms folded like an impregnable shield preventing all unwanted ideas from entering. Tempting though it might be, I can't make the Glaring Student sit under a blanket.

So instead I'll stand at the front of the class doing my best to ignore the Hostility Rays in hopes that exposure to a wide range of authors will somehow pierce the shield, melt the resentment, and help the Glaring Students open their arms to a world outside themselves. That is, after all, what I'm here for. 

When numbers and feelings don't mix

Last week when I spent Spring Break with the grandkids, my grandson kept opening up a music box that played "Feelings," a song that hasn't gotten any less sappy since it debuted in 1974. Every time I heard those tinkly opening notes, I wanted to grab the box, snap it shut, and toss it out the window--but I didn't, because I'm not that kind of grandma. I have years of experience in biting my tongue and I'm not going to forget those skills now.

This week, though, I have felt an awful lot like that music box: every time I open my mouth, I want to talk about feelings. Everyone's talking about numbers and money and percentages and interest rates, and all I want to say is it feels like a pay cut!

It's not a pay cut. It's not a pay raise either, but that's no surprise--we haven't had raises in a number of years I'm too depressed to add up. What we're experiencing is a reduction in a small but significant stipend teaching faculty receive from earnings on an endowment fund directed toward recognizing the value of teaching. To explain more clearly: some years ago, a bunch of people donated money to a fund to benefit teaching faculty, but the annual amount we'll receive from it has been reduced from a small but significant amount to an even smaller but still significant amount. So, yes: it's not a pay cut but it feels like a pay cut, particularly on top of all the other cuts we've been experiencing for the past couple of years.

But there's more. The reason the stipend needs to be cut is--and believe me, I have feelings about this--that we've evidently been overpaid for the past five years. I've seen the numbers and they are convincing, so intellectually I can agree that it was not wise to habitually pay out more in stipends than that specific fund could produce in earnings, but you could poll every single faculty member on this campus and ask whether they've felt overpaid for the past five years--or, really, ever--and not a single one would say yes. Everyone feels overworked and undervalued, but the numbers suggest that we have actually been overpaid from a fund designed to reward the value of teaching, and now we will have to endure a correction to bring that reward back in sync with what the endowment is producing, so, according to the numbers, there's really nothing to see here. We have been overvalued and now we will be rewarded more in line with what the numbers say we're worth, sorry as that valuation might be. End of story.

But it still feels like a pay cut, and I still feel like spilling out a sappy story every time I open my mouth, but I fear that someone might just snap me shut and toss me out the window, so I'll just sit over here and bite my tongue.

Colorful, quaint, and positively geriatric

I thought I had come to terms with the passage of time a few years ago when I taught a class on 9/11 literature to a group of students who had no memory of 2001, but this week my students reminded me just how much the gap between our ages is growing: They wanted me to explain what a character means when he says "I'm a spring."

We're reading Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is set in that distant decade the 1990s, when Getting Your Colors Done was a thing. I explained the whole seasonal color palette concept to my students. "I'm a winter," I said, a fact anyone who was sentient in the 90s could have discerned simply by looking at my outfit. My students seemed both puzzled and moderately amused.

I'm accustomed to explaining the 90s to my students, but it's usually the 1890s. When I assign readings by Paul Laurence Dunbar or Charles Chesnutt, for instance, I talk about lynching and the backlash against Reconstruction and the Old Plantation School of literature and the Atlanta Exposition Address, topics that feel much more weighty than whether a person looks better in pastels or primary colors.

What other 1990s phenomena will I have to explain to the class? The whole decade is a bit of a blur, possibly because I was busy working on my PhD while serving as editor of a community newspaper and raising two small children. I immediately think of the Challenger disaster, but that happened in 1986. In the 1990s, Princess Diana died. Apartheid finally fell apart. The Cleveland Indians went to the World Series but lost--twice.  Operation Desert Storm, the bombing of the World Trade Center, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, Dolly the sheep...interesting times. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and is now positively geriatric.

Which is how I feel when my students treat the 1990s as if it's just as distant as the 1890s, or when they talk about the Vietnam War as if it were roughly contemporary with the Civil War. To them, anything that happened before they were born is all part of the dim and distant past, interesting to learn about but full of primitive people doing quaint but incomprehensible things, like dialing a telephone or watching Matlock or getting their colors done. 

Next thing you know I'll be chasing young folks off my lawn while reminiscing about the joys of cursive writing and analog clocks--but at least I'll be wearing the right colors to suit my season.

Not the zombie apocalypse

This morning my campus appears to have been struck by the zombie apocalypse: people are dragging themselves around like the undead in search of fresh brains, but all the brains in evidence seem clouded and confused. 

Or maybe it's just me. The combined impact of spring break, the time change, and a head full of congestion have left me feeling as if I'm in the middle of a silent film running in slow motion. I spent yesterday sitting around surrounded by a great cloud of kleenexes and the congestion kept waking me up in the night, but today I feel almost human. 

Almost. It's going to take a lot more than antihistamines and caffeine to bring my brain back into clear focus. Good thing I have only one class today, followed by what should be a short and simple meeting, then home to an early bedtime, which probably won't prevent the all-day headache that generally hits precisely 48 hours after each time change. (Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?)

But here I am back in the office ready to tackle whatever I can manage considering the circumstances. If you stumble upon any fresh brains, please send them my way.

So much drama just over our heads

Here's how you can tell I'm on Spring Break: when my daughter asks whether I want to visit a blue heron rookery on a weekday, I say "okay." 

We felt a little like voyeurs as we watched dozens of great blue herons engaging in mating behavior. At a pull-off beside a busy road in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, we watched at least 30 herons in one tree and another 20 or more nearby. A male heron would fetch a stick and present it to a female to add to the nest. Occasionally a pair would do a little flirty fight-dance and then get down to the business of making sure the world has more baby herons. 

Backlighting transformed the herons into silhouettes, like massive paper puppets pasted onto the sky. The scene before us looked positively primeval, even when traffic whizzed past behind our backs and I struggled to keep the power lines out of the pictures. 

I wondered how so many people could drive right past all this drama taking place in plain sight, but the herons and the traffic seem happy to coexist. Near my son's workplace there's a heron rookery tucked in between a warehouse and a factory, alongside a railroad track and a busy highway. I'm sure many commuters drive past the rookery every day oblivious to the heron hi-jinks, and in a month or so the herons will feed and tend their nestlings without much concern for the bustling world across the railroad tracks.

The photos suggest a world far removed from everyday life, a place so exotic that we ought to have to trek for miles just to catch a glimpse. But no: all you have to do is pull off the road and look up. Given the wonders taking place in plain sight, it's a wonder the entire world doesn't come screeching to a halt.

Hard to see, but these two herons are mating

So many nests on one tree!

At another park, we saw a bald eagle.

 

Three stories of problematic storytelling

This big ol' pile o' books is threatening to topple onto my workspace if I don't deal with it, but I tell myself that I ought to write about what I've been reading before I put it all away. Writing about books makes me happy, usually, but this particular pile is a bit mixed. I'll highlight the three I found most interesting:

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: George Saunders's new collection of short stories, Liberation Day, is kind of meh. I love George Saunders and I always look forward to introducing my students to the weird but oddly familiar world of "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline," but this collection feels like a rehash of things he's written before, as if he's transported old characters to new settings to say the same old things--things worth saying, yes, but when a writer known for originality starts recycling his own material and becomes predictable, I lose patience. He's best when he's moving into new territory, as in "The Mom of Bold Action," in which he channels the inner voice of a mother who's constantly attempting to transform ordinary life into compelling fiction, casting her can opener, for instance, as a character in an imagined story called "The Trusty Little Opener." Everything she encounters becomes fodder for the fiction she isn't writing:

"The Tree Who Longed to Come Inside." Once there was a tree who longed to come inside and sit by the woodstove. He knew this was weird. He knew that his fellow trees were being cruelly burned in there. But, gosh, the kitchen looked so inviting. Because of all the hard work the mother had done. Painting, and whatnot. When she should have been writing.

These false starts always end before the mom can write anything down, but when she finally manages to fill pages with angry words, her words surprisingly create real-life consequences for her family and community. This obsession with the power of words appears in several other stories as well, mostly in dystopian settings where an oppressive power controls language in order to control people, but the idea comes across most tenderly in "Love Letter," in which a grandparent tries to give his grandson advice without arousing the suspicions of certain Thought Police who seem to have sprung from today's news. 

Control of language also plays a part in The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, a novel that beautifully recreates the awkwardness of female adolescent friendship while also raising interesting questions about ownership of stories. Two girls in post-World-War-II France entertain themselves by fabricating fictional worlds, only to find that their stories can cause real harm in their own lives and those of others:

A long time ago, when the game of writing was only an idea, like the idea of growing happiness, Fabienne said that we should write books together so people would know how it felt to be us. That, I now know, was the only mistake she made. What we wrote was about many things, but not about us. When the books were read by others, we were nowhere to be found.

The girls found in this beautifully written novel feel real and the consequences of their fabulation are utterly believable, even if some of the minor characters seem to have stepped out of the pages of a Dickens novel.

Maria Dahvana Headley takes a different route toward breathing new life into old stories. Her translation of Beowulf, published in 2020, feels fresh and powerful and poetic, primarily because she imagines the poem being told by a bunch of guys sitting around a mead-hall drinking. The problematic first word of the poem, "Hwaet," has been previously translated as "Lo!" or "Behold!" or "So," but Headley starts with "Bro," which feels just right. Headley's translation sometimes echoes the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse without sounding stuffy or artificial, as in this snippet from Beowulf's boast to Hrothgar:

I heard tell of Grendel from sailors--seriously,
the whole world knows the stories, swapped and sworn,
of Heorot Hall's early curfew, how every night
you surrender to silence when the sun sprints
out of heaven, leaving the celestial dome dark.
Every elder knew I was the man for you, and blessed
my quest, King Hrothgar, because where I'm from?
I'm the strongest and the boldest, and the bravest and the best.
Yes: I mean--I may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.

Seriously, if I were in a position to teach Beowulf to young people, this is the version I'd choose: totally un-stuffy and full of fresh fun. (But watch out--the alliteration is contagious.)