Antidotes for summer panic

Of course it's ridiculous to suffer a midsummer panic attack when summer hasn't, technically, even started yet, but the academic calendar skews everything so that June is my only real month off all year, though it's not entirely off because I have to attend webinars (yuck) and preside at meetings to plan events funded by the grant I'm administering, a task that will double in size in July, when I will also have to plan orientation for incoming faculty (and yes, I'm glad we have a few new hires this fall, since last year I planned the entire all-day event for exactly one new faculty member) while also preparing syllabi for two or, possibly, three classes, one of which I'm completely rejiggering, and the word possibly back there is another reason I'm a little stressed out since, for reasons I can't disclose, I won't know for another couple of weeks whether I'll teach that third (very important) class and I refuse to start working on fall syllabi until I know exactly what I'm teaching, so July will be crammed full and then we'll plunge into the deep end--August, when everything starts up again.

No wonder I'm panicking! Here we are in the middle of June and what have I accomplished? I've written an essay that felt like excellent therapy but will probably never be published, and I've chaired a couple of meetings, and I've worked on publicity about the grant, and I've driven my son to Columbus for chemotherapy and to Belpre for blood tests and a transfusion, and yes, I'm troubled that he needed two blood transfusions in one week and feels really awful after the most recent round of chemo, so I walk around with a solid little lump of concern sitting on top of my brain every single minute of the day, which makes it hard to think about more important things--but is there really anything more important right now than my son's health?

I've been seeking distractions so I won't think so much about what I can't control, but then I played this online game so much that it hurt my wrist and shoulder so I had to delete it from my phone, and then I started reading too much, taking up Middlemarch again, not only because I felt I needed to do it justice after ragging on it last week but also to try to resolve a question that was puzzling me: did I miss an important element of Casaubon's character? The question arose when a friend referred to Casaubon as a conchologist and I thought wait a minute, I don't remember that, so I had to go and read the whole stinking novel (which is really delightful and funnier than I'd remembered but not, I insist, the greatest of all time) and there it is, in chapter 30, when Casaubon is recovering from his illness and Mr. Brooke advises him to eschew scholarship and take up a more relaxing pursuit, a passage well worth reading simply for the contrasting voices:

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Brooke. "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now--I don't know a finer game than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might take to some light study; conchology, now: I always think that must be a light study. Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett--'Roderick Random,' 'Humphry Clinker'; they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you know. I remember they made me laugh uncommonly--there's a droll bit about a postilion's breeches. We have so little humor now. I have gone through all these things, but they might be rather new to you."

"As new as eating thistles," would have been an answer to represent Mr. Casaubon's feelings. But he only bowed resignedly, with due respect to his wife's uncle, and observed that doubtless the works he mentioned had "served as a resource to a certain order of minds."

You must unbend, I tell myself, echoing Mr. Brooke, but I certainly don't intend to take up the "light study" of conchology. Maybe I just need to read less.

And so I did. At the suggestion of another friend, I read Less, a novel by Andrew Sean Greer that neatly rebuts Mr. Brooke's claim that "We have so little humor now." You want humor? Read Less!  Middlemarch is funny (sometimes) but it takes a week to read, provided that you're not devoting any time to, for instance, having a job, but a quick reader can breeze through Less in a lazy June afternoon. I don't know how to describe the plot without evoking Homer and James Joyce and Jack Kerouac and, especially, Dante, which would make the book sound stuffy and scholarly, two things it most decidedly isn't, even though the main character, Arthur Less, finds himself in a dark wood on the eve of midlife and proceeds through various circles of travel hell. It's just a very funny account of a man running away from one problem and straight into a series of new ones while being stripped of everything that makes his life meaningful. Okay, that doesn't sound funny either, but trust me: it is a total hoot, with some marvelous moments of insight as well as a neat twist at the end. Just what I needed right now.

And so was this: "The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech," an online rant by Brian Phillips, who provides his list as a sort of addendum to the Pope's encyclical regarding technology. I suspect that every reader will find something familiar among Phillips's 40 problems, like the one concerning online tracking of packages:

Welcome to Schrodinger's UPS Vortex, the quantum rift within which your box is on a truck passing through Memphis, in a warehouse in Topeka, or on the outer rim of the galaxy, where it's being worshipped as a god by a species of semi-intelligent space protozoa. 

Or this one concerning the difficulty of finding helpful information in an emergency: 

I am in a hurricane. My house is in a swimming pool, and the swimming pool is in a tree. Emergency services are, for reasons I am not presently at leisure to explore, posting vital safety updates on X. When I try to read the relevant thread, the app tells me I can't do it unless I create an account, something I would gladly do if a Kia Sorrento were not flying at my face. I shall die peacefully here in my swimming-pool tree, knowing that at least i never had to talk to Grok.

Phillips ends his amusing rant with a mini-sermon aimed at tech billionaires, reminding them that "There are things in the world that are more important than money"--which, come to think of it, is an important principle underlying the plot of both Middlemarch and Less. All funny, and all effective at distracting from a midsummer panic attack in the middle of June.

But eek--where is the summer going?

And then we'll rank the lists of the greatest lists of lists

I'll bet I'm not the only English professor on the planet who has been asked recently--usually by people who have never read George Eliot--whether Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written.  

I'm not remotely qualified to determine whether Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written because I haven't read every novel ever written, but since it's summer break and there is literally nothing at stake, I'm going to go ahead and offer my unqualified answer: No. 

Now don't go hating on me already. I like Middlemarch; I've read it several times and I'll no doubt read it again; but not only do I not believe it's the greatest novel ever written, but I'm not convinced that it's the greatest novel about an intelligent woman who makes unfortunate choices. I would far rather read, for instance, Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) or Howards End (E.M. Forster) or The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton). 

Then again, it all depends on what you mean by greatest. There's a difference between an engaging novel and an important novel, a diverting novel and an influential novel. The categories may overlap, but still, there's a reason that many of the people asking me the question haven't ever bothered to read Middlemarch. It starts slowly, for one thing; the opening chapter doesn't provide a sufficient taste of the pleasures that await.

The question arises, of course, in response to the list of 100 greatest novels in English published last month in The Guardian (click here for full list), which surveyed 170 authors, critics, and academics to come up with the definitive list, which aroused so much discussion that they then assembled a second list of 100 best novels drawn from the votes of more than 3000 readers (click here for the readers' choices). 

There is some overlap; Middlemarch appears on both lists, but the readers placed it at number 2, after Lord of the Rings. I'm pleased to see that the readers' choice list elevates Joseph Heller's Catch-22 from number 99 to number 8, just one indication that the readers placed a higher premium on comedy than did the academics. 

I had a feeling that I'd read most of the books on both lists, but then I counted. On the academics' list, I started at number 1 and didn't hit a novel I hadn't read until number 42: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I tried to read--twice!--but gave up halfway through because I couldn't stand to spend another moment amongst all those whiny people. Reading a book halfway through twice is not at all equivalent to reading it all the way through once. It's the only book that appeared on my PhD comprehensive exam reading list that I never actually finished, not that it's ever made any noticeable difference in my career or life.

After I stumbled on number 42, I found another 16 books on the list that I either haven't read or else have retained no memory of reading. The Leopard? The Golden Notebook? No idea. I am ashamed to admit that I've never read The Master and the Margarita, but there's still time. I'm not sure there's time to slog through more than 1000 pages of The Man Without Qualities, but then again I've read In Search of Lost Time repeatedly without complaining about the length, so no excuses!

On the readers' choice list, I start running into trouble around number 30. I've never read Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, or if I did, I don't remember. I've never, believe it or not, read Watership Down, or Lonesome Dove, or The Outsider. All told, I've overlooked something like 23 titles on the readers' choice list, but I had trouble keeping count because I kept getting distracted by the titles on the list that I regret having read.

Hemingway? He wrote some nearly perfect short stories--"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Indian Camp," and others--but his novels leave me cold. 

Jack Kerouac? The prose in On the Road might carry me away, but the casual acceptance of domestic abuse in Big Sur left a bad taste in my mouth that tainted my every encounter with Kerouac.

Dune? Please, no. Impressive world-building, depressing sentence-building.

Despite my disdain, these novels got enough votes from readers to put them on the list of the 100 greatest. But again: what do we mean by greatest? The voters, whoever they are, may believe they're relying on objective criteria, but we're all human. By any rational measure, Middlemarch is an important, influential, even ground-breaking novel--but I'd rather read Edith Wharton.

The House of Mirth doesn't even appear on the critics' list, but Wharton's Age of Innocence is number 38. Wharton appears nowhere on the readers' choice list. No accounting for taste!

I wouldn't put Wharton at number 1, but I don't know which novel belongs there. Every title I choose makes me feel guilty about all the ones I'm neglecting. 

On the original list, you can click on a link to see the list of authors, critics, and academics and how they voted, which is pretty interesting. Both Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan rank Ulysses as the greatest novel ever written, but I could happily put Midnight's Children or Atonement in that spot if it didn't require shoving Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick out of the way. Michael Chabon put Moby Dick first and so did Stephen King, who warmed my heart by including McTeague at number 10. Jennifer Egan put Middlemarch first but included The House of Mirth at number 10.

The more lists I read, the more novels I want to put in first place, or else make up different lists for different types of greatness. One of these days we can make a list of the top 100 lists of top 100 greatest novels. It might be the size of a library's card catalog, but what a wonderful invitation into the joys of reading.

Readers: what's on your list--and what isn't?

Correspondence concerning "The Correspondent"

Dear old friend,

I've been wanted to send you Virginia Evans' novel The Correspondent but right now I can't seem to organize my life enough to put it in the mail, and on second thought it's the kind of book I look forward to reading again so maybe you should find your own copy. Sending you the book would be the kind of gesture that, over time, builds a friendship like ours, but you're the kind of friend who will understand that sometimes it really is the thought that counts.

How are things with you? Kind of difficult here, with frequent disruptions due to my son's health problems, although I hesitate to call them disruptions because it sounds so negative, as if I resent him for getting cancer. I would gladly take the cancer away from him if I could but since I can't, I'll drive him to Columbus for extra tests, cook the foods he likes best, clean up his vomit, and closely monitor my phone throughout an important meeting with the visiting accreditation team because my husband took our son to the emergency room while I was still barely awake this morning and I need to know what's going on. (Electrolytes are low. Maybe something more. Who can say? Nothing I can do for him at the ER so I'll keep busy here as much as possible considering multiple distractions.)

One of the things I really like about The Correspondent is how our main character, Sybil Van Antwerp, deals with the distractions that interrupt a life she considers alternately mundane and miraculous. A retired attorney and judicial clerk, she devotes her life to writing letters (some by hand, some by email) four mornings each week, an ongoing "correspondence that is her manner of living." She writes letters to friends and family members; to famous people like Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, and Larry McMurtry; and to strangers, some of them hostile, whom she somehow manages to transform into friends over time.

But that makes the book sound too saccharine. She's a feisty old lady, revealing fragments of herself to a variety of correspondents and requiring readers to assemble the puzzle of her complex character. Her voice is, by turns, angry, prickly, condescending, sarcastic, self-righteous, cranky, curmudgeonly, conciliatory, tender, and loving, and in the end she's a character with whom I'd gladly spend more time--hence my desire to re-read the book. 

You might enjoy this book because Sybil shares our love of reading. Nearly every letter refers to some book she's reading, and her letters to famous authors reveal how reading helps her understand herself and her world. In a letter to Ann Patchett, for instance, Sybil explains why she appreciates a particular character in State of Wonder: "I saw some reflection of myself in her. The agonizing ethical questions for which the reader puts her on trial. That amazement one feels at this stage of life--a sort of astonishment that is also confusion, which leads to a sort of worry, or a sort of fear, I guess. How did we get here?"

And I see some reflection of myself in Sybil's seeing some reflection of herself in Patchett's book, making the book a Russian nesting doll of character analysis. 

Like Patchett, Evans invites readers to put her main character on trial. Sybil has always welcomed the clarity law provides; at one point she explains why she pursued a career in law at a time when the field did not always welcome women: "The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order...well, of course it's appealing. There's nothing quite like the comfort of the law, black and white."

But the letters reveal that nothing is quite as black and white as it appears. Feisty Sybil first resists admitting culpability for both minor blunders and major disasters, but over time the blinders come off her eyes--even as she is literally losing her eyesight. She tells various versions of the truth to different correspondents but reveals the whole truth over time only to a correspondent she calls Colt, whose identity is revealed late in the book in a tender but harrowing revelation of personal pain.

Moving toward the end of an eventful but misunderstood life, Sybil seeks connection and significance. "I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction," she admits, adding that it is

a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I'm getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

She returns to this image late in the book, after her correspondence has brought together disparate people from all over the globe, people who would not have known each other except for their connection with Sybil, who has transformed these isolated nodes into a rich and thriving community, including one character to whom she reveals her shame over a long-ago tragedy, a character she tells, "it's taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that."

And that's another reason I wanted to send you this book: you have been on this road with me, have welcomed me into a comfortable space with a warm fire and a table laid, and I'd like to thank you for that before it's too late.

That's ultimately why the correspondence exists: to share the bumps in the road with someone willing to walk alongside. For Sybil, the letters she has sent out and those she receives 

are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn't there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one's life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it's a very small thing, to someone?

And that, I guess, is why I write to you and why I'd like to send you this book, to scatter puzzle pieces or chain links or dandelion seeds across the miles in hopes that some meaning will survive beyond our separate selves. If I can't send you the book right now--well, you're just the kind of correspondent who will understand.

Just thurbing around

I found myself today in James Thurber's closet, but they wouldn't let me stay.

I'm not sure why I've never before toured the Thurber House Museum, the restored house where the humorist lived with his family while attending The Ohio State University, the house that plays a central role in the stories collected in My Life and Hard Times. I know I've visited before but the museum is open only for a few hours Saturday and Sunday afternoons, so until today I'd never set foot inside.

But this was my lucky day. My daughter arrived to keep my son company in the hospital so I felt comfortable taking a few hours off to commune with Thurber's spirit. 

Now I know I've mentioned before that the first book I ever bought with my own money was The Thurber Carnival, which I found on the Clearance table at the Little Professor Bookshop on Park Avenue in Winter Park, Florida. I paid all of four dollars--for a hardback! 

I must have been about 13, because that was the year I began earning my own money with my first job. Three days a week I would ride my bike a couple of miles to a house just off of Park Avenue to take an elderly woman for a two-hour walk around the neighborhood so that her less elderly daughter could get some time to herself. I thought the daughter was the most elegant woman I had ever met, but the mother was a piece of work: tiny and fragile-looking but tough as nails. Thanks to dementia, she had the mind of a toddler and the stubbornness to match. One time she tried to manually drag me into a church hall, insisting that they were saving a pie for her. And once the old lady soiled herself and I had to clean her up--by myself--at 13 years old.

The elegant daughter paid me five dollars every time I took the mom for a walk, and I earned every penny of it. Sometimes I would reward myself on my way home with a visit to the Little Professor, and on one of those days I splurged on Thurber.

I'd already read my school library's copy of The Thurber Carnival on a friend's recommendation, and I'd insisted on reading "The Owl in the Attic" out loud to all my buddies, some of whom found it funny. I have read pretty much everything Thurber ever wrote multiple times and I've taught "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" to students who couldn't find the comedy, but even though Thurber died the year I was born, he's never lost the ability to make me laugh.

Today I looked at the typewriter he may have used to write stories for the Columbus Dispatch; I admired signed original cartoons and hand-written letters, and I restrained myself from filching a James Thurber bobblehead. I bought a T-shirt featuring a Thurber dog reading a book, an image reproduced in statuary in the garden. And across the street I saw a unicorn in the garden, eating a rose. 

But the most surprising thing I saw was a drawing inside the closet in James Thurber's bedroom. Many visiting authors and artists have signed the walls inside the closet, including my favorite New Yorker cartoonist, Roz Chast, who drew what could be my next profile picture: a woman at the end of her rope who carries on despite everything. It was a shock to find myself falling to pieces in James Thurber's closet, but given the circumstances, it seemed appropriate.

A little time away from the hospital made me feel good; being surrounded by James Thurber's wit made me feel even better. But nothing made me happier than finding myself in his closet, surrounded by reminders that sometimes laughter truly is the best medicine.

A typewriter heavy enough to serve as a murder weapon, if necessary.

Would Roz Chast mind if I used this drawing as my profile picture?

A Thurber dog, reading.

The unicorn in the garden. (If you know, you know.)

 

My fifteen minutes of fame

I had less than an hour yesterday to prepare to be interviewed for a local television news report about Toni Morrison, who is the subject of a year-long celebration throughout Ohio. I wasn't exactly dressed for the camera, but at least they didn't pan down to show my wacky socks. I'm pretty sure I said a whole lot of brilliant things about Toni Morrison's impact as a writer and editor, how she created psychologically rich characters and explored themes that resonate with readers, including issues of race and gender and identity formation and friendship and the way the past can haunt us, but in the news report they used what was probably the least important thing I said, about how Morrison's books often reflect her Ohio origins. That's it. I'm not going to comment on the news reader's delivery or the content of the report (which you can view here), but I will note that my very favorite thing about this brief video clip is that you can clearly see Twinkie the Kid smiling over my right shoulder. 

For anyone who wonders why Twinkie the Kid sits in such a prominent place in my office--well, of course there's more to the story. For today, though, I'm delighted that I didn't make a total fool of myself on the local news, even if my voice sounds like it belongs to someone who's spent a life smoking three packs a day. (It's just sinus congestion. Lifetime non-smoker here.)

Anyway, my fifteen minutes of fame are over and now I need to get back to work, with the assistance of Twinkie the Kid.

I wouldn't call it a bribe, exactly

And so it has come to this: in my final year of teaching, I am offering extra credit just to convince literature students that I'm not scary.

Apparently they think we're scary. Students, that is. An expert at one of our teaching workshops earlier this week said studies show that today's students are terrified of visiting faculty offices, something I really didn't need an expert to tell me. I can go weeks at a time without having a student in my office, except when I require them to schedule one-on-one conferences for writing feedback or for advising.

I have done everything I can to make my office hospitable: Comfy chairs! Toys! Interesting books! A Jane Austen action figure! (Though the only actions she can take are to hold the writing desk and pen, which makes her seem pretty poorly armed in the world of action figures until you realize that the pen is mightier than the sword. You go, Jane!)

So while my colleague across the hall enjoys a constant parade of students coming by to talk about their classes and projects and life goals, and while another colleague upstairs attracts an army of students by providing, outside his office door, a basket of free snacks (Rice Krispies Treats! Granola bars! Twinkies!), I sit here twiddling my thumbs. Not that I'm complaining--thumb-twiddling fuels a plethora of idle thoughts, some of which may actually lead to worthwhile results. But if experts insist and studies show that getting students to visit my office will make them more comfortable contributing to class discussions, then by golly I'll get them there.

So for the first time, I am offering five extra-credit points to any student who visits my office before February 6 and spends a mere ten minutes casually chatting about books and reading. How do they feel about books? What do they like to read? What don't they like to read? Why? I have promised a judgment-free zone and invited them to give Mr. Potato Head a makeover. Ideally, this will make them more comfortable opening their mouths in class while helping me to understand their complicated (maybe?) feelings about books and reading.

If it works, five points is a small price to pay. If it doesn't? Let them eat Twinkies. 

 

Welcome to my office!

  

 

Mary Roach: A little more than diddly

Just before we walked onstage in front of a packed house last night, the director of our campus speaker series asked me, "Do you usually get nervous before doing things like this?"

Things like this? What, like sitting on stage for an hour tossing questions at the author of eight best-selling books? Not something I do every day!

The answer is: yes, I did get a little nervous before I had that very public fireside chat with author Mary Roach last night, but it was the most fun I've had in ages. Aside from being a terrific writer, she is a warm and funny person who can talk intelligently about just about anything. Here's part of what I said about her in my introduction:

Early in her new book Replaceable You, in a chapter describing treatment options for people suffering third-degree burns, Mary Roach tosses out the phrase exuberant granulations as if it's precious treasure. In Fuzz, we learn about pronking and stotting and frass and kerf, and we encounter people who work as Danger Tree Assessors or Falling Safety Advisors. This is what I love about Mary's writing: she takes such great joy in language, glorying in the weird and wonderful nomenclature of science and nature while she's looking at interesting topics in granular detail--exuberantly. Near the end of Fuzz she writes about scientists' attempts to genetically alter mice, admitting that she "knows diddly about how it works but wants to become someone who knows a little more than diddly." Well we all know diddly about a lot of things--but by the time we're done tonight, I hope we'll know a little more than diddly.

And we did! We all now know much more about how Mary Roach writes her books and what she's learned along the way. The first question I asked was How far will you go to get the story? I've read only two of her books, but I've seen her get mugged by monkeys, get trained in wildlife attack response, climb inside an iron lung machine, get a hair transplant on her calf, and travel all over the world to track down scientists and other experts so she could observe their work while peppering them with questions.

I wish I could have written down her responses, but I had my hands full with a microphone and lists of questions, some of them written by my Nature Writing students, who had read a chapter of Fuzz. They wanted to know why she writes about serious topics humorously and why she tucks so many little gems into very funny footnotes. Her answers made us all a little smarter while keeping us laughing. 

But then she'd been doing that all day. Because of an unusual convergence of events, I was in charge of getting the author where she needed to go all afternoon, so we spent a lot of time talking while tootling around town and having dinner before the show. She is just as warm and interesting offstage, so by the time we got on the stage, I felt very comfortable asking questions.

And then after the show, she sat and signed books for a long line of people who wanted to keep the conversation going. It was pretty late when I dropped her off at her hotel, where she had arranged for a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call so a car service could drive her to the airport in Columbus. Maybe that's why I woke up at 3:30 this morning--in sympathy with the author who'd kept me so well entertained all day. The whole event wore me out but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Maybe next time--if there is a next time--I won't be quite so nervous.  

Illuminating "Illuminati"

Yesterday I showed my first-year seminar students the following definition of the word Illuminati: "Comprised of several of the world's most powerful heroes, the Illuminati is a secret organization that shapes the superhuman world and protects Earth from catastrophic threats."

"Is this what Tara Westhover is talking about when she refers to the Illuminati in Educated?" I asked. No, they said, and when I asked why, one said, "Because superheroes aren't real."

I suppose that's as good an answer as any. I pointed out that the definition I'd shown them came from a web page produced by Marvel, so it's relevant within the Marvel universe but not necessarily elsewhere.  

Then I showed another definition of Illuminati that went into great detail about an eighteenth-century Bavarian named Adam Weishaupt who had a penchant for secret societies. My students were pretty sure Tara Westhover didn't have Adam Weishaupt in mind in Educated, but they struggled to pin down a reason until I pointed out the source of the information: The Catholic Encyclopedia.

Westover's memoir, of course, concerns neither superheroes nor Catholic history but instead a father who's obsessed by conspiracy theories and convinced that going to college means being brainwashed by the Illuminati. Many of my students had read the assigned chapters with only a vague idea of what Illuminati might mean, but at least they're reading! And the word provided a good object lesson to introduce the primary purpose of the first-year seminar: developing information literacy and critical thinking skills.

They had more difficulty last week when I gave them a photocopy of the first few chapters of Educated and then required them to discuss them in class, for points. The discussion went really well, but I'd given them no information about the author or context so some students struggled to use the correct pronouns or place the scenes in the correct time frame. 

Afterward I asked a few students why they'd assumed the narrator was male and they said the character was doing "guy things," like working in a junkyard and messing around with guns. But I was more interested in my students' struggles to determine the historical context of the passage, with some insisting it must take place more than 100 years ago because the characters were relying on midwives and herbal tinctures instead of doctors and hospitals. A student who had spent time in the military said the reference to MRE's means it had to date from after the Vietnam conflict, which was progress, but it was only after I made them look up Randy Weaver and Ruby Ridge that they got the date right--1992. One student wanted to know why, then, the characters act as if they're living in "pioneer times." Really great question! Let's talk about that some more.

We've got quite a lot of Educated ahead of us so we'll have plenty of time to ask questions and learn to evaluate the reliability of answers, an activity that would surely lead Westover's father to insist that I'm a member of the Illuminati intent on brainwashing students. But I can live with that. If I can motivate a few students to stretch their minds beyond what they're so certain they already know, then my work here is done.  

Witnessing history with Claire Messud

Is there anything more alluring on a long empty afternoon than a pile of unread books? All those brand-new hardbacks with colorful jackets, full of promise and potential surprises--but where to begin?

I picked from the top of the pile This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, a novel based loosely on the author's family history ranging from 1927 to the present and from Algiers to France, England, Australia, Canada, Argentina, Cuba, Connecticut, and elsewhere, each time and place evoked through a wealth of vivid details to make these disparate times and places feel rich and real.

The plot follows members of an extended family as they try to create meaningful lives in the midst of constraints imposed by both large historical events (World War II, Algerian independence, the Cold War) and smaller but equally impactful family dynamics and responsibilities. As Hitler's forces conquer France, a French Algerian naval officer struggles to decide whether to join the resistance or stay home and protect his family; instead of staging an abstract conflict between love and war, Messud makes concrete the forces that pull the character in each direction, illustrating how life-changing decisions may be influenced by an accumulation of seemingly insignificant details.

Past and present interconnect and echo. The opening chapter features a young boy carrying his younger sister on his back to protect her tiny feet on a long dusty trek; years later, the younger sister tries to carry her brother's burdens and protect his fragile ego from the forces that tear him down. This urge to protect others leads family members to hide secrets and troubling emotions, so that gestures inspired by love lead to betrayal and alienation.

Despite frequent visitations of suffering, despair, and death, the novel is suffused with hope, particularly in certain quiet moments when characters consider how they are connected to others across time and space. In 1989, Chloe is making the ferry crossing from Calais to Dover, thinking about the family members she's left behind and wondering about the boat's other passengers, the boyfriend who will later become her husband and the strangers she will bump elbows with but never truly know. Trapped in transit between those she loves and those she will never know, she wonders, "How turbulent might the crossing prove? Each of us carried to the shore by all that had come before, then launched upon the wide, dark ocean."

This, in a nutshell, describes the arc of the novel, but Chloe isn't done. She gives herself a mission: "Look at all the others with whom you share the boat. Beyond the most immediate, you can't choose your companions for a crossing or a generation. You can't know the weather in store, the size of the waves. All in this strange eventful history is uncertain."

Another character--Chloe's aging aunt Denise--echoes these words in a later chapter. Like Chloe, Denise inhabits a liminal space, the last of her family members living in France while her beloved brother lies on his deathbed in America, and she muses on the missed opportunities in a life that others consider wasted. How can she measure the impact of a life devoted to protecting others, even if that protection is ultimately futile? Distant from her brother, she draws close to him in memory:

In her mind, she could see him, not as he was now but in all his ages. If nothing else, on this planet, they had borne loving witness to each other's lives, to the days and journeys, the freight of emotions, to the blossoming and dwindling of their animal selves. Much sorrow and rage, but more than that, laughter, joy, and wonder. How, now, as the shadows had grown so long, to cleave to the light? To be a witness, to stand alongside, simply to have lived through these strange, beautiful, appalling times, to have been a night-light, a mirror, a support--that, too, was God's work, though the ambitious American nieces, faithless and perhaps soulless might disdain it. That wasn't nothing.

This strange eventful history that made a life. 

And this is what Messud accomplishes in This Strange Eventful History: transcending time and space to bear witness to the small and insignificant events that build a life. How, now, to cleave to the light? Start by reading Claire Messud. 

Big ol' pile o' Christmas books (and that's not all!)

Now that's some powerful teaching

I was reading The Last Devil to Die, a Thursday Murder Club mystery by Richard Osman, when I happened upon a passage that made me laugh out loud. It's a little long but worth the effort. Nina, an archeology professor, is meeting with an apathetic student whose name she can't remember when they are interrupted by a hefty Canadian thug named Garth: 

There's one with her now, an identikit boy of around twenty, a first year, certainly. He's called Tom or Sam, or maybe Josh. The boy is wearing a Nirvana T-shirt, despite being born many years after Kurt Cobain died. 

They are discussing an essay he hasn't written. "Roman Art and the Manipulation of Historical Memory."

"Did you enjoy the reading at least?" Nina asks.

"No," says the boy.

"I see," says Nina. "Anything else to add? Reasons you didn't enjoy it?"

"Just boring," says the boy. "Not my area."

"And yet your course is titled 'Classics, Archeology and Ancient Civilizations'? What would you say your area is?"

"I'm just saying I don't pay nine thousand pounds a year to read a bunch of left-wing academics rewriting Roman history."

"I imagine it's your mum and dad paying the nine thousand pounds, isn't it?"

"Don't privilege-shame me," says Tom or Sam or Josh. "I can report you."

"Mmm," says Nina. "Am I to take it that you're not planning on finishing the essay anytime soon?"

"Read my file," says the boy. "I don't have to do essays."

"OK," says Nina. "What do you imagine you are doing here? What and how do you hope to learn?"

"You learn through experience," says the boy, with the world-weary air of a wise man tired of having to explain things to fools. "You learn from interacting with the real world. Books are for lose--" 

There is a knock at Nina's door, despite the SUPERVISION IN PROGRESS note stuck on it. Nina is about to send the unseen caller away when the door opens, and who should walk in but Garth, the colossal Canadian she had met at Sunday lunch.

"Sorry, this is a private session," says Nina. "Garth, isn't it?"

"I need something," says Garth. "And I need it right now. You're lucky I even knocked."

"I'm teaching," says Nina, then looks at the boy. "Up to a point."

Garth shrugs.

"So you'll have to wait. We're trying to discuss Roman art."

"I don't wait," says Garth. "I get impatient."

"Probably ADHD," says the boy, clearly glad there is now a man in the room.

Garth looks at the boy, as if noticing him for the first time. "You're wearing a Nirvana T-shirt?"

The boy nods, sagely. "Yeah, that's my vibe."

"What's your favorite song?"

"Smells Like--"

"And if you say 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' I will throw you out of that window."

The boy now looks decidedly less happy that there is a man in the room.

"Garth, I'm teaching," says Nina.

"Me too," says Garth.

"Uh....," says the boy.

"Easy question," says Garth. "Nirvana is the fourth-greatest band of all time. Name their best song."

" 'The Man Who...,' uh."

"If you're about to say 'The Man Who Sold the World,' think again," says Garth. "That's a Bowie cover. We can have a different discussion about Bowie when we're through with this."

"Leave him alone, Garth," says Nina. "He's a child. And a child in my care." 

"I'm not a child," says the boy.

"You want me to help or not?" says Nina. "Why don't we call it a day anyway? If you haven't done the essay, there's no point."

"My pleasure," says the boy, getting up as fast as he can.

"Wait, you didn't do your essay?" Garth asks.

"Leave him alone, Garth," says Nina.

"What was it about? The essay?"

"Roman art or something," says the boy.

"And you didn't do it? Couldn't be bothered?"

"I just...didn't...just wasn't...interested."

Garth roars and beats his chest. The boy instinctively ducks toward Nina, and she puts a protective arm around him.

"You weren't interested? In Roman art? You are out of your mind. You're in this beautiful room with this intelligent woman, and you get to talk about Roman art, and you're not interested. You're not interested? You've got three years till you actually have to go and get a job! You know what jobs are like? Terrible. You think you get to discuss Roman art when you've got a job? You think you get to read? What are you interested in?"

"I have a TikTok channel," says the boy.

"Go on," says Garth. "I'm interested in TikTok. I was thinking of dabbling. What do you do?"

"We do....fast-food reviews," says the boy.

"Oh, I like that," says Garth. "Fast-food review. Best burger in Canterbury?"

"The Yak House," says the boy.

"Noted," says Garth. "I'll check you out. Now I need a word with Ms. Mishra here, so I'm going to ask you to skedaddle."

The boy doesn't need asking twice, and shoots for the door. Garth puts out a massive arm to stop him. "Three things before you go though. One: if that essay isn't done next week, I'll kill you. I mean that. Not like 'Your mom will kill you if you don't tidy your room.' Actually kill you. You believe me?"

The boy nods.

"Good, stop wasting this opportunity, brother, I swear. Two, if you tell anyone I threatened you, I will also kill you. OK? Not a word."

"OK," says the boy.

"It better be OK. God cries every time someone lies to a Canadian. And three, the best Nirvana song is 'Sliver' or 'Heart-Shaped Box.' Understand?"

"Understand," agrees the boy.

"I played bass for a band called Mudhoney for two tour shows once. You heard of them?" says Garth.

"I think so," pretends the boy.

"Great, you check them out, and I'll check out your TikToks. Off you go, champ."

Garth ruffles the boy's hair and watches him run out. He turns back to Nina.

"Nice kid."

Since reading this, all I can think about is how different my life would be if I had a Garth in all my classrooms or standing in the corner for every student conference. It wouldn't do much harm to throw anyone out of my office window, but I suspect that Garth rarely has to follow through on his threats.

Read but not said

My capstone class will start discussing Percival Everett's James this afternoon, having finished with Huckleberry Finn last Friday. A few students are listening to the texts on audiobooks, so I asked them how the audiobooks handle the frequent use of the n-word. Apparently the narrator just says it, out loud, over and over again.

In class we're talking about the n-word and using the phrase the n-word but not saying the word out loud. In interviews about James, Percival Everett states that he chose to use the word in the novel because he didn't want to whitewash history or misrepresent the nineteenth-century vernacular, but while he uses the full word in the novel, he says the n-word in interviews. 

One student in my class tells about the time when her high-school English teacher introduced study of Huck Finn by going around the room and requiring each student to say the n-word out loud so they could get comfortable saying and hearing the word they could not avoid seeing on the page, but enough students (and parents) were uncomfortable with the exercise that the teacher backed off. 

Another student is student-teaching in a local high school and feels that trying to teach Huck Finn in today's high school environment would be more trouble than it's worth. I see her point, but nevertheless I jumped at the opportunity to teach Huck Finn alongside James. If nothing else, the portrayal of Jim in Huck Finn provides a valuable lesson on why it's important to empower diverse voices. Huck's voice is so charming and full of energy that it may distract readers from the stories he's eliding or ignoring altogether. James fills that void, providing a compelling counternarrative that sends us back to Twain with new insight, new questions.

But still we struggle with how to handle the n-word. In my class the word remains read but not said, which is an imperfect solution but at this point it may be the best way to introduce students to the incredible story of James.

Salman Rushdie's "Knife": Conjoined contradictions

For decades, Salman Rushdie has resisted allowing enemies to define him. The Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa declaring that Rushdie should be assassinated after publishing The Satanic Verses sent the author into hiding, but for more than 20 years Rushdie has lived openly and peacefully in New York, aware of the lingering threat but not constrained by it--until August 2022, when a would-be assassin stabbed Rushdie fifteen times with a knife before an auditorium full of onlookers in Chautauqua, New York. 

If his life is a book, writes Rushdie, "The attack felt like a large red ink blot spilled over an earlier page. It was ugly, but it didn't ruin the book. One could turn the page, and go on." 

Going on is exactly what Rushdie is trying to do in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. He had hoped to return to writing fiction, but he found that he could not write anything else until he wrote about the attack: "To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art."

Knife is divided into two sections, The Angel of Death and The Angel of Life, and the book immerses readers in both the horrors of violence and the healing power of love, along with other linked contradictions exposed by Rushdie's experience. For instance, Rushdie praises the onlookers who rushed to his aid after the attack:

I didn't see their faces and I don't know their names, but they were the first people to save my life. And so that Chautauqua morning I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason...and we also contain the antidote to that disease--courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

This horde of people devoted to his safety multiplies as he enters first a hospital and then a rehab facility, where he endures the humiliations of losing autonomy and agency over his privacy, his career, and, of course, his body:

In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won't sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body--to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness--so that you can live.

But even as he is dependent upon a hovering host of health-care workers, he finds that "When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness."

That loneliness leaves time for the author to mull over his peculiar relationship with his attacker, whom Rushdie never names but instead refers to as The A. In the twenty-seven seconds it took The A to stab Rushdie (in his eye, neck, chest, and hand), attacker and victim existed within what Rushdie calls "a profound conjoining." In an imaginary interview, Rushdie tells his attacker, "You put on the mantle of Death itself, and I was Life." Rushdie thinks of his attacker as a failure, a nothing, a hapless clown, but this haplessness is an advantage; one of Rushdie's doctors tells him, "You're lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife."

But there are many types of knives. The A's knife may have severed the author from his world, but Rushdie refuses the role of victimhood, instead wielding his own weapons:

Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, to make it mine.

He does this best while describing the attack and his long journey toward recovery as well as the role of his family and friends in carrying him through this journey. Despite the inciting act of senseless violence, Rushdie considers his story one in which "hatred--the knife as a metaphor for hate--is answered, and finally overcome, by love." In the end he travels back to the scene of the attack to convey an important message to his absent attacker--and anyone who might sympathize with the attempt to use violence to silence stories: "We're back, and after our encounter with hatred, we're celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life."

When Percival Everett meets Mark Twain

After reading Percival Everett's new novel, James, I can't decide whether Mark Twain is too busy rolling over in his grave to be envious of Everett's clever reimagining of Huckleberry Finn.

Percival Everett is having a moment. His 2001 novel Erasure inspired the 2023 film American Fiction, which won Cord Jefferson a bunch of awards, including the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. While the reclusive Everett struggled to avoid the Hollywood limelight, his new novel James arrived on the scene, sparking the kind of attention rarely lavished upon an author of clever literary fictions that generally appeal to a niche audience.

Erasure dealt with racial passing and so does James, but this time the passing occurs on multiple levels too complicated to unravel without spoilers. Every review I've read discusses how Everett plays with slave dialect. In Huck Finn, Twain uses dialect to mark Jim as part of a subservient, ignorant, infantilized class while allowing his basic human decency to shine through; in James, enslaved characters speak standard English amongst themselves but assume typical slave dialect in the presence of white people, who are happy only when they feel superior. This disparity creates amusing moments, such as when Jim tutors his children in proper pronunciation and deference. At the end of the lesson, the children recite, "The better they feel, the safer we are," which one child translates thus: "Da mo' betta dey feels, da mo' safer we be."

Intelligent people passing as ignorant to ensure their own safety: these passages are wryly comic until it becomes clear that such safety is ephemeral. At one point James gets separated from Huck and sold into servitude with a group of white men who perform minstrel shows in blackface; to appear on the stage, James must be disguised as a white man wearing blackface, which works well enough until an audience member insists on touching his hair. Here, his mastery of slave dialect can't save him and in fact only makes the danger more dire.

As the novel goes on, James encounters very un-funny dangers of the sort that Twain mostly elided: whippings, lynchings, rape, child rape, murder. James emerges at the end with his own name, family, pencil, notebook, and story, but each gain comes at great cost in pain and suffering.

What would Mark Twain think of this book? On the one hand, Everett has fleshed out Jim's story in a way that feels true and convincing, providing some laugh-out-loud moments and insightful critique of aspects of the era that Twain didn't feel comfortable including. On the other hand, he introduces some plot twists that may permanently alter the way we read Huck Finn. 

Everett's characters take a very different kind of journey from the one Twain provided them, but in the end I believe Twain would appreciate the way Everett shines a new light on the world Twain illuminated. Everett ends the acknowledgments with this line: "Heaven for the climate, hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain." After reading James, I'd love to be a fly on the wall to hear that conversation.

The free-book frenzy

Free books! For an academic, is there anything better?

Anyone looking at my shelves would assume that I already have more than enough books, and my giveaway pile keeps growing--and yet I still get excited when someone offers me a free book.

Back when textbook publishers used to send packages of sample texts, opening the boxes felt like Christmas. Usually most of the books went into the giveaway pile, but there might be one jewel that I would be happy to read even if I didn't want to spend my own money on it. A collection of critical essays on Charles Chesnutt? Yes, please!  

Some free books aren't really free, of course, but serve as compensation for service. Today I've been promised a book in exchange for reviewing a prospectus for a publisher, and while I enjoyed reading and commenting on the prospectus, my favorite part of the transaction occurred when I went online and chose one from a selection of books. I hope I enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed selecting it.

Funny story: at a recent academic conference, the book table included display copies of various books written by conference attendees, and at the business meeting the organizers drew names to give away those books. The twelve people whose names were picked from the hat had to cross campus to another building to choose their free books--first come, first served. The minute the meeting concluded, the winners made a frenzied dash across campus as if heading for the last helicopter out of Saigon. I'm slow so I knew I wouldn't get my first choice, but I got a free book on an interesting topic and took pleasure from the knowledge that I could send it to a friend who would find it compelling. 

But that wasn't my favorite part of that transaction. My book Teaching Comedy was one of the giveaways, and as I hobbled out the door I heard a swift young grad student calling out, "I've got to get there first so I can get Bev's book!"

He got it. I appreciated his enthusiasm for the book, but most of all I delighted to see that free books can still inspire such joy.

Writing in the round; or, random bullets of pie

Come to think of it, pie bullets are not a bad idea. Imagine: in the heat of the summer, in the heart of the city, tempers flare and guns are pulled but instead of bullets, they shoot pie. Or: two warring countries propel pastries at each other and then all the soldiers have to put down their weapons and sit down for a kaffeeklatsch. There are few problems that cannot be improved by pie.

Here's how you know I'm on summer break: if you ask me what I've been doing this week, I'll say, "I baked a pie." That's about it--but goodness it was a great pie, maybe the best pie I've ever baked. But it wasn't easy: usually at this time of year the local farm stands are overflowing with fresh Georgia peaches, but the Georgia peach crop failed miserably so we're seeing a big pit of emptiness where peaches ought to be. But last week I snagged a basket of South Carolina peaches--tiny, hard, not entirely ripe--and let them sit a few days until they were soft enough to put in a pie. It's a pain peeling very small peaches, but I'm willing to put up with the pain if the end result is a fresh peach pie. And then the crust: After all those years of watching my daughter make perfect pie crusts, somehow I got it right. Tender, flaky, golden crust; luscious peachy filling with cinnamon and nutmeg--best pie ever.

Writing about pie makes me think of John McPhee, who allegedly once said, "Everything I write about is round." This was back in the last century, when he was busy writing about oranges and basketball and our whole beautiful world, and when I was busy writing a paper demonstrating the impact of the circular structure in one of McPhee's books, though I do not at this point recall which one. Did he ever write about pie?

My favorite Cormac McCarthy book is sorely lacking in pie but also many other food items, since it's set in a post-apocalyptic world where food sources are rare. The Road is a remarkable book, pithily devastating and beautiful, and the author, who died this week, should be applauded for that accomplishment as well as others, but in my mind he will always be associated with one of the more miserable experiences of my grad-school career, when a professor assigned Blood Meridian but then wimped out of teaching it and required the few  who had read it to defend the book. I've written about this incident previously, but the fact that I can still feel that trauma after 25 years shows the power of petty grad-school political shenanigans.

I look back at that sad past self, ganged-up-on and forced to defend a problematic but beautiful book, and I want to reach back in time and hold out a piece of peach pie. In fact, why not offer the whole pie--everyone would have to move their chairs closer together to get a piece, and then maybe we could men the broken circle and have a real conversation without anger or rancor or bullying.

So whoever you are, whatever you're doing, stop for a few minutes and pull up a chair and let's enjoy the peace of pie.

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.

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. 

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.

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.)

Christine Smallwood's "The Life of the Mind"

Speaking of the life of the mind, I've just finished reading The Life of the Mind, a novel by Christine Smallwood focusing on the travails of Dorothy, an adjunct instructor teaching in an English department in New York City who is, from the first line, deeply engaged with the frailty of the body. The novel covers a period--and suddenly I see why it's going to be difficult to summarize this novel, because it's relatively plotless but covers a short span of time from the beginning of Dorothy's unfortunate miscarriage to the restoration of her menstrual period. 

Yes, there's a whole lot of blood in this novel, as well as sweat and tears and lumpy tissue and other bodily excretions. I wouldn't want to try to count the number of scenes that take place inside a bathroom. Dorothy struggles with an intransigent photocopier in the university library,  attends an academic conference in Las Vegas, sings karaoke disastrously at a party, and talks (or fails to talk) to her therapist (or one of her two therapists), but she also frequently attends to bodily functions that are never mentioned in 19th-century novels. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine Dorothea Brooke engaging in any way with a chamber pot, but Smallwood's Dorothy does a lot of her best thinking in the bathroom.

And much of the novel focuses on Dorothy's thoughts, most of which remain unspoken. As she agonizes over whether or how to share the fact of her miscarriage with the people closest to her, she thinks about Coleridge's ancient mariner:

She did not want to be the mariner, forcing the story of her shame on unwilling ears, yet she could not deny that only by telling his tale was the mariner released from his shame. But to be the mariner--to hold the attention of others--involved some combination of tragedy and gruesome charisma, some sheer skill, that she lacked.

But if Dorothy can't tell her story to the people closest to her, Smallwood can tell her story to us, making readers the wedding guests who "cannot choose but hear."

Well, I suppose we could choose to not hear simply by closing the book, but I didn't want to. It's refreshing to see an academic novel focusing so closely on a female protagonist who is whip-smart and witty but also oddly inept in social situations. The book is funny, particularly regarding the petty posturing common to academe--the chapter set at an academic conference is worth the price of admission--but it is also deeply philosophical and engaged with a wide range of literature and ideas.

For instance, while Dorothy is getting an ultrasound to determine whether her miscarriage is complete, she recalls the point in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain when Hans Castorp views an x-ray of his own innards:

Hans Castorp had been looking at bones, so maybe that explained the gravity of his feelings, the concreteness of his epiphany, his sense that he was meeting his own future self. His confrontation was with the very structure of the, his, human form, and with, no less, the hand--the part of the body that reaches out, that is manipulative, active, external, that writes and drives and builds and prays and feels. The hand. Dorothy was looking at a spongy interior, a disused room, a warehouse for a shell company, a cavern or cave. She knew from her undergraduate education that the shadows projected on the walls of a cave are never to be trusted, that they lack the reality of flesh, and of philosophy. If the womb was a grave it was also a junk drawer.

There's so much going on here regarding gender and Thomas Mann and Plato and the limits of human knowledge--the passage seems to keep opening up passages to new understanding while folding back in on itself. Everything is complicated, including the connections between mind and body.

It's no wonder that this chapter ends with Dorothy wishing for a place where "she could put her body down for a while, just a little while, before getting back into it." But this is just the problem with the life of the mind: it can't be separated from the frailty of the body. Christine Smallwood brings this conundrum to vivid life in The Life of the Mind, inviting readers to dig into the grave, fumble around in the junk drawer, and peer inside the bloody cave to see what blurry outlines of new ideas might eventually emerge.