Closing the book on the zombie apocalypse?

"No More Zombies!" declares Adam Brooke Davis in a terrific essay in the Oct. 18 Chronicle of Higher Education, available online (here) only to subscribers. He writes about how difficult it is to persuade creative writing students to aspire beyond creating another chapter in the Zombie Apocalypse. My favorite paragraph concisely distinguishes among various types of popular fiction:

If it makes you want to buy something, it's advertising. If it makes you want to kill people, take their land, vote them in or out of office, it's propaganda. If it just jerks you around by your reproductive instincts, it's probably pornography. And if it's warning you of the dangers of not brushing your teeth, it's a public-service announcement.

What these genres tend not to be is art, although of course there are always exceptions. "There is, of course, nothing so vacuous and banal that a strong mind cannot make something meaningful out of it," admits Davis, "But some literary works sustain conversation, attention, and rereading more than others." A hundred years from now, will readers be more likely to reach for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or plain old Jane Austen?

Wait, don't answer that. I think I'm about to get really depressed.

Tales from the crypt

Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary over why we never sit around telling ghost stories anymore, suddenly I sat surrounded in the stacks! Poe's verses pounded from my lips as guests, astounded, leaned and listened as of yore. In the crypt-like stacks they leaned and listened as of yore--only this, and nothing more.

Sorry about that, folks. Poe seems to have taken up residence in my skull since last night's Ghost Stories from the Stacks event, where I read "The Raven" to a hushed crowd intent upon capturing every word of Poe's galloping and alliterative verse. Students, staff, faculty members, and even a few college trustees chatted over cookies and cider before gathering in the dimly lit library basement to listen to ghost stories long into the night.

The library staff outdid themselves preparing for this first-ever event: backlit skeleton silhouettes hung from the library windows; visitors entered the library through a mist of faux fog and were greeted by librarians who looked as if they'd stepped out of a Charles Addams drawing. They had set up chairs for 25 or 30 people, but 60 showed up for the first reading at 10:00 and more for the second reading at 11. The staff brought more chairs, but even so, some students sat on the floor in the flickering light and eagerly listened to tales from the crypt.

Several of the ghost stories were set in southern Ohio or West Virginia, but a few old classics from elsewhere crept in as well: "The Monkey's Paw," "The Golden Arm," and, of course, "The Raven." A mixed group of students, faculty, and staff read the stories from a throne-like chair, introduced by the library director swathed in a black cape. From the chair I could see the faces of only those students sitting on the floor; the rest of the crowd disappeared into the darkness while the stacks loomed behind them. The crowd didn't mutter or shuffle or fiddle with cell phones; they simply leaned forward intently, listening enrapt as scary stories unfolded in the flickering light.

Given the success of last night's event, will Ghost Stories from the Stacks return another year? Quoth the librarian, "Evermore!"

When life and literature collide

I didn't do it on purpose, I swear. I made the syllabus ages ago. How could I have known that my students would have to read a vivid description of food poisoning in the same week many students have been stricken by a similar malady?

The only way I could have planned this unpleasant collision of reading and life would be if I had somehow caused the campus epidemic of gastrointestinal distress. What professor has that kind of power? And if I could make my students experience food poisoning while reading about food poisoning, maybe I could provoke an epidemic of malaria among my American Lit students, who are reading "Daisy Miller" for tomorrow's class, and later when we read Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" I could cause an epidemic of blindness, and then when my students are reading Toni Morrison's "Recitatif," I could make them all orphans. But then what do I do when we're discussing "The Undertaking" by Thomas Lynch? If I kill off my students, whom shall I teach?

Frankly, I would rather read about these maladies than experience them. I'm just sorry my students had to do both at once.

Summer reading diet

My summer reading has taken an unexpected turn and I don't know why. My book-reading hasn't changed, but I find myself reading very little online, primarily because all those sites that are must-reads when I'm enjoying the wonderful wireless connection at my office become much less urgent when I have to use the cranky dial-up connection at home. I'm reading fewer blogs and news sites and I'm responding very slowly to e-mail messages because life is just too short to be wasted waiting for a connection that may never connect or that may exist only briefly before getting cut off because of constant static in our home phone line.

So on the one or two days a week when I actually make it into town to visit my office, I like to get caught up on all that online reading I've missed...except I don't. Yesterday, for instance, I sat down at my desk in front of my wonderful wireless connection and started on my list of Required Reading only to find that I simply couldn't get engaged. I read a few things, got caught up on some blogs, looked at the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed, but the rest of the list just didn't appeal to me and I don't know why. I had the time and I had the connection, but I simply didn't care.

I've always been an opportunistic reader: I'll read whatever plops itself down in front of my face, including cereal boxes, airline safety pamphlets, and hopelessly outdated gossip magazines at the dentist's office. But apparently I have some limits, and this summer I'm finding them. Will my taste for online reading return once classes start in the fall? Only time will tell.

Writing about thinking about writing about thinking

"Writing is a technology to think with," wrote Richard E. Miller--or so I've been telling my freshman composition students all semester. Now that I need to actually locate the original quotation so I can get the wording just right and cite it properly, I can't find it.

I know it's marked in my first copy of Miller's book Writing at the End of the World, but that copy of the book is missing. It may have been stolen from my office, but with an office full of books, why would someone steal that one? More likely I loaned it to someone and then forgot. I do this all the time. I still don't know who has my first copy of the Whale Rider DVD, nor do I know what ever happened to my first hardback copy of The Thurber Carnival. I say "first copy" because I finally gave up on trying to get the loaned copies back and purchased new ones, which happens more often than I'd care to admit. If I charged late fees on borrowed books, I'd be on my way to the Bahamas by now. I need to just give up on lending out any book I ever want to see again.

Instead, I learn to live without them or buy a second copy. I recently repurchased Writing at the End of the World for the express purpose of locating the "technology to think with" statement, and I have just finished re-reading it, which I didn't mind doing because it's a wonderful book, but even though I was on the lookout for that statement, I never found it. Found all kinds of other good stuff, but not the particular sentence I need to find. Not even anything close.

Now I'm starting to doubt my memory. Did Richard E. Miller really write that or did I see it somewhere else and falsely attribute it to him? Should I go back and re-read everything I might have been reading at the time I first read Writing at the End of the World? Where do I start?

Back to square one--or page one, as the case may be.