Archive for the 'literature' Category
Well, this is how Miss Baby does it, anyway.
First, strip off everything, and admire your naked self in the mirror. Dance, pose, and comment on how pretty you are. (This is the point at which your mother leaves the room because her offspring is reminding her of William Carlos Williams). Then, pick out some panties. This is the most important of your clothing decisions. Put them on, describing them as you do so. Then, find another pair of panties. Take off your first pair (this step is optional), and put on the new ones, describing them as you go. Repeat this process as often as you like, and in various locations throughout the house. Eventually, you will be ready for clothing. Grab a pair of shorts and a shirt at random — give as little thought to this as possible. It’s not like we’re talking about panties or anything. Pull on the shirt, backwards if possible. You earn extra points if you can get the shorts on upside down, with your waist in a leg-hole and the waist around a leg. As far as shoes are concerned, large, colorful boots are best — choose the purple fleece for hot days, and the red rubber ones if it’s cooler. Oversized winter gloves are also an excellent accessory. Consent to have your hair brushed only if you can paint purple stripes on your face with makeup. Do so with glee, pausing to tilt your head and admire yourself from time to time.
Whatever you do, it’s important to pause and admire yourself from time to time.
I’m reading a new biography of Clarice Lispector. I love Clarice, and her biography has long been somewhat shrouded in mystery. That was largely her doing; she would lie about her age and ethnicity and all kinds of things in interviews.
That said, I’m having mixed feelings about this biography. He gives a lot of historical context, which is actually quite nice, but goes about it in an odd way; he’ll write about events in Clarice’s life, then spend a chapter on the Brazilian politics of that period in which he doesn’t even mention Clarice. Sometimes it feels like he’s alternating chapters between two books; one on Clarice, one on 20th century Brazil. He also quotes Clarice a lot, which is great. Sadly, his prose doesn’t stand up well next to hers. That’s not really a criticism of his writing; few writers can stand up next to her, in my mind.
All in all, I’m enjoying the book, but it makes me wish I were reading Clarice instead.
I have a student, an accounting major, who came to me after class to ask about Pacific Islander literature. (Even accounting majors have to take literature courses here, and this is her second one with me).
She’s interested, because she is from Guam, and she wants to write, mostly books about her family. I could recommend some Filipino writers, but I don’t know of any Guamian ones. Anybody out there have any suggestions?
If we can’t find any other Guamian writers, I guess that means I know one of the first.
Last week I read A Drifting Life, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. It’s an interesting — long! — autobiography by a fellow who was involved with the early development of manga. It totally has that “Floating World” feeling, as the protagonist moves from between Osaka and Tokyo, joining different manga groups and publishers, sometimes living in apartments with other artists, sometimes working, sometimes not (living with other artists seems to be detrimental to the creation of art — drinking is involved). The book definitely doesn’t feel tied to that whole Aristotelian beginning-middle-end thing; there’s no big ta-da ending to the book. Still, it is interesting, and often quite beautifully drawn.
It’s interesting to me that while he re-names the character that represents himself, Tatsumi still draws him somewhat accurately. Even though he has a different name, he looks like Tatsumi, which has started me thinking about self-portraiture in graphic novels. Joe Sacco always draws himself as a gawky caricature with flat, round glasses, so that you can’t see his eyes; Marjane Satrapi’s style is so stylized that her drawn self blends in rather than stands out….
Well, I’ve read two mystery novels this week.
The first was Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time . Alan Grant finds himself in the hospital after what must have been a dramatic chase scene; the entire story takes place in the hospital as he recouperates. Friends bring him books and the like to while the hours, but he fixates on a picture of RIchard III, whom he thinks doesn’t look like a criminal (evidently he would know). He’s put in touch with an expatriate American historian who becomes his researcher, and they work to find out just what happened to the princes in the tower. It’s more exciting and interesting than it sounds, but then, I find well-paced research exciting and interesting. It’s rather persuasive on the subject of Richard III, too. If I were teaching a history class, I’d definitely consider assigning this, especially as it frames lots of nice questions about historiography, research, evidence, etc.
The second was Amanda Cross’ Death in a Tenured Position, which I also enjoyed as a sort of amusing relic of the second wave. The mystery surrounds the fictional first tenured female English prof at Harvard; most of the book explores sexism in academia. A lot of this stuff is still out there, in different ways and to varying degrees, but this book presents an extreme case. It will make you glad you didn’t go to Harvard (and those grapes were sour anyway), and the detective is an English professor, so I’m there with her. I like that she solves the mystery by reading the deceased professor’s books, but was rather disappointed with the way it came out in the end (I won’t tell, so as not to spoil it). I am interested in reading something else with the same detective, though; it’s not her fault the author wimped out in the end.
I’m beginning to doubt my judgement. I assigned “Mother Courage and her Children” to my class for tomorrow night. Now, many of my students will be skipping class tomorrow on account of the Thanksgiving holiday. I went and looked for a video of the play, and there’s no such thing. A few years ago there was a fantastic-sounding production, free, in Central Park, with Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, with a text translated by Tony Kushner. It sounds lovely. Nope, nothing. No pirate video, nothing. I can’t believe no one snuck in a camera.
So, we’ll discuss this play. This, one of the most anti-war pieces of literature ever. With my class. My evening class — full of active duty soldiers, soldiers’ spouses, and retired soldiers. And golfers. The golfers will be gone, though — they’re the day students. So it will be me and the military and Bertolt Brecht, Marx, and the Verfremdungseffekt.
It will either be great or disastrous. As is usual in teaching, you gotta prepare for the second and hope for the first.
Filed under: literaturePosted: November / 4 / 2009
We did Faust tonight — Goethe’s — and the students were quite good. One of the first comments was that the Prologue in Heaven reminded them of Milton. That’s an excellent place to start!
It was wierd. This anthology uses a different translation than I’m used to — the Kaufmann is more standard — and, while I think it’s less precise, it is much easier to read. That’s a fair trade-off, I think, particularly since this is a general survey. The editors included selections from Faust I. Some of the omissions were logical — skip that whole Walpurgisnacht nonsense and get on with our lives — and some are nonsensical — they skip the first meeting between Faust and Gretchen. They also include a lot of part II, which I never read and never assign, because it’s just too darn wierd.
Good times.
I’m teaching World Literature II in the evening class, and tonight we read selections from the Hongloumeng. We actually had a good discussion of this rather exotic text, and I talked a bit about Taoism and Confucianism to help things along.
In the first chapter, a monk comes upon a magical stone with the story carved on it (it’s a big stone), reads it, and has an argument about literary theory with the stone. At one point, the stone declares that it is all real. Yes, the magic stone swears it all really happened. (One of the big issues in the story is the relationship between reality and illusion). At any rate, after their conversation, the monk re-reads the story, and enters into the Void, which is Truth, then into Form, which is Illusion, which leads him back to Form, Void, and Truth again. It’s a wierd little Taoist description of the reading process (well, reading aesthetically, anyway).
The students actually found this all rather interesting, and found the distinction between efferent and aesthetic reading useful, as they often do. It was fun.
These are mostly evening college students — adults, who do their reading because they or the army are paying for the class — but there are a few day students, most of whom are golfers. One of the golfers got frustrated (I know they are golfers because their advisor is listed on my form, and they dress like golf students — preppies), and complained that we were talking about gender roles (this was at a different point in the conversation). “His dad is mad because they were more strict about manliness then, but we aren’t like that anymore.” This gave me a great opportunity to talk about how culture shapes gender and constrains individual behavior and development, and to ask him, “So, you would be happy to find your son out in the garden having funerals for flowers?” He hemmed and hawed and admitted that perhaps we still do have a code of masculinity that limits individuals.
A few weeks ago I pulled the first Harry Potter book off the shelf and put it on the coffee table, hoping the Little Guy woud notice. Well, last night, he picked it up and said, “What’s this?” So we read chapter one before bed. He was quite interested; at one point the cat jumped up on my lap and interrupted my reading. I lost my place, and when I asked, “Where was I?” the Little Guy knew exactly: “Privet Drive!” The Little Guy is entirely capable of reading this book on his own, but he also enjoys being read to sometimes, and it’s a good read-aloud book.
At breakfast today, when the cat jumped up on the table, I called him Professor McGonagall, and the Little Guy explained things to me: “Magic isn’t real. That book isn’t real. Well, the book is real, but the things that happen in it aren’t.” That last careful self-edit made me laugh, but it is important to him to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction, which is fine. It will be helpful when the book gets scary.
According to The Atlantic, Ted Kennedy was fond of quoting Tennyson’s Ulysses. It’s an interesting context in which to read this poem, in which Tenysson imagines Ulysses, not as the youthful hero familiar from Homer, but as and old man, reluctantly ruling Ithaca. The poem makes a good a eulogy for the senator (note the ellipses — I’m skipping a bit):
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence…
…and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
