Books!! & other ways of passing the time. . .

On Saturday we took a small road trip to one of our favorite places to spend a lot of money: Borders!!! Now, not all Borders were created equal. In fact, when Borders came to New Orleans, there was disappointment all around, I think. And we have seen Borders ranging from the awesome (Ann Arbor) to pathetic (Houston) and everything (but not everywhere) in between. This particular Borders is about 1 1/2 hours away, and worth the trip. I was the one who wanted to go. This has been fairly rare, I must admit--part of my overall "crisis of literacy" (and not the one that I'm writing about in the dissertation). You see, for someone who wholeheartedly believes in the importance and value of reading to the human person, I have done painfully little of it for the past few years. I have had little motivation to pick up a book, especially a book I had never read before. Especially fiction. I did find time for some religious works, and have particularly enjoyed reading conversion stories. I would quip, "Graduate school will do that," and I believe that's true to a degree. I couldn't even really browse in a bookstore--I had no idea what to look for!! And on a level, it pained me. On another level, I was consumed by deep frustration and even a little apathy.

The good news is, this is passing, or has passed. I have read more books this year than in many recent years. Some have been children's books--okay, MANY have been children's books!! Most have been fantasy. It is possible that all have been fantasy (except the dissertation books, and I'm not sure how rereading Sons and Lovers for a chapter counts. . .) But at any rate, I have been reading, and I went to a bookstore, and with real enjoyment, picked out books that I actually want to read--some for me and some for my son. And as an extra bonus, I got a 25% educator discount!!!

So these were our purchases:

• for the toddler: Learn Shapes with Frog (shaped like a frog, and she recently learned to say "frog" even though daddy & mommy insist on saying "froggy") and The Crayola Rainbow Colors Book. (She also got a "duck"--as she says instead of "ducky"--which is actually a TY goose from the Charlotte's Web movie. Cute!)

• for the 10-year-old: Time Cat by Lloyd Alexander, Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton (of Borrowers fame), and Here Be Monsters! by Alan Snow, which seems to be written in the Roald Dahl tradition. Two we put back are Stowaway by Karen Hesse and Robert Andrew Parker (because we couldn't get everything) and The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, which I've been looking at for months because it looks so compelling and postmodern (in a good way).

• for the husband: (and for the Tolkien collection) The Return of the Shadow by J. R. R. Tolkien, because we (though not me so much) are actively building up our collection of the back histories. I find them interesting in a scholarly way, but difficult to read cover-to-cover. I'm all for collecting them, though!

• for me: A Penguin Deluxe edition of Lady Chatterly's Lover, which really wouldn't be anything interesting, except that it has very amusing (and kind of pathetic) cartoons about D. H. Lawrence's life all over the cover. So really, I bought it more for the cover than for the text, but it really was worth it!! And I also bought a fantasy novel called City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer. I've never heard of Vandermeer, but the back blurb claims that he "has reinvented the literature of the fantastic." What was really interesting to me, though, was not the novelty, though that's what initially caught my attention; rather, the book has a "feel" of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. It definitely seems postmodern, perhaps less well-organized than Calvino's (Calvino was, after all, a genius), and involves intertwining stories. It is a city of "elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, and incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origins." And that's not even mentioning characters! I hope it lives up to its blurb without being confusing and pointless (a definite danger with postmodernism!).

All in all, a happy book-buying excursion! ;) Now I have to find time to read! I'm supposed to be polishing off chapter 4 of the dissertation this week, after I prep for my class for the next few weeks. I have a doctor's appointment Monday (and here begin the weekly visits), and I will see if my doctor thinks I can safely go to the Renaissance Festival next Saturday!! I hadn't been thinking of going, but then it occurred to me--if I can go on a shopping trip this weekend, why not a festival next? I only feel pregnant when I'm trying to sleep and have to sit up to change positions, and when I have periodic fits of exhaustion during the day. Other than that, I just feel like. . . me! ;)

You Can Lead a Student to Literature, but. . .

You might gather two things from the title of this post--that I've been much engaged of late with teaching, and that the experience has been less-than-pleasant. The first assumption would be correct; the second, well, you'll see. . .

I am wrapping up the second major work on the syllabus, after the introductory foray into poetry that always begins my lit classes. I love teaching poetry, but it has to be done early in the semester to allow time for the poetry paper-and-presentation combo that I generally assign. They can't work on those without some basic understanding of form, meter, and some basic steps of interpretation. Having wrapped up "Goblin Market" last week, we have been covering William Morris's utopia News from Nowhere because I just couldn't talk about feminism in a serious, unbiased way with Herland. I had a difficult time convincing students that the "it takes a village" method of parenting promoted in Gilman's book had any benefits. "No really!" I said, "Doesn't it make sense that the most competent women should be raising the children?" "Well yes," I said, "It would depend on your criteria for judging competency." And "Yes," I said, "that would be a rather difficult line to draw." And, "Oh by the way," I said, "Gilman was a big proponent of Eugenics." "Why, yes, the concepts are very complimentary, aren't they?" Besides, I'm a poster child for motherhood right about now. Talking about it theoretically gets to feeling a little, um, disingenuous. So I decided to tackle socialism instead. Well, not really.

Because, you see, Morris was a socialist politically, but his utopia basically does away with any form of economics. There is no "economy," just a willingness to share--a communalism (I don't want to say "commune" or "communism") that resembles a large-scale monastic existence (only the economics of it--for want of a better word) more than any other model. Marxists, socialists--they don't really want to see an end to economics. Money stays, private property goes. It may not have started that way--just ask Marx and Lenin. . .

What's interesting about this utopia are Morris's aesthetic ideas, including ideas about the aesthetic value of work. Well, this can be hard to impress upon a group of students whose self-stated purpose in life is to compete and to work to acquire "things." If this sounds harsh, I wish you could see the class discussion boards. I had someone grudgingly acknowledge that there are people who work because they enjoy their jobs, but most can't see why anyone in Morris's utopia would be inclined to work. They suggest instead that the mindset would, in reality, be more like those who "mooch" (my word--their sentiment) off of Welfare. Ooof. Well, considering the financial backgrounds of a lot of these students, I'm not all that surprised.

What is surprising to me is the way they harp on reality. I guess Morris's utopia is realistic enough and yet idealistic enough that the main question in their heads seems to be, "Could this really work?" With the implied answer being, "No, because people are. . ." (nasty, cruel, lazy, competitive--enter negative adjective of choice.) And many of these students are self-described Christians. I must say that it pains me to see students so young who are so cynical. I consider myself a pretty cynical person, but I realize more and more that I have a kind of idealism that runs pretty deep. At any rate, I do believe that there should be more to choosing a profession than the money one will make and the things that one will acquire by working in that particular job! And I do believe that there is a dignity in just knowing that one has a job and that there is a kind of despair that goes along with not believing that a job will ever come along--and that the despair leads people (not all, but some) to rely on social services. Why bother, when the world seems against us? Where I differ from many others who profess similar philosophies is in the solution--namely, that I don't claim to have one. I believe that the individual is the key--not the mass, and so to help the general, we must look for the one person who needs encouragement, then another, then another. My job here is just to get them to look beyond their social situations and their conceptions of reality and say, "Well, yes. . . I guess it would be better if people could do what work appealed to them and still be just as comfortable as the next person." Perhaps the next question might be, "Well, why isn't it like that, anyway?" At any rate, I actually mentioned the term "dignity of work" on the discussion boards, and pointed out that many people work who have no hope of ever gaining a Lexus, or even owning their own home--which so many people take for granted. And I asked why that might be, when many of the people in question do not enjoy what they do.

I guess this brings me to what a wonderful thing discussion boards can be if used correctly. Not that I'm a master by any means. I have modified how I moderate and assign the discussion boards from the beginning of the semester, and I have tried this in semesters past. Basically, I have to have them write questions about certain topics on certain days, and on alternate days, they answer others' questions. Then, depending on where their questions lead, I either use them as discussion-starters in class, or start my own discussion board and have them answer my thematic questions. The result is that they actually say more about the literature--when properly prompted, and when they don't get stuck on "how people really are" or "how the society works"! At any rate, the discussion can evolve much more naturally, and I like having the students set the agenda, since I'm not really trying to promote one (contrary to their expectations--when they saw the term "socialism," they expected the worst from me, I'm sure!!). I'm not a socialist, but at this point, you might have a hard time convincing them of that!

While this is a frustrating experience in some ways, it is also inspiring in a way. Here, I actually do have an opportunity to get them to imagine the world in a different way--which is, indeed, the point of a utopia, and the value of fantasy. C. S. Lewis once wrote that one who reads fantasy “does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted." Tolkien takes this a quite a bit further in his (much more scholarly) "On Fairy Stories," which promises to provide for a lot of good discussion in the coming week(s), by theorizing the nature of the enchantment (in a Christian context, which might inform some of the discussion board topics, but will probably not enter into class discussion).

As we wind down William Morris, who it seems we have barely started, and prepare to meet Tolkien, which meeting I look forward to eagerly, we have ongoing contemplation of poetry on an individual level as they prepare to write their poetry explications (with a fantasy twist). Today I met with a student who was so petrified of poetry that she was literally only reading words on paper, and wasn't really sure how they strung together to make meaning. This sounds harsh, but it is accurate. I have never seen such anxiety with regard to literature before. She was literally shaking as she answered my "What is this poem about? What's going on in this poem?" with a timid, "Well, it could be about . . . death?" I believe that answer seemed as likely as one of the other "Themes of Literature" she undoubtedly learned about in high school. But the beauty of assigning an explication paper is that it really allows the student a true opportunity to discover the meaning of the poem for him or herself--in this case, guided by me, but it was a good teaching opportunity. I believe I did "lead her to literature," and she does indeed understand this poem--and perhaps, by extension, all poems--better.

In short, I really love this syllabus. I hope that wherever I go next, I am able to continue my thematic course on fantasy. Maybe one day I will even be able to edit an anthology of British fantasy literature that can be used for such a course--you know, the Norton Anthology of British Fantasy or some such thing. . .

It's the idealist in me, perhaps (you know, the one I keep hidden like Boober fraggle and Sidebottom), but I think there might be some value in this reading and teaching literature thing after all. At any rate, this semester is giving me that feeling.

Things I've Been Thinking About (September Edition)

I realize my posts have been rather slim lately. That's because I've primarily been focused on the dissertation (I'm almost finished the D. H. Lawrence chapter, which will leave only 2 chapters to go--yay!!), the class I'm teaching (we have been discussing Rossetti's "Goblin Market," which is a fun one--they truly enjoy it, which is rare), anything I might want to finish sewing before the new baby comes, and generally staying on top of cooking and cleaning (things I rarely do, but I've been cooking in a renewed effort to economize and by "cleaning" I mean keeping up with tidiness on a day-to-day basis--or almost). You might call it extended nesting. I've been very domestic. :P I'm also a little concerned about the fact that my son wants a Wii for Christmas and there's very little chance that "Santa" will be able to find one. :( At least by itself rather than in a "bundle" for $540. (Lest you think I routinely buy my son $250 Christmas presents, I don't. It would be a "family" present--for ALL of us!--and never the first year out! Generally I wait for prices to go down on game systems, so maybe in 2009. . .)

So what other lofty thoughts have been going through this mind? Well, I'll tell you. . .

1) Harry Potter -- I recently read The Half-Blood Prince when my son checked it out from the school library. I feel slightly guilty about that. I have an ongoing problem with Rowling, and since I have not really seen this one articulated, I will mention it in brief. Basically, it's the goodness or evilness (?) of a given character, and how this personality trait is determined. While Rowling ostensibly resists determinism by giving lip service to how one character could have easily substituted for Harry as the "chosen one," it's not believable. Characters do not really seem to be counted good or evil according to their actions. Whether Harry does good or evil (let's call it "bad," since he is never quite allowed to do evil, just cheating, dark arts spells and the like, which nevertheless go beyond the antics of Fred & George), he is untouchably good. Whether Snape does good or evil, Dumbledore trusts him implicitly, yet the reader is constantly encouraged to judge him as evil (a fact that has bugged me since book 2--I know, I'll read the last book, but the inconsistency is the point). No matter what a Malfoy might do, he's evil (and a little snot, to boot). And yet we are kind of expected to see people as defined by their actions--well, unless you count the bad things that James and Sirius did. Hmmm. . . Well, this Good or Evil predestination or determinism rather comes to a head in Voldemort, who not only does bad things, he is genetically determined to be evil, being last of Slytherin's line and the product of serious inbreeding, a half-blood at that (and resents it) and is raised in an orphanage so he doesn't know nurturing (which means his Slytherin traits really are inbred and not the product of upbringing). Basically, there was never an opportunity for Tom Riddle to say, "You know, I don't think I'll be evil today." And you know what? I find that disturbing.

2) My family is outgrowing our vehicle and our bed. How to fit 2 carseats and a 10-year old in the backseat of a Hyundai Tuscon? Not a clue. And what exactly will we do when a newborn wants to nurse in bed with Momma while a toddler wants to climb in bed for an hour or so? (The bed is a queen and Momma and Daddy aren't really small people.) No, the correct answer isn't turn the toddler out of bed. My husband has speculated that he will be sleeping on the futon in the living room. I don't see that happening. After all, he & I squeezed in a twin with our son when he was a month or so old (long story)! We were arguably a lot smaller then--I know I was, at least!! The toddler bed is making things a lot better, but she still has nights when she isn't comfortable for one reason or another--sometimes gas, sometimes hunger, sometimes overtired or not enough exercise. Who knows? She might go back in her bed more often if I had the inclination to lug 30 lbs. of sleeping toddler across the room, but really, the belly's getting to be enough to carry around! I did read an interesting Mothering article about having a toddler sleep with you--you can find it here. I don't personally like to force young children to sleep in their own beds--or their own rooms. As I see it, they still need us for a while. And if the Von Trapp children hadn't run into Maria's room when they were scared of the storm, we wouldn't have "A Few of Our Favorite Things"!

3) Braxton-Hicks. Lots of them. I don't remember them making it hard to walk. Is this O.K. at this stage?? I realize they get more noticeable each pregnancy, but geez!!

4) Applying for jobs. One in particular. At a Catholic college in Indiana in the middle of nowhere (as far as I can tell). High course load, but it sounds pretty flexible. I could probably end up teaching all over the board--not getting pigeonholed and not teaching theory instead of lit. I can teach theory, but I don't want it to be the focus of my teaching, which means I should go somewhere where I won't have to teach grad students--not really something I feel the need to do anyway. I'm not sure I see the appeal. I mean, really--I wouldn't want to teach someone like me!! ;) But I'm not going to worry about job apps much. I'd love to have a job next year, but I need to do what I'm doing right now without any more distraction than absolutely necessary, and I won't be able to go to major national conference meat market this year anyway (no great loss to my mind).

5) Something morbid (and potentially judgmental) about motherhood in Texas, but I don't really want to write about it or speculate on it. I did once comment to someone--many years ago--that crimes seemed weirder in Texas, or more extreme, or something, and the sheer list of occurrences cited here seems to substantiate that. But the scope of crimes has gotten so weird anyway that I don't know if I would have made that observation today.

6) I love Crocs!!!-- And I'm not terribly worried about them making news recently. We have reached a point recently where each member of the family has a pair of genuine Crocs (imitations can't come close!) and I boast 3 pair. I barely wear anything else. Especially pregnant, and especially since they have relatively "feminine" styles--I don't have the "garden variety" clog (ha ha). But consider this:

According to reports appearing across the United States and as far away as Singapore and Japan, entrapments occur because of two of the biggest selling points of shoes like Crocs: their flexibility and grip. Some report the shoes get caught in the "teeth" at the bottom or top of the escalator, or in the crack between the steps and the side of the escalator.

The reports of serious injuries have all involved young children. Crocs are commonly worn by children as young as 2.

Yup, my baby has a cute little pair of Mary Jane Crocs. But I ask you--which is more unnatural? Having a baby (or even a young child) walk on an escalator (people have gotten stuck in those things before Crocs!), or having her feet wrapped in flexible material that molds to her feet and doesn't restrict her movement? She has yet to have a pair of "traditional" shoes. Because you know what? Bare foot is natural, and soft shoes are the next best thing!!

7) Frequently, I'm thinking about sleep or caffeine. . . Or the fact that my baby will be the first of 3 to be born caffeine-addicted (only by comparison to the other 2). This probably explains why I seem to be unable to come up with anything else I've been thinking about. Bed time!! But anyway, apart from the tired, I've been feeling really well, and I've been better able to keep up with everything that's going on lately than during the entire pregnancy. I'm feeling a bit unwieldy (I'm carrying this baby a bit oddly), but feeling good about where I am right now!

Fantasy Reading: The Fall List!

I just submitted my book order for the fall (dangerously late according to the preference of the department, but they assigned me late, too). I am really enjoying the theme of fantasy, and while I am doing many of the same works, I have varied it a bit. I have to work around the constraints of the pregnancy, too, which means I have allowed a few weeks at the end of the semester for them to present poems to the class. I will have already graded & returned explications of these poems early in the semester after we have discussed poetic techniques, so they will have an idea of whether or not their interpretations are complete before they teach "their versions" of the poems to the class. So far when I have taught the course, interpretations were not too far off, but every now & then it does get a little sticky. . . These are not to be researched papers or presentations, so I want them to really engage with the poem, meet with me (preferably, though this never happens) and then write without any so-called "expert" opinions (or web site opinions) about the poems. And using Wikipedia (with or without acknowledgment) is a fail-able offense.

I am excited about being able to do more with my fantasy class because I can really see it being a possible asset on a job search. Not that universities are dying to have someone to teach fantasy, mind you, just that it's a creative idea for a special topics or an honors course, and the way that I teach it avoids the strictly "popular" (ooooh--bad word) fantasy novels and demonstrates how fantasy operates within canonical (ooooh--another bad word) literature. Okay, so it's not really canonical, after all, does anyone really teach Rossetti's "Goblin Market" as part of the traditional canon? No, but she's Victorian, female, and Pre-Raphaelite, so she can be classified according to the standard ways of classifying literature, and yet she is a marginalized figure, more or less, having been neglected for a while in favor of the male Pre-Raphaelites (who are also neglected in favor of bigger & better Victorians, but that's rather a different subject). It is primarily a British fantasy course (I would love to edit an anthology, know any publishers?), though I include some Americans and an Italian (Calvino). I'm thinking that I could expand to include some stuff from the Middle Ages--the dream visions could arguably be the first fantasies--and even Dante, both of which would set the stage rather nicely for Christian fantasy, if such a thing were desired at the university where I eventually teach. The possibilities are endless! This is a bit out of my exact field, but it touches on the boundaries of my field. And I've done work in fantasy & science fiction before. Truly, I would have gone in this direction, had I not thought that it would mean committing academic suicide. Fantasy? Taken seriously? Only as a hobby, and then I'll probably still be thought slightly odd. And yet, in my optimistic moments, I imagine that it'll be an asset. Eh, who knows?

So here's the list of actual texts they will purchase:

• Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems (Dover)
• Morris, News From Nowhere (Dover)
• Paul Negri, English Victorian Poetry (Dover)
  
• Stanley Appelbaum, English Romantic Poetry (Dover)
  
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven and Other Favorite Poems (Dover)
  
• Bob Blaisdell, Irish Verse (Dover)
• J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up: A Fantasy in Five Acts (Dramatists Play Service)
• Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Harvest Books/Harcourt)

Then, on course reserve or electronically:

• Tolkien "On Fairy Stories"
• Preface to Lord of the Rings
  
• "Riddles in the Dark" from Tolkien's The Hobbit--the original and revised versions
• selected chapters from Tolkien's Two Towers
• Lawrence “The Rocking Horse Winner”
• Forster “The Celestial Omnibus”
• Forster “The Other Kingdom”
• Woolf “Solid Objects”
• Patrício “The Fountain Man”
• Bradbury “The Veldt”
• Murphy “Peter”
• Yolen “Snow in Summer”
• Barthelme “The Glass Mountain”
• Frazier “Coyote v. Acme”
  

You will notice that instead of one large poetry anthology, I have selected several Dover anthologies (at a couple of dollars a pop) and that all of the short stories are on reserve. No suitable anthology of fantasy fiction exists to my knowledge. There are some pulp things out there, but they don't really fit the bill for an intro to lit. course. My contemporary short stories lead into postmodernism, and thence to Invisible Cities (which they will tackle on their own in an online "distance" unit--regrettably!).

Many of my short stories make reference to Peter Pan, so I have made the tough decision to replace The Tempest with Peter Pan for drama. Tough decision, but Peter Pan is pretty classic, has been extensively interpreted through film, and suggests the ways in which innocent children's fantasy can be made much, much darker without being perverted too much. I have also replaced Gilman with Morris's News from Nowhere this semester, swapping gender for socialism (she was a socialist, too). We'll see how that works. I was just finding it hard to talk about her ideas in a fair way, especially when all the students were rather vehemently denouncing her communal motherhood ideas. It's hard to point out what's good about an idea that is, at base, scary and counterintuitive. But I feel that utopia is a necessary part of "fantasy" and needs to be addressed in my course.

Tolkien, of course, defined the genre of fantasy, though it preexisted him, with Lord of the Rings and his "On Fairy Stories." I would love to teach one of the three parts of LOTR in its entirety, but I prefer Two Towers, and don't feel comfortable teaching just that one. It's incredible how many students have not read them. So I will address Tolkien's definition of allegory in the Preface, discuss the locus amoenus (a sweet place of rest, most often in Italian literature--especially Dante--and Classics, not really discussed in English lit--I also like to think of them as "sanctuaries"--think Catholic, too) in some chapters of Two Towers (likely the ones dealing with Treebeard). I would introduce The Silmarillion, but really, would that be fair? (Trying not to make the course too Tolkien-heavy. . .)

Anyway, I would feel better about this if I thought that I would really be able to focus the necessary amount of time on the class--what with being 7, 8, or 9 months pregnant. But we'll see how it goes! It always helps to teach something you like!