September 2024 – Novel Readings

3032-Start-Here-crop I had such good intentions to post regularly again this term about my classes . . . and somehow the first month has gone by and I’m only just getting around to it. The thing is (and I know I’ve said this a few times recently) there was a lot going on in my life besides classes in September, much of it difficult and distracting in one way or another—which is not meant as an excuse but as an explanation. Eventually, someday, maybe, my life won’t have quite so many, or at least quite such large, or quite such fraught, moving pieces. Honestly, I am exhausted by the ongoing instability—about which (as I have also said before) more details later, perhaps—and the constant effort it requires to keep my mental balance.

Anyway! Yes, I’m back in class, and that has actually been a stabilizing influence overall: it turns out I do better when I am busier. I have two courses this term. One is a section of “Literature: How It Works,” one of our suite of first-year offerings that do double-duty as introductions to the study of literature and writing requirement classes. In the nearly 30 years I’ve been teaching at Dalhousie, I’ve offered an intro class pretty much every year, though multiple revisions of our curriculum over that same long period have changed their names, descriptions, formats, and especially sizes. I don’t think it’s just nostalgia that makes me look back wistfully on the version that was standard in my first years here: called “Introduction to Literature,” running all year, capped at 55 with one teaching assistant per section to keep us in line with the 30:1 ratio required by the writing requirement regulations. So many things about that arrangement were preferable to the current half-year version with 90 students . . . but even as demand has stayed robust for these classes, our available resources have shrunk, and so here we are. (Oh, but how much more I could do when I didn’t lose so much time to starting and stopping anew every term—and actually the change to half-year courses was brought about because the university acquired registration software that could not accommodate full-year courses and so we were forced to change our pedagogy to fit it. That still makes me angry!)

broadview short fiction There are still things I like about teaching first-year classes, though, chief among them the element of surprise, for them as well as for me: because students mostly sign up for them to fulfill a requirement, and choose a section based on their timetable, not the reading list, they often have low expectations (or none at all) for my class in particular, meaning if something lights them up, it’s kind of a bonus for them; and for me, it’s a rare opportunity to have a room full of students from across a wide range of the university’s programs who bring a lot of different perspectives and voices to the class. I do my best to keep a positive and personal atmosphere—and some interactive aspects—even in a tiered lecture hall that makes it essential for me to use PowerPoint and wear a microphone; we have weekly smaller tutorials that also give us a chance to know each other better.

I continue to think a lot in my first-year teaching about the issues of products and processes that I have written about here before. This year I am also using specifications grading again, with its emphasis on practice and feedback rather than polish and judgment. I feel good about the basic structure of the course I have worked out over its recent iterations—but it seems possible I will get a break from teaching intro next year, and that would buy me time to give it a refresh, perhaps (who knows) the last one before I retire. This week is the last one of our initial unit on poetry (we will return to some more complex poems at the end of term). We’ve approached it in steps, focusing first on diction, then on point of view and voice, then on figurative language, then subject and theme—all, as I’ve tried to emphasize, artificially separated so that we can be clear about what they are and how to talk about them, but actually happening and mattering all at once. So this week’s lecture is “Poetry: The Whole Package” and the reading is “Dover Beach”—last year it was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” but that seemed to be too much for most of them, and no wonder. (Still, it was fun to teach “Prufrock,” which I’m not sure I’d done before.)

bleak-housse My other class is 19thC Fiction, this time around the Dickens to Hardy version. (Speaking of full-year classes, once upon a time I got to teach a full year honours seminar in the 19th-century British novel and let me tell you we did some real reading in that class! Ah, those were the days.) (Is talking like this a sign that I should be thinking more seriously about retirement?) I went with “troublesome women” as my unifying theme this time: Bleak House, Adam Bede, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. We have been making our way through Bleak House all month; Wednesday is our final session on it, and I am really looking forward to it. I hope the students are too! But I’m also already getting excited about moving on to Adam Bede, which I have not taught since 2017. It was wonderful to hear a number of students say that they were keen to read Bleak House because, often against their own expectations, they had really loved studying David Copperfield with me last year in the Austen to Dickens course. (You see, this is why we need breadth requirements in our programs: how can you be sure what you are interested in, or might even love, if you aren’t pushed to try a lot of different things? And of course even if you don’t love something you try, at least now you know more about it than whatever you assumed about it before.)

The_Years In many ways the first month of term is deceptively simple: things are heating up now, for us and for our students, as assignments begin to come due. After a fairly dreary summer, though, when the days often seemed to drag on and on, I appreciate how much faster the time passes when there’s a lot to do and I’m making myself useful (or so I hope) to other people. I also decided to put my name on the list for our departmental speaker series, to make sure the work I did over the summer didn’t go to waste, so I will wrap up this week by presenting my paper “‘Feeble Twaddle’: Failure, Form, and Purpose in Virginia Woolf’s The Years.” Wish me luck! It has been a long time since I did this exact thing; in fact, I believe the last presentation I made to my colleagues was about academic blogging, more than a decade ago. I have given conference papers and other public presentations since then: I haven’t just been talking to myself—and you—here, I promise! But I haven’t felt that I was doing work that fit very well into this series, which for related reasons I haven’t attended regularly for many years. I made a vow to engage more with my department and my colleagues this year, though, and so I’m going to the talks as well as giving my own. This is one result of my recent reflections on what I want this last stage of my professional life to be like: difficult as it still sometimes is for me to do this, I want to be present for it, if that makes any sense.

And that’s where things are at the moment, after the first month back in my classes. I probably shouldn’t make any promises about returning to the kind of regular updates I used to make to this series, but as always, I have found the exercise of writing this stuff up both fun and helpful—that hasn’t changed since I reflected on my first year of blogging my teaching. It’s a bit like exercise, I guess: if you can just get past the inertia, you feel better for doing it! We’ll see if that’s motivation enough.

I read 16 books in August. Two were audiobooks, which is new for me: Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (which I highly recommend) and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (which was narrated wonderfully by Dan Stevens and proved an excellent choice for me to listen to, just brisk and suspenseful enough to keep my attention on walks or while crafting). Two were for reviews for Quill & Quire: Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted (my review is submitted and will be online pretty soon, I expect) and Jenny Haysom’s Keep (this review is in progress). One was Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (it me): I wasn’t sure I should count this, as to be honest I started skimming after a while, which is not to say it had nothing to offer me, especially its explanation of why positive thinking approaches to some kinds of mental health struggles can be not just annoying but genuinely counter-productive.

My book club decided to get in one more meeting this summer as a follow-up to our July discussion of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. Keeping with our current French theme, we chose Gigi, which I think for all of us was our first experience of Colette. Although it’s a slight little book, it gave us plenty to talk about, from how we felt about the difference in age and maturity and agency between Gigi and her eventual fiancé to how much it is a romantic fantasy and how much a critique of the terms of that fantasy. Gigi takes a stand against her own commodification—but then she acquiesces to its terms just before she “wins” the real prize of a proposal. Does she really love Gaston? Does he really love her, or is he just getting her by whatever means he can? We were intrigued that Colette wrote the novel during the Nazi occupation of France, which perhaps gives some poignancy to its nostalgic evocation of the Belle Époque. We considered moving on to Lolita, but instead decided to stay in the French demimonde and read Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias (in translation), which I am keen about as it is of course the origin of La Traviata, which has been my favorite opera since my parents gave me an LP of highlights from it (the Sutherland / Bergonzi recording) for my 5th birthday. Joan Sutherland signed the record cover for me when I met her backstage at the Vancouver Opera in 1977.

I did some lighter reading that I mostly enjoyed, including two novels by Katherine Center, who I somehow had never heard of before I read Miss Bates’s review of The Rom-Commers. As often happens, after that I seemed to see her titles everywhere! I had to put a hold on the new one and my turn is still a long way away, but I was able to get What You Wish For and Happiness for Beginners from the library. I had actually watched some of the Netflix adaptation of Happiness for Beginners before, not knowing it was based on a novel, but I didn’t finish it, as I was finding it laborious and un-charming. I really liked the novel, though, more than What You Wish For, which I already forget almost entirely! Another light(er) read was David Nicholls’ Sweet Sorrow, which was a bit YA-ish for me but still pretty good. My favorite of his remains Us.

August was Women In Translation month. I didn’t go all in on this, but I did bookend the month with translated works, starting it with Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time and ending it with Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. Neither of them thrilled me, though both definitely kept me interested. Parts of Ogawa’s novel were also really haunting, though by the end it felt too much as if she was just pushing on to get finished with the concept she had for the novel. I sometimes feel the same about the enthusiasm for reading “books in translation” as I do about the enthusiasm for “lost gems”: both are not really coherent categories, and also just because a title has reached us from the other side of the world or from across the years doesn’t exactly guarantee its merits. (As I have said elsewhere, I wonder why middling books from 60 or 70 years ago seem so much more alluring than similarly middling titles from today.) On the other hand, there is a lot more advance curation of what’s available of both of these kinds of novels and it is certainly reasonable to expect that works that do get translated into English are above average and so worth trying. And of course it is intellectually beneficial not to be too provincial in one’s reading, for sure!

I had high expectations for both Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren and Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho, but neither of them excited me very much. On the other hand, I expected to find Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise overhyped, but it was a highlight of my reading month—gripping, morally urgent, beautifully told. I also was very impressed with Ann Schlee’s Rhine Journey, which I was moved to read after hearing a convincing discussion of its merits on Backlisted.

Finally, I am so glad Shawn (of Shawn Breathes Books) recommended Sara Henshaw’s The Bookshop that Floated Away: it was a delight. It was more acerbic than I expected, but that was actually fine with me, as sometimes I get irritable with books that feel too obviously designed to appeal precisely to book lovers and those who (sigh) occasionally and delusionally imagine that owning a bookstore would be a lovely retirement option. (There’s this vacant house / storefront on Spring Garden Road that desperately needs salvaging and would make such a charming site . . . but even if the whole plan weren’t unsound, that property also has “money trap” written all over it.)

All in all, then, a good reading month, with lots of variety, some hits, and some misses, though even the misses were well worth reading. With classes about to start, I don’t expect to get through quite so many unassigned books in September—but having said that, I’ve been setting some goals for myself and one of them is to read more and spend less time watching TV and doomscrolling on social media. Sometimes I need these distractions: they have a useful anesthetic effect when I just can’t keep it all up (and, as I remind myself, there are worse ways to get numb when you need to). But they don’t do much for positive energy—though aspects of social media, such as book talk and podcasts, definitely do! Anyway, writing these down as intentions (and making those intentions public like this) may help me make better choices in the moment.

Another goal for the fall is to blog more, including continuing my longstanding series of posts about my teaching. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want from the last phase of my career: I reach retirement age in 8 years, which, depending on the day, seems either very close or very far away. I don’t necessarily have to stop then—or, for that matter, to keep going until then! Things have been so turbulent in my life in recent years that I haven’t really been able to focus on this particular issue, but I do know that I don’t want to just drift towards retirement. Something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done! One small gesture in this direction (though I would not say it looks like noble work at this point) is that I have volunteered for our departmental speaker series, where I will present whatever it is exactly that I’ve been doing about Woolf’s The Years. The paper’s working title is “Feeble Twaddle,” which is one way Woolf herself described the novel while she was working on it but which also often seems a fair description of the shitty rough draft I have so far produced. Being on the speakers schedule will, I hope, motivate me to wrestle it all into better shape. I think the last formal talk I gave to my department was an attempt (along these lines) to convince my colleagues about the potential merits of academic blogging—another lifetime, that seems like. That ship has probably sailed, although it has been interesting to watch my institution embrace a carefully vetted and marketed version of blogging under the rubric “Open Think.” You have to apply to participate! (Ahem, you could also just get your own free WordPress site and have at.) I guess it was the DIY version they didn’t like, maybe because they couldn’t control it, or take credit for it.