On Facebook there’s a meme going around of people posting a list of the albums that inspired or defined their teenage identities. One thing all the lists I’ve seen so far have in common is that they’re all pop music of one kind or another. I wonder if that’s because it’s a genuine rarity for a teenager to listen to classical music, or jazz, or folk, or opera — or because popular music is in some sense more personal, or speaks more immediately to mood and time and place.
My own teenage listening was a pretty odd mixture. I probably listen to more pop music now than I did in high school. I was an opera lover from a young age, and the music I heard at home was most often classical or folk: my parents deny ever being hippies, but their record collection certainly bore signs of their having lived in Berkeley for much of the 60s, with lots of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul, & Mary. During my high school years, most of my family was quite involved in international folk dancing. My father and I, more specifically, were involved with a group called the “Philhellenic Dancers”: we met weekly to learn and practice dances from all regions of Greece, and a subset of the group, including the two of us, gave performances in restaurants and at festivals, including a few times at Greek Day. (As almost none of us were actually Greek, I have thought a lot about this group in light of current debates about cultural appropriate. But that would be — maybe will be — a separate post some day.) 
In Grade 11, I started working part-time at The Magic Flute, a classical record store that for many years was a Vancouver institution: this was a job that both reflected and supported my orientation towards classical music. My first gig there was doing inventory, for which I was paid in store credit. The fruits of that labor are now boxed up in my parents’ basement. With vinyl making a comeback, maybe I should finally get the boxes shipped out here for sorting. (I can’t find any photos of the store online, but I did find this clip of its graphic logo, which was on all our shopping bags and on the cover of the mail-order catalog that I assembled and edited for many years.)
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ll of these activities and interests infused my listening life. I didn’t have any sense of disdain for whatever the top 100 might be; I just didn’t pay that music much attention. I knew and liked some older stuff: when Simon & Garfunkel did their reunion tour in 1983, for instance, I lined up overnight with a friend to get floor tickets, and enjoyed their B.C. Place concert from our spot maybe 3 yards back from the stage. I got to be good friends with Veda Hille (now an original and successful musician in her own right) and she introduced me to the Beatles (imagine needing an introduction to the Beatles in the mid-80s, but I did), and then when we were co-editors of our high school year book, we listened to a lot of David Bowie while developing photos in the darkroom. Other people’s influence brought in other music: my boyfriend was a Eurythmics fan, for instance (I died my hair purple to go with him to their concert — though since my hair is naturally quite dark, the result was more like a purple aura than a bold statement). It was Vancouver in the 80s, so perhaps Bryan Adams fandom was inevitable, and when Born in the USA came out, my best friend and I put it on our Sony Walkmen and listened to it over and over. (That friend liked to get out and have some fun, so she is also the reason I saw Michael Jackson live when the Victory Tour came to Vancouver.)
But there really isn’t a list of 10 albums that for me made up a distinct soundtrack of those years, at least not one that really speaks to who I was. Instead, there are particular songs or albums that now have astonishing power to summon up different periods of my life. It’s remarkable how music can do that, isn’t it? A song comes on and suddenly there you are immersed in a whole set of feelings, as if you are being dunked into a vat of memory. These are often not songs that are personal favorites – what matters is that for some reason they became part of a moment in time for me. I was in the grocery store yesterday, for example, and Billy Joel’s “I’m Moving Out” came over their annoyingly loud sound system — and I was instantly back in the New Kent Hotel in London, where my sister and I stayed at both ends of our 6-month tour of Europe in 1986. (I just looked it up, and what do you know: it’s still there.) It was really a kind of hostel, with a lot of long-term guests, many of them Australians on work visas, and the ones we roomed with played Billy Joel a lot. In the photo you can see the Bryan Adams poster my best friend gave me to take along, to remind me of my roots (I guess). I took photos of it on display in a lot of different hostels! The song brought it all back to me, perhaps because I don’t think I have ever played it myself in any other context: I remember all the excitement and anxiety of being on that big adventure.
Sarah McLachlans’s “Building a Mystery” is another really evocative song for me. It’s on her album Surfacing, which came out the year Owen was born. I was up a lot at night nursing, and I used to play it softly as I rocked with him. It was a hot summer, and I was equal parts miserably exhausted and desperately in love with this new little person. If I hear songs from that album without warning — especially “I Love You” or “Angel” — I am liable to get teary, though I’m not sure why these memories are quite so poignant. Maybe it’s the sense of distance, the realization of just how much has changed, and how inexorably time keeps moving forward. Then there’s Enya’s “Caribbean Blue,” which my husband and I danced to at our wedding rehearsal dinner in 1992: an unlikely choice, perhaps, but it is a waltz and it had become one of “our” songs. One of our first joint activities (cliché alert!) during our daringly brief courtship was taking ballroom dance classes together, so we actually did a pretty good job of our dance, if I may say so myself! Of course I can’t hear that song now without remembering what a happy weekend that was, as our friends and family gathered around us to wish us well. We walked down the ‘aisle’ (we were married in a restaurant, so it was pretty informal — the plan had been to use their waterfront garden, but it rained) to one of Dvorak’s string serenades: this, along with my turquoise silk dress, helped make the ceremony itself seem less clichéd!
Although I listen to music almost all the time now, there’s little that has the same emotional power over me: I have to go deeper into my past to get the same effect. I wonder if it’s just that the more immediate events and their associations haven’t yet distilled into part of my history. There is certainly some music that is fundamental to my life — that I have loved for so long, that has given me so much pleasure, that when I hear it it restores me to myself. At the top of that list would be Joan Sutherland’s 1962 recording of La Traviata: my parents gave me the highlights LP as a birthday gift in 1972 and I cherished it even before I had the honor of getting Sutherland’s autograph on the cover years later. (Richard Bonynge’s autograph is on the back: I still feel a bit embarrassed about how indifferent I was to his offer to sign it too, but I was 9 and Sutherland was my idol.) No piano music has ever displaced Chopin’s in my heart since I first tried to learn some of his easier waltzes as a student: practicing the A-major Polonaise in the little room I signed out in the music building helped me sustain myself emotionally during my terrible first year of graduate school at Cornell. And speaking of graduate school, The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” promptly delivers me back to my friend Bernie’s green pick-up truck and all the times we drove in it across the Catskills to my sister’s house in Mamaroneck…
I think my problem with the “10 albums” meme is not that there is no soundtrack to my teenage years but that my teenage years were just a few in a much longer musical history, an idiosyncratic collage of constant listening. What about you: are there songs or albums that invariably recall either high school or some other memorable moments in your life?
We don’t stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve anymore. I can’t remember when we gave up on this tradition, exactly. The last New Year’s Eve I specifically remember was 1999-2000: remember the Y2K panic? We didn’t really expect a dramatic catastrophe on the stroke of midnight, but it was hard not to wonder just what would go wrong. I think we rang in the New Year a few times after that, but there came a point at which it was just too obvious that nothing significantly changed with a new date, and also while the children were small, staying up late on purpose when we were already tired all the time didn’t make much sense. This is one way in which I have broken with my upbringing: to this day my intrepid parents and whoever’s celebrating with them stand out on their front porch in Vancouver and listen for the ships in the harbor to tell them when it’s officially midnight, then bang enthusiastically on pots and pans — a ritual I participated in with glee for many years. (To my knowledge, none of our neighbors ever complained.) I don’t think they still have Pêches Flambées for dessert, though: that used to be the showy finale to our elaborate New Year’s Eve dinner.
Anyway, here we are now, writing 2017 instead of 2016 but otherwise puttering along more or less as usual. For me, that means getting things in order for my winter term classes, which begin on Monday — a week later than is typical, which has been a real boon. The campus itself, including the administrative offices, opened up this week, so I’ve been able to get handouts printed and copied and all kinds of other preparatory business done, including a trek across campus to scout out the room where I’ll be teaching ‘Pulp Fiction,’ which is in an unfamiliar building. Will that preemptive action ward off anxiety dreams about getting lost en route? Here’s hoping.
The very first reading we’re doing, though, is a nifty little short story by Lawrence Block called “How Would You Like It?” I often begin the fiction unit in an introductory class with Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”: it’s really short, but also full of things to talk about, so it makes a great warm-up exercise. It didn’t really fit ‘Pulp Fiction,’ though, so I hunted through my anthologies looking for something else equally brief that would help us get some key literary terms on the table right away while also (hopefully) catching people’s interest. I found the Block story in an excellent anthology called A Century of Noir; though it actually isn’t exemplary of noir, I liked that it was twisty as well as short, so I thought I’d try it out. One of the topics I always address early on is point of view, along with the different options for narrators; the story will work well for that, and it also provocatively introduces questions about vigilante justice that we will be discussing with both our Westerns and our mystery readings.
My other course this term is 19th-Century British Fiction from Dickens to Hardy. As regular readers will know, I do this class (or its prequel, 19th-Century British Fiction from Austen to Dickens) 
Earlier this year there was a lot of buzz when a Princeton professor published a “
I have been thinking about the question of failure in academia again since my promotion was denied. The appeal is ongoing, so I don’t yet know how the story will finally turn out, but no matter how it does, the fact will always remain that I was not successful in this process.** It has recently occurred to me that one reason last year was so difficult for me is that when things took a turn for the worse, one of my most intense reactions was humiliation. I felt profoundly embarrassed, because I had been held up for scrutiny and found wanting: I had not passed the test, and in this world, that feels not just like a professional evaluation but also like a very personal and all-too-public shaming. I know that this is not an entirely rational response, but I bet it also isn’t unusual for academics who fail in this way, especially when you add in 
What I have been thinking about more recently, though, is how much worse this cringing attitude made the whole experience for me, because it led me to be not just discreet but downright secretive about what was going on. I’m not saying that I should have made all aspects of the case public (and I don’t plan to now, either): I have some doubts about the advice on 
I don’t rule out that some of the intensity of my own reactions might be idiosyncratic: I myself was surprised that I took it all so hard, and that has been cause for some self-reflection. (Indeed, I have experienced fits of meta-failure in which I have been thoroughly unimpressed with myself for not handling everything better!) That’s what got me thinking again about the general context, though — about what failure means and how failure is treated in the academic world. And it also got me thinking about other failures in my own life, along the lines of the ‘CV of Failures.’ It isn’t, after all, as if this is the first time I have swung at something and missed. So in the spirit of Johannes Haushofer, here are a few more of my own failures. I’ll restrict the list to things that quantify more easily than, for instance, my general failure to thrive during my graduate coursework, and that are on a larger scale than, say, the many books I have failed to understand.
I’m reading To the Lighthouse for the first time. I know, I know. I also know that I should love it, because it is beautiful and moving and brilliant and original — and I sort of do, so far, except when I don’t. I am not a particularly good reader of Woolf’s fiction: it was only a few years ago that I finally read 
“Time passes.” It’s such a neutral-sounding phrase, almost like a stage direction, one that requires all the director’s ingenuity to show us its truth without taking us through the whole chronology. It’s an obvious truth, one we’re all perfectly well aware of, but we feel it deeply only during what George Eliot calls “one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace,”
You see, I’ve been working on these off and on since 1993. I was newly married then and still not quite accustomed to the amount of golf my husband likes to watch on TV every weekend. Since it was hard to get away from the TV in our small apartment, and it didn’t seem very friendly (or very practical) to absent myself from home altogether, I decided to take up some hobbies that would keep my hands busy and give me a sense of accomplishment while I watched golf with him. A long-time reader of Tudor fiction, I was also working on a dissertation about Victorian historical writing, including Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England— one way or another, Henry VIII and his wives had been in my life a long time. My thesis also included a chapter on the symbolic significance of needlework in Victorian historiography! So I was pretty excited when I chanced on a pattern in New Stitches magazine for Katherine Howard (wife #5, beheaded, in case you can’t keep them all straight). and even more excited when I realized it was part of a series and I could order the back issues, which I did. Over the next few years I completed four of the queens (Katherine Howard, Anne of Cleves, Katherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn). Just two wives were left, plus Henry himself.
What inspired me to take her out? Mostly that I’ve been experimenting with 
think that for me, The Turner House would actually have come closer to being a (if not the) “Great American Novel” if it had really embraced its potential capaciousness. How can a novel about a family with thirteen children (and assorted grandchildren and great-grandchildren) be under 35o pages? Imagine if every one of them — and Francis and Viola, too — had a separate section, full of contexts and choices and rich, textured details about their characters and their lives. This (missed) opportunity really struck me near the end of the novel, when we got a crisp précis of the account Lelah gives Brianne of her marriage to Vernon:
The house I live in now will be the setting of my own children’s family memories, as we moved in when they were still too young to remember anything else. My most vivid memories of their infant years, though, are all from our first two Halifax homes. One was a traditional old house with bow windows up and down and lots of character inside — meaning, of course, lots of things that weren’t in very good condition. The walls, for example, were paint over wallpaper over aged plaster, and not altogether as solid as you’d like! That’s where we set up Owen’s nursery, where he took his first steps, where he used to astonish me with words, math, and music with his magnetic fridge letters, and where he played his first notes on the piano. I remember sitting up many, many nights that first hot summer after he was born, rocking and nursing and idly watching TV (usually Law & Order, which was always on somewhere) so I wouldn’t fall asleep and drop him — that’s where I was when the news broke of Princess Diana’s death.
It sounds more poetic 
Not for them — for me!
Another reason teaching is a tonic for me, though, is precisely that I am not faking my interest in the course materials, and time spent really focusing on them brings me back in touch with the things that brought me into this profession in the first place. I loved being an English student myself (well, I loved being an undergraduate student – I mostly hated being a graduate student), and it’s in the classroom that the reasons for that are most present to me: the books themselves, of course, but also the open-minded engagement with them — teasing out what is most interesting, looking at the details and trying to put them into patterns that illuminate the whole, thinking and talking about the ideas that animate them, and all this, best of all, in conversation with other keen readers who bring their own questions and ideas to the process. This week’s readings are very purposeful, too, which gives our work on them extra urgency: in Mystery & Detective Fiction, we’ve just wrapped up 
