If At First You Don’t Succeed, Must You Try Again?

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

DALHOUSIE-UNIVERSITYI’m trying to move on from my promotion debacle–honest! But I recently went another round with someone about whether I will, or should, reapply, one consequence of which is that I want to sort out my response (literal and emotional) to that question.

Since my final appeal was denied in November, I have actually had a version of this conversation fairly frequently. Usually, it reflects a friendly spirit of boosterism: it is supposed to make me feel better that people think I did deserve the promotion–and of course that is a nice thing to hear, and I do quite genuinely appreciate the expressions of support. Even so, I find these conversations stressful, because of their unspoken and (I assume) unintended implications, as well as some of the tacit assumptions behind them.

One plausible implication of pressing me to try again, for instance, is that getting promoted counts as professional success, and so until and unless it happens, I’m a professional failure. By some measures, this conclusion is obviously true, though it relies on rather circular logic. One of the hardest things about the whole process for me was precisely that I began it feeling proud of my accomplishments and ended it feeling like a failure. Pressure (however encouraging) to reapply makes me feel that way all over again, and reflects, I think, the general feeling among academics that of course we all want to achieve these professional milestones, which of course are meaningful indicators of the worth of our work.

For me, however, the pressure to reapply undermines the hard mental work I’ve been doing since last summer to distinguish my own standards for success from the standards against which I was measured by so many people involved in my promotion case. Regardless of what our regulations actually say, only very specific kinds of work were ultimately treated as eligible contributions to my discipline. Repeatedly and with conviction, I made the case for a more expansive and flexible definition of “scholarship,” but I was told in so many words that if I want professional advancement my body of work must conform in both kind and quantity to “past practice.” More than once I was told (as if to soften the blow of rejection) that my application was “premature”: the message was not, however, that eventually the quantity of my non-academic writing and other projects would meet the necessary (though nowhere specified) requirements, or that if I reached some higher (again, nowhere specified) level of achievement in my public writing, then my file would ripen into eligibility. Very specifically, I was told that I would deserve promotion if and only if I met the “usual” standard for peer reviewed publications.

I feel very strongly, however, that I should not allocate my time and expertise based solely on how my institution will reward me for it. That, to me, would be a poor use of my tenure, and of the academic freedom it secures for me. (Indeed, I think a case could be made that by insisting that if I want professional advancement I must work in one way and not in another–despite the university’s own regulations and the positive judgments of peers in my discipline–several levels of review at Dalhousie compromised, perhaps even violated, my academic freedom.) If I get nothing else positive out of this whole dreary experience, I hope that at least I have finally made my peace with the consequences of choosing to do critical work of a kind I find valuable, intellectually stimulating, and challenging, and that I have learned (or am learning) to stop seeking external validation for it–at least, not from Dalhousie. Instead, I am thinking hard about what success looks like on my terms and how best to achieve it. In this respect, applying again would be a real step backwards.

Another way of looking at my situation, of course, (and the way I’m sure my friends and colleagues intend when they urge me to reapply) is not that I am a failure but that the system failed me–but in that case, what do I have to gain by having another run at it,  except possibly vindication? If I’m not in fact a failure, why do I need to be promoted in order to carry on  precisely as I have been doing? This is a question I have spent a lot of time thinking about. I actually started asking this question even before my final appeal, which for a while I wasn’t 100% sure I would go through with. Why had I applied in the first place? What was in it for me, really? The professional payoff (including financial) is actually not significant–it’s mostly about pride and prestige–and there are even some down sides to it. I did think I had earned the promotion, and it is the usual next step for professors of a certain seniority, so part of my initial decision was just thinking that my time had come. But I also, I admit, had wanted to prove something, to myself and to some of the people around me. I wanted validation for the decisions I’d been making. I wanted my work to get an A! That’s an awfully hard habit to break–but, to reiterate my previous point, that’s exactly what this process has finally (I hope) managed to do for me.

I think my friendly boosters also don’t quite realize the time and the toll the process has already taken. I began compiling materials for my file in June 2015; the decision on my appeal arrived in November 2016. For nearly a year and a half, that is, I was frequently (and mostly negatively) preoccupied with it, including many hours in meetings, many more hours writing responses, rebuttals, and appeals, and many, many, more hours brooding–many of those hours lying unhappily awake while arguments and counter-arguments and what seemed like willful misrepresentations of my work went round and round in my head. Because so much of my social life is bound up in my departmental life, there has been significant fall-out. Some of my relationships, including with formerly close colleagues, have been irreparably damaged. I’m only just recovering my individual equilibrium, something that, as Timothy Burke aptly observes, isn’t easy to do, given the peculiar nature of academic culture. (That post of his has given me a lot to think about.) There’s absolutely no guarantee of smooth sailing if I opt to do this all again–so blithely urging me to press on seems a bit callous! Besides, I’m 50 now. How many of my remaining full-time years should I put into seeking approval from other people instead of just doing the work that matters to me?

For myself personally, then, applying again just does not seem worth the effort and the risk. I might change my mind, but it’s hard right now to imagine why. Another frequent component of these discussions, though, is that I owe it to other people to try again. It is often pointed out to me, for instance, that women are underrepresented in the higher ranks of the academy. I’m not sure my particular case has much to do with this general situation, and I’m not so far convinced that I should feel any special obligation because of it either.

I’m somewhat more persuaded by the argument that the kind of change or challenge to academic norms that I represent won’t happen unless people like me fight for and then use the influence that comes with seniority to turn advocacy into policy. But we have already changed our policies here at Dalhousie: it’s attitudes that haven’t changed–at least, not much. A lot of us were pretty excited about blogging for a while, but our more recent discussions showed a significant (and understandable) decline in optimism about that. Also, while there’s a lot of talk about “knowledge dissemination” and “public engagement,” it looks to me as if the trend is towards shaping that work into something recognizably academic and institutional–incorporating peer review into blogging, for instance, and establishing university programs and centers for things like the “public humanities,” rather than cheering on people who just go out there into the public sphere and participate in forms and discussions of different kinds. In this context, I’m not sure how much good I can do, individually, to instigate or support change, or at least why I have to put myself through another grueling round of extreme academic vetting in order to do it. It seems to me that I am doing as much good by persisting on my own, just trying to exemplify one of many alternative models.

“Never say never” is perfectly reasonable advice, and who knows how differently I will feel in the future, or what else might have changed in the world around me. For now, though, being promoted to full professor is simply no longer one of my goals.

YMMV: Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

murakamiIt turns out I wasn’t entirely wrong to have avoided Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. A number of people recommended it to me after I posted last week about hoping that I can learn to approach my writing in the same spirit as I do my running: focused on my own goals and the intrinsic satisfaction of reaching them, without comparing myself to others, without feeling inadequate because I don’t run faster or further. I knew Murakami’s book was out there, but because I also knew that he ran marathons, I had figured it would probably provide just one more potentially demoralizing comparison of my own modest efforts to someone else’s much more impressive accomplishments.

To be honest, to some extent that was how I reacted to What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The book made me feel a little bit defensive, a little bit apologetic, a little bit embarrassed not to be pushing myself harder and achieving more–not just as a runner, but as a writer. After all, it turns out Murakami doesn’t just run marathons: even when he’s not running in races, he runs for hours at a time, and in addition to marathons he also does triathlons. And, of course, he isn’t just an obscure writer puttering away, doing his best and trying to find satisfaction in that, but an internationally renowned, best-selling, prize-winning writer. Gee, thanks, everyone! As if my Salieri syndrome doesn’t flare up enough quite on its own.

That wasn’t the entirety of my response to Murakami’s book, though: there was also a lot about it that I liked. Above all there’s Murakami himself. I was amused and a bit touched by his remark that he thinks most people would not like his personality very much:

There might be a few–very few, I would imagine–who are impressed by it, but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn’t compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away alone in a closet? . . . I just can’t picture someone liking me on a personal level. Being disliked by someone, hated and despised, somehow seems more natural.

Later in the book he describes his own “nature” as “individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered.” “I’ve carried this character around like an old suitcase,” he goes on,

down a long dusty path. I’m not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I’ve carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect.

Maybe it’s because I recognize something of myself in these descriptions that they didn’t alienate but rather charmed me. I also appreciated that his self-deprecation doesn’t come in the rather arch form that seems common in some kinds of personal essays these days but instead seemed (surprisingly, given his accomplishments) quite sincere. At one point he describes himself as a teenager staring at his naked body in a mirror and adding up all his (perceived) flaws. His evaluations of his own character here don’t seem immaturely judgmental, the way he now knows that earlier exercise was; it seems as if he has simply assessed himself as honestly and dispassionately as he can and learned to live with what he found.

murakami-2In a similar way, he talks about both his running and his writing without flourish or posturing. There’s no false modesty, but also no braggadocio. Further, though he does talk a lot about training and personal bests, he never seems competitive against anyone but himself. He certainly has a different relationship to running than I do, an interest in pushing himself and seeing (literally but also metaphorically) how far he can go as a runner, but he does it because it suits him: for him, it’s a way of expressing himself, not proving anything. In fact, sometimes what he seeks and finds in running is humility: when he feels he has been “criticized unjustly,” for example, he runs “for a little longer than usual”:

By running longer it’s like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are.

He also believes that for him, running enables writing. Keeping it up has been worth it for him not just for its immediate benefits but because “I like the novels I’ve written . . . and if running helps me accomplish this, then I’m very grateful to running.”

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is kind of a meandering book: it mixes some memoir with bits of travel writing, thoughts on music, a few practical notes on long-distance running, and some reflections on the writing process. One of the things I liked best about it is that just as I would be getting a bit impatient with details about training regiments or running shoes, Murakami would take a turn through some more metaphysical scenery. The insights he offers aren’t, I suppose, particularly profound or surprising, but he doesn’t present them as if they are: only as if he has thought about them, or they have become clearer to him, and so he’s sharing them. “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits,” he says, for instance: “that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life–and for me, for writing as well.” Or,

For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary–or perhaps more like mediocre–level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday.

When he talks about writing more directly, he often emphasizes how difficult it is:

Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers involved in quiet intellectual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process–sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track–requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people realize. . . . Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being; and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion.

Implicit here is that he means this writer, this novelist, just as when he describes the routines he thinks are essential to success, such as “sit[ting] down every day at your desk and train[ing] yourself to focus on one point,” he means they worked for him. Your mileage may vary, he might have said, if he were offering this advice today! I don’t know if that’s how all novelists work, and since I’m no more likely to attempt a novel than I am a marathon (I think, anyway), I’ll probably never know if that’s what it would be like for me. What he describes is not totally different, though, from what it takes to do even the kind of writing I do, which also requires focus and effort, especially “selecting the right words, one by one.” His fundamental insight, too, is not so different from the one I arrived at in my own minor epiphany, though he seems to live it, while I still aspire to it:

What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you’ve set for yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn’t seek validation in the outwardly visible.

Transgenerational Haunting: Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone is painful, even tragic, and yet it is also just funny and acerbic enough to keep it (or its readers) from becoming unbearably sad. In fact, I thought there was something oddly bracing about it. That’s partly because I thought it was so well done, artistically and formally, but it’s also because the novel balances its devastating portrayal of depression and anxiety with its persistent faith in basic human kindness and, especially, family love. Haslett doesn’t oversimplify the challenge of severe mental illness — not just for the people living with it, but for the people living with them, whose lives are also inevitably changed by its presence. He also doesn’t romanticize it, or offer the faux consolation of silver linings: nobody is redeemed by it, it doesn’t bring anybody transcendence or special wisdom. It just is–for everyone involved.

That’s the paradox that’s at the heart of Imagine Me Gone, really: that our connections to each other are the source of so much of what is both good and bad in our lives. At the same time, the novel powerfully conveys the intractable isolation someone like its protagonist Michael — brilliant but ultimately unable to find either stability or happiness — feels, especially when faced with people who love him but cannot understand him, who can’t give up on the idea that somehow, if they just do the right thing, they can fix him, make him like them. Their love becomes its own kind of burden, because it shades into denial. It takes Michael’s brother Alec almost the whole book (almost the whole of Michael’s life) to grasp this. “I hadn’t been listening,” he finally realizes:

not for years. I’d wanted him to be better for so long that I had stopped hearing him tell me he was sick. For the first time I saw him now as a man, not a member of a family. A separate person, who had been trying as hard as he could for most of his life simply to get by.

haslett2Michael’s illness cannot be willed away, stared down with stoicism, or held at bay by distractions or the pretense of normalcy — though even as he brings out the error, indeed the danger, of approaching it this way, Haslett is also very critical of medicalized approaches that consist largely of throwing more and more pills Michael’s way.

I did wonder, by the end of the novel, whether it goes too far in showing depression as a death sentence, not once but twice. It would be possible to interpret the novel as dangerously defeatist about mental illness. Michael’s father John calls it “the beast”; to him, suicide is ultimately his only way of defeating it:

I’ve come here so often trying to escape this monster. But now it is the one sapped, and limping. And I am the hunter. In the clearing overlooking the bend in the river, we come to a halt. . . .

Invisibility. That is its last defense. That I won’t have the courage to look it in the eye. You wretch! it cries, desperate for its life. You selfish wretch! Leaving them with nothing! But it is no good. It is my prey now.

Of course, this passage is from John’s point of view: Imagine Me Gone is not itself proposing that death is the way to triumph over depression, and Michael’s death (like his illness itself)–though inevitably associated with his father’s–has a different character entirely. This is a novel about these particular imagined people and their disease: it doesn’t claim to be a manual about depression or anxiety in any broader sense (though at least to me, as a non-expert, it seemed to have been not just deeply imagined but also carefully researched, in support of its meticulous and convincing accounts of symptoms and treatments). As with my reading of Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows, I was distracted a bit here by reflections on my own experience of a similar situation, through which I learned a lot about how intractable and complicated depression can be and how variously individually people experience it. Naturally, this novel does not tell my (or my friend’s) story. There are many people who (to borrow John’s metaphor) do tame the beast, whose mental illness is a chronic rather than terminal condition–but Haslett has no obligation to provide “balance” by incorporating them as well. It’s just interesting to think about the implications of the stories he did choose to tell.

haslett3Another thought-provoking aspect of Imagine Me Gone was the kinship Michael identifies between the family history of mental illness that so shapes his own individual story and the blight of slavery as foundational to America’s history. Michael is preoccupied with reparations, which for him represent a political and moral necessity that is impossible for him to separate entirely from his own tormenting belief that he is to blame for his father’s suicide. How can you right the wrongs of the past? How can you endure and survive your inheritance of suffering?

Michael becomes preoccupied with the concept of “transgenerational haunting,” which he learns about from a psychological study of “black teenagers with recurring nightmares of slavery”:

Some dreamt of being confined to the holds of ships amid the withered and dying, others of being publicly stripped and lashed. One boy, who evinced no particular knowledge of black history, had a recurring nightmare that he was being hung from a lamppost and dismembered.

The author of the study finds no pattern of “stories of enslavement among ancestors” of these “kids from the north of England.” Why would this be the stuff of their nightmares? Where did the visions come from? Michael finds his answer in “an observation that the author himself made little of”: all the boys were avid listeners to “black American dance tracks”:

No one doubted that the agony of slavery haunted generations of spirituals and gospel. Why not the latest twelve-inch? These boys weren’t listening to Mahalia Jackson sing about how she got over, but somewhere in the cut the same ghosts were being shaken loose.

Music is Michael’s passion (the sections of the novel that are in his voice nearly overwhelm with manic neepery on this topic, which, while true to his character, did become a bit tedious for me), so this sets up his own sense of being similarly haunted. He feels strongly his own complicity in racial injustice: “I owe,” he says,

The inalienable privilege of my race to the victims of the Middle Passage, a debt whose repayment has proven tricky to schedule, given the endless deferments, if not forbearances, and the way that the blood of slavery tends to run clear in the tears of liberals.

More than this, though, he feels haunted himself by the horrors of the Atlantic crossings–by, for instance, the story of the Joaquin, a slave ship on which “270 of the original 300” captives died. He is careful to disavow too close an analogy between his experience and theirs, and yet in ways he can hardly understand or articulate, he feels that the story of the Joaquin is somehow his own as well:

The fact is that when I read the story of the Joaquin, I feel understood. Not in any literal sense–the comparison of my dread to theirs would be grotesque–but in the unrelenting terror, in that schism of the mind. Which is how I know now that the dead generations don’t haunt down tidy racial lines, as if there were such a thing. The psychosis is shared. I was born into the fantasy of its supremacy. Others are born into the fantasy’s cost. But the source of the violence is the same. The work I do is for no one’s sake but my own.

Michael’s preoccupation with slavery adds a political layer to the poignant personal story that Imagine Me Gone, on its surface, seems to be. What is the implication of yoking these two kinds of hauntings together in this way–of linking a family history of one kind of trauma to a national history founded on another kind? I found myself thinking about this in terms of genre. Haslett’s novel is not overtly the same kind of book as Jane Smiley’s Last 100 Years trilogy, in which the unfolding family history is clearly tied to the story of America as a nation. But in its own way it may be doing something similar in connecting private and public life, or individual to “world-historical” events. Through Michael, Haslett characterizes slavery as America’s inherited disease, one with symptoms every bit as complex and destructive in American life as John’s or Michael’s illnesses are for them and their family.

The obvious conclusion to this extended analogy is that the nation cannot heal unless it too can find some way to treat its transgenerational haunting. Here too I don’t think Imagine Me Gone holds out much reassurance. Before John’s death, Michael suffers a menacing premonition, a vision in which “flayed bodies swarmed in front of me in a bloody contorted mass.” The horror drives him away from his family; his flight to safety, “without ever warning them,” is the immediate source of his own guilt. Is his inability to survive the life that flows from this selfish act a gloomy prediction about America’s future? Or does a note of hope prevail in the persistent efforts of those who love John and Michael? I’d like to think the latter is true. Certainly that’s where Imagine Me Gone ends: quietly invoking the remarkable optimism and tenderness of love as it faces an unknowable future.

A Minor Epiphany About Writing and Running

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

sneakersI had a minor epiphany this morning: I should try to approach writing in the same spirit I approach running.

I’ve been running fairly regularly for over a decade now. It has turned out to be just the kind of exercise that suits me. Growing up, gym class was always a nightmare for me, from the embarrassment of the changing rooms to the alienating exposure of team sports–and that’s not even getting into the stress of the “Canada Fitness Tests,” with their gold, silver, and bronze levels, which Canadian readers of a certain age will probably also remember. I dreaded every aspect of gym, and as a result, when I was finished with school I shunned every form of exercise. It took me years to get over the bad memories and to admit that getting more exercise would probably be good for me–that I might even enjoy it, if I could do it on my own terms. As a graduate student, I started going to aerobics classes (hey, it was the early 90s–everybody was doing it!); some years after we moved here, when that habit (and fad) had lapsed, I took a beginner’s clinic at the Running Room and I have kept up a running program since then.

This does not mean I excel as a runner. I don’t run very far or very fast. In fact, pretty much everyone else I know who also runs goes further and is more ambitious: many of them have taken to doing “events”–5Ks, 10Ks, even marathons–while I’m happy just to complete my modest route around the neighborhood. When I’m out on my morning runs, I move quickly out of the way when I hear footsteps behind me so whoever it is can pass me easily, which they always do. My intransigent allergies–wholly resistant, as far as I can tell, to all non-drowsy antihistamines–mean I always need to carry a kleenex (how I wish more running gear had real pockets!), and in colder weather especially my eyes water terribly: I’m probably quite a sorry sight!

Why, then, would I want my writing in any way to resemble my running? Here’s what clicked with me this morning, after my run: none of these things about my running bother me, because I get out of it exactly what I want. I don’t feel any shame or pressure about how fast or how far I run; I feel no competitive desire either to race against others or to improve my own “personal bests.” I run for one reason only: because I feel better (more energetic, more focused, healthier both physically and psychologically) when I do it regularly. When I don’t, both my energy and my mood slump, and that prompts me to get back to it. I have set my own standard for success,  and the intrinsic rewards are enough to motivate me.

I sincerely hope that I am a better writer than I am a runner. No doubt, up to a point, that’s because I am more ambitious about my writing than I am about my running: I aspire to be an excellent writer, while I have never aimed to be (or imagined I could be) a serious athlete. I don’t want to let go of that ambition. I would, however, like to set my own standard for success in this arena as well. I would like not to be dependent on others to measure it for me, and not to be envious or discouraged in the face of what other writers accomplish. It’s hard, sometimes, to see other writers appear to sprint past me or achieve marathon-like projects while I am (or feel as if I am) still running in circles. It’s also hard not to judge myself by the goal posts other people have set up–even if I am deliberately running in a different direction. (Have I tortured this analogy enough?!) I need to find, in writing, the same sure sense of what I’m doing it for that I have about my morning runs. I need to remind myself–until I don’t need reminders anymore–that a lot of the satisfaction and rewards are intrinsic, that I’m doing it my way for a reason, and, above all, that I feel better when I write than when I don’t.

It’s a good goal, anyway, something for me to think about as I set my priorities, not just for the summer but for the longer term. Changing attitudes is harder than changing shoes, though!

Summer Plans: The Risks and Rewards of Reviews

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

The jet lag has lifted and I’m settling back into my routines after my trip to Vancouver–my first real vacation away since July 2015. And even so, it was hard to keep work obligations entirely at bay: a very late paper arrived at 10 p.m. the night before I left and had to be dealt with a.s.a.p.; proofs for a forthcoming review appeared in my inbox a few days along and threw me into a panic until I got reassurance that the corrections could wait until I got back; and a book for another review was my reading material on my way home–although that was my decision, and the book in question (Adam Sternbergh’s The Blinds) isn’t particularly hard work. I don’t really mind: porous boundaries are a small price to pay for the autonomy and flexibility I enjoy at this stage of my career, and there was certainly plenty of work-related business I simply ignored until today, when the Victoria Day holiday too is past.

Now that it is today, though, it’s time to get sorted for the summer. As previously mentioned, my first task is sort of a meta-project, in which this post is a very preliminary step: I want to take some dedicated time to plot out a more deliberate trajectory than I have followed for the last couple of years. It’s not that I’m dissatisfied with what I’ve accomplished: despite the still-embittering lessons of my promotion denial, I have no regrets or second thoughts about where I have been putting my energy or how I have been using my expertise. I certainly have at no point since the bad news felt inclined to rededicate myself to conventional academic publishing. I don’t set myself against it as an enterprise in toto, and I might yet decide that a project I’m interested in is best suited to publication in that form for that audience, but I have long believed that we produce not only enough of such scholarship but too much of it–too much too fast, at any rate, for us to keep up with it ourselves, or to assert its value with any confidence–and so as a profession we can and should spare some of our “HQP” to go and do otherwise.

My version of “otherwise” has so far included a range of essays on Victorian fiction aimed at a non-specialist audience (though not, I have always hoped and often found, lacking in interest for specialists as well); a website and e-book of supporting materials for book clubs reading Middlemarch; this blog, which includes commentary on academia and especially on teaching along with its posts on books and literary culture; and a fair number of book reviews in a widening array of venues. One of the things I’m specifically thinking about right now is what, if any, parameters to set on that last category, especially because for the last year or so I have pretty much always had at least one review underway at all times, and when work is otherwise busy that’s about as much “extra” attentive reading and writing as I can manage. Given that even short reviews still take me several concentrated days, I could almost certainly fill up most of this summer with them if I accepted or sought out all the possible opportunities — but should I?

One reasonable answer is, “Why not?” One pragmatic reason to review as much as I can in as many publications as will have me is that doing so builds both my skills and my “brand” as a reviewer. I get valuable experience, and I gain the kind of credibility as a critic that my academic resume does not earn me outside the ivory tower. At least as important–maybe more–is that I really like the work. It is more intellectually stimulating than I would have thought before I tried it, and more creative: for every book you have to find the story to tell, the tilt to hold it at so you can see it clearly but by your own lights. The different genres of reviewing add a further challenge: the more expansive 2000 (or more) word review-essay we typically run at Open Letters Monthly makes different demands, and allows for different kinds of fun, than a more pointed review of 300, or 700, or even 1000 words. I have already learned a lot about both books and criticism from practicing in these different forms, and I enjoy feeling that I’m getting better at it. (I have also learned even greater respect for those who do it much more frequently and fluently than I!) 

I also like the scale and scope of the work. Each assignment (whether I choose it myself or it is set by another editor) comes with known parameters and a deadline, a finite structure that suits my temperament. There can certainly be stress involved, especially before I know what my angle will be and then as I try to shape my ideas into my allotted space in a way that satisfies me and doesn’t (to my eyes, at least) sacrifice nuance or particularity. As I get more experience, however, my confidence grows, so that now I recognize those messy earlier stages as a necessary phase before I chip away and refine, leaving something as clear and expressive as I can make it. There’s a lot of satisfaction in successfully completing a piece of writing with such a specific mission and then moving along to the next one.

I have also appreciated the way reviewing has expanded my reading, particularly when the books are suggested by other editors rather than hand-picked by me to suit my own known tastes and sensibilities. I would point, for example, to the increase in Canadian titles I have read since taking on some commissions for Quill & Quire and, more recently, Canadian Notes and Queries, though the best example of a writer I would probably never have discovered on my own but loved would be David Constantine. Here, however, is also where the advantages of reviewing shade into the disadvantages: for every David Constantine or Danielle Dutton or Sarah Moss, there’s another writer whose books I would not be bereft to have missed — though of course you can’t know that until you’ve tried them. “Most books aren’t very good,” one experienced reviewer once said to me, and now that I do more reading on demand (though not nearly as much as he does!) and somewhat less just for myself, I understand much better what he meant. There’s a certain resignation every full-time reviewer must feel on opening up the next cover without any expectation of greatness. Of course, that makes it all the more delightful when a book exceeds expectations — which in turn probably accounts for the effusive praise books that are pretty good but not that good sometimes seem to get. For a reviewer who reads, perforce, a lot of mediocre titles, the relief no doubt results in some disproportionate enthusiasm.

So one risk of doing more reviewing is having to read a fair number of books that may not be that good or may not really reward the effort it takes to say something interesting about them. This is not the case when working with George Eliot, whose worst books are still more worthwhile than many writers’ best. Another risk is that the temptation of doing these neatly finite pieces makes it harder to commit to longer-term or more open-ended ones: the immediacy of the next deadline becomes the perfect excuse for putting off what might be harder but ultimately richer writing projects. I said before that I would like to get back to writing more essays–I don’t mean just reviews that are more essayistic, but essays that range and explore literary ideas in a different way. I would like to push my limits and increase my fluency in that genre as well, but I feel as if I have lost my nerve when it comes to proceeding towards an idea that isn’t justified by a specific occasion, such as “here’s a new book,” or framed by a pre-set task and word limit. What could I or should I try to write about? A likely genre for me to pursue here is the literary profile, but I’ve had trouble focusing on a topic, so that’s one thing I’ll be thinking about during my planning period. Another common kind of literary essay is a pitch for the “underappreciated” novel or novelist. I griped a bit on Twitter about what I see as the “literary hipsterism” of this approach, but that needn’t be the tone, and in fact all of the ‘Second Glance’ pieces I’ve written for Open Letters are in this spirit but don’t (I hope) suggest I’m preening because I think I’m particularly cool to know about them! 

But essays too are, in the end, small scale projects. Should I be aspiring to something on a larger scale? In the academic humanities, books are by far the most valued form; I’ve questioned the assumption that they should be, especially under current circumstances, and though I have watched with a bit of envy as some of the online writers I’ve followed for some time have published books that look really great, I do still feel that you should write a book if you have a book to write–something that needs and deserves a more expansive treatment–not as an end in itself. How do you know if you have a book in you, though? Or, how do you know what kind of book you might have in you, or already have begun without realizing it? More than once here  I’ve brought up the possibility of a book that is actually a collection of smaller parts (revised versions of my essays on George Eliot, for instance). I have spent a lot of time on that idea before, including on my last sabbatical, and I even wrote a draft introduction. My work on that project stalled, for various reasons, but perhaps it’s time I took it further. Here, then, is something else I’ll be reflecting on.

In the meantime, I have the Sternbergh review to do, and Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, which I committed to write up for OLM, has just arrived and looks mighty tempting. And I just said yes to another editor for a June deadline. I’m looking forward to doing all of these, but I need to make up my mind how many more I can do if I still want something else to show for my summer. If…

Back Again, Bearing Books!

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

I am back from my trip to Vancouver, where in spite of the rain (even, in some ways, because of it) I had a lovely time visiting with family and friends and drinking in the always inspiring sight of the mountains rising above the city and the sea. It was a a welcome interlude between the end of a challenging term and the beginning of a summer of reflection and writing.

I didn’t end up doing a lot of reading while I was in Vancouver. During the day I was often out and about, and in the evenings we talked and then wound down with a little TV. A particular treat was watching Dr. Thorne, which my Trollope-loving father had saved up for me. I thought it was delightful, though as I rather sheepishly confessed to him, it has been many years since I read the novel (one of his personal favorites) — perhaps it’s time I reread it! In return (?) I introduced my parents to the quirky little comedy Detectorists, which my husband and I found both hilarious and unexpectedly touching. I’m not 100% sure my parents were converted, but at least now they know it’s there.

I did get some travel reading done. I’m nervous on planes, so light or fast-paced books are good as my concentration isn’t always great. En route to Vancouver, I found Miranda Neville’s The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton an excellent diversion, and on the way home I alternated between Georgette Heyer’s Black Sheep (reliably amusing) and Adam Sternbergh’s The Blinds, which I’m reviewing for Quill & Quire. I plucked several promising titles off my mother’s well-stocked shelves, but the only one I read cover to cover was Martha Gellhorn’s A Stricken Field. I didn’t think it was a very good novel, but it tells an important story based on Gellhorn’s experience reporting on the plight of refugees from the Sudetenland after its annexation by Nazi Germany: it’s not particularly artful, but it is certainly gripping. I read about two-thirds of a Donna Leon mystery but left it behind unfinished: I might try to find it here, just to know whodunit and why–but I don’t feel highly motivated to as I was finding Leon’s prose terribly stilted.

Though I didn’t manage a lot of good reading while I was away, I did bring back a nice stack of books to read here at home. One ritual my mother and I have on my visits is an expedition to Hager Books, which is a small store with a nice atmosphere and thoughtfully stocked shelves. We peer around at everything and kibitz, in our opinionated and idiosyncratic ways, about authors and titles we’ve read or are interested in–or, for whatever reason, want nothing to do with! I picked out Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata and Anita Brookner’s Providence as part of my “keep independent bookstores in business” project. As I observed when reporting on my last trip to Vancouver, my mother’s personal book collection is another great resource, and recently she has been pruning it, putting some boxes together to donate to the public library’s book sale. I had the bright idea to “just take a look” through them and of course found a few I couldn’t resist, including another by Anita Brookner, one by Angela Huth I haven’t read before (I really like both Invitation to the Married Life and Easy Silence), and Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour.

Including The Blinds, then, which had been mailed to Vancouver so I could get started on it sooner rather than later, I came home with 8 more books than I left with. And yet wouldn’t you know it: the book I most want to read next turned out to be waiting for me when I got back to Halifax. It’s Marina Benjamin’s The Middlepause: On Life After Youth, a 50th birthday gift which seems like just the right book to help me think about where my own life is now and what I want to make of it next. That is likely, then, to be the next book I write about here.

This Week: Summer Plans

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I haven’t disappeared or given up blogging! It’s just that as soon as my final grades went in, I had to buckle down and finish two reviews that have been haunting me — not because I didn’t want to write them, but because though I have had the books for some time and had even started reading them, it just hadn’t been possible for me to get the hard work of writing thoughtfully about them done. The result was that even though neither of them was technically late, I felt guilty for weeks! But one went in last week and the other today, and while I now have to wait and find out what the editors think, including what revisions they want, I’m out from under that shadow and ready to contemplate the rest of my summer.

It doesn’t look much like summer yet, of course. May weather in Nova Scotia is … well, let’s be charitable and call it changeable. We have had a couple of days–or at least afternoons–of beautiful sun, and the daffodils are in full bloom, but there has been a lot of rain and fog, and I’m not putting away the flannel sheets any time soon either. Sometimes you have to very consciously remind yourself how great it is not to be buried in winter anymore, because the relentless gloom and grey can be almost as depressing, even if you don’t have to shovel it.

However! Rain is perfectly good weather for taking stock and making plans, and that’s the stage I’m at now. I actually feel as if I need some dedicated time for that, because I’m not really sure right now what my top priorities are. I spent a lot of the last two summers doing work related to my promotion application: in 2015, I spent a buoyant summer preparing the application, a process that (ironically, in retrospect) made me feel very proud of what I have accomplished in the last decade or so; in 2016, I spent many dreary hours writing out appeal documents of one kind or another, trying to convince other people of the value of the work I’d been doing. Since the appeal was denied in November I have tried, with intermittent success, to focus again on my own goals and standards, but just keeping up with the day to day demands on my time and energy kept me from doing this in more than an ad hoc way. Ideally, the summer months allow for sustained reflection and work of a more expansive kind–but what work, of what kind? I know that I’d like to get back to writing more essays instead of just reviews, but about what? I have a couple of ideas and one fairly definite plan; it will feel good to clear my desk (and my desktop), set some priorities, and get to work on projects I am excited about.

I’ll settle in to do this after I get back from my vacation: I leave on Thursday, as soon as we’ve put our annual ‘May Marks Meeting’ behind us. It will probably continue to be quiet here at Novel Readings while I’m away (though I will have my laptop along, so you never know). However, I will be reading plenty (I’ve got Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In the Castle for the plane, for instance), and I will come back refreshed and ready to write.

This Week In My Classes: The Dust Settles

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I filed final grades for my winter term courses this week: apart from a couple of make-up tests that still need sorting out, my work for them is over. I have sorted and recycled or filed all my notes and paperwork, and put the books back where they belong — which for some of them means on the shelf where I will gather materials for next year’s courses, but for all of them means out of the way of the space I will use to stash everything for my summer projects. (These will get their own post, once I’ve sorted out better just what they are!)

Looking back over my 2016-17 teaching, a few things stand out.

First of all, while classroom teaching is always, for me, the best part of this job–the part that makes up for a lot of the nonsense and the stress and the long hours it entails–this year it mattered to more than ever, because I was doing it under the shadow of my promotion appeal, a process that significantly undermined my confidence, my self-esteem, and my collegiality. During the fall term especially, I often found it hard to concentrate, never mind to be my best self, but almost without fail, my time in the classroom was both intellectually stimulating and emotionally therapeutic.

howe-close-readingSome of that was due to my specific teaching assignments this year. My fall term courses were both ones I have taught before and really enjoy. Since I first designed my version of Close Reading, I have tried to infuse its more technical aspects with both critical and moral purpose, and the result is that it generates some of the most interesting discussions and assignments I get. It was also balm to my soul to spend five weeks on Middlemarch for this class: that is not enough time, of course–what would be?–but still feels comparatively luxurious (when I teach Middlemarch in my standard 19th-century fiction class, we get three weeks). Finishing with The Remains of the Day is always marvelous, but Ishiguro’s novel felt particularly and painfully relevant right after the U.S. election.

My other fall term class was The Victorian ‘Woman Question.’ For this class we read works from a range of genres, including Mill’s The Subjection of Women, Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and EBB’s Aurora Leigh–another text that resonated powerfully with current events. I had a particularly keen and engaged group in this seminar: class discussions were exceptionally smart and lively, and the group presentations were among the best I’ve ever seen.

In the winter term, I taught 19th-Century Fiction from Dickens to Hardy, which is familiar territory in most respects as I teach either it or its Austen to Dickens version pretty much every year. (I’m fearful that might change when we revise our curriculum to cope with our shrinking faculty complement–that would be sad!) I do try to mix things up at least a little bit every time, and this year’s innovation was putting Adam Bede on the reading list. I thought it taught beautifully: it is more schematic than Middlemarch and more accessible than The Mill on the Floss (both of which I have taught in this class). I think some students found it a bit slow–but imagine, then, how they would have found either of the other two! It also stood as a wonderful contrast to Tess of the d’Urbervilles; a lot of students wrote on these novels for their essay question on the final exam, and the results were usually excellent.

The big teaching adventure for me this term was Pulp Fiction. I’m not really sure yet how it went: I’m still thinking about it! I found it much more difficult than I’d expected to get discussion going in class–both in the lectures and in the smaller tutorial sessions–and this made me worry that nobody was finding the readings or the class engaging, but based on some feedback I’ve had since, I think at least some of the students were enjoying themselves just fine, they just weren’t talking. This is not ideal, obviously, so as I prepare to teach the class again next winter I’ll be thinking about ways to liven things up.

valdezOne thing I realized as the term went by is that the big questions that, in my mind, really motivated the course–questions about the difference between “pulp” or “genre” fiction and “literary” fiction, for instance–were not of great interest (at least, as far as I could tell) to most of the students: they did not seem to be invested in either the distinction or arguments against it. My guess is that most of them had never thought much about genre categories or literary prestige before; certainly I got no sign that they believed themselves to be victims of or participants in any kind of “culture war” by virtue of having been assigned Elmore Leonard and Loretta Chase instead of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. It’s possible that some of them are now more interested in how and why we might draw these kinds of lines, but it was at once disorienting and refreshing to realize that they were not nearly as exercised about them as people often are in the media or in the world of literary criticism and book reviewing. In the end it was just another thing I was trying to teach them about.

I also found that the issue of how to deal with “inappropriate” or potentially offensive content in our readings–such as racist language or explicit sex scenes–which is something I fretted about a lot as I drew up the course materials and my early lecture notes–did not seem to be much of a problem either. It is possible that I successfully preempted some kinds of knee-jerk reactions: for the first time ever, for example, I included a kind of “content warning” statement in my syllabus, acknowledging the presence of elements that we would need to exercise care, precision, and maturity in addressing. One of the first technical things I talked about was the use/mention distinction, and I took care also to work on the difference between a character’s point of view and what we could discern to be the position the novel as a whole took on issues like race or gender. It’s also possible that I will learn more about students’ reactions to these issues when I read the course evaluations: it may be that students who did find some of the material uncomfortable also did not feel free to tell me so. In a way, that is fine, provided they were not unhappy with how we (or just I) dealt with the material in class discussion.

I know how fortunate I am that these four courses comprised my entire teaching load this year, especially as two of them were upper-level courses in my own field of specialization. When we adopted 2/2 as our standard teaching load a few years ago, we did have to raise class sizes, sometimes significantly,  which meant that though contact and preparation hours went down, the marking load stayed more or less the same. Larger classes also increase administrative time–everything from data entry to alphabetizing assignments to handling student appointments and emails takes longer the more people you are keeping track of. (This term, for instance I had about 130 students between my two classes: I’ve had more some terms, though I’ve also sometimes had fewer.) As we head into 2017-18 we are facing a significant reduction in the number of full-time faculty members in our department: inevitably, we are reconsidering how to allocate the resources that will remain. My teaching next year is going to be almost identical to this year’s, but after that, who knows?

You can read more about my classes going all the way back to 2007; posts about it are indexed on the Teaching page (so far I haven’t added links to this year’s entries), or you can click on the tag for ‘This Week In My Classes’ and work your way backwards.

“Modest Hope”: Rosy Thornton, Hearts and Minds

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thornton

After that, there was a return to something of the camaraderie which had developed between them during these last two terms and he discovered himself nursing the more modest hope that her departure would not mean a cessation of their friendship.

The last time I wrote about Rosy Thornton here, in a post on her later novel The Tapestry of Love, I identified Hearts and Minds as a book that “now numbers among the little cluster of books I think of as my ‘comfort reading,’ books that I reread when I want to wander mentally away from home without feeling adrift, to be distracted without being distraught or dismayed.” That was in 2011, and to be honest I don’t think I have actually gone back to Hearts and Minds since then, not because I changed my mind about it but because — happily — the cluster of books I reread for amiable diversion is larger than it used to be. It now includes, for instance, a number of romance novels, which provide not so much comfort as cheer.

I wonder if it’s because in the interval I have read so many books with happy endings that on this reread, Hearts and Minds seemed more melancholy than I remembered it. Not that it’s a sad or pessimistic book — far from it. It’s a campus novel, and thus perhaps inevitably satirical — a much kinder, gentler satire than, say, David Lodge’s — but it’s also an intimately human story about well-meaning people trying to make their way forward, as best they can, in their intertwined professional and personal lives. It doesn’t offer either belly laughs or epiphanies, but it’s full of quiet insight and a kind of wry tenderness.

The novel’s paired protagonists are James Rycarte, the charismatic newly appointed Head of St. Radegund’s College, Cambridge who has landed in academia after a career at the BBC, and the college’s Head Tutor, Martha Pearce. Martha’s career as an academic economist has stalled because of her devoted attention to her administrative duties. She likes the work, but her term is nearly up and she’s facing an uncertain future worsened by her teenage daughter’s inertia and withdrawal (which she fears is depression) and her poet husband’s self-indulgent underemployment. Despite the value she places on her work, and the utter dependence of her family on her as the only real earner, Martha is plagued with guilt about her long hours and fragmented attention.

Much of the novel’s plot is devoted to maneuvers around a potential donation that would shore up St. Radegund’s literally sinking foundations but poses what some faculty see as an unacceptable conflict of interest. On this, and on the equally vexing issue of a student strike against rising college rents, James and Martha work together first as colleagues, then as allies, and finally as friends. If you think there’s some romantic potential there, you’re not wrong, but one of my favorite things about the novel is that it’s recognized in but does not become the story. In fact, it’s really only James who develops warmer feelings, but he is too good a man to make them Martha’s problem, even when she lets on that she and her husband may be separating. As for Martha, she may be fed up with her husband and desperate for a change, but that doesn’t mean she’s giving up on him or their life together. It’s all very mature — and that’s one of the other things that struck me about the novel this time, that it’s a realistic novel about the complexities of mid-life and mid-career.

Almost every crisis that looms in Hearts and Minds fizzles out by the end of the novel: as a result, there are neither catastrophes nor epiphanies. Maybe it doesn’t sound all that comforting, but that lack of drama, along with the gentle wit with which Thornton treats all of her well-imagined characters, is what I like about it. This time around it reminded me less of Anne Tyler and more of some Joanna Trollope’s earlier novels, especially A Village Affair or Marrying the Mistress. Hearts and Minds is a little lighter than either of these, but they all have the same commitment to taking everyday life seriously, appreciating its bright spots without too much wishful thinking about how easily we can solve its inevitable problems.

This Week: All Exams All the Time

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OK, I exaggerate slightly: I’ve also had some papers to grade. But the final exams for both of my winter term classes were this Tuesday. At 3 hours each, with set up and pack up time that meant over 7 hours straight in the dreary Dalplex fieldhouse, and I walked away with 120 exams which I will be working my way through until next Tuesday at least. Overall, it’s not exhilarating work: there are certainly bright spots (many of which so far have been in the essay answers from students in the 19th-century fiction class), but a lot of this marking is more or less drudgery. I do try to make the questions not just relevant but, where possible, interesting, for me as well as for the students, but as I’ve written about here before, the main value of exams for me is simply, and kind of sadly, coercive. So I approach this part of every term with resignation, and try to pace myself so that repetition and fatigue don’t make me mean.

The other typical feature of this time of year is an uptick in meetings. These too require some deliberate self-care for me these days, as I continue to struggle a bit with the emotional residue of my failed promotion application. Certain topics, and certain faces, can still trigger bursts of bitterness; one thing I’ve been thinking about, inspired in part by this excellent post from Timothy Burke, is how to orient myself towards the university for the remaining third of my career there. (I’ll probably write something more about this once this term is fully behind me.) At the department level, our meetings are particularly difficult right now as we are facing a decline of a third in our faculty complement (the number of full time faculty in the department) due to the non-replacement of retirees. As you can imagine, shrinkage on this scale has significant repercussions for everything from our ability to form supervisory committees for graduate students to the kind and range of undergraduate courses we can offer — and thus for how we structure our majors and honors programs. Let’s just say the term “death spiral” has come up more than once: it’s hard to sustain a program, much less expand or innovate it, under these conditions.

I have been managing to get some reading done: some serious reading, with an eye to reviewing deadlines coming up, and some light reading. I just finished Julie James’s newest, The Thing About Love — and did not love it. It was entertaining enough, and she’s good at both plot and banter, but the awkwardness I always notice in her prose seemed particularly conspicuous this time. I can’t believe better editing couldn’t smooth a lot of it out: she has tics like explaining new names by adding “referring to etc. etc.” after them. I was diverted by the book, but also disappointed in it, especially as I like her previous novel, Suddenly Last Summer, a lot. I am really looking forward to doing some immersive reading that’s not for work (or for formal reviews, for that matter). I have some birthday gift cards I’m going to use to treat myself to some new books as soon as I file final grades! It will probably be pretty quiet around here until then.