Bloggers and Critics: Everything new is old again

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

My previous post on appreciating book bloggers was in progress as the discussion unfolded on Twitter about ‘book bloggers ruining everything’ (via Ron Hogan, for one, who was watching a discussion from earlier this year between Charles McGrath and Daniel Mendelsohn* that involved a fair number of pot shots at book bloggers [see here if you want to watch it for yourself]). I’ve been thinking that one of the reasons these reductive and dismissive attitudes towards bloggers have any traction at all, and come from such otherwise very smart people, is the problem of filtering.

In blogging (as in every medium) there is good stuff (even some great stuff) and bad stuff (even some really truly terrible stuff). It is probably true, just because of the lack of inhibitions on blogging and other forms of self-publication, that the bad-to-terrible stuff  outweighs the good-to-great stuff by a larger margin than in old forms of print media. It takes patience, curiosity, time and open-mindedness to trawl the vast array of blogs (even in the subset of book blogs) looking for the good stuff. Lots of us do it, because there are real rewards for lovers of books and criticism and conversation. But it’s vanishingly unlikely that someone who gets all their links from the Big Established Sites, including their blogs, will find most of the sites we write for or read, because they all seem to read and link to exclusively other Big Established Sites. The Book Bench at the New Yorker, for instance, has its own often engaging posts, but it links around pretty much exclusively to places like the Nation, or the Guardian, or the Wall Street Journal, or PEN. These are worthy sites, of course, but anybody who’s interested in the Book Bench is probably already following them, one way or another. At most, all the Book Bench is doing is letting us know which pieces in these esteemed sources were of particular interest to them, or saving us the trouble of sorting through more than a couple of our RSS feeds for the day. The blogroll at the Book Bench has 24 links–not a bad start, but all, again, high profile already (mostly other mainstream media outlets, plus Maud Newton, Sarah Weinman, and a couple of the best-known online book sites–The Millions, The Second Pass). Again, all worthy of our attention–well, there’s one on their list I’m not sure about, actually, and why it’s there and not some of the ones I admire, I have no idea.  The Guardian has a smaller and even odder selection; at the TLS, both Peter Stothard and Mary Beard have small blogrolls too, though ones that reflect a bit more idiosyncrasy, which is nice. Still, none of these sites (or a number of other blogs associated with major papers and magazines) seem genuinely bloggish, in that there’s really no sense of the reciprocity I suggested distinguishes blogging as an especially open and generous form. The major aggregator sites (I’m thinking of Arts and Letters Daily, for instance, or Three Quarks Daily) also rarely step outside the rarified world of the ‘top’ sites. It would be refreshing, and good for the general conversation about books (which we’re all passionate about–or at least amateur book bloggers are), if these Big Established Sites would participate in the remarkable opening up of the cultural conversation that the internet has enabled.  Right now, I think  followers of the big sites are bound to feel a bit claustrophobic after a while, not to mention excluded. The exercise of looking for the good stuff among the bad would be tiring and discouraging some of the time, but acknowledging the smart, articulate blogs that are more than what Mendelsohn calls “unchecked effusions”–and doing so in a forum that already has  a little credibility in the world of old media–might help people like McGrath and Mendelsohn stop conflating form and content–or just ignoring content altogether. A good place to start would be with the handful of sites I listed.

*I admit that I was particularly disappointed at the tone of Mendelsohn’s comments (though he does acknowledge that there are some good lit blogs, and his point about chasing ‘hits’ by writing what gets attention is a fair one) because I wrote what I still consider one of my best blog posts about his remarkable book The Lost. What difference does it make that I wrote this sitting in my basement fairly late at night? (I’ll spare you the detail of whether or not I was actually in my pyjamas: the blogger’s wardrobe seems to be an issue of surprising concern to some people.) It’s either good writing and analysis or not. It’s true that I wrote it without the benefit of an editor (well, besides myself–and I’m pretty tough on myself, as I am on others), but the unmediated scrutiny of online readers is another way to test the merits of the result. In my case, I was gratified to be recognized for my work by Three Quarks Daily, where the editors named this post a finalist in their arts and literature blogging contest last year (these contests, by the way, are a great step towards the kind of sorting project I wish sites like this should do–but I don’t notice 3QD linking regularly to the winners or finalists in their regular posts).

Book Bloggers: An Appreciation

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Last week was Book Blogger Appreciation Week. I wasn’t involved in it at all directly. I’m not exactly a “book blogger,” I suppose–more of a blogger who often writes about books, if there is such a distinction. I haven’t really been very bloggy lately, either: I haven’t been linking around a lot, or writing posts that respond to other people’s or that intervene in debates that are circulating around the blog world. I used to do more of that kind of thing, and I kind of miss it, as you get more of a feeling of connection if you do, in fact, make connections. But it requires more immediacy than my blogging has had for a while, partly because my writing attention has been spread a little thin recently. I do like taking the time to write longer reviews, but I worry that in a blog, that kind of thing can start to seem rather self-absorbed! And I think it’s not true that, as one fellow blogger recently suggested to me (perhaps tongue-in-cheek?), blogging is all about narcissism and craving attention. Well, OK, there has to be a little of that, even though we all probably insist both to ourselves and others that we do it for the instrinsic satisfaction. We do, but if that was all we wanted, we could just use a scribbler and a pen. But the attention we crave is that of like-minded people, people who will enter into our idiosyncratic interests and share their own, people at once curious and generous enough to come into our space. And we try to get their attention by freely offering our ideas about books, which is also a pretty generous thing to do. So in the spirit of reciprocity that I think is really fundamental to blogging, I’d like to note my appreciation for some other bloggers who write about books. I appreciate in particular that in the world of these blogs, unlike in the world of mainstream book reviewing, you don’t get overwhelmed with multiple and thus inevitably repetitious reviews of the same handful of new books. This is very much the world of publishing’s long tail. It’s a world in which books published in 1798, or 1817, or 1946, or 2007 are all equally vital. It’s a world in which there’s room for personal responses, but it’s not the taste-test world of Amazon “top” reviewers: in this world, it’s expected that you’ll think about your reactions and write about them as well as you can. This is not an exhaustive list of the blogs I follow (neither is the blogroll on the right, which reminds me–I should update that), but it’s a start on acknowledging some of the sites that consistently replenish my own stock of ideas and enthusiasms about books and blogging, as well as my TBR lists.

Wuthering Expectations: ‘Amateur Reader’ has just celebrated the third anniversary of his wonderful blog. This is the site that brought us the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge (eep! I haven’t finished The Perpetual Curate! But I did read all of The Antiquary) and Sympathetic Character Week, among many other finely themed interludes. His posts are smart, entertaining, and often unexpected in the direction they go or the insight they discover. AR manages to have fun with writers from John Galt to Elizabeth Gaskell to Thomas Carlyle (and you’ve gotta love a blog that turns up 19 posts tagged ‘Thomas Carlyle’).

Tales from the Reading Room: ‘Litlove’ is another of my go-to bloggers. The tone is more introspective than at ‘Wuthering Expectations’ but the effect is just as engaging. Each post, whether personal or bookish, is patient and nuanced. You could do a lot worse than spend an hour browsing in the Reading Room archives, where you will find thoughtful encounters with writers as diverse as Orhan Pamuk and Jeanette Winterson, Steig Larsson and Henry James. At the top of the page today is a wry (and, to me, familiar) story about disagreeing over Facebook. I have litlove (and DorothyW of ‘Of Books and Bicycles,’ below) to thank for recommending Rosy Thornton, whose gently incisive academic novel Hearts and Minds I just finished.

Necromancy Never Pays: Jeanne wins the prize for most unusual blog title! (Its provenance is explained in the sidebar, if you click on over.) In addition to reviews and reflections on recent reading, lately including Franzen’s Freedom and Temple Grandin’s Animals Make Us Human,  NNP offers regular doses of poetry (often her choices are new to me) and Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers (discouragingly, for a supposed professional, I almost never know the answers!).

Bookphilia: Bookphilia’s Colleen is another blogger who offers not just sharp and refreshingly personal reviews of a wide range of reading material (particular interests include Japanese, French, and 19thC British literature),  but also special features, in her case including ‘Curious Creepy,’ in which she spies (for lack of a more tactful word) on what people around her are reading, and ‘I Interview Dead People’ (including Wordsworth, just for example). Her posts on George Eliot’s Romola are not only spectacularly interesting but were also well timed to show my graduate seminar last term (a) how to work well with such difficult material and (b) how to write great blog posts that invite high-level conversation.

stevereads: Is there anything Steve doesn’t read? With his inimitable energy and enviable fluency, Steve covers  everything from the weightiest historical biography to the fluffiest Harlequin Romance with equal rigor and in equal detail. Wondering which edition of Moby Dick to read? Steve’s your man. Wondering what’s new in comics? Once again… Steve keeps tabs on the ‘Penny Press‘ (those lowly competitors of OLM!), reviews Penguins on Parade, and shares the very different beauties of National Geographic and Paul Marron. He offers his original takes on classics (Green Eggs and Ham, anyone?) and illuminates corners of the book world so obscure we can all only wonder: has he, in fact, read everything?

Of Books and Bicycles: Unlike me, DorothyW has finished The Perpetual Curate, and her write-up is as clear and inviting as her book reviews usually are. She has a knack for making me feel inadequately sporty, what with the whole cycling thing (but I run! not far, not fast, but I do run!). She also writes about teaching and about a wide range of writers, from Sara Caudwell to W. G. Sebald. Like litlove, she participates in the Slaves of Golconda reading group, which has always looked like a fun thing to do. Hmmm…do you think I would want to belong to their club if they were willing to have me as a member?

Bibliographing: Nicole at bibliographing is another blogger I count on for fresh, pithy, but thoughtful perspectives in all kinds of books. She recently weighed in on a little-noticed title by some guy named Franzen, for instance, but she’s as like to write on Melville (didn’t he also write a Great American Novel?) or Roberto Bolano. (You know, as I write up these little blurbs, I start to wonder how, with all the reading going on out there, anybody actually gets any of their real work done…)

The Little Professor: Miriam Burstein’s Little Professor blog may have been the first one I started reading, and it’s still the very best place to go for detailed write-ups of completely obscure 19th-century religious novels. If that sounds dry, well, it’s a testament to Miriam’s style and savvy that while I have never finished one of these posts with any desire at all to read the book under discussion, I have never regretted reading the post itself! She exemplifies the possibilities for academics who want to bring their expertise out into the public eye. A good example is her recent post on Roger Scruton and Newman’s Idea of a University. For something completely different, but also typical of her wit and creativity, try LP in the House.

To all these bloggers, and to everyone else on my blogroll and Google subscriptions, thank you for bringing your intelligence, humor, and passion to writing about books–for free, and for everyone. It’s much appreciated!

This Week in My Classes: Agatha Christie and a Trio of Lyrical Treats

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Actually, the trio of lyrical treats identified in Dorothy Parker’s delightful “Pig’s-Eye View of Literature” are Byron and Shelley and Keats, while this week in British Literature Since 1800 we’re doing Coleridge and Shelley and Keats. But Coleridge can be lyrical too, and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is something of a treat, though of just what kind I’m never sure. We’re still very much in the warming-up phase in this class. Building any momentum is significantly hampered, I find, by the long course add-drop period (two weeks in which at any time new faces may appear while ones you were just starting to attach names to vanish without a trace). The system is clearly designed to make things easier for the students, who can take their sweet time sorting out their courses; the pedagogical inconvenience and paperwork generated for us as we try to keep our class lists up to date and initiate the dribble of new people into the class expectations and materials don’t seem to matter to the people in charge. Yes, this is making me cranky: I’ve just updated my class lists for about the 12th time, then had to manually add and remove students from Blackboard and PBWorks in the hopes that the newbies will show enough initiative to check out all the information provided on these sites rather than just showing up this afternoon and asking “did I miss anything?” In an entire week of classes? YES! Of course you missed something. (Yes, I know the Tom Wayman poem about this.) Anyway, it’s routine business at the start of every term, but it’s absurdly inefficient.

What they missed, if it’s English 2002 they are just joining, is our introduction to the course, first of all, in which I outline not just the schedule and requirements and so forth, but also the principles and motivations behind them and the objectives I hope they’ll meet. Next was our introduction to Romanticism, via Wordsworth, and a training session on using PBWorks. I raised the stakes a bit this year to motivate better participation in the wiki projects. Last year’s results were OK, but the weak spot was the concept of “gardening,” signing in a couple of times a week just to tweak the site and make it a little better. With the project overall worth a bit more of their final grade, I hope they’ll take this responsibility more seriously. It’s not a big time commitment, but as everyone who works online knows, a few minutes every so often can make a big difference. Last year I waited for weeks to see if someone would correct a main headline that read “Woodsworth” (someone eventually did, but not until I dropped a big hint in class about embarrassing typos). This week we continue our discussion of Romanticism but complicating and even undermining some of the generalizations I offered about it as a chronological period and, more importantly, as a literary movement. Coleridge’s preoccupations are not the same as Wordsworth’s, and Keats and Shelley are different again, from the ‘first generation’ as well as from each other. I always feel that Romantic poetry is a like Impressionist art, in that it is easy to like it in a casual sort of way: the surface features are pretty and undemanding, and the first layer of ideas is easily assimilated. But both get more interesting in context, as you get a sense of what the artists were working against and for. With Wordsworth in particular, that’s what I tried to bring out in the short time I had for him: I made a pitch for how it is possible to read “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” which is about as simple and child-like a poem as you could dream up, as revolutionary precisely in its simplicity and child-like attitude, as well as its invocation of memory and nature as balms for the troubled modern soul. OK, it’s maybe a bit of a stretch, but if they can come to see daffodils as aesthetically subversive, they are on their way to appreciating some of the ways a text achieves its significance–and to realizing that its significance will not always be obvious but will often require some thought and some research to understand.

In Women and Detective Fiction, we warmed up last week with samples from some ‘classic’ authors, to get a sense of the history and conventions of the genre to which our women writers will provide a counter-tradition (or, as I suggested today, a counter-point tradition, as the intersections are many). So we read Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and Hammett’s “The House on Turk Street.” Then on Friday we looked at a couple of early examples of women writing about crime and detection, with Susan Glaspell’s great story “A Jury of Her Peers” and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Long Arm.” Both press us to consider the adequacy of conventional ideas about both crime and justice; in both cases, people’s gendered expectations interfere with solving the crime. This week it’s Agatha Christie, with a selection of Miss Marple stories, and then next week we’re on to Nancy Drew. In this class the material is quite fun and the group is highly self-selecting, so in some respects things are bound to go along smoothly. The challenge becomes making sure we take the material seriously ourselves. I’m a little worried that two classes on Miss Marple is too much: it’s tricky scheduling things so that the pace of topics is reasonable, especially when the readings aren’t especially deep or complex. (There’s a reason, as others have noted as well, that close reading tactics become dominant just when there’s a significant body of literature that is quite difficult to understand at first glance, and also why certain writers are especially ‘teachable’ using these methods–Donne, say, rather than a more literal poet like Dryden, or Hammett rather than Christie, to use a more immediately relevant example.)

Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

If you ever read a book, or were a child, or read a book to a child–if your childhood was shaped in any way by the books you read–then you should buy this book and read it immediately. It’s available at the astonishingly low price of $5.36 U.S. from Amazon. Go order it. Now! Then spend a few hours in the company of a woman who helped make you who you are, and make childhood what it is, through her passion, enthusiasm, and advocacy for children’s literature. Good Night Moon, Charlotte’s Web, Harriet the Spy…these and many, many more books were published by the Department of Books for Boys and Girls at Harper’s under the guidance of Ursula Nordstrom. Until a couple of weeks ago I had never heard her name, and now I consider her one of the best friends I have that I’ve never actually met. She actually reminds me a lot of my grandmother, also an editor, also a working woman in a man’s world, also a passionate lover of the written word, and also a firm believer that you could accomplish almost anything with a great letter, especially one bursting with conviction and affection and bristling with CAPS, dashes, and exclamation points. The combination of Nordstrom’s powerful personality and lively writing style and the interest and nostalgia of the discussions of so many now classic children’s books makes this volume an enormous treat to read. Because you are all going to rush out and get your own copies, I won’t do more here than touch on some of the many highlights. Here’s Nordstrom writing to Maurice Sendak in 1963 (Nordstrom contracted Sendak as an illustrator in 1950 when he was working at F. A. O. Schwartz setting up window displays):

Maurice, before I sent the paste-up I went through it, rereading the words, and looking at the pictures again. It is MOST MAGNIFICENT, and we’re so proud to have it on our list. When you were much younger, and had done only a couple of books, I remember I used to write you letters when the books were finished, and thank you for “another beautiful” job — or some such dopiness. Now you’re rich and famous and need no words of wonder from me. But I must send them, anyhow, when I look through Where the Wild Things Are. I think it is utterly magnificent, and the words are beautiful and meaningful, and it does just what you wanted it to do. And you did just what you wanted to do.

I’ve felt sort of down in the dumps about picture books lately, (and about those who write and illustrate and buy and review them, too, to be frank!). But this bright beautiful Monday your beautiful book is exhilarating, and it reminds me that I love creative people and love to publish books for creative children.

Her conviction that children are creative, and that they and their imaginations will flourish if only plodding adults will get out of their way, is one of her most attractive qualities–it seems even more appealing and important today, actually, because a former student told me a shocking story about the preschool teacher she’s currently working with who does not allow any fiction at all in her classroom, including, explicitly and emphatically, books with such unrealistic ingredients as talking animals. No Charlotte’s Web for them, though perhaps this anecdote in one of Nordstrom’s letters to E. B. White would help to change her mind:

I went to a convention of librarians and saw a lot of good souls there and I met a lot of teachers, too. I was really amazed and pleased to discover how many of them (teachers) know and use some of the good children’s books–especially your two. One teacher told me that she’d had a principal who didn’t care what she did with her students as long as she “got them through the Cumberland Gap by Thanksgiving.” But, she said, she was trying to stand firm and trying to use books imaginatively with her students. Or scholars, as you put it. She said she had one class of “culturally deprived” you should excuse the expression youngsters, and she was supposed to “teach them Emerson’s essay on Friendship.” She said it was a lost cause so instead she read them Charlotte’s Web which, she stated, does everything Emerson could have done……She put it better, but I thought it was a good idea and wanted to tell you about it.

We long for another E. B. White book.

She boosts and encourages and promotes and hassles and celebrates and coddles and challenges her writers, determined to get the very best out of them she possibly can–for them, and for the children. (In his introduction, editor Leonard Marcus notes that her characteristic marginal note was “N.G.E.F.Y.,” or “Not Good Enough For You”–which is indeed a brilliant and highly motivating combination of praise and criticism.) It’s endlessly engaging to read her missives to them. I found the back-and-forth about illustrations particularly fascinating; here’s a little bit from a letter to Katharine White (E. B.’s wife):

You will see that in the sample drawings for Stuart Little Mr. [Garth] Williams did one picture in different techniques. We like the more detailed technique, don’t you? He was careful about lots of small but important details. For instance, in the picture of the doctor examining Stuart, Stuart is standing up. Mr. Williams had him lying down in the first sketch but changed it because he was afraid he might look like a little dead mouse if he were lying down. (That is probably a silly detail to pass on to you, but it was somehow encouraging to us.)

Garth Williams (who also did the drawings for the Little House books) was the illustrator for Charlotte’s Web as well:

On drawing marked (1) [Nordstrom writes to EBW] Charlotte has 8 eyes, which apparently she should have. Two on the top of her head, two low on the sides of her head, two where eyes usually are, and two where Garth has indicated a nose. I think that if the nose dots were made larger (as her eyes would be) and the line he has put in for her mouth were omitted, she would be still attractive but more of a spider. I put a small piece of paper over that line of her mouth and she looked better (less like a person).

Tell me you didn’t just go get your copy (of course you have one, right?) of the illustrated Charlotte’s Web to check out Charlotte’s eyes!

My favourite mode for Nordstrom, though, is advocate. She is impatient with bumbling adults who put their limited imaginations in the way of children’s more innocent, creative, and adventurous way of looking at and experiencing the world. In 1954, she rattles off a long (in this edition, nearly five full pages) letter to a Harper’s rep who was struggling with complaints about How to Make an Earthquake by Ruth Krauss, the author of A Hole is to Dig (which Sendak illustrated). “I bleed at every pore,” she tells him, “when I read your plaintive statement to the Sales Manager, ‘I wonder if the book couldn’t stand a little editing if it isn’t too late.” It is too late, she tells him, but more importantly, it would be a huge mistake, a catastrophe, to revise the book in order to placate buyers who thought it encouraged children to be messy and disrespectful. “What does Ruth have to do to convince some of your customers that she knows something about children they don’t know?” Nordstrom wonders. “Oh hell, it all boils down to: you just can’t explain this sort of wonderful stuff to some adults, Jim”:

I saw the finished book, type and pictures, yesterday, and it is really swell. The pictures are delightful. There will be a couple of ‘activities’ that some grown-ups will object to but the book as a whole is a book of freshness, imagination, love, originality, humor, pathos, and–well, take your pick of flap-copy nouns. Just look at the last line of the How to Entertain Telephone Callers–which ends “or whatever is your talent.” Believe me, that is so close to children, so exactly right, so damn warm and perfect that any little child can’t help but feel happier at the moment when it is read to him. “Happier” isn’t the right word. I guess I mean that “or whatever is your talent” can’t help but make any child feel warm and attended to and considered. And, believe me, not many children’s books make children feel considered. No child would define it that way but you’ll know what I mean.

“Krauss books,” she admits, “will not charm those sinful adults who sift their reactions through their own messy adult maladjustments.” But rather than edit the book to please them, she stands up and fights for a book that is “pure 100% Krauss.”

kitchenPerhaps her most heroic moment is her defense of Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, which as I’m sure all of us remember, includes among its many wonderful drawings one of “a little naked 6-year old,” as Nordstrom describes it to E. B. White. “I have had several requests,” she goes on, “for a revised edition in which the little boy is clothed or covered in some graceful way.” One librarian took it upon herself to solve this problem by painting on a diaper. “Other librarians might wish to do the same,” said a letter to the School Library Journal. Nordstrom’s statement in response to this act of  “censorship by mutilation”  is a manifesto not just for children’s books but for the whole idea of creative freedom, and for the principles of openness and access that libraries in particular ought to represent:

A private individual who owns a book is free, of course, to do with it as he pleases; he may destroy his property, or cherish it, even paint clothes on any naked figures that appear in it. But it is an altogether different matter when a librarian disfigures a book purchased with public funds–thereby editing the work of the author–and then presents this distortion to the library’s patrons.

The mutilation of Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen by certain librarians must not be allowed to have an intimidating effect on creators and publishers of books for children. We, as writers, illustrators, publishers, critics, and librarians, deeply concerned with preserving the First Amendment freedoms for everyone involved in communicating ideas, vigorously protest this exercise of censorship.

452 writers, illustrators, publishers, critics, and librarians signed the letter.

Nordstrom is just as outspoken on the challenges of being a working woman in a male-dominated environment as she is on everything else; she helped later generations of women understand themselves better by supporting works like Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy and its sequel, The Long Secret, which included the first mention of menstruation in literature for young people:

I remember clearly the day I read the manuscript of The Long Secret and came upon the part devoted to Beth Ellen’s first menstruation. I wrote in the margin, “Thank you, Louise Fitzhugh!”, for it seemed to me it was about time that this subject, of such paramount importance to little girls of Beth Ellen’s age, was mentioned naturally and accepted in a children’s book as part of life.

Here’s a moment where her efforts certainly touched my own life:

The great Shel Silverstein told Marlo Thomas the great Marlo Thomas to look me up while she is in NY making a TV special. . . She is very caught up with Women’s Lib . . . and she has been upset by some of the ‘sexist literature’ being fed to children. She had seen a couple of particularly obnoxious books called I’m Glad I’m a Girl and I’m Glad I’m a Boy. What she wants to do is make a record for Caedmon Records (very good people) that people can play to their children, and she hoped I could find her some writers who would contribute brief stories and/or poems which will in some way counteract the sexist stuff. I showed her William’s Doll…

That’s right: the resulting album was Free to Be…You and Me. (When I listened to it as a child, I never fully appreciated the track “Parents are People”–now it means a lot more to me!)

The fun just goes on and on, and my appreciation for who Nordstrom was and what she accomplished just goes up and up as I look through the volume again, but I can’t go on forever here–and you need time to read the whole thing for yourself, so I’ll end by thanking SD (again!) for another unexpectedly great reading experience.

Fall 2010 Course Outlines

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In the comments to my previous post, a couple of people said they’d be interested in seeing my course outlines for this fall, so I’ve prepared short versions of them (trimmed of the boilerplate stuff about attendance policies, late papers, academic integrity, accommodations for students with disabilities and so forth). Of course, if you’re particularly keen to know what my policies are on attendance or late papers, I can explain them too. There is not one right way to design or run a course; I use readings and assignments (and policies) that have seemed to me to work well over the years, and that suit the kind of teacher and person I am. (Like parenting, teaching is an activity in which I think you can only really flourish if you are yourself in it, playing to your strengths and acknowledging and, as much as possible, guarding against your weaknesses.) That said, I also learn and borrow from colleagues on campus or online: the wiki assignment I’m using in English 2002, for example, is a version of one Jason B. Jones designed and explained at the very helpful blog ProfHacker. Questions or suggestions welcome–there’s always a next time!

English 2002 Syllabus Short Version

English 4205 Syllabus Short Version


This Week in My Classes: Let the Wild Rumpus Start!

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

Well, it won’t be wild today, I don’t expect, but my teaching term does begin, with the first meeting of my seminar on Women and Detective Fiction. I’ve always really enjoyed teaching this seminar in the past: it usually attracts a good group of students, the readings are varied and, I think, productively juxtaposed, and the discussion as a result tends to be lively and interesting. Plus who wouldn’t like a reason to read Gaudy Night and call it working? Today is just administrative stuff, mostly, though I’ll make a few remarks about my choice of readings and some of the themes that I expect we’ll concentrate as we go forward. Then we’ll discuss the course requirements and expectations, and then sign everyone up for question sets and seminar presentations. Looking at my incredibly detailed syllabus, I am amused to remember the one page mimeographed sheets that served this purpose when I was an undergraduate. Now, if it’s not in the syllabus, good luck insisting on it! Today, students expect a very literal and precise explanation of what they are supposed to do and how they will be evaluated for their efforts. There are some good reasons for this, including transparency (it seems only fair that they should know what they are supposed to do and how they will be evaluated for it!) but at the same time the trend towards hand-holding does rather sap the student experience of what I guess I’d consider adult expectations. I worry, too, that my detailed handouts (and Blackboard sites) sometimes backfire, in that students don’t even try to infer anything or figure anything out for themselves (looking up regulations, for instance)–and then there are the students who blithely ignore all the support materials and email or corner you with tediously repetitious questions about when things are due, what the policy is on late papers, and so forth. I no longer answer these questions, except with a smiling “You’ll find all that information and more in your syllabus.” It’s that whole teach a man to fish philosophy (imagine, then, how it peeved me to see on one of my course evaluations a year or so ago, “She’s not very helpful: whenever I asked her anything, she just said “look in the syllabus”…).

Anyway, these petty annoyances aside, I’m glad to be heading into the classroom, and I expect to post regularly about it as I have been doing since Fall 2007! I still find the expectation (mine, not anybody else’s) that I’ll keep up the series a helpful kind of discipline, and I’m still frequently surprised at what I discover I have to say about the class meetings, even if it’s only some idea about what not to do next time when I cover the same material. This term is all repeat teaching, actually, except that I always tinker a little with the reading lists from year to year. In the British Literature Since 1800 survey course, for instance, I’ve put in Gaskell’s Mary Barton instead of Great Expectations, which mixes things up a bit. Much as I love Great Expectations, brilliant as it is, and sorry as I am not to be doing any Dickens, as a result, in the course–I just couldn’t go through it one more time quite so soon! And Mary Barton, while not nearly as brilliant, is in lots of ways just as interesting and representative of important things about Victorian literature. Plus it has a boat chase. I love the boat chase. In Women and Detective Fiction I didn’t succeed in really revamping the list, but then I’ve always been mostly very happy with it. But I did eventually add in Nancy Drew. And did I mention that I get to reread Gaudy Night? To my annoyance, Death in a Tenured Position (which nicely rounds out the academic focus of Gaudy Night and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman with a more contemporary perspective on feminism and universities) went out of print right after I placed my book order, but happily our bookstore has been able to round up nearly enough copies for everyone, and if the students can show a little extra initiative, they will be able to find more themselves. I didn’t want to let this book go, not just because of the academic angle (and the importance of poetry in it, which makes another interesting link to Gaudy Night) but because I definitely wanted to talk about Carolyn Heilbrun (who has also written some of the best essays around on women and detective fiction). I could have picked a different one of her novels, of course, and next time I might have to, but I’m fond of this one–and sometimes, with so many to choose from, that’s as good a reason as any!

So, off I go to class, and then this afternoon we all ‘meet and greet’ our incoming graduate students, and then we’re well underway for the year.

Summer Reading Wrap-Up: Mitchell, Genova, Paretsky, Nordstrom

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September 12 is the last day for counting books towards our goals for the public library’s summer reading club. Maddie and I were aiming for 25 each. I’m not sure I’m going to get four more titles in by Sunday, what with classes starting and all. There’s hope: I’m currently reading the latest (and I guess the last, since it’s posthumous) in Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone series, and Parker’s books have very few words in them. I’m also about half way through a couple of others, including Reginald Hill’s latest and Isabel Coleman’s Paradise Beneath Her Feet. Actually, I suppose there’s no reason I can’t count More All-of-a-Kind Family, which I reread a couple of days ago–so if I finish all three I have already started, I’ll make my quota!

I haven’t written detailed posts about all the books on my summer tally, so I thought I’d at least put a few thoughts together about some of them, if for no other reason than that I find I remember books much more clearly once I’ve written about them (plus, of course, if my memory dims, I can amble through the archives and perk it up).

One book that I read with interest and, for a while, some real enthusiasm is David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. But as I mentioned before, I hit first ‘An Orison of Somni-451’ and then ‘Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After,’ and my reading never recovered its momentum. Mitchell is clearly a brilliant and virtuosic writer, but after a while I found I was more aware of  his virtuosity and the ingenuity of the nesting narratives than I was actually engaged in them. The multiple genre trick is a risky one, I think, because after all, not all of us enjoy quite such a range of genres or styles, and this book rather insistently refuses to care about that. That kind of challenge to our reading habits may be good, and in fact for the first third of the book I found it invigorating to be wrenched out of one story into another, to adapt to the new style, and to puzzle over how the parts would ultimately interrelate. I’m fairly sure they do, but by the time I was finishing the book up, I wasn’t excited enough about it to figure out how or why.

I read Lisa Genova’s Still Alice on a friend’s recommendation (you know who you are, you lurker!) and while I can’t really say I enjoyed it, since it was extremely depressing, it was certainly moving and probably important, too. I thought it read a bit too much like a case study, or a novelized reenactment, especially through the first few chapters in which a number of fairly technical issues of symptoms, diagnoses, and medications need to be covered. But as Alice’s disease progresses, the tactic of recounting the story from her point of view became increasingly effective and is handled with wise understatement. After I finished it, I was pretty anxious every time I couldn’t remember something! My excuses, after all, are always the same as Alice’s: I’m busy, I’m distracted, I’m juggling multiple demands and tasks most of the time…and I’m too young to be demented–aren’t I?

I read Sara Paretsky’s next-t0-latest V. I. Warshawski novel, Hardball, with interest (her most recent, Body Work, has just come out). I liked it quite a bit. A while back I wrote a bit pettishly that I wasn’t sure my interest in this series could be sustained any further, mostly because I found it too predictable that the villains are always corporate leaders or businessmen, or corrupt politicians. Though this continues to be the case, within variations, in Hardball, I’m inclined more favorably to Paretsky’s overtly political worldview these days. One factor is just the sheer amount of time I’ve spent on my mystery and detective fiction courses, and in prowling around looking for interesting books to assign for them. I appreciate that Paretsky has a worldview, that she uses her novels quite deliberately to explore it: an awful lot of mystery novels are formulaic but without the compensations of actual ideas. I hadn’t taught Paretsky in my lecture course until this past year, when I substituted Indemnity Only for Sue Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi as an example of feminist revisions of hardboiled conventions. (In my ‘Women and Detective Fiction” seminar, I’ve always done both, which allows from some productive comparative discussions.) Grafton’s book is much wittier, but Indemnity Only seems to me to have aged better in some important ways. For instance, Grafton’s detective, Kinsey Millhone, embodies a certain kind of liberal feminism that Grafton called ‘playing hardball with the boys’ (hey–I just noticed the correlation with Paretsky’s title–but I don’t think there’s any deliberate interplay there). Kinsey is strongly male-identified; she refuses to dress up (her indestructible black dress that she keeps balled up in the back of her car for emergency girlishness is a running gag in the series); she takes pleasure in pumping her own gas; and so on. I like her tomboyish character, her refusal to play nice–and in ‘A’ is for Alibi and many of the other books in the series, I think Grafton does a lot of smart things with Kinsey’s struggles to maintain her autonomy, especially in romantic relationships. But the books are only implicitly political, and then only at the individual level: Kinsey won’t put up with shit, from men or anyone else. Paretsky’s idea of feminism seems to me a more complicated one; she pays a lot of attention to systemic problems, connecting women’s efforts to achieve or use power to social structures that also disadvantage people because of race or class. She puts a lot of emphasis on women’s relationships as potentially empowering allegiances, but she also seems more positive about the potential for equity in romance, though she doesn’t pretend it comes easily. The crimes of her novels are always intricately related to this nexus of issues: in Indemnity Only, for instance, the central mystery turns on fraud and corruption among powerful men, but the climactic confrontation at the end is nearly fatal for Vic and her love interest, Ralph, because he has not been able to take her work seriously. Though Vic is very tough, she is also very feminine in some conventional ways: we had some lively discussions in my class in the winter about her emphasis on what she’s wearing, the overt pleasure she takes in nice clothes and in looking good, and about the relationship of this interest (which Kinsey Millhone vehemently rejects) to different ideas about feminism and femininity. I was a little peeved to learn V. I.’s cup size in Hardball: it figures (so to speak) that she’d be a 36C. So as far as that goes, she still conforms to certain standards of female beauty–but that’s OK, some of my best friends are curvy.

The last book I wanted to say something about is Dear Genius: The Collected Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. But you know what? It was such a great read, and has so many delicious quotable bits, that I think I’ll put that off for its own post (also, I really should be prepping class notes by now…).

Shirley Hazzard, The Evening of the Holiday

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

The Evening of the Holiday tells the story of a love affair between the English Sophie and Tancredi, an Italian Sophie meets during a trip to Italy to visit her relatives. Sophie and Tancredi begin their affair on the night of a holiday celebration, but the novella’s title also anticipates the inevitable end of their holiday romance, and the ending of the holiday from reality that their affair itself represents. Both accept, temporarily, the fantasy that they needn’t ask any questions about the future, but the unspoken but deeply felt knowledge that their relationship is temporary gives it greater intensity, as if the emotional investment of a lifetime must be compressed into an interval of weeks. But that knowledge cannot be suppressed forever:

He was about to speak; or so he told himself, as he sat there silent. Exchanging in his mind one pretext for delay after the other, he was like someone who, at the close of a beautiful day, constantly shifts his chair to enjoy the last of the light.

She said, “Don’t be anxious to find a reason.”

He had forgotten what they were saying. She saw that, and added, “To come to the end of this.”

He smiled at her vaguely, as if it were all a joke.

In the same patient voice, she continued: “Since there’s no need. Since we don’t have much time left together.”

The astonishment Tancredi felt at being thus relieved in an instant of any necessity to describe their position had nothing to do with a sense of deliverance – for by demolishing his belief in her unawareness of their dilemma she automatically brought into focus the dilemma itself, and he was faced not with the discussion of the thing but with the thing itself.

This excerpt actually shows off nicely both the qualities that impressed and captivated me about the book and the qualities that made it less than satisfying for me. I really appreciated the intelligent precision of Hazzard’s language, and the deftness with which she identifies the significance of a particular detail or moment. How nicely her simile of the person shifting his chair, for instance, captures the mood of this moment for the lovers, still enjoying the pleasures of the day but now with some effort, not simply basking in them. The simile also, of course, echoes the title, and so we feel the readerly pleasure of our author’s artful control of her ideas. But Hazzard’s prose is extraordinarily restrained: it has a flat affect, as if, knowing the risk of falling into sentimentality in telling a love story, Hazzard decided to leave passion off the page entirely, leaving us to infer it, to trust that it’s there. I felt as if I was watching the drama play out through a window, with each detail clearly defined but distanced. Here’s another excerpt, this one from just before Sophie leaves. She and Tancredi go for a drive and take a detour near an abandoned villa, its ruins, again, artfully suggestive of the impending ruin of their affair:

The rough surface was comforting after the urgent efficiency of the highway; among its dents and ridges they slowed to a walking pace. On either side grass grew high against the twisted trunks of the trees. When they had gone about fifty yards along the avenue, Tancredi parked the car at a place where the roadway widened slightly and where another car might pass. But nothing approached them in the driveway or from the road behind. Under the hospitable arch of green, sheltered from the light of these last curious days, they were silent in one another’s arms.

Insects and birds resumed their interrupted life outside the car. A leaf or two fell on the windshield, and they heard the flourish of some small animal in the grass. All around them, across the countryside, men and women went about their work or sat down to their lunch, talked and laughed – or wept, as they wept now. Even in that luminous green she persevered, trying to fit this love into some immense, annihilating context of human experience, assailing it with her sense of proportion.

Tancredi, who knew more about proportion, lifted his head from hers. “What could be worse than this?” he asked. “What could be worse?”

Not long ago he had thought it logical that she should leave him. In the face of this pain, it now seemed meaningless, an action deliberately performed against the only life they could be sure of, their prsent existence, in the name of a future that might never come, and that in any case must contain inapprehensible elements.

It’s beautiful writing, evocative, descriptive, and intelligent about their emotions–but where is the emotion in the writing? Do passionate love affairs really end so discursively? I found myself wishing for something to break the glass, something like Dorothea’s outburst when she sees Will Ladislaw leaving, again: “Oh, I cannot bear it – my heart will break!” Call it melodrama if you like, but my own experience suggests it’s closer to the truth, even for (perhaps especially for) love defined by the certainty that it’s only a holiday.

Joe Meno, “People are Becoming Clouds”

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

“People are Becoming Clouds,” the seventh story in Joe Meno‘s well-received collection Demons in the Spring,  is equal parts wistful and whimsical. “People are becoming clouds nowadays,” it opens, with a quiet certitude that belies its disorienting premise that in fact, literally, people are becoming clouds–people like Eleanor, John’s wife, who “turns into a puff of soft white vapor” whenever her husband tries to kiss her:

The vapor is quite odorless and can assume various sizes and shapes. It can still understand when it is being spoken to, the vapor. . . . A partial list of the strange shapes Eleanor has taken as a cloud of vapor: a dove with enormous wings blowing a large trumpet, an intricate snowflake with castles for feet, a swan with an impossibly long neck sewing a blanket, a fairly accurage representation of an angel with rings of spoons for a halo, and a gigantic apple being swallowed by a ghostly white tiger.

I admit, my first reaction was impatience at this liberal sprinkling of the dust of magic realism over a pair of otherwise quite commonplace characters. At the very least, surely a far-fetched premise of this sort needs to be decked out in more fanciful prose. But the story won me over, in part because it remained in such a low key that a gentle poignancy gradually takes over its “what if” scenario. “Couples go through these kinds of things,” poor John thinks, and while of course he’s wrong in the real world, where people are don’t turn into clouds, he’s right that couples go through all kinds of things, sometimes difficult and even hurtful things, and often they do keep trying, as John and Eleanor keep trying, to maintain themselves or to recover what they’ve lost.

What John and Eleanor have lost is intimacy. There’s a comical aspect to their attempts to recover it once Eleanor has vaporized, but that light mood drifts easily into grief:

He will reach his hands up to grab her but he will be unable to. He will try to breather her in, to take her into his lungs, but his face will only become red until, finally, he gives in. He will turn on his stomach and want to cry into the pillow but he will not. He will be too embarrassed to cry.

The story also allows a note of deeper inquiry to creep in. Eleanor claims her transformations are beyond her control, but John always hears her laughing just before. She also never transformed before their marriage. Is Eleanor escaping or eluding John when she becomes a cloud? Is she an oddly literalized version of the many literary heroines who tease their lovers by remaining just out of reach, a temptress or siren? Or perhaps she’s a perversely successful version of the other literary heroines who find it difficult to reconcile married love and autonomy? Or are these questions too weighty–do they try to hard to bring the clouds down to earth, to give them definite shape? When asked by their “weather/relationship specialist” which cloud shape she prefers, Eleanor says, “I like just being a general kind of cloud the best.” Perhaps she just appreciates embodying possibilities, rather than actualities. And how bad is it, really, for one partner in a  marriage to turn into a cloud? While John suffers and pines for his tangible wife, even he wonders, “Would I still love my wife so badly if she wasn’t so impossible to claim? Would I still want her if I could have her whenever I wanted?” “People are Become Clouds” invites us to think about dreams and desires and the shifting shapes they take, but it does so with delicacy and humor.

The collection’s original design was meant to assert the appeal and value of books as tangible, aesthetic objects, “celebrating this archaic archaic form,” as Meno puts it. In support of this idea, each story is illustrated by a different artist. The illustrations for “People are becoming clouds” are by Nick Butcher.

Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

The author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Laila Lalami, is a long-time blogger at the site originally known as Moorish Girl. I have followed her writing there for some time and have been looking for the novel locally for a while; I was very pleased, therefore, to come across it on my recent expedition to The Strand.

It doesn’t seem entirely apt to say that I enjoyed reading Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. It’s elegantly written, spare but not unnecessarily elliptical, suggestive and yet surprisingly detailed for a novel that’s less than 200 pages. This artistic care (and it does, somehow, strike me as a careful book, by which I mean painstaking, not cautious) is dedicated to such a quietly harrowing account of hopes turned back and diminished, though, that pleasure seems an uncomfortably voyeuristic response.

Lalami explains on her website that the novel was inspired by stories she read about Moroccans attempting illegal crossings of the Strait of Gibraltar, hoping to begin a new life in Spain. The novel is artfully constructed, beginning with the crossing itself, introducing us to each of the four protagonists huddled with 25 other people in a 6-meter Zodiac. The pilot refuses to take them all the way to land; they are all tipped into the water and make their desperate way across the last stretch of water to the beach as best they can, only to face the unwelcoming realities that await them on shore. As we backtrack in the next part of the novel to learn how our four came to be in the boat, their watery struggle takes on retrospective symbolic significance: they have left home in the first place to avoid drowning of one kind or another. In tracing the very different lives of the four main characters up to the crossing and then picking them up again after the attempt, Lalami finds an effective formal device for conveying the variety and the human complexity of circumstances that drive people to such dangerously optimistic decisions. At the same time, in concentrating on just four stories she puts a human face on the pursuit too easily abstracted under terms like “illegal immigrants.” And though each of her stories is highly particular, both to the character she has imagined and to the social and historical context that is her focus, the hopes her people cherish–for opportunity, for freedom, for the dignity that comes with prosperity and independence–resonate because they are universal. Without belittling the families or the cultures they are choosing to leave behind, Lalami moves us to sympathize with her people because they look across the water and imagine something better. The saddest part of the novel, I thought, was its quiet concession to the elusiveness of that dream: hope is a dangerous pursuit, not just because of the risks of the pursuit itself, but because sometimes the chance you take brings you only further away from what you really wanted.