Category Archives: Life

Friday, May 23, 2008 · 7:11 pm

Summer plans

I’m back from the retreat and now my summer vacation is officially beginning. I’ll still have plenty of work to do all summer, though. Some things are minor like reports to write and articles to polish off, and other things are more time-consuming, like preparing for a new class in the fall. Most of my working time this summer, though, will go toward preparing to teach and then teaching my first online class, which will run in July. I’m thrilled to be able to teach without having to leave my study and without having to pay for gas and spend the time commuting, although I’m guessing I’ll end up preferring classroom teaching to online teaching.

Now I’m going through the awkward transition time between the busy semester and the more leisurely summer; inevitably I go through a few days or a week where I feel all out of sorts and strange and as though I don’t quite know what to do with myself, before I settle into a pattern of work and leisure that I can maintain for a few months. I always expect to feel nothing but euphoria when I’ve wrapped up the school year, but of course it doesn’t work that way.

I’m tremendously excited about one thing coming up this summer: I’ll be spending a weekend with Emily, and it looks like the two of us will travel to the middle of Pennsylvania somewhere to meet Courtney. Another blogger meet-up! I’m becoming addicted to hanging out with bloggers. I’ll be sure to write up the details.

I’m also hoping to go backpacking or perhaps rent a place in northern New England somewhere to do some hiking and bike riding. I wanted to do such a trip last year, but my illness got in the way, so I’m determined to make it happen this year. I’ve felt a longing lately to do a bit of traveling, or at least to get out of my house more, so although we don’t have money to do much in the way of real traveling, I want to see some of the beautiful local or relatively local places I haven’t yet seen. Perhaps, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to climb Mt. Washington in New Hampshire this year.

And, of course, I’ll be reading. There’s the list I created here with some books to choose from and also the list of nonfiction books I posted here that still looks enticing. There will be the summer library sales to visit and the library itself and of course there are all the books I’ve got unread on my shelves (I just recently added Thomas Bernhard’s novel Frost).

I’ll be racing too; I’ve got races every Tuesday night and races many weekends through July, and I hope to fit in many rides in between all those races. I’d love to do another 130-mile ride like the one I did a few years ago; perhaps I will be able to do it without crying from pain for the last ten miles as I did last time. Sounds like fun, right?

Now I’m off to finish reading Cranford, an utterly charming novel. Then I’ll have the fun of deciding what novel to read next.

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Filed under Books, Cycling, Life

Saturday, May 10, 2008 · 7:06 pm

Saturday rambling

There are a number of posts I’d like to write soon, including one on a surprisingly beautiful Wallace Stevens poem (surprising because I thought the poem’s title was one of the more ridiculous titles I’ve ever heard — more on that later) and one on Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, which I recently read for class and which is wonderfully strange. But I’m in a mood to write something rambling and disconnected instead of a more focused post, so that’s what you’ll get.

I spent a lovely evening in Manhattan yesterday with a fabulous group of bloggers (and one fabulous woman who unfortunately doesn’t blog); you’ll find them at Telecommuter Talk, Musings from the Sofa, ZoesMom, and The Reading Nook. Have I mentioned before how much blogging has enriched my life? Well, it has. All of these people, and quite a few others besides, I’ve met because of blogging. We had fun traipsing around from bar to restaurant to bar, celebrating Becky’s impressive new job and drinking unbelievably overpriced cocktails. That’s Manhattan for you — fun but expensive.

In the train on the way to the city, I discovered to my horror that the book I chose for one of my reading groups is terrible. I didn’t choose it all on my own, actually; it was one of three books I selected that everyone else voted on, but still I’m instrumental in the choice, and now I feel guilty. I can see why one of the group’s members was noncommittal in her reaction to it, perhaps not wanting to offend me. Hobgoblin has yet to pick it up, but when he does, I’m looking forward to the conversation in which we mock it mercilessly.

Okay, now I’m a little afraid to mention what book it is, just in case the author googles himself and finds my unkind comments. But — oh, well. It’s Eric Wilson’s book Against Happiness, a book I’d heard some bad things about but also some good things, and so was prepared to like, if possible. It does exactly what the title says — argues against America’s obsession with the pursuit of happiness. This is fine in itself, but the way he makes the argument is the trouble … but more later, when I’ve actually finished the book and can write a proper review.

Have you had the experience of choosing a reading group book that everybody hates? Did it feel terrible? (I may be in luck though — perhaps the other members won’t agree with me …)

Today I went on a 3 1/2 hour ride, heading out to the Housatonic Hills race course to practice climbing all those hills; it was in the mid-60s and dry, pretty much perfect bike riding weather. All the way around the race course, though, I remembered what it’s like to race up those hills, and it filled me with dread. There’s nothing worse than finding yourself at the bottom of a steep hill with your heart rate already maxed out, chasing a pack of riders so as not to get dropped and hoping that you don’t fall over from exhaustion. I have this experience to look forward to in June …

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Filed under Blogging, Books, Cycling, Life, Nonfiction, Reading

Saturday, May 3, 2008 · 6:59 pm

PEN World Voices: Rushdie, Eco, and Vargas Llosa

When I saw that Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, and Mario Vargas Llosa were to appear together at the PEN World Voices festival, I bought tickets immediately, and I’m glad I did — the event was fabulous. Even before the event itself began, good things were happening; I ran into Anne Fernald from the blog Fernham and got to chat with her for a couple minutes. Then Hobgoblin pointed out that Richard Ford and Jeffrey Eugenides were sitting two rows in front of us. I also had a nice conversation with the elderly woman sitting next to me; she told me about her book that had been published years ago and her successful career and her great-grandchildren who are too busy to visit very often.

Then the event began; first there was a general introduction, and then Umberto Eco appeared. He explained that each writer would read from his work in his native language, and then he began to read a section from Foucault’s Pendulum in Italian, while the English translation was projected onto a screen. It was thrilling to hear Eco read in his native language; the Italian was beautiful to listen to, and I soon stopped following the words on the screen and in order to pay more attention to the way the language sounded. When he finished he left the stage and Rushdie came out to read from his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. It was a funny passage (or maybe it’s just funny when you’re listening to it in a crowd) about the Emperor Akbar who has built a “house of worship” in honor of reason, which turns out to be a tent because rationality is an impermanent thing. Then Vargas Llosa read from his 2007 novel The Bad Girl, in Spanish. This time I followed the English words to see what I could understand from the Spanish; the passage was about the narrator falling in love with the flamboyant Lily, a girl newly arrived in his town of Miraflores. The passage had the same light and humorous tone that I saw in the one work of his I’ve read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a book I read with enjoyment.

After the readings, all three writers came out on stage and were joined by Leonard Lopate (a WNYC talk show host), the moderator for their discussion, and things really got going. They began talking about the “Three Musketeers” theme — this was the title of the night’s event — and the story of how the three writers had met a decade earlier and had such a fabulous time they gave themselves the name from Dumas. Now they were here for a reunion. This story quickly turned into a discussion of Dumas himself, and how badly The Three Musketeers is written — Rushdie and Eco took great pleasure in describing just how sloppily Dumas could write and how wordy he could be, and one of them said, “The magic of The Count of Monte Cristo is due to the fact that it is badly written.” These two had the audience laughing uproariously; they both have fabulous senses of humor — Rushdie is dry and witty, and Eco exudes energy and expressiveness in that stereotypical Italian way, complete with hand gestures. He was utterly charming. Then Vargas Llosa, who is funny too but in a more dignified way, stepped in with a defense of “bad writing”; he argued that if the writing draws you in and moves you then it can’t be bad writing and that good writing isn’t merely a matter of good grammar and pretty words. This drew hearty applause from the audience.

Then Lopate stepped in started asking them serious questions about the clash of cultures in their novels — I would have preferred that he just let the writers keep up their debate and their jokes because the minute he asked a serious question the energy fell and the mood changed. But the conversation was good, of course; they talked about how writers in the U.S. don’t have any meaningful political role, which is often not the case in other countries, and why this might be so, and they debated whether writers flourish more in dictatorships rather than democracies (because they are the only ones speaking truths the country wants and needs to hear). They all seemed to agree that the U.S. is a special case because of the way its writers are seen as entertainers rather than as important political figures. In his deadpan way, Rushdie claimed that this problem is entirely due to movie stars, which then turned the conversation to Rushdie’s own experiences acting in movies, and he quipped, “I’m so glad you’re asking me about my best work.”

Then Lopate asked a couple questions solicited on index cards from the audience; the first question, asking the writers to describe their writing methods, got only boos from the audience because of its banality, and I was delighted to see Richard Ford yell out “Next question!” Before they moved on, though, Eco, looking inordinately pleased with himself, explained his writing method — he starts on the left side of the page and works his way over to the right. This got a laugh.

The next and last audience question got them talking about the virtues of the English language; Rushdie described it as “a bendy language,” and one of the others, I can’t remember who, argued that its flexibility is both a virtue and a risk — its openness and adaptability have led to some of the world’s greatest literature, but these same qualities can possibly lead to its dissolution, as people from all around the world make English their own.

And that was it — afterwards was a book signing, but we didn’t stick around, as we hadn’t brought any of our books and needed to run off to catch the train. I left vowing once again to take advantage of opportunities like this more often than I do; living within easy traveling distance of NYC can be a wonderful thing.

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Wednesday, April 9, 2008 · 7:07 pm

Wednesday whining and some poetry

This semester is dragging along, as slowly as it possibly can. I really don’t like wishing for time to pass by, as I feel like I’m wishing my life away, and that can’t be a good thing, but still … I’m longing for summer when I’ll have more time to read and sleep and ride my bike and go to yoga class and walk and read blog posts without feeling rushed. My semester, unfortunately, goes all the way through the middle of May and then some, so I have over a month left. Not that I’m counting or anything (okay, I have 4 1/2 weeks, dozens of classes to teach, hundreds of meetings to attend, and thousands of papers to grade, or something like that).

Unfortunately, I’m in a bit of a reading rut too, as I’m not enjoying Rosamund Lehmann’s novel The Echoing Grove as much as I thought I would. I loved Lehmann’s A Note in Music and thought I’d like anything she wrote. But The Echoing Grove hasn’t captured my attention and imagination as much as I’d hoped. It’s slow-moving and narrow in focus, but neither of those things is a problem for me, as I generally like that sort of book. It’s about relationships and love and family, and I generally like books about those topics. But in this case the characters haven’t grabbed me. I’m having trouble figuring out what to make of them, and I’m not finding myself very interested in their fates. Surely this is a bad thing. It was quite the opposite when I read A Note in Music, as I found myself responding emotionally to the characters and the situation. I’m not going to give up on Lehmann, though; I’m convinced I’ll like her other work. It’s just this one that’s not working for me.

I did begin a book of poems, which I’ve had a hankering to do for a while; I picked up Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems. I’m not expecting to read through the whole collection, as it’s quite long, but I thought I might try to read the first section, his 1931 collection Harmonium, and then decide where to go from there. So far I’m enjoying the poems, although they are not yet knocking me off my feet. When I find one that does, I’ll post it here.

As for poems that do knock me off my feet, though, there is the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet we covered in my class today. I’m not a religious person these days, but Hopkins almost makes me wish I were. How can you read a poem like this one and not be tempted to believe in God?

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:

Praise him.

I love the way Hopkins uses sound in the poem, for example, the alliteration that appears in nearly every line: Glory/God, couple/colour/cow, fresh/firecoal/falls/finches, plotted/pieced/plough, trades/tackle/trim, fickle/freckled, swift/slow/sweet/sour. This is a poem that simply must be read out loud to be fully experienced (true for most poetry I suppose). Hopkins likes to use alliteration and other sound effects because they reflect the design he sees in the world around him — the design created by a God taking great care of the world he’s made. Hopkins also likes to write lines that are difficult to read out loud, lines with odd rhythms and strings of words that you have to work hard to spit out: “fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings” or “with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” As you are reading it, you are forced to slow down, which makes you linger over the words and perhaps take more time to consider their meaning. Reading a Hopkins poem out loud makes the words feel like physical things themselves; you can almost feel them in your mouth as you read.

And if I were to believe in God, I’d want to believe in one like Hopkins describes — one who has created and sees the beauty in “all things counter, original, spare, strange; / whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?).”

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Saturday, April 5, 2008 · 8:31 pm

The language of dance

Last night Hobgoblin and I went to see a dance performance in New York City. This was a new experience for me as I’d never been to a professional dance performance before.  We went with a colleague of mine and her husband; she is the one whose class on creativity and the arts I am sitting in on this semester in order to teach it myself in the future. Part of the training process I’m undergoing is for my mentor and I to attend some arts event of our choosing, which the school will pay for. So I decided I wanted to see an art form I’m not terribly familiar with, hence our trip. 

We saw a performance by the Stephen Petronio Company; there were two dances in the first half of the show, the first one loosely telling a story about a woman at a beach who meets a sexy but amusingly ignorant man. The second one was more abstract; it had music by Rufus Wainwright that used poetry by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the lyrics. What stood out to me most was the point when the lyrics began repeating Dickinson’s line “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”; the entire dance was performed in simple costumes with nothing on the stage and lighting that would change with different sections of the music, and at the point where Dickinson’s line began, the light warmed to a bright orange color and the dancing was exuberant and acrobatic – hopeful – with lots of leaps and pirouettes. After an intermission a longer piece was performed with five sections, each one with different music and a different concept. I didn’t quite figure out how all the pieces fit together, but each one had, if not its own story, then an idea or a feeling that the dance communicated.

I have trouble when it comes to describing the dances themselves, though; I have a much easier time writing about costumes, lighting, and music. These things seem more concrete to me. In my colleague’s class we are talking about terms with which to analyze dance, terms such as line, stage use, symmetry and asymmetry, geometrical patterns, and form. I was able to pick out some of these elements in the dances; I noticed now and then the use of the canon form, or I’d see how the bodies were symmetrical or the use of line was particularly effective or the choreographer was using space of the stage in an interesting way. 

But when it comes to dance moves themselves I don’t really know what to say; I recognized some moves that come from ballet, but there was much more going on and I have no vocabulary with which to describe it. I watched some of the more intricate scenes, and I couldn’t imagine how the choreographer could possibly think all this up. I know there must be a dance language, a vocabulary of moves and a tradition of how to put these moves together – a syntax I suppose – but I know nothing of the language and so feel speechless.

We talked about this after the performance and I found others felt similarly uncertain, and it reminded me of how some people feel about poetry and the challenge of analyzing a poem. Readers don’t need a critical vocabulary to respond to poetry, but without it they can feel at sea and so shy away from attempting a response at all.

What was interesting for me, though, was the degree to which I was comfortable with knowing I was not fully getting it, knowing that while I was appreciating the beauty of the dance there was so much communicated through it that I couldn’t understand. I think I am much more comfortable dealing with not getting it in dance than I am in poetry, an area I have much more experience with; when I come across a poem whose meaning I feel I can’t penetrate I can get frustrated because I feel I should get it, whereas with some of the more obscure dance sequences I didn’t mind feeling lost. There was something freeing about not having the expertise to fully understand what was going on. I could relax and just let it happen. That’s not to say I would ever want to give up what expertise I have in order to approach a poem with that freedom, but I did appreciate how experiencing something new forced me to find the pleasure in being a beginner.

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008 · 7:45 pm

Till tomorrow …

Well, I was going to post on Benjamin Black’s The Silver Swan tonight, but I got sidetracked by listening to Barack Obama’s amazing speech, and now I need to finish The Gathering so that Hobgoblin has time to read it before Friday’s book group meeting.  So, until tomorrow …

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Sunday, March 16, 2008 · 6:25 pm

The race and the play

My race today got canceled because of snow that never actually materialized (the race promoter had to make a judgment call yesterday and the forecast wasn’t looking good then), but I’m grateful because I developed a sore throat yesterday and needed to take two naps today. It’s safe to assume I would not have done well had I tried to race. My racing season isn’t getting off to such a good start, but I can’t say I care a whole lot — the riding not the racing is the point for me. So far I’ve ridden 930 miles this year, which is just about what I rode last year, and I feel like I’m riding stronger and faster.

So, the play on Friday was a bit of a disappointment. I saw Vigil, written by Morris Panych and thought the play’s premise had a lot of potential that the play itself didn’t live up to. Mostly I was disappointed because I wanted to have the experience of losing myself in the performance, of forgetting that I was in a theater and getting so caught up in the story I didn’t want it to end. The last two times I’ve been to the theater I’ve missed that experience, and I wonder if it happens less often than I think, or if I’ve just had bad luck. I’m not one to lose myself easily in stories when I’m reading; I tend to keep an analytical distance, even when I’m enjoying the book and having an emotional response to the characters or the situation. I just don’t tend to forget I’m sitting there turning pages every now and then. With films, though, I’ll get caught up in the story fairly easily, and I wonder why that doesn’t seem to translate to the theater. Perhaps it has something to do with the way going to the theater feels like an event, as it isn’t something I do that often, and perhaps the unusualness of it makes me keep the self-awareness that precludes getting caught up in the story.

The play’s premise is that a lonely, isolated man, who is also almost unbearably self-centered and misanthropic, quits his job to come take care of his aunt who is on her deathbed. The aunt is not approaching death fast enough for this man, however, an opinion he makes abundantly clear to the poor woman. The first part of the play basically consists of jokes where the man says in a variety of horrifying ways that he wishes his aunt would hurry up and die.

What makes the play interesting is that, at least initially, the aunt doesn’t speak at all. This is not explained (at least not at first); we just accept that for some reason she responds to the man with gestures and facial expressions, but without words. I liked this set-up because it gives the man room to say whatever he wants, to reveal things about himself, to tell stories about his past, and he can do this because he has not just a listener, but one whose only judgment is a stare or a grimace or a smile. His audience never interrupts him, or offers an opinion, or asks him to be quiet.

The man does tell lots of stories about himself and does reveal things about his past and his personality (which is pretty messed up), but the disappointing thing is I never felt these stories added up to much. It was just one funny or moving or horrifying story after another. Now the play’s main plot is about the evolving relationship between the man and his aunt so it does have a traditional story arc that is satisfying in its own way, but so much of the play is taken up with the man’s monologues that I thought for sure all those stories would end up going somewhere. Instead they seemed to be there merely to make the audience laugh and to make the man look troubled and pathetic.

But in spite of my doubts about the play, I did enjoy the whole experience; it’s a pleasure to be able to critique something when it’s finished, after all, and that’s not a pleasure I take lightly.

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Friday, March 14, 2008 · 2:25 pm

Friday notes

I’m going to see a play this evening called Vigil written by Morris Panych, a man the theater’s website calls “one of Canada’s greatest award-winning playwrights.” It’s described as a black comedy, which sounds great to me. I’ll make sure to let you know how I liked it.

A work friend invited Hobgoblin and I to see the play, the same friend I’ll be starting a book group with, which meets for the first time next Friday. I’ve begun reading the first book, which is Anne Enright’s The Gathering. I’m not sure how the discussion will go; it could be interesting because my friend has finished the novel, and while by the end she decided she liked it, in the middle she had some grave doubts. I’ve read maybe the first 20 pages, and I find myself irritated by it. This may be a matter of my mood; I go through stages when I can’t stand much contemporary fiction, particularly of the literary “lyrical” sort. I was irritated by the way the first-person narrator kept jumping around in time, from idea to idea, character to character, taking her time to put things together so I could feel I’m on solid footing. I thought she should just get to the point.

You can see why I chalk this up to my current mood — I’m not proud of feeling irritated by a narrator who asks me to work a little bit. I feel lazy when I complain in this way. But sometimes what I need is some straightforward storytelling, told in language that doesn’t draw attention to itself.

I want to write about Benjamin Black’s The Silver Swan, a book that didn’t irritate me at all ... maybe later this weekend. Enjoy your Friday!

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Saturday, March 8, 2008 · 5:26 pm

Notes

You’ll be happy to know I’ve finished my reading for tonight’s book group meeting and am set to head out soon. We’re discussing Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key, and I’m curious to see what everyone else makes of it. It’s certainly not my usual sort of reading, but that’s good — it’s what makes book groups interesting. I’ll post on the book later.

Hobgoblin returns from El Salvador tonight; his school group will reach campus at some ungodly hour like 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., so rather than picking him up, I dropped a car off on campus yesterday, bringing my bike along so I could leave the car and ride home. It turned out to be a lovely ride; I lengthened it a little bit so I could stay out for a couple hours and I had a great time in the balmy, almost 50 degree weather.

I’m worried about tomorrow’s race, though — it’s super windy tonight and the wind is supposed to continue into tomorrow morning. The wind was bad enough for the race last week, but it promises to be even worse tomorrow. That will make things interesting. Hobgoblin plans to race, even though he’ll only get a couple hours sleep (the situation is made worse, of course, by the time change which forces us to lose another hour).

I’ll let you know how it goes!

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Thursday, February 28, 2008 · 8:00 pm

Some random thoughts

  • First of all, Dan Green has written a response to my response to his response to my post on biography from a few days ago. All this back and forth has been fun, but I’m thinking that we’ve reached the point where further responding doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If you check out Dan’s posts, don’t miss the comments, particularly the those to his first response. There are a lot of interesting comments on my posts too — thank you readers!
  • So Hobgoblin is leaving for El Salvador tonight, and Muttboy and I will have to spend the week alone, mourning his absence. The house will be way too quiet. I hate the fact that you can’t explain things to dogs, that I can’t tell Muttboy that he just has to wait a week and everything will be back to normal. Fortunately, we’ve got a dog-loving friend who has agree to walk him for a couple hours along with her own dog every day I have to go to work, which means Muttboy will be one tired dog, which I hope will make things easier on him.
  • I received an ARC of Benjamin Black’s (aka John Banville) crime novel The Silver Swan and have read the first few chapters; so far it promises to be fun. I may want to hunt down the first book in the series Christine Falls once I’ve finished this one — yes, I’ll read them out of order, but that’s okay — and maybe I’ll even be inspired to read something by Banville. At any rate, I’m in need of something light and plotty, and this will suit me just fine.
  • I have also begun Wuthering Heights, which I’ll be teaching in a few weeks. I’ve never taught this novel before, and I have no idea how it will go over. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, in fact.  It’s plotty, although not light — but it will just have to do, no matter what mood I’m in.
  • My first race is Sunday! Yikes. I’m not ready. But then, I never feel ready. I put off registering for the race until the last minute because I was denying the fact that race season is about to begin. I really prefer training and only race to give me something to work towards. And because it would be silly not to. And because afterwards I’m always happy to have done it. But beforehand, I wish I could just keep riding on my own, all by myself.
  • I plan to be back tomorrow posting on Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel for the Slaves of Golconda reading group.  I’m looking forward to the discussion!

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Wednesday, February 13, 2008 · 10:25 am

This hardly ever happens …

My department chair just called me up and strongly urged me to cancel my classes and stay home today.  Cool!  We got snow yesterday, which has now turned to rain, which is causing some serious flooding.  It’s not the sort of flooding that will put us in danger as long as we’re at home, but it has flooded the roads enough that some of them are probably closed and traffic is surely terrible.  My department chair tried to get to school and turned back when she saw that cars on the highway were in water up to their doors.

So I should be thrilled to have this day at home, but instead I feel anxious.  I don’t like missing class because it messes up our rhythm, gets us behind, and generally confuses things.  And I’ve been so busy lately — I’ve been used to moving at a pretty fast pace (fast for me) — that I don’t quite know how to deal with the free time.  It’s hard to shift gears so abruptly.  Do I just sit around in the middle of the day and read Virginia Woolf?  I guess so …

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Tuesday, February 5, 2008 · 8:05 pm

Notes

Oh Lord this semester is going to be a long one. I’m not going to whine in this post, don’t worry, but I do wonder what it means that I’m already counting how many classes I have left to teach this semester. I usually begin counting, oh, around two-thirds of the way through, when the end is in sight. But this time I began counting from the very beginning. That’s not good.

But I’m enjoying sitting in on my Intro to the Arts class — the one I’m observing now to teach later. The first day the professor made us draw! Now this frightened me a bit, as I have no skills whatsoever in drawing. But even though I’m not a student and am only observing, the professor handed me a sheet of paper, and I thought I couldn’t exactly refuse to do it, and I wouldn’t want to refuse to do it, anyway, as that would look silly. The assignment was to draw our lives in three panels. It’s an interesting assignment for the first day, and I’ll probably make my students do it when I teach the class. So I drew a sorry-looking book, a heavy, awkward-looking bicycle wheel (couldn’t manage an entire bike), and a third-grade-level picture of the woods to sum up my life. We were supposed to exchange pictures with other students and then the professor asked for people to share theirs for the class to analyze and interpret, and, of course, mine got chosen, so the whole class could see my sorry art work. So — I’m learning a lot in this class, including what it’s like to be a student feeling a bit out of her depth.

As for reading, these days I’m in the middle of Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day and am enjoying it thoroughly; it’s her second novel, and one of her more conventional ones. It’s got four main characters, two young men and two young women, and it explores their complicated relationships with each other. I’m enjoying her close attention to emotions and moods and psychological states, as well as her depiction of gender dynamics. One of the characters is involved in the women’s suffrage movement, so it’s an obvious theme, but Woolf also shows how the power dynamics play out in conversation among men and women in a way I find fascinating. I’ll say more about the book later.

And two new books have come into my possession lately, both of which I’m excited about. A friend gave me a copy of George Saunders’s book of essays The Braindead Megaphone; I’ve enjoyed Saunders’s short stories and am curious to see what he’ll do with the essay form. And then Emily sent me a copy of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which I won in her recent blog contest. I’m looking forward to reading both of these.

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Sunday, January 27, 2008 · 6:57 pm

The weekend

I had a lovely weekend, beginning with dinner on Friday night with two of my favorite bloggers, Emily and Becky, and various spouses, sisters, and friends at a place called Bloodroot, a self-described feminist vegetarian restaurant and bookstore (the website explains their philosophy, particularly in this essay). Every single one of us got lost on the way there, but it was well worth the trouble of finding our way. It’s basically one large room with books at one end, right next to the kitchen, and tables at the other. Hobgoblin and I arrived first and so had plenty of time to look at the books, which was dangerous, because I came across something I couldn’t resist: Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray, an 18C novel that isn’t widely available. In spite of my best intentions, how could I resist?

The restaurant is a cozy, casual place, the kind of place where you can get to know the owner a bit (which we did) and can easily strike up conversations with strangers (which one person in my group did), and where you’ll find a notice that asks you not to inquire about or comment on the number of calories in the food because it feeds into our culture’s dangerous obsession with body image.

The conversation was lively, which was no surprise, but I was a bit surprised to find fellow athletes and outdoors enthusiasts in the company, and we had fun talking about the local parks and cycling culture. It turns out I’ve been riding my bike past Becky’s house for a long time without knowing it.

Then yesterday Hobgoblin and I headed down to New York City to celebrate my birthday (which is tomorrow — unfortunately no good for celebrations, as it’s my first day of class). We headed for the Morgan Library and Museum, an institution I had never visited, and now I’m wondering why not. Many thanks to Emily, who’s recent post gave me the idea to go. It was fabulous, and I recommend you see it if you get the chance. You can look around Pierpont Morgan’s library, which is stunning — actually you can see his study and his librarian’s office as well as the library, and all three rooms take your breath away. It seemed like he had every book published in the 19C or earlier, every one of them beautifully bound.

The rest of the museum had some wonderful items as well; my favorite part was the medieval and renaissance manuscript collection (all those illuminated manuscripts) and the collection of more modern literary artifacts, including a handwritten page of Joyce’s Ulysses and poems by Auden and Eliot in their handwriting.

Then Hobgoblin and I spent some time in bookstores, this time without buying anything (amazingly enough), had a nice dinner, and headed home. Not a bad way to spend a weekend!

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Friday, January 25, 2008 · 5:08 pm

A new semester

So far at least, I think I’m staying true to the spirit of my New Year’s resolutions post, which is to say that I’ve stayed pretty relaxed about what I’m reading and how much and not worrying about whether I’m fulfilling challenges or finishing as many books as I did last year.

I may be taking this relaxed attitude even further in the coming months as I’ve got a busy semester ahead of me and may not have time to do as much reading as I’ve done in the past. The truth is, in pre-blogging days I probably read a lot less than I have been in the last couple years; I probably lingered over books longer and read fewer of them at once. I didn’t keep records then, so I don’t know for sure, but that’s what memory tells me.

The mood I’ve been in lately has me returning to this older, slower mode. This is not to say that blogs have been a bad influence (quite the opposite in fact!) or that I haven’t enjoyed all the reading I’ve done in the last couple years. But I’m looking ahead to the semester right now (which begins on Monday), thinking about the new class I’m teaching and all the work that will involve, about the class I’m sitting in on and all the time that will take, and also about all the exercising I want to do this spring and how I don’t want to quit going to yoga class when things get busy like I usually do, and I wonder how much time I’ll have to read.

I do hate being busy. And you should know that my definition of busy is probably pretty tame compared to most people’s. I like having lots and lots of time to myself that I can fill in any way I want to. I’m not someone who thrives on stress and tension — these things wear me down and make me unhappy.

Anyway, my point is that in order to stay calm and sane, I will need to have very low expectations for myself when it comes to reading and to blogging. If I’m busy I’ll have less time to post, but also less material to post on, as I’ll be reading less.

We’ll see how that goes; I’ve made claims about posting less in the past but have found the number of posts each week creeping up. But I may really need to back off a bit this time.

By the way, the new class I’ll be teaching is a British Literature survey from the Romantics up to the 20C. It should be fun. And I’m sitting in on a class that’s sort of a survey of various art forms — visual art, film, dance, literature, and music — in order to get ready to teach it next year. I’m excited about teaching this class, although not so excited about the time it will take to sit in on someone else’s version of it and the fact that my school is requiring that I do the observation before I teach the class itself (I’ve never had such intense training like this before, not anything like it; I always just figure out what to do on my own). On the other hand, I haven’t sat in on an entire class in quite a while, and it will be interesting to see how another teacher handles things. It may make me want to become a student again.

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Monday, January 14, 2008 · 6:51 pm

Notes and news

Today is one of those days that should have been excellent but wasn’t — my semester hasn’t begun yet, so though I still have work to do preparing syllabi and such, I’m not terribly busy. What do I have to complain about, right? Except I could never rouse myself to do much today and so had the sense that I was wasting time but didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. I’ve been enjoying my books but even they weren’t satisfying me. The weather is lousy too — wet and cold. But the worst thing is that poor Muttboy hurt himself out in the woods this afternoon; Hobgoblin noticed him walking slowly but didn’t think much of it until they were both home a couple hours later and Muttboy started whining. When he tried to stand up, it was obvious that it hurt and he would yelp now and then. A suffering dog is a really sad thing, isn’t it? Hobgoblin called the vet who basically said to give Muttboy two aspirin and call her in the morning — good advice, I’m sure, but not terribly comforting. Now he’s curled up on the couch sleeping.

But I don’t want this post to be one long whine, so I’ll mention a few things besides my troubles. For one, Litlove’s new book, The Best of Tales from the Reading Room arrived in the mail today, and what a nice looking book it is! It’s got a picture of Litlove and some comments from blog readers on the back and an introduction that tells the story of how she got into blogging. The book itself is made up of many of her best posts — ones on Rilke, Julian Barnes, Virginia Woolf and many other authors and topics, and some more personal posts as well.

And one more thing about Litlove — her new edition of The Best of New Writing on the Web is up, so go check it out!

In other news — Harper’s has an essay by Ursula Le Guin called “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading,” unfortunately not available online. It’s interesting, though, so if you are in a library or bookstore and see it, it might be worth a glance. In the article she says some very sensible things, in particular her point that we tend to forget that for most of history people didn’t read all that much:

… I also want to question the assumption — whether gloomy or faintly gloating — that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

For most of human history, most people could not read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless; it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue.

Of course, it’s a shame that many people choose not to read today, but I think the point is right that we tend to think that reading is in a crisis that has never existed before. While Le Guin has no kind words for those who choose not to read, the real villain of her essay is the publishing industry. She lambastes it for seeking never-ending growth in profits in an industry that just can’t sustain it:

To me, then, one of the most despicable things about corporate publishers and chain booksellers is their assumption that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn’t “perform” within a few weeks, it gets its covers torn off — it is trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. This week’s blockbuster must eclipse last week’s, as if there weren’t room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of most publishers (and, again, chain booksellers) in handling backlists….

But capitalists count weeks, not years. To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance on a hot author who’s supposed to provide this week’s bestseller. These millions — often a dead loss — come out of funds that used to go to pay normal advances to reliable midlist authors and the royalties on older books that kept selling. Many midlist authors have been dropped, many reliably selling books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch. Is that any way to run a business?

Finally, I’ve begun looking into Franco Moretti’s The Novel: History, Geography, and Culture and have found much to learn. I’ll post more on that later.

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Monday, December 31, 2007 · 4:36 pm

Happy New Year Everyone!

Happy New Year! Hobgoblin and I will spend the evening as we usually spend New Year’s Eve, drinking hard cider, eating chips and other food that’s bad for us, watching movies, and trying desperately to stay up till midnight (and perhaps failing). Have a great evening whatever you are doing and have a wonderful 2008!

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Wednesday, December 26, 2007 · 7:57 pm

The Christians and the Pagans

Hobgoblin and I returned home a day early to avoid the snow that’s supposed to come tomorrow, and now we’re safe in our respective studies, back at our computers, and all is well. We had a good time at my parents’ place, although Muttboy suffered some because my oldest brother’s dog is more energetic than he is, and whenever she was around, he couldn’t get a moment’s peace. He would stare intently at us, as if to say “get me out of here, please! She won’t stop pacing back and forth and I can’t handle it anymore!” Hobgoblin had to take him outside practically every hour to give him a break.

But otherwise, all went well; the 13 of us hung out and talked, played board games and Texas 42 (a domino game my mother brought from her home state), watched some movies, and read books together. I managed to keep from reverting to my 13-year-old irritable self, the one who can’t handle anything my mother says or does and who glares at people for no reason and picks fights for fun. Having so many people around I didn’t grow up with helped me behave myself — in addition to my six siblings, we also had three spouses and one girlfriend staying in the house, plus two friends/significant others dropping by now and then, and one visit from the local youth pastor. I almost couldn’t help but behave myself.

And yes, the theme song of this Christmas was Dar Williams’s “The Christians and the Pagans”; in fact, my middle brother’s girlfriend had a copy of the song and played it for Hobgoblin and me on Christmas day. It was the four of us, the pagans of the family, plus one sister of whose religious status I’m uncertain, hanging out at home on Sunday morning while everyone else was at church, and again on Monday evening while everyone else was at the Christmas Eve service. We talked about atheism and pantheism and panentheism, our problems with the idea of a transcendent God, and about our experiences with church youth groups, and we looked forward with trepidation to the youth pastor’s visit; I have nothing against youth pastors generally (although I can’t say I’ve met many I’ve liked), but this particular one cornered me last summer at my brother’s graduation party and asked me where I’m going to church these days — an awkward conversation followed, and I haven’t yet gotten over it. But his visit was fine — no awkward questions this time — and just as in the song, “hands were held and prayers were said, sending hope for peace on earth to all their gods and goddesses.”

And now I’ll tell you about the stack of books I came home with. Hobgoblin gave me two, both of which promise to be very informative: first, Franco Moretti’s The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture, a book I’ve been longing for for a while but wasn’t ready to spend the money on. It’s a big, fat book with tons of essays on the novel; the back cover says that it “looks at the novel mostly from the outside, treating the transition from oral to written storytelling and the rise of narrative and fictionality, and covering the ancient Greek novel, the novel in premodern China, the early Spanish novel, and much else, including readings of novels from around the world.” Sounds great, right? He also gave me The Woman Triathlete, which I spent much of Christmas day reading through. It’ll give me useful ideas for training.

From other family members I received Charlotte Bronte’s novel Shirley, which I’m excited about as I’m trying to read some of the Brontes’s lesser-known works; Alan Lightman’s book on science A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit; Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart; Louise Glück’s book of essays on poetry, Proofs and Theories; and Marjorie Agosín’s book of poems Secrets in the Sand. This last book came from my sister who heard the author read at her college and got her to sign my copy.

Needless to say, I’m excited about all these books and eager to have some more reading time over the next couple weeks.

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Friday, December 21, 2007 · 6:32 pm

Happy Holidays!

Hobgoblin and I are driving out to Rochester, NY, tomorrow and are bound to get stuck in a snowstorm at one point or another, so wish us luck! We’ll be there for about five days. I’m looking forward to seeing my family, all the members of which will be there. This means we’ll have two parents, seven children, and four significant others (at least — others may unexpectedly show up). And I think we’re all staying at my parents’ house, which is not terribly large. I’ll enjoy myself, but I may also be ready to return home when the time comes …

I’m not entirely sure what books I’ll take with me, but I know I’ll include Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations. I’m also considering Heather Lewis’s House Rules, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. I tend not to read all that much when at my parents’ place, however; there are too many people around to distract me, and the television is an almost irresistible lure — Hobgoblin and I don’t have a television and I’m quite happy not having one, but when I do get the chance to watch, I like to see a little of what I’ve been missing. Last year we watched many, many episodes of “The Office,” which I thought was great.

So — have a wonderful week everybody, and I’ll be back soon.

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Sunday, December 9, 2007 · 6:39 pm

Life Update

I’ve been feeling a bit burnt out on a couple things lately, most especially on grading, but also on blogging, so things may be quieter around here for a while, until I get some motivation back (which may happen tomorrow, who knows?).

There were a lot of things I was going to do this weekend, and I’ve done very few of them; mostly I’ve been reading P.D. James’s Devices and Desires and getting a tiny bit obsessed with the idea of racing in a duathlon or a triathlon. This is silly as I can barely run a mile (although I’m better at this than I was just a couple weeks ago!), and I haven’t swum in forever. But I’m that way sometimes — I’ll latch onto an idea, however far-fetched, and for the next few days I can think of little else. I’ve been reading Jenny D.’s blog on triathlon training with great interest for a while now and today I stumbled across the Triathlon Training blog, and read through its archives. I’ll have to keep running and see if I’m still interested after a month or two.

Here are the good things about duathlons or triathlons (not sure which I’d prefer — triathlons appeal, but getting to a swimming pool to train would be a pain):

  • I’d be able to compete individually instead of being part of a team. I like my teammates a lot, but I’d much prefer to compete on my own, just me against the clock. With cycling, I’m supposed to be helping out my teammates instead of riding for myself. Now, this doesn’t actually mean much, as I am not good enough to help out teammates and I often don’t have any to help. But still, I’d rather be working for myself.
  • I won’t know for sure until I compete in a triathlon, but I’m pretty sure it’s much, much safer than criterium riding. I do have a reckless side, but I also really don’t want to be in bike crashes.
  • I like the idea of being able to compete in more than one sport. It’s just cool.
  • The training would be more interesting — it wouldn’t be just riding all the time. I don’t mind riding all the time, but I do like the idea of some variety.

The down side to triathlon training?

  • I might find it overwhelming. I feel like I barely have enough time to ride now, and if I were competing in three sports … ?
  • I’d have so much to learn. This is good and bad — it’s intriguing but also daunting.
  • It would cost money. I’d have clothing and equipment to buy. I have some idea of what it would require now (new running shoes, training clothes, a wet suit, aero bars for my bike), but I’m sure there are things I don’t even know about that I’d need.
  • I’m pretty sure I have a good body type for criterium riding but not for triathlons. The triathletes I know are rail thin, and rail thin I am not. I do know a lot of criterium riders who look like me, though — fit women with some bulk on them, with lots of muscle.

Those are my thoughts — we’ll see. In a year from now perhaps I will have forgotten about this entirely, or perhaps I’ll be deep in triathlon training.

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Friday, December 7, 2007 · 7:00 pm

Seven Things

As it’s a lazy Friday night, one when I’m feeling a bit grumpy I must admit, it’s a good time for a frivolous post. BettyBetty has tagged me for the “seven random things” meme, otherwise known as the “seven weird things” meme, although I prefer the word “random,” as I’m not sure I can think of seven things that are weird about me. Or maybe I should say, I’m not sure I can think of seven weird things I’m willing to share. I’ve done this kind of list before (see here for example), so I’ll try not to repeat myself.

  1. I have had and still have, although to a lesser degree, an intense fear of being upside down. Gym classes where we did tumbling were absolute nightmares. I couldn’t do a somersault, much less a cartwheel, much less anything more complicated than that. I lied to my gym teacher on those days, pretending to have injured myself or pretending that I was sick. Looking back on it, I wonder what she would have done if I’d told her how petrified I was. She might have understood, but I’m not entirely sure. And there was no way I was going to risk it.
  2. I didn’t learn how to whistle until I was in college, and even then I didn’t learn very well. I can whistle one note, maybe two if I work really hard.
  3. I’ve known so many English-major types who are terrible at math, but I’ve always loved it. In fact, I always did better in my math classes in High School than I did in my English classes. One of these years I might take a math class at my college, just for the fun of it.
  4. Although I’m not exactly the bungee-jumping, parachuting type, I can be a bit reckless. I’ll walk by myself down city streets at night when I know my female friends wouldn’t. I’ll go hiking by myself and not tell anybody where I am. I’ll take a walk with wet hair when it’s 10 degrees out. I’m just not very cautious. This is something I learned from my mother, who is much the same way.
  5. I have a high tolerance for dirt and clutter. My housekeeping standards are execrable. Were I to hire a house cleaner, I would need to clean up the house before that person came over. This I also learned from my mother. Her high tolerance for dirt and clutter used to drive me crazy when I was young, but now I understand completely. There are so many better things to do than clean house.
  6. I eat hardly any vegetables at all. In this respect I haven’t yet grown up; I eat exactly what I want when I want with little thought for nutrition. I do think about my weight, but this doesn’t actually influence my eating choices very often. I tell myself I’m going on a ride later, and that will burn off the calories from the bag of chips or the cookie or whatever.
  7. I fantasize about spending the summer backpacking on the Appalachian Trail. I’d like to see if I could last a entire summer, or if I’d get sick of it and want to come home after a week or two. I’m pretty sure I could make it though. I’d spend the time climbing mountains and swimming in ponds and visiting small towns. I think it would be lovely.

If you haven’t done this yet, give it a try!

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