The wingable and the unwingable

I've been thinking, lately, about the things one can wing.

The list of Things Wingable probably varies by individual, but I suspect that everyone's list grows with age--as we develop more confidence and a greater store of knowledge (of our subject area, of our audience, of ourselves). Still, I feel comfortable asserting the following:

All performances may be winged (or, following Dr. Virago, wung). Thus a class, a meeting, or conceivably even a talk--though your Flavia is not remotely expert enough for that last one and suspects she never will be. Anything done live and leaving no permanent record can be carried off without a great deal of formal preparation if one has enough charm and bravado.

Written things cannot be winged. They're permanent. They should reflect, if not careful thinking, then at least careful writing. Those things take time, and although time alone doesn't guarantee that they'll be good, writing can't be faked in the same way that a one-off performance can be.

Grading also cannot be winged, and for the same reasons.

Administrative tasks, alas, also cannot be winged. They require paperwork, meetings, paperwork, email exchanges, paperwork, phone calls, and more paperwork. And while writing can be almost infinitely deferred, paperwork WILL NOT BE IGNORED.

So, when something has to give, you know what it is. I've been winging a lot of classes lately, and I hate it. I hate the fact that, because I have forms and applications and committee work with absolute deadlines, I come into the office, spend four hours on that stuff, read or skim the books I'm teaching the next day, and show up in the classroom without more than a few dogeared pages to guide me.

I've also been doing precious little writing, here or elsewhere. But I'll tell ya: getting paperwork in on time? Returning students' papers promptly? That's all you need to do to aquire a(n entirely undeserved) reputation for efficiency.

A dream deferred

In case you're wondering?

The description "whiskey-voiced" is entirely accurate.

If you have, let's say, gone out three nights in a row and had, let's say, three or four glasses of whiskey each of those nights, you will wind up with a huskier and more sultry voice than you began with.

And if you were already a low alto, this might just make you start contemplating a career as a blues singer.

Until you recall that, oh yeah: you can't carry a note in bucket, or even a totally cute handbag.

Professing literature it is.

Thirty-three

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.



That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go merry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.

(Herrick, "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time")

Hello! Adult in the room!

I'm really not cut out to be an authority figure.

Before class the other day, several of my students began discussing one of my colleagues--initially by way of recommending him as a teacher, but sooner or later you know what happened: they started gossiping about him. They traded stories about which of their mutual friends were in love with him and which friends thought that idea was totally gross. Then they started dissecting his mannerisms and wardrobe.

I tried to pretend that I was NOT HEARING this, keeping my eyes down and feigning great seriousness as I scratched notes in the margin of my lesson plan, but it was hard to keep a straight face. Finally, after one particularly outrageous statement, I looked up, made eye contact with the student who had just spoken, smiled wickedly, and said, "You guys know that he and I are friends, right?"

This abashed them not at all. "Oh, you won't tell him this!" said one. "Is he married?" said another. "Any kids?"

They kept talking. And then, to my shame, I heard something that made my mouth twitch, and then I snorted, and then it was All Over.

But karma'll get you. Last night I was out with several friends at a largely empty wine bar, 20 miles from RU. We were being really loud--laughing and shouting and arguing with each other and writing limericks on the back of napkins.

And? In walked one of my students.

Questions epistemological and existential

Taped to the bottom of my laptop screen are two fortune-cookie fortunes.

The one on the right is the more recent; it's been there for about six months, and reads, "Be assertive when decisive action is needed."

The one on the left has been there for at least two years. It reads, "What's the fucking point in any case?"*

I often sit here, wondering how one knows: when is decisive action needed? What is the fucking point?

When I know, you'll know.



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*At the Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross one of the souveniers was a Chinese take-out box with fortune cookies containing lines from the play.

Course-design bleg

Next semester I'm teaching a new course on sex and gender in the Renaissance. It's a 300-level class, and one that will be cross-listed with Gender Studies. I've already submitted all the paperwork suggesting that I know what I'm doing--giving a rough course outline and bibliography and all that--but of course, I don't actually know what I'm doing.

That's where you come in. If you work on the Renaissance (or more generally on issues of sex and gender), what would you teach? I intend to structure the course topically, and I have a good sense of the primary texts I'll assign. . . but since it may be obvious even to those who don't know my secret identity that I don't work on anything remotely related to sex, sexuality, or gender (or indeed anything remotely sexy), there are probably plenty of works I'm not thinking of.

More important than primary texts, though, I'm looking for what y'all would consider essential works of scholarship (theory, literary criticism, historiography) that are either a) accessible to undergraduates in a non-capstone-level class, or b) totally, totally necessary for me to read over the summer so's I'm competent to teach this thing.

Assume I know nothing. Now help me fill that void!

Why I teach literature

New Kid tapped me for this one, which began ages ago with Dr. Crazy and has been around the blogoverse and back (AWB's response being one of my favorites) while I've been off doing God-knows-what.

There are plenty of reasons why I teach literature, including the fact that I get paid to do it--to read and reread material I enjoy. But the reason that I wound up here in the first place, which is to say, the reason I went to grad school and stuck it out, is because I believe that reading literature critically gives us the tools to make sense out of our lives. And as a result, to live better.

I don't mean that in the usual "whoo! art is uplifting and we become more human and more humane through reading great literature" kind of way, and I don't mean that I want my students to seek out parallels between their own lives and the works we read. What I mean is that learning how to analyze and interpret texts teaches us to exist in the world in a more thoughtful, engaged, and critical way.

That's why I went to grad school, although that's also what many people would consider the worst or at least the most naive of reasons: I went, basically, because I felt I wasn't done studying literature, and I wanted to do more of it and to do it better. And even during my unhappiest days I felt that I was learning something valuable--not socially valuable, but personally valuable.

Early in my second year I went to see a movie with a friend, and during the ten or so minutes that it took for him to walk me home afterwards we chatted about what we'd seen. The conversation wouldn't now strike me as remarkable, but it did at the time: even as I was speaking, I realized that I had, somewhere in the previous year or so, learned to see differently. I had a vocabulary to talk about what was going on in the movie narratively--and even though I didn't really have a vocabulary for what was going on cinegraphically, I was still noticing things that I wouldn't have noticed before and fumbling toward articulating those things and their effects.

Recognizing how textual narratives are constructed allows us to understand the other narratives we're confronted with--whether told by our families and friends, our politicians, or ourselves. And although I just said that I found what I learned to be personally rather than socially valuable, I actually think it's both. I believe that understanding how narratives are shaped and manipulated allows us to reflect more fully on ourselves and the scripts we live by (and who's writing them). This in turn gives us greater confidence, competency, and agency in the world.

That, at any rate, is why I study literature. It's why I teach it, and it's one thing I hope my students gain from it.

Disenfranchised!

My state holds its primary elections tomorrow. In my county, the polls are open from noon until 9.

I, however, will be on campus from 11 until 9.30.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but the silencing of Renaissance scholars with 3/3 loads and 30-minute commutes is one seriously underreported electoral scandal.

Random bullets of back in the thick of it

• Having my first class at 11.30 a.m. is almost unimaginably blissful. Even on days when I haven't gotten enough sleep, I still feel okay when I get up. (Maybe because it's not pitch-dark outside?)

• I just learned that I'll have the same schedule next fall.

• I wonder whether I should find it troubling that the album I've had playing in my car to and from campus all week has been Kanye West's College Dropout.

• So far my students seem great. And there are only 60 of them.

• My contract was renewed, which means I'm basically guaranteed an income through 2012--something that, after time served in grad school and as contingent faculty, I hope never to take for granted.

• The state and my faculty union finally hashed out their own contract, which means I might soon see the cost-of-living increase I was supposed to get September 1st.

• So all's as well with my financial world as it can be while I remain both indebted and improvident.

• Wearing pointy, red stilettos on the first day of class will earn you many compliments. But if it's a day that involves 10 hours on campus, nearly seven of them in the classroom, you will have a very disagreeable walk back to your car at 9.30 p.m.



• As lessons go, that one's not really worth learning

Doubling forward, doubling back

About a year ago, dhawhee wrote a post on her favorite trope (in her case, zeugma). As I’ve been bushwhacking my way through the draft of an as-yet rather terrible essay on some new material, I’ve started noticing all over again what appears to be, if not necessarily my favorite trope, then certainly one I use with insane frequency: hendiadys.

I first encountered this term just a few years ago, in Frank Kermode's chapter on Hamlet in Shakespeare's Language--but when I did I realized immediately that it was a defining feature not only of most of the works I wrote my dissertation on, but also of my own writing. Literally "one from two," hendiadys refers to a pair of words linked by "and" that expresses a single meaning neither word alone conveys.* Some of these we use every day, unthinkingly, to the point that they're clichés: "house and home," "law and order," "doom and gloom." Ideally, though, they're less common, more evocative, and even surprising pairs.

I'd like to claim that I use hendiadys consciously (and of course evocatively!), but I notice it most when when I'm drafting--when I let myself just write, just in order to get words on the page and without turning on the editorial function. When I do that, I write in pairs unthinkingly and almost compulsively.

Here are two sentences I just added to the essay I'm working on:

In this passage, [Thing A] is characterized by its fragmentation and imperfection. Unlike [Thing B], which appears functional and whole while being divorced from any authentic source of motion or meaning, [Thing A]'s brokenness is a sign of its legitimacy.

Fragmentation and imperfection; functional and whole; motion or meaning--and actually there's another, ghost pair, "legitimacy and truth," which I rejected a split second before typing it.

So what the hell is that all about? Now, it may simply be that I believe in the buddy system when it comes to word usage (why settle for just one when two are available?), but since I don't tend to verbal excess or floweriness in other ways, I think my use of hendiadys is at least partly a process of refinement: of figuring out whatever it is that I really mean and how to say it.

In the above example, for instance, I'm still not sure whether what I'm talking about is motion or meaning. . . or some third and entirely different idea; that pair would definitely go in a revision. Similarly, I pre-rejected "legitimacy and truth" because, although the two terms don't express the same idea, they're too close in sense and not really interesting as a unit anyway. When I generate that kind of pair, it's clearly just a placeholder: two words that are different approximations of what I think I'm trying to say. On the other hand, pairings like "fragmentation and imperfection" or "functional and whole" do useful work, conveying ideas that no single term can express.

So partly it's that I don't like to commit--I'd rather generate possibilities than foreclose them--but it's also about what sounds right in my head: pairs and trios of words and terms and clauses just make rhythmic sense to me in ways I can't explain.**


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*Technically, hendiadys has a more narrow meaning, referring to pairs in which one noun is clearly subordinate to the other and could be converted into an adjective modifying it--but this broader usage is approved by at least some of my reference books, so I'm going with it.

**Before writing this post I was unaware that there is also such a thing as hendiatris, which involves three words that express a single meaning. But you'd better believe I employ that, too.

Isn't there a school for remedial move-busting?

If it's not all diffidence and ambiguity, all the fucking time, it's abrupt and startlingly inappropriate declarations and/or proposals.

Goldilocks should really just stay home.

Household emergency

I'm sure you're wondering what kinds of emergencies crop up in the Fescue household. Well, they're grim: the other day, the two halves of my cocktail shaker got stuck together.

Initially, I wasn't concerned. I ran it under hot water for a while. Then I got out the rubber jar-opener thingy to give me a better grip. Then I put it in the freezer to cool it down (on the vaguely-remembered principle that metal contracts when it's cold). Of course, I promptly forgot it was there--but upon rediscovery, days later, the thing still wouldn't budge. So I tried more hot water; the submersion method this time. Then I tried to prise apart the two halves with a very fine knife blade. Then I tried to push them apart with a flat-headed screwdriver. Then I sprayed the entire thing with WD-40. Then I repeated all of the above.

At last I sank down on the kitchen floor, massaging my nearly sprained hand. Forget getting food caught in one's throat and dying for lack of a Heimlich maneouver: rebellious inanimate objects are the real downside to living alone. Would it, I wondered, be totally inappropriate for me to take the shaker into work and ask for the assistance of a male colleague? Someone with bigger, stronger hands?

I didn't even consider buying a new shaker: this one is perfect, and has done noble service over the past decade. I bought it at Williams-Sonoma on my way home from work my first New Year's Eve after college, in preparation for the party I was throwing that night. I remember being shocked at its price (some $35 back in 1997), but I've since discovered that Williams-Sonoma carries better cocktail shakers than just about anyone--elsewhere the things tend to be cheaper, but are always more poorly made.

I set it aside. Then I came back to it. Finally, to the relief of all (well, me), something worked: filling the thing up inside with warm water and lots of dishsoap.

And all I can say is, thank God I'm still on vacation. Crises like these take a lot out of a girl.

Yours truly, immortalized!

There's no real story behind my pseudonym. When I moved blogs I decided that I wanted a pseudonym that was an actual name (rather than a title, like La Lecturess, which I'd come to find awkward), but unusual enough to be memorable. I was inclined toward something Latinate or Italianate, and I liked the fact that Flavia alliterated with my new blog's name.

All of which is to say, when I chose my pseudonym I'd forgotten about Donne's "Elegy II." Perhaps you've forgotten it, too?

Elegy II: The Anagram

Marry, and love thy Flavia, for she
Hath all things, whereby others beauteous be.
For, though her eyes be small, her mouth is great,
Though they be ivory, yet her teeth be jet:
Though they be dim, yet she is light enough,
And though her harsh hair fall, her skin is rough;
What though her cheeks be yellow, her hair's red,
Give her thine, and she hath a maidenhead.
These things are beauty's elements: where these
Meet in one, that one must, as perfect, please.
If red and white, and each good quality
Be in thy wench, ne'er ask where it doth lie.
In buying things perfum'd, we ask, if there
Be musk and amber in it, but not where.
Though all her parts be not in th'usual place,
She hath yet an anagram of a good face.
If we might put the letters but one way,
In that lean dearth of words, what could we say?
When by the gamut some musicians make
A perfect song, others will undertake,
By the same gamut chang'd, to equal it.
Things simply good can never be unfit;
She's fair as any, if all be like her,
And if none be, then she is singular.
All love is wonder; if we justly do
Accompt her wonderful, why not lovely too?
Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies;
Choose this face, chang'd by no deformities.
Women are all like angels: the fair be
Like those which fell to worse; but such as she,
Like to good angels, nothing can impair:
'Tis less grief to be foul, than t'have been fair.
For one night's revels, silk and gold we choose,
But, in long journeys, cloth and leather use.
Beauty is barren oft; best husbands say
There is best land, where there is foulest way.
Oh, what a sovereign plaster will she be,
If thy past sins have taught thee jealousy!
Here needs no spies, nor eunuchs; her commit
Safe to thy foes, yea, to a marmoset.
When Belgia's cities, the round countries drown,
That dirty foulness guards, and arms the towns:
So doth her face guard her. And so, for thee,
Which forc'd by business, absent oft must be,
She, whose face, like clouds, turns the day to night,
Who, mightier than the sea, makes Moors seem white,
Who, though seven years she in the stews had laid,
A nunnery durst receive, and think a maid,
And though in childbirth's labour she did lie,
Midwives would swear, 'twere but a tympany,
Whom, if she'accuse herself, I credit less
Than witches, which impossibles confess,
Whom dildos, bedstaves, and her velvet glass
Would be as loath to touch as Joseph was:
One like none, and lik'd of none, fittest were,
For things in fashion every man will wear.

Now tell me that wouldn't make for an awesome personal ad.

Print and personality

As usual, I'm weeks (but no longer months!) behind in my magazine reading, and so only just got around to Caleb Crain's "Twilight of the Books" in the December 24 & 31 issue of The New Yorker. Although I feel I've read a half-dozen versions of this same article over the past year or two--and I'm dubious about some of Crain's conclusions--it was still a worthwhile read.

Nevertheless, I take issue with this statement, near the essay's close, about the difference between text and television:

Moving and talking images are much richer in information about a performer's appearance, manner, and tone of voice. . . . The viewer may not catch all of the details of a candidate's health-care plan, but he has a much more definite sense of her as a personality, and his response to her is therefore likely to be more full of emotion. There is nothing like this connection in print. A feeling for a writer never touches the fact of the writer herself, unless reader and writer happen to meet. In fact, from Shakespeare to Pynchon, the personalities of many writers have been mysterious.

The first two sentences are mostly unobjectionable, but the last three get my vote as the stupidest thing ever said about writing by someone who purports to be both a reader and a writer.

Yes, yes: we probably learn more about the average person and his personality from a video clip than we do from a paragraph of his prose (though God save me from having to scrutinize either). But when it's writers we're talking about, I'm not sure that anything conveys personality better than the written voice. Do we learn everything about a writer from his work? Not a chance. But we probably learn more from it, over time, than we do from seeing him at the supermarket every week or catching the occasional t.v. interview.

Writing isn't a transparent medium, and even autobiographical writing like that on this-here blog involves some masking or resculpting of reality in order to produce a prettier or simply more coherent self. But that's true of all public performances--whether they're enacted on the page, before a t.v. camera, or live and in person. I'm not sure that someone who wanders into a panel and sees me deliver a conference paper, or even someone who chats with me over coffee, knows me any better or any more authentically than someone who only knows me through my blog. The two people probably know different things about me, but the person who has only encountered me, casually, in person does not know more. Likely he knows less.

Maybe not everyone is attuned to writing in the same way, but I believe that diction, syntax, and sentence rhythms are profoundly revelatory. I've fallen in love with some people, and become convinced that I know them, through their writing, while absolutely hating others--and all in ways and for reasons that have less to do with the subject of their writing than with matters of style and rhetorical self-presentation.

I imagine there are many people in the blogosphere who have had similar experiences. And I can say that, although there's always a moment of surprise and readjustment when I meet a blogger in person for the first time, I've never yet been wrong about someone's personality based on our initial, purely textual encounters.

Learning as dis/recovery

Over the past few days I've been making some headway on my long-deferred project of giving myself a crash course in literary theory, a subject largely and mysteriously absent from both my undergraduate and graduate training. My goal is modest: basically, to learn enough not to reveal myself publicly as an idiot.

I have a few textbooks and anthologies spread out on my coffee table (thanks partly to recommendations by Sisyphus and Horace), and I'm picking through various schools and theorists, reading all the headnotes and a good selection of essays. As I expected, it's been a deeply pleasurable activity. Much of what I'm reading is exciting in its own right, and some of it beautifully expressed, but my pleasure derives at least in part from the discovery that I know more than I thought I did, and in some ways what I'm really acquiring is a better context or frame for that knowledge.

It's satisfying to learn where certain terms that I've long understood and sometimes even used actually come from, or seeing how Thinker B was influenced by Thinker A. I recall having had a similar "a-ha!" experience late in my junior year in college, when I'd taken enough literature classes that I finally felt I had a general sense of the whole--how all those disparate periods, genres, and authors fit together.

In this case, though, I'm not just fitting things into a historical or intellectual progression, but realizing that I've already been (however un- or semi-consciously) trained in much of this. That stuff that I do with texts? There's a method to it! Or there could be! I haven't just been fumbling along, making shit up.

This, in turn, makes me think about the way we teach our students to read and work with texts. Obviously, I don't teach theory qua theory, but I do expect my students to be able to ask certain kinds of questions about the works we read, and to approach them in ways that produce meaningful analyses and richer readings. Those questions and approaches aren't my approaches, of course--they reflect the ways that I and most literary scholars of my generation have been trained--though I may be guilty of having too readily assumed that they're the obvious or only ones.

Still, much of what we do in the classroom is similar to my own project over the past few days: not teaching students new things so much as showing them what they already half know. There are, of course, things that have to be learned from the ground up. But the older our students are the more likely it is that we're teaching them to focus or reorient skills that are already there; we're just helping them to be more thorough and more self-aware about the process.

Is that wishful thinking? Well, maybe. But even if it's not true for every student, it's surely pedagogically useful to conceive of literary analysis (both its acquisition and its exercise) in these terms: as "discovery" in the old sense of dis- or un-covering something that was there all along.