Mrs. Fanny Assingham's Observations

From the inner suburbs of Howard Hughes territory

2005-10-22T18:52:00.000-04:00

this antibacterial ballpoint pen. For writing the labels on your jars of pee, I guess.

Unbe-effing-lievable

2005-10-21T11:33:00.000-04:00

I'm pretty sure George Orwell predicted something like this in 1984 which used to be standard reading list material for high school English. That didactic novel, along with "Politics and the English Language," used to be a standard offering in high school literature anthologies when I was in high school. "Politics' also was a standard item in freshman comp readers like the venerable LittleBrown Reader when I was a lowly M.A. teaching assistant a long, long time ago. The way I was taught both works, and subsequently taught the essay, was as a warning, as a sort of consumer reports for citizens. Back then the country was worried about the Commies. From the Soviet Union. Who might someday invade us through our Mexican back yard. And manipulate our newspapers and rewrite history. We teaching assistants were more worried about the Reagan administration, which seemed the ne plus ultra of the Orwellian, which just goes to show how limited our imaginations were.

That's what I assumed most people got from Orwell, back in the day. Turns out the guys currently in Washington were reading his stuff as a how-to manual, while the editors of America, who should have read it as a warning, must have skipped class that day.

Sticky

2005-10-21T10:46:00.000-04:00

Left of the Mississippi offers her usual humorous take this week on the intersection between a late-blooming public school gen-x'er and the private academy she now calls home. Given America's ballooning obesity problem, I think she ought to lay off the candy treats as incentives and tell her so in the Comments--my privilege as her late-but-n0t-quite-so-late-blooming-public- school-boomer sister. Plus, I remember a high school field trip to Lake's Crossing, the state mental hospital in Reno, Nevada, during which the psychiatric nurses would pop M&Ms into the mouths of severely disturbed children when they (the children) managed to behave well. Sooooo I'm a bit uncomfortable w/the whole candy treat incentive thing.

But the actual MLA activity she describes sounds interesting. I hope she'll share it, like a good little sis.

More poetry sightings

2005-10-21T10:39:00.000-04:00

The chalker had more Ginsberg up on the exterior front wall of the liberal arts building and some Thoreau on the walk in front of the mathematics building yesterday afternoon. Rains from the margins of Hurricane Wanda mean these won't last long.

And it's not even National Poetry Month!

2005-10-19T09:14:00.000-04:00

Seen chalked on the sidewalk outside the campus's main library, this disembodied line from Allen Ginsberg's great 1956 poem "America":

America why are your libraries full of tears?

That was all. No advertisement for a meeting or film. No commentary. No identifying markers. Just pure abstract allusion for, I'm betting, the sheer poetic joy of it. Very clever, too, of the mystery student chalker to begin what I hope will be a long campaign of disembodied poetry with a line from one of the founders of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute (which, coincidentally, butted up against my back door when I was a grad student in Boulder donkey's years ago).

It was a cheerer-upper for this tired prof, slogging in from the parking lot this morning after a long evening of a long week of marking some often terribly uninspiring midterms and quizzes. And a welcome change from the interminable and unvarying chalked Jesus Saveses that usually stain shoe soles and pant hems all over campus. I could feel my head lift and spine straighten, and I actually trotted up the four flights of stairs to my office.

I don't know if the M.S.C. will chalk again, or, if so, whether s/he's going to stick to Ginsberg, or is selecting from gay poets, Jewish poets, beat poets, American poets, or modern poets or whether s/he'll offer up some heady and unexpected combinations. But I'm going to keep my eyes open for other bits of disembodied poetry and maybe, just maybe, buy some sidewalk chalk of my own. There's some Edna St. Vincent Millay I'd like to float around.

Librarian Friend Saves the Day!

2005-10-12T21:59:00.000-04:00

It's been a busy 10 days for Mrs. Assingham; what with midterm grading and university-mandated program assessment, and doing a little buck-and-wing about the possibility of multiple indictments among the White House Iraq group and related jerks, she hasn't had time to hold a thought in her pretty little head.

Fortunately, Librarian Friend steps into the breach, forwarding this site, a compendium of the best fall color web-cams

She also begs to remind us Eastern Daylight timers that it's awful dark out in Banff-Alberta when we're having our morning java.

Thanks, Librarian Friend, for this vivid reminder that it's a beautiful world we live in--and CONGRATULATIONS on your new librarian gig. Excelsior!

Sigh

2005-09-28T15:38:00.000-04:00

Prepping Owen Wister's classic The Virginian for my "Myths of the American West" course, I pause over this, in the 1911 Re-Dedication [to Theodore Roosevelt in his Bull-Moose incarnation] and Preface:

After nigh half-a-century of shirking and evasion, Americans are beginning to look at themselves and their institutions straight; to perceive that Firecrackers and Orations once a year, and selling your vote or casting it for unknown nobodies, is not enough attention to pay to the Republic. If this book be anything more than an American story, it is an expression of American faith. Our Democracy has many enemies, both in Wall Street and in the Labor Unions; but as those in Wall Street have by their excesses created those in the Unions, they are the worst; if the pillars of our house fall, it is they who will have been the cause thereof.

Imagine that: the Republican Wister decrying the half century of mainly Republican corruption and/or incompetence--basically every president between Lincoln and Roosevelt (most of them Ohioans! including our own Bob's great-grandfather (fruit doesn't fall far from the tree, does it?)), whose post-Rooseveltian presidency led LaFolette and Teddy to form the Bull Moose Party--and the fecklessness of the American electorate who sell out their faith every four years.

Wister thought the decline of the Republic was about to end, with the election of Roosevelt to a third, non-consecutive term:

I believe the pillars will not fall, and that, with mistakes at times, but with wisdom in themain, we people will prove ourselves equal to the severest test to which political man has yeat subjected himself--the test of Democracy.

He was wrong, of course. The Democrats swept the election with Wilson who in his second term famously did not keep us out of war. But the Republic staggered on, with more or less erect pillars until recently. I wonder if Wister'd be so optimistic now.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer fella

2005-09-28T15:26:00.000-04:00

I was in class when it happened, but I too am doing the happy dance now. But seriously, does anybody really think he'll do any time? After all, he's not some poor trailer park kid caught with a couple of joints with intent to deal, he's a loyal servant of what Gore Vidal rightly terms "the ownership" and a rallying point for the white xtian lumpenprole South.

I bet he walks, and I bet it in sorrow and anger for what this nation's become.

Studentism

2005-09-27T21:15:00.000-04:00

This memorable bit from a student paper: "the crux of the pitfall"

And bravo to you, too, Lonely Old Courage-Teacher

2005-09-22T10:55:00.000-04:00

On the first day of autumn, in a season of storms, words of comfort
from Walt Whitman.*

On the Beach, at Night
 By Walt Whitman
1
ON the beach, at night, 
Stands a child, with her father, 
Watching the east, the autumn sky. 
  
Up through the darkness, 
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower, sullen and fast, athwart and down the sky, 
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east, 
Ascends, large and calm, the lord-star Jupiter; 
And nigh at hand, only a very little above, 
Swim the delicate brothers, the Pleiades.
  
2
From the beach, the child, holding the hand of her father, 
Those burial-clouds that lower, victorious, soon to devour all, 
Watching, silently weeps. 
  
Weep not, child, 
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears; 
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious, 
They shall not long possess the sky—shall devour the stars only in apparition: 
Jupiter shall emerge—be patient—watch again another night—the Pleiades
    shall
 emerge, 
They are immortal—all those stars, both silvery and golden, shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again—they endure; 
The vast immortal suns, and the long-enduring pensive moons, shall again shine. 
  
3
Then, dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter? 
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars? 
  
Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding, I whisper, 
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,) 
Something there is more immortal even than the stars, 
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,) 
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,
Longer than sun, or any revolving satellite, 
Or the radiant brothers, the Pleiades.


*And no, he's not talking about Jaysus. Something far bigger
than your mere God, I think.**
**Sorry to use your punctuational trick, Left, but it's
just for this once. It's not like you've copyrighted it.

Brava! Sharon Olds

2005-09-21T20:27:00.000-04:00

This week's Nation online offers the full text of poet Sharon Olds' eloquent refusal of Laura Bush's invitation to participate in the this year's National Book Festival. The festival is timed, the editors note, to coincide/conflict with a huge anti-war action on September 24. I quote Olds' devastating close below. Count on a poet to make every word count. The whole letter, linked to above, is worth your time:

"I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting 'extraordinary rendition': flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it."

Olds acknowledges regretting, a bit, losing the opportunity to attract new readers. Any writer would. But she makes her principled stand nonetheless. It'd be nice if she sold a few books on the 24th, wouldn't it? I see that Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 is only $11.53 at Amazon.com and $15.24 (members) at barnesandnoble.com. Nice price. Attractive cover, too.

Not a candidate for the National Book Award, I'm betting

2005-09-21T20:09:00.000-04:00

Librarian Friend forwards the following synopsis for a book on tape she's having to catalogue:

Lily Munroe has trained for the grueling Iditarod dog
race with a single-minded determination. The person to
beat is deliciously sexy and devilishly charming
playboy Derek Wright, who is secretly an elite
antiterrorism agent. As the two race across Alaska,
their blazing passion melts paths through the ice and
snow. But Lily is being tracked by a merciless
assassin who wants to send her to a frosty grave. Only
Derek stands in the killer's way.

I've red-lettered some of the above to try and get at what seems to be a troubling subliminal message from the Bush administration's Department of Homeland Security. Apparently priapic federal agents are busy destroying the permafrost up around the arctic circle, using only their genitalia, handy women and a couple of dogs. No wonder Michael Chertoff was too preoccupied to notice the flooding in New Orleans. Floating the idea in a book on tape accustoms America to the shocking reality before the story breaks (if ever).

Not exactly a day that will go down in infamy

2005-09-19T15:33:00.000-04:00

So the New York Times finally launched the much feared "Times Select" today, charging internet readers for access to the Op-Ed goodies and causing consternation across the left blogosphere (perhaps the right blogosphere as well--I try to stay out of those sorts of dives). I do think it's an unfortunate name: at least, whenever I see the adjective "select" following the noun it's supposed to modify, I can't help but imagine a brand of high-end cat food or the sort of bottom-end canned tuna that looks like cat food.

I'm having a hard time getting too worked up about the Times' decision, myself. All the news that's fit to print is still free, as are the letters to the editor, which are probably my favorite part--even the most knee-jerk conservative Times letter-writer has an admirable vocabulary and a way with a compound-complex sentence. I doubt the Times is going to beef up its bottom line by making the opinions pay-per-read. Times columnists, like Post columnists, are pretty widely syndicated and most of America gets them in their local papers after a day or two. If it means I'll have to wait until the Wednesday Dayton Daily News to read Krugman and Herbert, and Thursday to not read Tierney and Brooks, so be it. It's not as if opinions have a limited shelf life. I'll miss Frank Rich a bit, but even he shows up in my local rag when he's really hot, so I'll live. In fact, I suspect most of us will live--we may even thrive. Think how much time one could save, reading opinion columns only once a week instead of once online and once over breakfast two days later.

In which I come dangerously close to discussing workplace issues

2005-09-17T19:28:00.000-04:00

Grading the first batch of quizzes for my American lit survey (1865-1920) I'm floored, as I am with every first batch of quizzes with how little of what passes my lips or flashes up on the overhead actually makes it, whole and unadulterated, into some students' heads or onto some students' looseleaf. One gets used, of course, to having "minstrel show" come back as "menstrual show"--even though one wonders how a female student--young enough to still feel self-conscious or inconvenienced or possibly even relieved (depending on circumstances) by her monthly onset--can calmly sit thinking I'm talking about popular public displays of (presumably) menstrual blood (in the nineteeth century! in the genteel South!) and not raise her hand to ask a clarifying question, but after awhile one's amusement becomes forced and one's laughter hollow.

Happy Belated Birthday...

2005-09-16T21:48:00.000-04:00

...James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789)! Most readers today, if they think of Cooper at all, think of the subject of Twain's Bloomian-literary-patricidal "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" and pat themselves on the back for never actually having read him. But Cooper was the first of our novelists to offer a concerted critique of Americans' "wasty ways," via one-toothed hawk-eyed septuagenarian frontiersman Natty Bumppo, possibly the last fully original male character in American literature. The four extended vignettes of waste in the 1823 hit--and never out of print since--The Pioneers vividly capture the greed and shortsightedness at bottom of our national character, and foretell the eventual extinction of the passenger pigeon, the deforestation of the North Atlantic states and upper midwest and overfishing of our bodies of water.

Sure it takes him 15 chapters to get through the story's first evening and introduce the bulk of the (mostly flat) characters, but the writing is by turns funny, acerbic and thrilling. And after that 15th chapter, in which, after a careless shooting (by the Judge), execrable driving (by the Sheriff), an attempted bribe (Judge again) and lies and half-truths all 'round, nearly the entire cast foregathers in a tavern to drink themselves insensible on Christmas Eve, with nary a pious mention of the "reason for the season," you begin to realize that all the palaver from our self-appointed, liver-lipped guardians of faith and morality (are you listening O'Riley?) about how the ACLU and other liberal running dogs are preventing Americans from celebrating the season as they used to in some former Christian America is so much unpleasant smelling gas.

Miscellany

2005-09-12T20:08:00.000-04:00

Those interested, morbidly or otherwise, in Mrs. Assingham's current stomping grounds will do well to click through, then bookmark, this wonderful new photographic blog Photos from the Streets of Dayton, Ohio USA. "Man digs champion booger" is a good example of the high life hereabouts.

I can't take credit for finding this treasure. 'Twas found and shared with me by the Drunken Orangetree, who is my own Col. Bob in his blogosphere person. Going on the assumption that "A man and a woman are one / A man and a woman and a neat-o discovery are one," and knowing he's as used to me borrowing his good stuff as I am used to him b.m.g.s. I offer it here for your delectation.

Required reading

2005-09-10T20:40:00.000-04:00

George Washington Cable on levees, flooding, race.

Two new blog links

2005-08-18T10:35:00.000-04:00

The reader on whom nothing is lost will have noticed two new blogs listed in the links section, mercuryfern and Feministe. I've been browsing them both for about a month and want to share the finds. One of these brainy young bloggers is just passing footloose thru my campus on the way to bigger and better things. The other (actually a pair of brainy bloggers sharing space) came to my attention via Michael Berube Online, also listed in the links section to your left. Enjoy.

Thursday Fish Blogging

2005-08-18T09:45:00.000-04:00

Must one own cats and a digital camera in order to blog? I'm hoping not, and as a sign of faith in the blogosphere's welcoming of pet diversity, voici Stan and Ollie, the tiger barbs formerly known as Goopy and Bagha the Plentimaw Fish. (Actually, voici a link to a picture at an aquarium website--we haven't progressed to digital cameras yet.) This hardy and cheerful pair have been with us for 5 years now, outlasting other, fancier, costlier, fish; forgiving us our benign neglect and rising gracefully to the surface of the tank every evening when we shake in a flake or two and think warmly of Fred Rogers who first showed us how.

New Numbers

2005-08-18T09:03:00.000-04:00

According to the Dayton Daily News article (which doesn't seem to have made the online edition) there were 170 of us at the vigil, plus another 70 or so at another vigil in Bellbrook. Bellbrook's in Greene County and that's, as so many yard signs informed us back before the '04 general election, BUSH COUNTRY. This is indeed the age of miracles and wonders.

I probably think this song is about me

2005-08-17T21:52:00.000-04:00

Meanwhile....I was standing at the vigil minding my own business and holding up my sign ("Mothers' Vigil for Cindy Sheehan") when I noticed that a photographer for the local paper was snapping an awful lot of photos of moi. She asked my name too, and I told her, all the while thanking my lucky stars for tenure. I'm just vain enough to be torn about what I might see in tomorrow's paper. I'd sort of like to see myself in tomorrow's local section (there'd be a neat symmetry there, in that, the last time my mug showed up in a newspaper, I had been minding my own business at a mall coffee shop a week or so before Christmas back last century and been buttonholed by the "Daily Question" reporter for the Reno Gazette Journal with a question about my support for George H.W. Bush's then Gulf War, and I managed a terse and damning enough assessment to be the top-featured respondent the next day) but I'm also conscious that in 13 years in Ohio I've added almost 30 pounds, and a lot of them show up in my face, which the camera has never actually what you'd call loved anyway. But I'd also be hurt if the paper omitted me entirely and selected photos of people I'd have to assume the editors considered more attractive or dignified or intelligent looking (since we're in Ohio it couldn't possibly be that they were less fat). I have a t-shirt given me by my sister back in the days when she was education director for Planned Parenthood of Northern Nevada. It reads "I am the Face of Pro-choice America." I wear the shirt as often as I can, but I can't help worrying "what if people don't like my face? will it make them dislike pro-choice more than they already might? Is it my face's fault that women's reproductive freedom rights are being slowly whittled away?"

Now that's vain.

Cindy's gift

2005-08-17T21:12:00.000-04:00

Went to downtown Dayton this evening with the Col. to take part in a vigil for Cindy Sheehan (and all the dead on both sides in W's Vanity War) and have come back home feeling refreshed, even though the black body radiation off the street and buildings was something fierce and I'm all over sweat. The Col. estimates there were about 150 of us with candles and signs, stretched the length of the block, and some across the street. No police presence at all and the car traffic up and down 3rd Street was 99% positive: honks, cheers, thumbs up, one black power salute, and dozens of good old peace signs. Only one bad finger given us in three hours. The War to Stroke the President's Vanity has lost its support Montgomery County, OH.

We were all peaceful and, though mostly strangers, glad to be together even though for such a bittersweet reason. Today's indictments against Bob Taft helped keep us a bit high: the first crack--the first time in almost 5 years that a prosecutor has seriously taken on Republican corruption and brought an investigation to a palpable result. Some of us were hoping to get a chant or song started, but, hey, we're Ohioans, so nothing came of that. We tend to be pretty modest and self-effacing. We hardly ever chant. If you held a gun to our heads, we might scuff our toes and mumble a bit, but we don't like to put ourselves forward in any organized way. Which is why our showing up at all there downtown tonight was little short of miraculous. Coupled with all the other vigils that were supposed to be happening around the country tonight, that's a sign and portent that the White House scryers might actually have to pay some attention to. Can a rain of frogs be far behind?

Thanks, Cindy Sheehan, for reminding us we've got backbones and real questions that deserve to be answered.

Holy Moley!

2005-08-17T18:34:00.000-04:00

Housecleaning happens in Ohio. Can it be much longer before there's a thorough scrubbing of nasty dirty corners nationwide?

Yes, I'm math-impaired

2005-08-16T09:14:00.000-04:00

The Tree, who knows my math impairment firsthand, points out that Holden was only 39 when Bridge on the River Kwai was released. Let's see, 1957 minus 1918, carry the one, borrow the ten, please excuse my dear aunt sally, oh crap I'll just accept it. I guess in fantasy land that makes him my boytoy.

I can live with that.

Funny thing about aging: when I was a complexion-challenged youngster still living at home at home, hating the establishment, lacking the nerve to run away to Haight-Ashbury, and my folks would be watching a movie on the TeeVee with Holden, he just looked like a creepy, stringy, sweaty old guy to me. Now I write paeans to a dead man's pecs. How's that for creepy?

Over 1,000,000,000,000 catalogued

2005-08-16T08:45:00.000-04:00

Our Librarian Friend passed along the link to this weirdly compelling site, Watch WorldCat Grow. Every 10 seconds or so the entries are updated as libraries around the world catalogue new books and media. It's the library equivalent of watching through a hole in the security fence as a new building goes up, or spectating at Spring Training, or sitting on a dusty fence while there's calf-branding going on.

WorldCat, an international library cooperative with, I'm told, origins in Ohio, catalogued its one billionth holding Thursday, August 11th: exciting news for compulsive readers and library junkies everywhere. As I check today they've already added more than 800,000 since hitting the one billion mark. Congratulations WorldCat! Well done! And thanks for the reminder that there's no greater pleasure in life than watching someone else work.

Your Assignment: Pour a cup of coffee and watch WorldCat grow for a bit--and you thought you worked hard!

Such thoughts I have of you tonight, William Holden

2005-08-15T20:16:00.000-04:00

Maybe it's an age thing, but suddenly I've been thinking a lot about William Holden and finding him strangely attractive. And not just any William Holden, but my age-appropriate William Holden of the late 1950s, early 60s, when the actor was in his forties and still sported as firm a pair of pecs as you'd want to see on a middle-aged actor.

But it's not just the Rrrrrrroooowwwrrr adult male physique, though that doesn't hurt, or his considerable, understated strengths as an actor. It's the typical William Holden character I think I'm in love with--Cmdr. Shears of Bridge on the River Kwai (pictured here), or Sgt. Sefton of Stalag 17--and to a certain extent Pike Bishop of The Wild Bunch--though it's mainly the war pictures I'm drawn to (of which there were many more than the two I mention). Holden's character in these was the cynical American prole, wise to how the boys with the power ran the game, using people like himself as expendable pawns and refusing to be used any farther than he had already been used. Refusing to be used further, the character is damned by other characters as lacking in patriotism, is brandad as, at the least, a slacker, at worst a traitor. Sound familiar?

In Bridge on the River Kwai, Holden's character impersonates an officer to escape manual labor, from which the Geneva Convention exempted officers, in the prison camp and, when that doesn't work--the movie's early conflict between Alec Guinnes and Sessue Hayakawa hinges on the Japanese commander's violation of the convention--escapes through the jungle and is rescued by the British at sea. Convalescing in India, Holden's character continues the impersonation because officers get better treatment than enlisted men--better liberties, better parts of the beach, better convalescent quarters, sexual access to the nurses. Forced to join the British commandos on a raid of his former prison to destroy the bridge, Holden's character makes it clear that he goes under protest, that war is not a jolly game, as the British commandos would have it, that patriot is just a word the bosses use when they mean sucker. Sound familiar? Nonetheless, when faced with it, his character fulfills his task and blows up the bridge--though one suspects that when and if he escapes Burma a second time, having been unmasked as an enlisted man, there'll be no more nurses for him.

In Stalag 17, Sgt. Sefton, who holds himself aloof from the other prisoners, takes care of his own interests, denounces patriotism, and sauces all his interactions with the others heavily with sarcasm is unattractive enough to be a plausible candidate for suspicion of being camp stooge. At the instigation of the real stooge (German plant Peter Graves) Sefton is beaten and robbed by the other "good" prisoners; but it's his convalescence from this beating that allows him to figure out how Graves's character is communicating escape plans to the German guards. There's something weirdly satisfying, even for pacifistic me, in Sefton's revenge, when Graves's character is mistakenly machine-gunned by the guards off-camera, in silhouette--but, then, I never cared for Peter Graves.

What interests me most, I guess, is how popular this character was with audiences in the so-called conformist, post-war '50s, among veterans like my old man who enlisted, underaged, in '38 and stayed in for the duration of that war and the next, and among civilians like my mother who'd dealt with rationing, who collected aluminum and string and mended her laddered stockings, who a enjoyed single women's relative wartime freedom, working at Fitzsimmons military hospital, had a classic cute meet with a handsome airman in Denver, married him quickly and raised their first child alone while her husband was posted to North Africa with the Army Air Corps.; and how invisible this character, this cynical, questioning American, is in movies today. I'd bet that if we could somehow wipe both movies from the cultural memory, thus freeing them of their classic status, and plunked them down as brand new in the local multiplex, the roar of rage from today's pro-war contingent would be deafening; that we'd hear from all the usual suspects about how liberal Hollywood is undemining the American fiber, etc., etc., etc. I bet Holden would find himself in some list of the 100 most dangerous people in America, along with Cher and Jane Fonda.

Cynical, wide awake, suspicious of power--especially power at its most glib and evasive--resistant to conformity and the the maddening pressure of the mob: I like that vision of the American male (and his very nice physique). Pity you don't see his type around much anymore.

Trees, acorns not falling far from

2005-08-06T07:45:00.000-04:00

My almost-11-year-old has just finished reading Tom Sawyer, which he declared upon starting would be his only big novel this summer. He prefers non-fiction books about science and military hardware and cartoon compilations (this summer he's burned through the big New Yorker compendium, the first two volumes of the Complete Peanuts and multiple paperbacks of Calvin and Hobbes). Also, this is the summer the comicbook-appreciation gene he inherited from his father, the Col., finally manifested and the two of them have bonded over several volumes of the Marvel Masterworks Fantastic Four and Magnus Robot Fighter.

But getting him to read prose fiction is tricky. Like most males he has trouble with commitment, so anything that looks like it will require more than a few nights to get through gets an automatic thumbs-down. Short stories are an ideal medium, but difficult to find in accordance with his abilities and tastes. A collection of Sherlock Holmes stories and Asimov's I, Robot got him through much of this summer (He heartily recommends "The Speckled Band" and "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"). His literary competence has far outstripped his emotional maturity, so fiction aimed at his age group, he complains of as too insultingly simple. But more complex young adult fiction tends too often to assume a dawning sexuality in its readers--off-putting and booo-oo-oo-oo-or-ing to one still firmly in the Legos and latency stage--or to rely heavily on violence to move the plot along.

But ours is a tender-hearted young acorn, whose love of military hardware is founded on a mostly abstract appreciation of its destructive potential (Required to make a Martin Luther King's day dream for a class poster back in first grade, he wished for "peaceful tanks." I think that tells us everything we need to know about the scion.) So, for example, he refused to proceed any farther with HP&tH-BP the minute Malfoy broke HP's nose, stating that, while he knew somebody would have to die at the end of the book, he didn't see why he had to put up with having it rubbed in for a couple-hundred pages in advance. The first Artemis Fowl book made him faint in the middle of third-grade silent reading period two years ago. So the level of violence deemed appropriate in contemporary juvenile fantasy-adventure is a little too much for him.

Enter Tom Sawyer. I don't know what inspired me to recommend it, even over my misgivings about its odor of late nineteenth century paternalistic racism. But I was pretty sure that if the whitewashing chapter didn't grab him, then using a cat to pull off a crabby teacher's hairpiece would. And it did, though he won't fully admit it. Knowing that I want him to enjoy fiction means he remains non-committal (to me) about what he enjoys. But if he keeps reading it, or refers casually to it unprompted, or, as happens occasionally, plops himself down into a chair in the middle of the day and reads it all in one sitting, I know he's hooked. Twain's book didn't achieve one-sitting status, but my son kept reading it nights, so it was a nominal success. Not surprisingly, he fell in love with Tom's friend Huck, his speech patterns, outsider status, and his lore. Driving out to buy school clothes the other day, I jokingly showed him how to make an evil-eye ward-off sign as we passed Wal-Mart. He countered by observing that there's plenty of "weird superstitions like that" in Tom Sawyer, and telling me about Huck's cure for warts, among other things.

He finished the last two chapters of Tom Sawyer last night and came downstairs to report it ("I guess it was ok. Pretty interesting") and also to (as has become an unfortunate habit this summer) cadge a few extra minutes out of bed way past bed-time by casually reporting such news and asking needless but suddenly urgent questions). Turning to go back upstairs again after eliciting the promise of a second tuck-in and some cold water, he declared his plans to "read the sequel. I guess it's more about Huck, so it'll probably be more interesting."

His mother's heart leapt.

Silly me. . .

2005-08-06T07:21:00.000-04:00

. . . to take on a blog at about the same time I start teaching my 5 week/4 day a week summer course, along with those last few book reviews to edit and mail out.

I've got two more weeks left in the classroom and so will take a little break now to give myself enough time in the day to prep-n-grade and see students and grant indulgences by day, locate my chi and bike my miles, do my share of the housework, drink mojitos, eat Col. Bob's barbecue, and lounge about reading the latest haul from Borders (Ahab's Wife and Zorro) by night. All more than enough for one as basically lazy as I am.

Part deux of "My Career in Religious Education" is in draft, but please don't expect it before next weekend.

My Career in Religious Education, Part 1

2005-08-01T15:16:00.000-04:00

A story in today's newspaper had me recovering a long suppressed memory of my brief career as a religious educator.

My Career in Religious Education, Part 1: I Am Called to Teach

When I was a bookish and responsible 15-year-old biding my time until I could escape rural Nevada and throw myself into the thrilling world beyond, the mother of one of my classmates up and ran off with a man not her husband. “Up and ran off” was the phrase which rang the four block length and breadth of my home town, plus out into the ranching community at both ends. This upping and running off would have had no impact on me whatsoever except that my classmate’s mother was also the second-grade catechism instructor.

(Readers who have not brushed up against the one holy catholic and apostolic church may need a field guide to understand the implications of this:

catechism is after-school religious instruction for Catholic-raised children whose parents for one reason or another have enrolled them in public rather than parochial schools
catechism is intensely boring and, in those days, only escaped after one went through confirmation in the ninth grade
catechism in rural communities like mine is usually taught by a combination of volunteers from the altar society who would rather ride herd on bored children one hour a week than iron and starch altar linens week in and week out and wizened and hairy nuns, in this case Dominican, who travel down from the city once a week in what must be for them the equivalent of hairshirt-wearing mortification
second grade is the year in which Catholic children are prepared for their first confessions.
confession is an important sacrament in that all the other sacraments, except baptism depend upon it; you’re not supposed to take communion without first having absolution and since both the full-bore Catholic marriage ceremony and extreme unction involve taking communion, you’re pretty much screwed if you can’t do the confession and penance thing. More important than that, confession is an essential step on the way to confirmation—and without confirmation I suppose you’d never escape catechism.)

So you can see what a big deal it was to the local Catholic community, not to mention the second-graders, when she up and ran off. Heck, it was a big deal to the whole movie-theaterless, pre-cable TV town. Between the adults hashing over the scandal in kitchens and bars across the valley and adults and children vicariously enjoying the misery and embarrassment of cuckold—I mean abandoned—husband and children, it was every bit as lingering, dramatic and satisfying as Peyton Place—novel, movie or daytime serial.

Still, except for the frisson offered by the event, it would have had little impact on me in the long run except that, as a bookish and responsible fourteen-year-old who had just been confirmed the previous year (Anastasia, if you must know, for no other reason than that I’d just read Nicholas and Alexandra and War and Peace and loved all things Russian that year), I was, along with another bookish girl in my class, asked by Sister Joseph to take over the second-grade catechism class and get them through their first confession. Both of us planning to be teachers when we escaped, and both of us sensible that volunteer work really looked good on college and scholarship applications, we took the job. And therein lies a tale that will take a few days to tell.

Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself

2005-07-27T11:28:00.000-04:00

I don't get around to the Common Dreams.org website as often as I should. But when I do, there's often something worth reading, like this essay by Calvin White, "Who's Taking the Blame for Christian Violence?"

Read 'em and Weep

2005-07-26T10:00:00.000-04:00

We compulsive readers discover Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology in adolescence, about the same time we find ourselves agreeing with Holden Caulfield that people are all phonies, with Gene and Phineas that the old men start the wars young men fight in because they're jealous of young men's beauty and passion, and with Marcia Willard that you can't trust anybody, that even family will hate you if you're too intelligent.

That the world is full of hypocrites is the major epiphany of the early teen years; we experience it with mingled revulsion and disbelief, with howls of inner anguish, private bouts of passionate weeping, and outward surly behavior. We write a poem or two ourselves (best forgotten). When we get a little older we get used to the idea of hypocrisy--exercise expediency from time to time ourselves even--and, embarrassed at the nakedness, excessiveness, and naievity of our adolescent revulsion at it, we put away those works of literature that expose hypocrisy so directly and move toward more "adult" literature, where ambiguity is the both the chief aesthetic value and the chief solace.

But sometimes a little straight talk is wholesome, and it's worth paying a visit back to Spoon River.

Here's Masters on the souls of judges and politically ambitious lawyers, just in time for the John Roberts confirmation hearings.

The Circuit Judge
By Edgar Lee Masters

Take note, passers-by, of the sharp erosions
Eaten in my head-stone by the wind and rain --
Almost as if an intangible Nemesis or hatred
Were marking scores against me,
But to destroy, and not preserve, my memory.
I in life was the Circuit judge, a maker of notches,
Deciding cases on the points the lawyers scored,
Not on the right of the matter.
O wind and rain, leave my head-stone alone!
For worse than the anger of the wronged,
The curses of the poor,
Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear,
Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer,
Hanged by my sentence,
Was innocent in soul compared with me.

John M. Church
By Edgar Lee Masters

I was the lawyer for the "Q"
And the Indemnity Company which insured

The owners of the mine.

I pulled the wires with judge and jury,

And the upper courts, to beat the claims

Of the crippled, the widow and orphan,

And made a fortune thereat.

The bar association sang my praises

In a high-flown resolution.

And the floral tributes were many—

But the rats devoured my heart

And a snake made a nest in my skull!

Homework: Reread something that really spoke to you at about age 13. Take a cleansing breath and try not to blush for who you were or for what you've become. You may weep a little weep, though, if you need to.

Nothing Fails Like Failure Department

2005-07-25T20:06:00.000-04:00

An impressive job on the part of Ohio's Republican rulers and the bleating sheep who keep voting them in, in exchange for paltry income tax cuts that have amounted, in any year, to less than the price of a carton of cigarettes (the pre 2005 tobacco tax hike price, to boot).

Ohio's hapless Democratic party bears some responsibility too. In the 13 years I've lived here they've handed over both Senate seats (Metzenbaum's and Glenn's), countless Congressional districts and just about the whole state government. The Republican legislature's gerrymandering of Tony Hall's former district, to give white exurban faux-rancho conservatives from Warren Country the the power to overwhelm Dayton and Montgomery County's historically strong Democratic vote went essentially unchallenged by the Dems. The party barely even supported its last candidate for governor, Captain Janeway's squeeze Tim Hagan, preferring to let the Third Frontier Borg plant have the mansion for a second feckless term.

Way to go Ohio! We've beat our own record for bankruptcies (again!) and have the governor with the lowest approval rating in these United States.

See you at the red light

2005-07-25T08:32:00.000-04:00

Hi. I'm the middle-aged woman in the well-maintained economy car, driving exactly 35mph (the posted speed limit), bopping her head and singing along with Don Walser to "Shotgun Boogie" in front of you on that residential stretch of Grange Hall Road in Beavercreek, OH, north of Linden and south of the I-675 overpass. Actually, now that I've seen your empurpled face in my rear-view mirror--you're tailgating so closely that I can't even see the hood of that gas-guzzler you're driving so poorly--I'm the middle-aged woman driving exactly 34, or maybe even 33mph in front of you. I just love cruise control.

Do you know you've got this vein in your forehead that pulses when you're stressed out or angry? You should have that looked at, Mister (sometimes, Sister). I can see it really clearly from where I sit and, though I'm just a simple country doctor of philosophy, that looks like a stroke in the making. I can also see the interior of your vehicle and, know what? There's no hugely pregnant woman in there about to deliver a baby. There's no frightened child holding an arm mangled by the family wood chipper. There's no locked briefcase left behind by the current resident of the White House when he was last here trying to sell the rubes on his latest plan to enrich his pals.

There is, in fact, just you; sometimes with a cell phone glued to your ear, sometimes ruminating a fast-food breakfast sandwich (I always wondered who was dumb enough to eat those things), sometimes dropping a cigarette butt out of your window. And clearly--wow that vein is really standing out now--clearly this is not emergency enough, nor are you important enough, that the speed limit through a residential stretch of this or any other community should be set aside just for you.

Face it, if you were important enough, you'd have sirens and lights, or a police escort. And simply being an aggressive nitwit is not an emergency situation--though if there were a surgical procedure to correct it, you should see if it's covered by your insurance. Maybe when you see your doctor about that vein in your forehead.

See, this is a residential street, even if it is out in the country. There are houses on the east side, all the way up from Linden. Houses on the west side too, part of the way. And there are children living in those houses; you can see them getting on and off the school buses during the season. They have pets, too, if the daily-renewed cat remains that pepper the street, slaughtered by other self-important speeding louts in cars too big for their driving skills are any indication.

Now the road widens out to four lanes, just south of the t-intersection with New Germany-Trebein Road. You gun your engine and slew out to my left to pass, not even using your turn indicator to let the poor sap behind you know what's up. As you pass me, red-shifting a bit, you turn your head toward me and utter something. My lip reading skills tell me it's the usual store-bought imprecations to go with your store-bought breakfast and your store-bought faux-rebel 'tude. You certainly are tough. I see a car seat in the back of your....Escalante is it? Hummer? Tahoe? Whatever it is it's big and ugly... and, yes, a little tow-headed angel in the car seat. I bet little angel's ears are burning. You actually speak that way around your own kid? Ahh, well. Diff'rent strokes. Or maybe the car seat is empty and little angel is back home, innocently rolling down the driveway and into the street on her big wheel, or toddling out from between two parked cars to fetch his wayward bouncy ball. Whee! I hope no self-important boob is tear-assing through your neighborhood right now.

Good work, you're going almost 50 mph now. Too bad the light at New Germany-Trebein is red. But at least you beat me there. That's gotta feel good. Pity they don't hand out prizes. Have a nice day!

Time for a new cd. Hmmmm, Alison Krauss, I think, or maybe John Fogarty.

Breakfast of Champions

2005-07-25T07:13:00.000-04:00

Vladimir Nabokov named the poached egg on toast "the most delicious breakfast known to man"--and he's definitely got a point, especially if the white is firm, the yolk still runny and there's lots of butter on the wheat toast. But for my money, I'll take a piece of sourdough toast with butter and blackberry jam, a dish of sliced strawberries with sugar and cream, and a cup of drip coffee, black no sugar: the most delicious breakfast known to [this] woman, especially if eaten when the rest of the family is still off in slumberland and a bit of breeze is coming in through the front window. That's when peace comes dropping slow.

Homework: Get up early enough tomorrow to eat something simple you've made yourself. Doesn't that feel nice?

That's the Silver one, in case you were planning on sending a gift

2005-07-21T08:42:00.000-04:00

I'll be taking a long weekend away from the computer to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary. That's twenty five years of hashing over plot points with Col. Bob (see "Who's Fanny" below). Or, to put it another way, one quarter of a century. More than half my life. I'd say that's a pretty good outcome, considering just how utterly clueless and unprepared we were at the time. Oh, we had the sex part pretty well doped out, having met in that free-lovin', disco-dancin', punk-rockin', 'shroom droppin', Harvey Wallbangerin', pre-AIDS decade, the '70s. It was all the other stuff, that takes up the remainder of one's waking hours, that we weren't too clear on. We had no money, no jobs, no degrees (as yet) and only the most nebulously worked out plans for the future.

Since we were living in Reno at the time, we ambled downtown to the Office of the Washoe County Commisioner of Civil Marriages, then located at the corner of Court Street and Sierra Street, just south of the long-gone Ardan's department store (NB: this is NOT the same thing as a wedding chapel. The Col. and I were short on practical sense, but we did have good taste!), paid our $15 and were married in our street clothes in a bare office with knotty pine paneling and single print hanging on the wall. Our parents were there, my then best friend and the Colonel's then closest brother. Our two rings--silver with a sort of cowboy-paisley engraving, long since worn away--had cost a total of $45 at the Westerner Silver Shop in Shopper's Square. I doubt if the little party we had with college and town friends the next day set my parents back $150, including the professionally made cake.

I'm sure there were people who thought I was pregnant at the time (nope) or who figured we wouldn't last more than a few years (wrong-o), or that we were plumb crazy (gotta give 'em that one), but we've managed to outlast that. Twenty-five years is a long time to eat breakfast every day with one person, ample time to behave foolishly or carelessly or inconsiderately. But it's not nearly enough time to have with the one who still makes one flutter, who is still wittier, smarter, tenderer-hearted, and sexier than anyone else one's ever met. I don't know if we'll both live long enough to make the half-century mark, but I'm planning on hashing over those plot points with the Col. until the very last page of the novel.

Sorry 'bout that

2005-07-19T06:51:00.000-04:00

The link to Sandburg's poem "The Liars" in yesterday's post was bad--my bad. I think I've got it fixed now. As a back up, there's a link in the title to this post too. Thanks for alerting me, Anon. And thanks for reading my blog. I've read many of your poems with pleasure over the years :)

Poem of the As-Yet-to-Be-Determined Calendar Unit

2005-07-18T15:15:00.000-04:00

Here's a prescient bit of poetry by Carl Sandburg, entitled "The Liars." In my green and salad days, when I was studying modern poetry as an undergraduate at the University of Nevada, Reno (go Wolfpack!), we didn't read Sandburg. We read the difficult modern poets: Yeats, Stevens, Eliot, for example. And since it was the seventies, we didn't read any modern woman poets, or even any modern poets who weren't white, no matter how difficult or modern they might be. It was the bad old days.

Back then, I had assumed that Sandburg hadn't made the curricular cut because he was not a great poet, that he was too easy--high school stuff. And, indeed, "Chicago" and "Grass" and even the poem about the fog's little cat feet still are pretty much poems you can count on the average high schooler to have encountered. And, given the standards outlined by the spokesmen of modernity, the Eliots and the Warrens and the Pounds, Sandburg wasn't allusive enough, ambiguous enough or formally crafted enough to be great. Sandburg is, in comparison to the greats of modernism, crude, direct, obvious.

But then, in 1989, Cary Nelson argued very convincingly in his stunning book Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910-1945 that the values of modernist poetics arrayed themselves against political expression, particularly to labor/socialist political speech/art then being created by the struggling masses. (I'm not doing Nelson real justice here, but it's been years since I read the book). But at the same time high modernist poetry was doing its own political work, in that by directing the reader's gaze away from the political, it reinforced the status quo.

So here is Sandburg, crude, direct and obvious, and damned if this poem isn't exactly applicable to Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Scott McClellan and George W Bush, and their GOP and few-remaining media enablers-- as seen in this excerpt:

A liar looks ’em in the eye
And lies to a woman,
Lies to a man, a pal, a child, a fool.
And he is an old liar; we know him many years back.

A liar lies to nations.
A liar lies to the people.
A liar takes the blood of the people
And drinks this blood with a laugh and a lie,
A laugh in his neck,
A lie in his mouth.
And this liar is an old one; we know him many years.
He is straight as a dog’s hind leg.
He is straight as a corkscrew.
He is white as a black cat’s foot at midnight.

Your Homework: Read the rest of the poem. Discuss it with
friends and family.Then copy the link to the poem and email it
somewhere it'll do the most good. Ask, what did the President know
and when did he know it?

Buurrrrp!! The Harry Potter review

2005-07-17T12:15:00.000-04:00

Just one post today as I stayed up until @ 2:30 finishing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. At my age it’s not even a question of losing beauty sleep anymore, it’s more an issue of whole neural pathways breaking down overnight. One’s formerly beautiful mind starts to resemble an unmaintained road in Lyon County, Nevada. One becomes incapable of complex thought. That and one’s ravelled sleave of care stays pretty much unknit, the hurt mind unbalmed, and sore labor definitely unbathed -- which means that after bolting down Potter (buuuuuurrrp) I lay awake thinking of all the things that had to be done today to get ready to teach my summer American literature course which begins on Monday. So I’m not, as my lamented father would say, firing on all four cylinders.

Anyhoo. I won’t give away the ending, if you haven’t already deduced it from the pre-release hoopla. I mean, we’re not talking Moby Dick, here, where it’s best to just let the class know right from the get-go that Ahab goes down with the whale and all hands save Ishmael go down w/the Pequod, while he alone is left to tell the tale, so they (the class, I mean, not Ahab et.al.) can get beyond mere plot and get to the important stuff like the Cetology and the Catskill Eagle. (I hope I haven’t spoiled things for anybody here.) With Melville, plot’s just a framework to hang ideas on; with Rowling--and not just her of course, but with all the big popular entertainments (those books that, as James would say, are meant to be swallowed whole, like puddings)--plot is what you’re paying for. It’s definitely not the ideas, and not even so much the ending, it’s the twisty turns that get you there that you’re paying for when you shell out your $29.99 plus pre-publication order discount (I got 50%).

As puddings go, HP was mostly tasty although, as I intimated earlier, it might have benefited from the firm hand of a sensible editor. However, as I’ve never once myself gotten beyond imagining what my back-cover photo should look like in the novel-writing game, I won’t cavil over length. What I am posting to gripe about is the slack job of proofreading by Scholastic. As early as page 10 one reads (NOTE: I am printing the offending element in bold red for those of you who were never county spelling champ in eighth grade):

. . the Prime Minister could not help but fear that the next time Fudge appeared it would be with graver news still. The site, therefore, of Fudge stepping out of the fire once more . . . was about the worst thing that had happened in the course of this extremely gloomy week.

This is not the only typo of this sort--the kind that slides past spellchecking programs because the wrong word is some other word spelled correctly--and there are a few sentences here and there which, frankly, and I speak as someone who has had to chew her way through not a few Jamesian sentences, simply do not parse. Now, honestly, you'd think with all the money they're raking in, Scholastic, Rowling, et. al., could have sprung for an English major or two to read the thing carefully. It's not like there aren't plenty of deserving and underemployed specimens about who could use the money. The conventional wisdom is that Rowling has almost single-handedly revived reading as an habitual pastime among the youth of today, and kudos to her for doing her part. But it would be nice to think that the young weren’t absorbing crappy spelling habits while becoming habitual readers.

So, HP&tH-BP is a pleasant and tasty pudding, a proper English trifle, if you will (and though you may already know who dies, I'll bet you don't figure out who the titular Half-Blood Prince is much before you're told) but you'll find a few ill-mixed and cornstarchy lumps within that may temporarily spoil the smooth custardy smoothness you'd expect from so famous a cook.

Ask a librarian...

2005-07-17T09:25:00.000-04:00

A librarian friend sends the following comment

You know that the Library of Congress controls the master list of subject headings for libraries. Today I read that the LoC subject heading “Iraq War, 2003” has been changed to “Iraq War, 2003 - ” ; one little dash says so much, doesn’t it?

continuing proof that if you really want to know what's going on in the world, go to your library and ask around. They know, or can figure out, everything. All that keeps me going some days is the hope that, in 10 years or so, one can pull up the LC Subject heading for Bush, George W. and find such sub-headings as: war crimes of, impeachment of, etc.

Your assignment: go to your local library today. Ask your friendly librarian how library budgets are faring this year. If you live in Ohio, ask how our pioneering OhioLink network has fared under the past 10 years of one-party rule and fiscal mismanagement. (Coingate is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. To grasp the full extent of Ohio Republican corruption, check out this excellent blog.) Then ask the librarian to help you find out what your legislative district is and who your representatives are. Send them an email or letter reminding them that libraries are in the front line of community education and do more to make good citizens than any number of anti-flag burning statutes. Then you may check out a book and video of your choice. Enjoy!

Now that's right beautiful

2005-07-15T07:26:00.000-04:00

And a lucid explanation, too. Is there any better site on the web than Astronomy Picture of the Day?

As if you needed a reason to buy it

2005-07-14T21:57:00.000-04:00

I'm not one of those people who went ga-ga over Harry Potter when he first flew over the pond. After all, I read big books, very big books, multiple times and even taking notes, for a living, so the notion that a big fat novel might grip me enough to cause me to switch off the TV, put the tads to bed early, and stay up reading all night was not, as they say, an unfamiliar one.

But I am a compulsive reader--and I get through lots of books in a year. Rowling's books are a pleasant diversion, less so now that success has, apparently, resulted in an editorial hands-off policy. But even still, and though they do rather go on and on lately, Rowling's novels possess that admirable, easy style, a combination of off-hand erudition and commitment to simple craftsmanship that's the hallmark of even B- and C-list British writers, not simply the grade A bunch. And I say this as a die-hard and committed Americanist who relishes the rough-and-ready anti-craftsmanship that's signified American fiction since day one.

So, yes, I've read the first five and planned to pick up HP and the Half-Blood Prince sometime this weekend, if I had a chance, nothing urgent . . . til now.

Turns out the pope's a-scared of Harry's seductive capacity--fears the boy wizard might pull young Christians to the dark side. Poor dumb Benedict! It used to be that you could distinguish between Catholics and hardline fundamentalist yahoos by their aesthetic taste if nothing else. All those gothic cathedrals and Palestrina masses had been good for that much. But now, as the Catholics narrow and narrow their whole weltanschauung, even himmelanschauung, if I may, to the width of the dilated cervix and birth canal they've become as like the fundamentalists as they can be, even to the tin ear and blindness to metaphor that distinguishes the Left Behind and Christian romance crowd from the rest of us with brains in our heads and enough literary competence to actually experience a text in all its rich complexity.

The only danger Harry and friends pose young readers, Christian or otherwise, is that they might develop a taste for clean English prose and a preference for a narrative voice that maintains an ever-so-slightly-humorous distance from the events it narrates. That is to say, an appreciation for narrative distance that might someday sharpen into a taste for the ironic mode.

On second thought, I guess I see what the old guy's a-skeered of after all.

Homework: Before you sit down with your copy of HP&tH-BP and the ice-cold beverage of your choice, read the following poem by Sharon Olds and defend one of the following points:
1. This poem made me laugh so hard I sprayed tea out my nose!
2. The only thing grosser than thinking about the Pope's package is thinking about your Dad's package.
3. Blasphemy!

Who’s Fanny?

2005-07-14T13:48:00.000-04:00

Which as anyone who paid attention in fourth grade knows means “who is Fanny?” not “to whom does this fanny belong?”

Fanny Assingham is a secondary character in Henry James’s late masterpiece The Golden Bowl. Not wishing to give away the plot, let me just say that she sets the various mésalliances in motion simply through her acquaintance with the four main players and is the first to spot and comment upon nearly everything that happens afterward. Almost her whole action consists of hashing plot points over with her husband, Col. Bob Assingham,. She’s a typical Jamesian observer, so few of whom were female—a middle-aged woman of comfortable circumstances, a bit eccentric (though nowhere along the lines of Portrait's Mrs. Touchett) and not without a hint of malice. AND she’s got a great name, one of the best, I think, in the whole James canon.

I, too, am a middle-aged (well, 47) woman and not without a healthy dollop of malice. I’m fond of giving advice, and expect to have it followed, or don’t come crying to me. My circumstances are as comfortable as those of a late-blooming, slow-producing academic at a small public university during the disastrous Bush administration can be, which is to say not as comfortable as I deserve but considerably more comfortable than (increasingly) many of my students’ circumstances and, indeed, than the circumstances of at least three-fifths of the population of my Ohio city, none of whom are as comfortable as they deserve, nor will be.

I teach university not because I want to seduce young minds to the evils of liberalism, but because I want to seduce young minds to literature, the reading of which may, merely may madam, develop in them sufficient intuition and empathy that they may actually begin to see themselves as members of a human community—which, I admit will likely lead to a healthy liberalism but tough, as they say, toenails. We fight the battle with the weapons we’ve got. Mine happens to be the (lower case) word. Particularly with discussions of books one should have read, reprints of poems appropriately topical, and reference to what I'm learning daily in my research, on the news, in blogs like this. Oh, and I give homework.

Your assignment: spot the poetic allusion in this post. Discuss its combination of critique of fundamentalist booboisity and exploration of the power of fictions, supreme and otherwise.