Here’s the latest of the videos Eric Trimble and I have done for the freshman class I co-teach with Alex Barron.
This one’s on “The Pub and Public Housing.” It relates to Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments.
We’re getting better at these, I think. I hope.
Teaching’s been fun this week. I finished Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in one class. We’re in the middle of King Lear in another. I got to lecture on Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments in a third, and that’s brought all the tragedy into context.
I highly recommend Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van), followed by his Mann Booker award winner, Paddy Clarke ha ha ha. Once you read them all you’ve gotten Irish literature. Pathos, bathos, comedy, fuck and shite. You still have to read your Yeats, Joyce, Heaney, and Medbh McGuckian. But you’ll have a good foundation.
But my novel’s been off track for weeks. That’s the problem with teaching other people’s great works. Your own feeble ones fall by the wayside (and “fall by the wayside” apparently comes from the Gospels … that’s an old idiom). My book’s been languishing, and it bothers me.
That means I’ve broken one of my main rules. Write every day. Set a schedule, and stick to it. I didn’t come up with this rule, of course. I’m not sure if you can find the first person who came up with that one. But it’s the main writing rule. Romantics believed in inspiration, but the good ones still wrote every day. I’ve always been on the fence between the Romantics and their predecessors, the neoclassicists, the Augustans, the eighteenth-century writers, whatever.
So, tomorrow comes, and the writing resumes. I might get a few pages in today. We’ll see.
I’m glad the semester’s about to hit. And yes, I do mean “hit.” I’ve loved the summer. Great travels, to England, France, middle Illinois … And to New Jersey and New York before that. Those weren’t my favorite trips, but they were trips in any case (refer to earlier posts – April and May).
But, “the semester.” It’s a movement and a moment. I’m glad to get back to one.
This one’s more complex for me than others have been. My first-born starts university this year. She’s a wickedly smart, complex person. She was born a boy named Pádraig, and now is a girl named Freya. She’s traveled her voyage well, and keeps traveling it. She’s an awesome kid, kind of my hero. I wouldn’t have had the courage to tell my parents in my teens that I was transgender and had to change. I wouldn’t have had the courage to start dressing like a girl to go to high school. She’s a brave person in ways I could never approach. I fear for her, but mostly, I admire her.
Over the past few days I’ve been talking with friends whose children are heading to college/university. I feel for them. But for me, the transition’s been very different. I lost my boy a few years ago and didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t lose my child. I’ve never stopped loving her. But I was there on the day when s/he was born. My ex-wife and I didn’t want to know the gender of either of our kids in advance. It was my job to say: “It’s a boy!”
That means that I lost my idea of my kid. I didn’t lose my kid, not ever. But I had a boy, then I had a girl. We did these things in an old-fashioned way. Ultrasounds for health, but not for gender. We didn’t want to know. But while we ironically thought back to an earlier, simpler time, we should’ve been thinking to a later, more fluid moment. But what did we know? We were good young liberals, but steeped in tradition.
Over the years s/he became less comfortable in his skin. (I’m using “he” and “his” now because that’s how we knew each other. No disrespect to the change). It was hard to figure out how to help him. I didn’t know what was going on. My culture led me to be very silent about personal matters. I transmitted that to him. His mother did the same. Her culture was very open, but her personality was more private.
So it took her turning 16 and telling us she’d been a girl all her life. It’s been a challenge for her mother and me. It’s been a much bigger challenge for Freya, obviously. She’s the toughest of us all, I think. We can talk about it well now, but it took a while. We’re very happy she’s found herself, and things are good now. But transitions happen. Ours probably wouldn’t make for a good book. No disapproving parents. Just some shock, then a lot of adjustment.
I’ve been trying to teach her to drive. I have a Fiat 500, manual transmission. She’s had some issues with little things, like parallel parking. I told her she might manage it better if she quit the estrogen for a week. She half smiled. We have to have these little jokes. Or maybe I just do. Like I said, she’s the tough one.
And in two weeks, classes start, and she’ll be at my university. I talk to my friends whose sons and daughters are going off to school. They all feel a little weepy. It’s very understandable.
But in my case, I’ll be seeing more of my kid than I have for years. She’s lived with me exclusively for the past 2 years. But now she’ll be on my campus, and in one of my classes. I hope we both make it.
I’m less worried about her than I am about me. She’ll be great.
My friend Khanh Ho asks a good question in a piece today in the Huffington Post. How do you balance “work” and “writing.”
Excellent, and impossible question. First of all, what is work? Is it teaching? Of course it is, as Khanh makes clear. He loves it and won’t give it up. But writing is our work as well. Those of us who go into books and ideas for a living don’t ever want to stop writing. We teach miserably if we just teach the last the thing we heard in graduate school, no matter how good the graduate school was. (And ours was damn good.)
But time management’s such a huge issue. I can write a book every year. Or I can teach 6 classes every year and go to a lot of meetings. But can I do both? Not yet, apparently.
The book’s moving along, and I’m happy with it. The teaching’s getting into shape. I have a couple of lilac shirts that should make an impression while I’m teaching why Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can be seen as both racist and anti-imperialist. As the French would say, c’est compliqué, quoi? And they’d say it rightly.
But half of me wants to teach Conrad. The other half wants to write about Libya, Paris, 2011, the Arab Spring, and make it cool and fun. That’s the “writing.”
My favorite thing in Khanh’s post is that he didn’t say “teaching” and “work.” In academia, you often hear that distinction. Your teaching is something you have to do, your research is your real “work.” Nothing could be further from the truth for a real thinker. It’s all work. I like “work” and “writing” as a dichotomy. The people I hung out with at the Daniel Defoe Conference this weekend would get that completely. Teachers, thinkers, writers. They all taught me a lot, and they understood the centrality of teaching. But there’s writing to do, and tomorrow we get back to it.
Keep up with Khanh’s successes and travails here: http://www.losangelesmystery.com/
Sorry I’ve been gone for a while. It’s been a hectic, bad and good summer. Great times in London and Paris, bad times with losing my father and my good friend Adam. But when you’re an academic, the summer has a way of putting a coda to things, and you go back to the day-to-day life that keeps you going.
I’m not there yet. I go to a conference about Daniel Defoe tomorrow. I’m looking forward to that. I’ll be interviewing Defoe scholars for a film I’m making, and giving a paper that doesn’t really need to be given, but there it is. The idea of the paper warrants something, and that’s what conferences are for. We air our early ideas, and then we turn them into something more valuable, and hopefully publishable. Mine is about Defoe, punishment, the pillory, prison, and forged money. That list of things makes it sound better than it will on Friday, but let’s not quibble.
The “hush puppies” of the title are really a joke. I bought some, picture above to the right, and am going to wear them to feel silly, while I speak. It’s my equivalent of viewing the audience naked in order to beat down the nerves.
The novel’s been limping, but I’ve gotten some great ideas for it. A reader told me the main character seemed too emotionally detached. My last girlfriend told me the same thing, so … maybe I’m writing me there without knowing it. It’s hard to write an extrovert hero when you’re an introvert. But I value his critique. He read the character well. It’s time to make him more exciting. I’ve read a Robert Ludlum novel or two (maybe two), and know that they’re best when people are actively doing things.
So I’ll move to that soon. Tomorrow, I’m off to the Defoe Conference, where I get to catch up with old friends and colleagues, interview some very smart people, and get the footage I need for my current academic project.
Like the Romantic sublime, this post comes to you a bit delayed. Wordsworth put it either best, or just most famously:
Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
We questioned him again, and yet again;
But every word that from the peasant’s lips
Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
Ended in this, — ‘that we had crossed the Alps’.
Imagination — here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say —
“I recognise they glory.”
I wrote about travelling to find what he was trying to find once here. But that’s not what this post’s point.
A few people came over the other night for no particular reason, but when the date was set for July 13, I couldn’t help thinking about Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” or, more correctly: “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, upon revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798.”
When I visited Tintern Abbey it was closed. I didn’t know you could close a ruin, but you can. So I went along the Wye and looked at it. That was more in the spirit of Wordsworth’s poem, so I didn’t really mind.
I tried to feel
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
It didn’t happen there. That took a few more years and a trip to the Alps, where Wordsworth missed the sublime in 1792. He’s the better poet of the two of us, but I’m the better sublime-finder.
Last night had nothing to do with Wordsworth, in the end. Good friends, good food, some Jackson 5, and Earth, Wind and Fire at the end.
So what I’m saying is that turned into more of a Coleridge evening than a Wordsworth one. But I think I’ll celebrate Tintern Abbey Day every year from here on.
It’s been a lovely time. Wonderful conference. I’ve been been at Symbiosis 2013 for the last few days in Uxbridge, where I’ve heard excellent talks and have had the opportunity to talk with so many fun and interesting people. My only bit of Anglophilia comes here: British conferences are much, much, more interesting and rewarding than American ones.
The conference organizers, Phillip Tew and Matthew Scott, deserve tons and tons of credit for making it an excellent time. I loved hanging out with Simon Hull and Nick Bentley, Lucia Hodgson, and one of my great mentors, Richard Brantley.
But Richard is one of the most generous scholars I know, in addition to being a very smart one who writes excellent things (like this one, which all libraries should stock).
Beyond that, these people have suppressed and oppressed my people for centuries, so I can’t go more overboard than I just did, unless I’m on one of Marlow’s boats on the Thames, full of horrible imperialists, and I can take a few with me.
Tomorrow I’ll have some lunch in Neal’s Yard or somewhere else in central London, then will be on the train to Portsmouth and the boat from there to France.
But London has acquitted itself very well this time. It might be my tenth trip here, maybe my twelfth. As a British literature scholar, it’s my necessary place. I don’t have as many good reasons to spend weeks at the British Library anymore, now that so many things have been digitized. But conferences are well worth it. The talks, the talking after the talks … All very excellent. And a wonderful Jeremiad from Robert Weisbuch about what we all need to do to make the humanities what they should be again.
And tomorrow … vacation.
What fathers won’t do for their children. My daughter’s fanaticism will be requited when I bring her the stuff I got at The Who Shop a block from West Ham’s stadium.
It’s miles from everywhere. I took a cab. My driver was from Somalia. He says it’s much better there than it was, and he’s going back for a visit soon.
He also says England’s a Third World country, because the street numbers make no bloody sense. I’m inclined to agree.
Now I’m in The Boleyn, a pub on the way to the Underground, because it’s after noon, and I can tarry on my way to Uxbridge and serious academicness.
I’ve spent two days in Daniel Defoe’s world now. Most of it’s gone, so it’s taken some looking. Defoe was a modern man, so it only makes sense that most of his world’s been demolished, and only some of it by German bombs in World War II. It’s been bulldozed for progress for the most part.
I
just finished my conference paper for next week. It followed the pattern most academic writing projects do. Reading, lazing around thinking about the reading, re-reading and taking copious notes, then two furious days of explaining why Moll Flanders is not a terrible hypocrite despite being incestuous, bigamous, a thief, and a whore (her words).
I won’t go into details, but it involved reading about convict transportation, English land law, inheritance law, marriage law, the Old Poor Law of England, along with a lot of things particularly focused on Daniel Defoe’s most excellent 1722 novel. It all percolates and gets noted, footnoted, then finds its way into some words I’ll say to fellow scholars in London in about nine days.
This brings me to the difference between academic writing and fiction writing. Writing is writing, yes, but writing and writing are not exactly the same kind of writing, if I’m being clear here.
Parkinson's Disease Diary 