The literary rabbit hole

When this long weekend dawned (we had no school on Friday) I felt the warm breeze that carries the promise of a literary retreat. "I get to read this weekend." I thought. "Read" in this sense refers not only to the action of reading commentary and school reading during the week, which is indeed enjoyable. On a weekend in a house to myself, though, reading means pursuing every whim, researching each writer, idea, piece of literature that crosses my path. I set down the rabbit hole of reading, and thanks to my computer and the public library there is never a light at the end of the tunnel signalling the cessation of searching. 

The opening to the tunnel often lurks surreptitiously, as it did that Saturday in June when I watched this video of Damien Lewis performing Antony's monologue from Julius Caesar; or two weekends ago when I was perusing an 11th grade American Literature text book and read this excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr's book Stride Toward Freedom (link is a classroom handout). 


In the first instance, I tumbled into an obsession that led me to reference Julius Caesar in nearly every conversation I had for the next two weeks. It also furnished reading material for the 13 hour flight from Amman, Jordan to Chicago, which I spent swiping back and forth on the screen of my iPhone in order to read the zoomed-in PDF pages of the play (Ben Gurion Security confiscated my larger e-reader devices). 

In the second instance, I read King's allusion to the verse in the gospel of John in which Jesus says to Peter "Put up thy sword!" (John 18:11). Fresh from a Quaker conference during which I mulled over a lot of theology and Christology, I recognised this command as an essential fragment of scripture for opponents to violence. (There was a bumper sticker on the car that I rode out to the conference in: "When Jesus said 'love thine enemies', I'm pretty sure he meant don't kill them.") 



For the rest of the weekend I thought about Jesus's command against violence, especially when Sunday's sermon covered what I consider a confusing text: Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42). Yes, Mary gets the goods by listening to Jesus rather than cleaning house, but every church community I've ever felt good in had a crew of people serving as Marthas. Capital Church in Salt Lake City, with its tireless team of greeters, coffee makers, popcorn poppers, child care takers, flyer printers, providers of sweet-smelling foam soap in the bathrooms, is a prime example of a church well-endowed with diligent Marthas, who address all the decidedly non-spiritual touches which made the church building a warm space fit for community- (and spirit-) building. Anyway, the link back to Jesus and non-violence had to do with the reminder that violence, ("the sword") is wielded in many ways, especially against women, that don't involve a sword. 

Now for this week's tunnel, the opening to which was tucked into the practice test for the Indiana State CORE Teaching Assessment, the test I must pass in order to teach English in this state (the same one I was preparing for when I came across the King excerpt). 

The practice test I bought included the following excerpt. 

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.

To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. What pray, is a few hours a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her sister's address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.

First of all, I got the question related to this text wrong on the practice test. I said that the passage indicated "a controlling ambition" in the main character, Caroline Meeber. To me she seems controlled by the ambition to leave her town and pursue life in the city. Despite her hesitations, she does what Joyce's Eveline cannot: she breaks the ties with home, and faces into the headwind of change.

The test said that this passage indicates an "internal conflict" which I thought was not very bold. Every main character has, at some level, an internal conflict (right? I'm actually not sure about that). And I don't sense a conviction in Caroline to stay where she is. A recognition of what one is leaving, even a recognition that it has been good, is not an indication of a desire to stay. I can say this with confidence after my recent departure from Palestine. 

Anyway, I enjoyed reading this extract, and found by googling a few phrases that it is from the book Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser. I had never heard of Dreiser before, so what did I do? Yes! And here's the article I found: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/04/21/the-cost-of-desire

When reading New Yorker articles, especially book reviews like this one, I am often awed by the journalist's apparent breadth of awareness, confidence in making bold assertions on the topic of six recently-published tomes he is reviewing, and ability to touch on several ideas central to human existence in a satisfying way without coming to a conclusion about any of them. And yet still they end the article in a way that makes my mind smile.

I was so smitten by this article that I looked up David Denby, who is now 72, and who was known primarily as the film critic of the New Yorker until 2012 or so, and is now a staff writer. (The article above was published in 2001.) 

I found quickly that he is also well known for writing the book Great Books in which he describes his experience of re-enrolling at Columbia College, decades after he graduated from that institution, in order to take the Literature Humanities course, whose syllabus consists of the pillar texts of the western canon, through a new lens. 

My friend Kaitlin actually gave me this book during our senior year of high school, once I had been accepted to Columbia and was looking with excitement at my very own pile of those Great Books. I don't think I made it past the first chapter of Denby's book. Which means I probably read as many words in that books as I read of most of the books on the course syllabus - not through any wilful neglect: I am a slow reader, and reading a book the size of Metamorphoses each week was not feasible. I think I learned more about Ovid ogling the ceilings of the Morgan Museum on Madison Avenue than I did in the Lit Hum classroom). 

Denby's most recent book is one I'd like to read in its entirety: Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives. Denby spent time in tenth grade literature classes to see what kind of readers kids are now that they have near-constant screen access. In this article, he explains his project, and provides a look at one of his classroom experiences in a Manhattan school. 

Denby finds that the kids are rather dark when writing poetry. (Truly, take a look at the excerpt in the above link, if only to read the poetry the students wrote in response after reading some poems by Sylvia Plath.) I have often been struck by the same darkness he notes. When given the chance to write poetry, no student writes pastoral reflections on the beauty of life; they recount the unforgiving realities of their lives. This was evident at Ramallah Friends School, where the students who submitted writing to the literary magazine wrote about the difficulty of life under Occupation, but it's also true in the other examples of tenth grade poetry I've read in Changing English articles. While the consistency of the trend is surprising, the fact that students write dark content somehow isn't. Why not flex one's ability to comment, with acid, if possible, on the many ways in which teenagers are wrangled like wild horses? 

The tunnel this weekend has had another branch. This one sprung from a podcast I listened to on the way to the Richmond Museum of Art. Actually, I should make this another post. 


This song is playing in the coffee shop where my jaw is contracting from the caffeine from the (single shot??) americano I just drank: