I can never sleep on nights when I don't have school the next day. I discovered this during my first semester teaching English A in Ramallah when I woke up in that big airy room to read Macbeth in order to keep ahead of my students.
The late early mornings I've been reading short stories by Anton Chekhov. They are intoxicatingly incisive. There is something about short stories, something terrifyingly courageous in its searchingness and thoroughness. Nothing escapes the attention of the writer, which is both cavalier and murderous. The exacting examination is so unrelenting, so threatening to me as a reader, that I'm sure a novel in this style would be too much to take, although I find most types of literature are more easily digested in the wee hours, when real life seems to be on hold and the warmth of a hot mug through my pajamas provides assurance: the discomfort of reading will fade as surely as the heat fades.
I shouldn't exaggerate. There are purely glorious moments in the stories too, which cause no pain and indeed bring joy in great measure. Near the beginning of "A Boring Story" the narrator begins receiving letters from a young woman acquaintance of his. Listen to the way this women is introduced!
"Eighteen years ago my oculist colleague died, leaving a seventeen-year-old daughter, Katya, and sixty thousand roubles."
Often in this story the man furnishes his own indictment. He is old, crotchety, unfeeling, selfish, temperamental and rather spineless. I love that a short story writer need not editorialize, indeed cannot, when the story is in first person. The narrator does all the work by presenting himself as exactly who he is, and he is greatly flawed.
Anyway, the wonderful part about Katya comes later, when she starts writing letters (I'm putting two translations because I find the differences between translations absolutely fascinating):
1. Her first letters from the road were extraordinary. I read them and was simply amazed that those small pages could contain so much youth, inner purity, holy innocence, together with subtle, sensible opinions that would have done credit to a sound male mind. The Volga, nature, the towns she visited, her comrades, her successes and failures -- she did not so much describe as sing them; every line breathed the trustfulness I was accustomed to seeing in her face -- and with all that, a mass of grammatical errors and an almost total lack of punctuation.
2. Her first letters on the journey were marvellous. I read them, and was simply amazed that those small sheets of paper could contain so much youth, purity of spirit, holy innocence, and at the same time subtle and apt judgments which would have done credit to a fine masculine intellect. It was more like a rapturous paean of praise she sent me than a mere description of the Volga, the country, the towns she visited, her companions, her failures and successes; every sentence was fragrant with that confiding trustfulness I was accustomed to read in her face -- and at the same time there were a great many grammatical mistakes, and there was scarcely any punctuation at all.
(The rest of the story)
This is precisely the kind of writing I want to inspire in students! How to do it! How to provide that invaluable entity which Katya and I were lucky enough to have in our early writerly stages: an audience.
Yesterday I dreamt up a plan to have students blog next quarter. Once a week they could choose one of several options for posting on their blogs: responding to the whole-class text, connecting the text to their independent reading book, connecting one of their texts (independent or class) to their own lives, writing a poem, taking a picture during the week, uploading it and writing about it. I'm trying to think of ways to differentiate for students who will all need to be able to type and write, and for whom one writing assignment rarely suffices, at least that I've been able to create thus far.
Back to Chekhov:
The narrator of "A Boring Story" is wholly unsatisfied with his own prominence in the field. At one point he describes how unpleasant dinner with his wife and daughter have become. "I look at the two of them, and only now, at dinner, does it become perfectly clear to me that their inner life escaped my observation long ago." Agh! You see how swiftly and unremorsefully his blow falls not so much on himself but on the reader!
The problem with the family is that the women are caving under pressures. "Maybe the whole trouble is that God gave my wife and daughter less strength than he gave me. Since childhood I've been accustomed to standing up to eternal circumstances, and I've become rather seasoned ; such catastrophes in life as renown, the rank of general, the change from well-being to living beyond one's means, acquaintance with the nobility, and so on, have barely touched me, and I've remained safe and sound; but on my weak, unseasoned wife and Liza it all fell like a big block of snow, and crushed them."
I suppose I'm still enough of a Marxist to drink in these blows to hierarchy and capitalism like warm chicken broth. But, I mean, he's right. None of these things provides him any comfort in this, the late stage of his life. I'm particularly moved by the shift from well-being to living beyond one's means. I wonder what the Russian original for "well-being" was. The other translation speaks of the transition from comfort to living beyond our means. I like the well-being part because it implies that beyond a certain level of material wealth, we actually are impeded from feeling whole. I agree.
There's another great moment where he degrades his own position for its worthlessness. This is in a moment quite close to his death (or so he thinks at least - he is still alive at the end of the story):
The naivete with which, in my youth, I exaggerated the importance of renown and the exclusive position celebrities supposedly enjoy, strikes me as ridiculous. I'm well known, my name is spoken with awe, my portrait has been published in Nive and World Illustrated, I've even read my own biography in a certain German magazine -- and what of it? I'm sitting all alone in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm ... Family squabbles, merciless creditors, rude railway workers, the inconvenience of the passport system, expensive and unwholesome food in the buffets, universal ignorance and rudeness of behavior -- all that and many other things it would take too long to enumerate, concern me no less than any tradesman known only in the lane where he lives.
This reminds me of a true learning moment when I lived in New York and was working early one Thursday morning at the farmer's market at 116th and Broadway. While we unpacked boxes of apples and squash, one apple crate served as compost. Rotten pears and strands from carrot tops accumulated in the battered box. At one point during set up a very well dressed businessman stepped out of a privately-driven black sedan, apparently headed onto Columbia's campus. He was obliged to step directly over the compost box and among the other farmy detritus which populated the sidewalk and the space between our truck and the cars on the street. I stared at him and thought, "It doesn't matter how much money you make, you cannot avoid that compost box. No amount of income can insulate you in this city from certain realities, among them this morning, rotting fruit."
I found this immensely satisfying and my admiration for New York grew to even greater volume.
The late early mornings I've been reading short stories by Anton Chekhov. They are intoxicatingly incisive. There is something about short stories, something terrifyingly courageous in its searchingness and thoroughness. Nothing escapes the attention of the writer, which is both cavalier and murderous. The exacting examination is so unrelenting, so threatening to me as a reader, that I'm sure a novel in this style would be too much to take, although I find most types of literature are more easily digested in the wee hours, when real life seems to be on hold and the warmth of a hot mug through my pajamas provides assurance: the discomfort of reading will fade as surely as the heat fades.
I shouldn't exaggerate. There are purely glorious moments in the stories too, which cause no pain and indeed bring joy in great measure. Near the beginning of "A Boring Story" the narrator begins receiving letters from a young woman acquaintance of his. Listen to the way this women is introduced!
"Eighteen years ago my oculist colleague died, leaving a seventeen-year-old daughter, Katya, and sixty thousand roubles."
Often in this story the man furnishes his own indictment. He is old, crotchety, unfeeling, selfish, temperamental and rather spineless. I love that a short story writer need not editorialize, indeed cannot, when the story is in first person. The narrator does all the work by presenting himself as exactly who he is, and he is greatly flawed.
Anyway, the wonderful part about Katya comes later, when she starts writing letters (I'm putting two translations because I find the differences between translations absolutely fascinating):
1. Her first letters from the road were extraordinary. I read them and was simply amazed that those small pages could contain so much youth, inner purity, holy innocence, together with subtle, sensible opinions that would have done credit to a sound male mind. The Volga, nature, the towns she visited, her comrades, her successes and failures -- she did not so much describe as sing them; every line breathed the trustfulness I was accustomed to seeing in her face -- and with all that, a mass of grammatical errors and an almost total lack of punctuation.
2. Her first letters on the journey were marvellous. I read them, and was simply amazed that those small sheets of paper could contain so much youth, purity of spirit, holy innocence, and at the same time subtle and apt judgments which would have done credit to a fine masculine intellect. It was more like a rapturous paean of praise she sent me than a mere description of the Volga, the country, the towns she visited, her companions, her failures and successes; every sentence was fragrant with that confiding trustfulness I was accustomed to read in her face -- and at the same time there were a great many grammatical mistakes, and there was scarcely any punctuation at all.
(The rest of the story)
This is precisely the kind of writing I want to inspire in students! How to do it! How to provide that invaluable entity which Katya and I were lucky enough to have in our early writerly stages: an audience.
 |
| The City of Kharov, c. 1900, 12 years after "A Boring Story" was written. |
Back to Chekhov:
The narrator of "A Boring Story" is wholly unsatisfied with his own prominence in the field. At one point he describes how unpleasant dinner with his wife and daughter have become. "I look at the two of them, and only now, at dinner, does it become perfectly clear to me that their inner life escaped my observation long ago." Agh! You see how swiftly and unremorsefully his blow falls not so much on himself but on the reader!
The problem with the family is that the women are caving under pressures. "Maybe the whole trouble is that God gave my wife and daughter less strength than he gave me. Since childhood I've been accustomed to standing up to eternal circumstances, and I've become rather seasoned ; such catastrophes in life as renown, the rank of general, the change from well-being to living beyond one's means, acquaintance with the nobility, and so on, have barely touched me, and I've remained safe and sound; but on my weak, unseasoned wife and Liza it all fell like a big block of snow, and crushed them."
I suppose I'm still enough of a Marxist to drink in these blows to hierarchy and capitalism like warm chicken broth. But, I mean, he's right. None of these things provides him any comfort in this, the late stage of his life. I'm particularly moved by the shift from well-being to living beyond one's means. I wonder what the Russian original for "well-being" was. The other translation speaks of the transition from comfort to living beyond our means. I like the well-being part because it implies that beyond a certain level of material wealth, we actually are impeded from feeling whole. I agree.
There's another great moment where he degrades his own position for its worthlessness. This is in a moment quite close to his death (or so he thinks at least - he is still alive at the end of the story):
The naivete with which, in my youth, I exaggerated the importance of renown and the exclusive position celebrities supposedly enjoy, strikes me as ridiculous. I'm well known, my name is spoken with awe, my portrait has been published in Nive and World Illustrated, I've even read my own biography in a certain German magazine -- and what of it? I'm sitting all alone in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm ... Family squabbles, merciless creditors, rude railway workers, the inconvenience of the passport system, expensive and unwholesome food in the buffets, universal ignorance and rudeness of behavior -- all that and many other things it would take too long to enumerate, concern me no less than any tradesman known only in the lane where he lives.
This reminds me of a true learning moment when I lived in New York and was working early one Thursday morning at the farmer's market at 116th and Broadway. While we unpacked boxes of apples and squash, one apple crate served as compost. Rotten pears and strands from carrot tops accumulated in the battered box. At one point during set up a very well dressed businessman stepped out of a privately-driven black sedan, apparently headed onto Columbia's campus. He was obliged to step directly over the compost box and among the other farmy detritus which populated the sidewalk and the space between our truck and the cars on the street. I stared at him and thought, "It doesn't matter how much money you make, you cannot avoid that compost box. No amount of income can insulate you in this city from certain realities, among them this morning, rotting fruit."
I found this immensely satisfying and my admiration for New York grew to even greater volume.
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