Kitten of Kansas, cat of NC

My first teaching gig after grad school was as an assistant professor of music theory at the University of Kansas. Lawrence was a blue-tinged college town situated on the eastern end of Bob Dole country. I arrived two years after Bob Dole lost the presidential election to Bill Clinton (Dole won most of Kansas, but Clinton won Douglas County).

One of the first things I did in Lawrence was adopt a cat. I had grown up with female cats--Cuddles, Grimalkin, and Charcoal--and I fully intended to adopt a female cat and to name her Fafner.

I took it as a sign that the humane society had a cat named Madison--the same name as the town of my doctoral alma mater. But there, next to her, was a big schmusig orange tabby named Larry--the chummy name of the town of my current professorial gig. Larry was so very schmoozy that he ended up coming home with me and becoming Larry Fafner. He made it his habit to sleep at night curled around my head, purring. He was a lovely cat.

Larry Fafner came with free tape worms that required, in quick succession, a bad vet, a change of vets, a good vet, and several hundred dollars to resolve. Two short months later, when I decided to adopt a second cat to keep Larry Fafner company, the good vet gave me some financial advice: look more thoroughly for signs of health in the adoptee, and bring him/her straight from the pound to the vet before bringing him/her home to Larry.

So, three days in a row, in mid-November 1998, I visited the Lawrence humane society. On Wednesday and Thursday, I played with multiple adorable kittens, leaning toward a sweet little tabby I thought I would call my own--until, on Friday, I decided he was perhaps more wild than Larry would tolerate, and I settled on a jet black kitten named Luke instead.

"We usually require cats to be here for eight days before adopting them out," the pound administrator told me cheerfully, "and Luke has only been here for seven; but that's OK, we'll let you take him." Thus it was that Luke and I headed to the vet that very afternoon. The vet said the cat needed a flea dip, so I left him there and went home to think about a new name while they de-pested him.

When I returned late that afternoon to pick up Not-Going-to-Be-Named-Luke Kitten, he looked content and clean in his carrier. The staff at the clinic had fallen in love with him and, oohing and ahhing about his adorableness, confirmed I had made an excellent choice.

On the way out to the car, sweet wee Kitten started foaming at the mouth. I did an about face and returned to the clinic.

"How odd," said the vet. "He must be allergic to the tinsel toy we gave him. Let's just take that away..." He removed the silvery tinsel ball from the carrier and sent us on our way.

Later that evening, Kitten was still hyper-salivating, and he refused to eat or drink. I phoned the vet, who agreed to meet me at the now closed clinic to re-evaluate the cat. He decided that perhaps Kitten was younger than originally thought and was having a reaction to the flea medication. Together, we gave Kitten a warm bath using Dawn dish detergent--apparently the mildest vet-recommended soap available for washing cats. As we finished, Kitten leaped out of the sink and hung from my sweater, warm and soaking wet.

Thus Kitten learned how to stare water in the face and never blink.

That night, to keep an eye on him while keeping him away from Larry Fafner, I nestled Kitten into a cushioned shoe box and pulled him under the covers with me.

Thus Kitten learned that sleeping under the covers is the bees knees.

On Saturday, Kitten continued hyper-salivating and still refused to eat. Back to the vet we went. The vet taught me how to force feed the cat using a syringe and extra moist prescription canned food. It worked alright at the clinic, but at home, it was another matter. At feeding time, I sat on the edge of the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn, held Kitten in my lap, pried his mouth open, and forced the food in--whereupon he shook his head to keep the food from going down, spraying food all over me and the shower. For a very sick kitten, he achieved remarkably thorough coverage.

I know all of this happened in mid-November, because it followed closely on the heels of another November event. On November 3, I had worked late and then gotten drawn into watching state election returns online. My office was across the hall from some practice rooms, and one of my students dropped in to chat after he finished practicing. When he saw that I was watching election returns, the conversation turned to politics. A little voice in my head said "don't talk to students about this." Another little voice responded "it's OK, your students are adults. They're in college. You can have respectful conversations."

I adopted Kitten about a week after that--the same week that I returned essays to my undergrad theory class. The student with whom I had the conversation on election night got a B-. The B was for the paper itself, and was generous because I was new at being a hardass; the minus was for the peer-review he was supposed to have provided for a classmate, in writing, but didn't. The week I adopted Kitten, the student angrily informed me that he was going to sue me because I had graded him down for being a Republican.

My department chair was extremely supportive. He advised me to listen to voice #1 next time, but stood by me during the craziness with Righteous Student. It was a rough way to end the semester.

Enter Kitten, to cheer me up and keep Larry Fafner company. But Kitten was still quite ill on Sunday. By then, my choices seemed to be either to return him to the pound--where surely they'd euthanize him--or to hospitalize him. I linked Kitten's survival to my own, not knowing whether Righteous Student would succeed in destroying my fledgling career. So back to the vet Kitten went, to be force-fed and re-hydrated by the experts.

Kitten survived, and so did I. The vet phoned on Monday to tell me Kitten was finally drinking on his own. By the time I picked Kitten up on Tuesday, his name had become Homer Wells--an orphan cat named after an orphan named after a cat. Those familiar with John Irving's The Cider House Rules recognize "Homer Wells" as a profoundly pro-choice choice. Righteous Student was transferred to a TA's class, where, alas, he shifted his harassing energy onto his new teacher. I imagine he has wreaked a life of righteous havoc ever since.

Homer Wells, the cat, went on to achieve great things in his life and most certainly learned to "be of use." A vociferous and territorial defender of unmatched socks, he became the namesake for my avatar (mom2homer) when I wanted to assimilate with other moms on a parenting listserv. In midlife, Homer learned how to use the toilet, sorta, and before age and arthritis caught up with him, he was an expert catcher of mice and bats. In his old age, he figured out how to do unexpected things with computers.

Good night, you kitten of Kansas, you cat of NC.

Homer Wells

September (?), 1998 - April 5, 2016

A related literary genre

In my last post, I forgot to mention a genre that I think of as related to Survival Literature: the I-Hiked-a-Thousand-Miles Confessional. In these narratives, autobiographers challenge themselves by hiking and camping their way across vast distances. The stories are framed by precise geographical coordinates (starting at Official Point A with the plan to reach Official Point B before winter); the threats faced are more often from people (including the authors themselves) than from the great harsh outdoors; and the authors discover great things about themselves and humanity in the process. They are self-absorbed seekers, like Siddhartha, but enjoyably so and, despite their flaws, way less annoying.

The genre includes books like Bill Bryson's laugh-out-loud funny A Walk in the Woods and Cheryl Strayed's recent Wild. I read most of A Walk in the Woods several years ago but, as is also my propensity with peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, never quite managed to consume it in its entirety. I read all of Wild on a binge this fall, following Alive and Between a Rock and a Hard Place.

I have a friend who has hiked the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail each at least once, and the frequency with which people ask her if (as a woman) her experience is like Wild drives her nuts. I understand why people ask, though. Wild is to literature as a woman is to an academic department dominated by men, asked to serve on more committees than anyone else in order to speak for The Female People. On the bright side, if Wild were fiction, the protagonist would be dead by the end, or at least plain, if not ugly--the traditional literary ways to punish women who have sex and do drugs, let alone hike solo.

The great literary experiment falls into a crevasse and dies

2014 is almost over, and I haven't written about my epic Books-I-Hated-in-High-School Literary Revisitation Experiment since April, when I discovered my affinity for literary characters who most other people think are evil. There the experiment ended. I left my hero, Madame Dufarge, in the middle of her revolutionary subterfuge; may she continue to knit secrets in perpetuity.

Was whatever spark I once had for reading permanently dimmed by the literary canon forced upon me in high school, when I was too young to appreciate it? Yeah, probably. Did I enjoy rereading any of it as an adult? Yeah, OK, some.

To cleanse myself after the year of dutiful experimenting, I turned to a genre I usually enjoy--Survival Literature--and reread Alive for the third time. If the High School Literary Canon Committee ever wants to drop Siddhhartha, they could surely pull some excellent replacements from Survival Literature, which offers real-life tales of self discovery to shock and awe any teen. Consider the following:

* Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read. A Uruguayan rugby team charters a plane that crashes in the snow-covered Andes in 1972. The narrative explores the emotional and physical endurance the survivors tap into to stay alive during their 10-week ordeal, including their difficult, respectful, and transformative decision to cannibalize frozen corpses. Although search efforts are launched by friends, families, and Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan government agencies, rescue comes only after two survivors trek 60 miles through the mountains to find help.

* Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. Simpson and his mountaineering acquaintance Simon Yates pair up for an ill-fated climb up the north face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. When Simpson breaks his leg near the beginning of their descent, Yates rigs together a pair of ropes that he uses to lower Simpson down the mountain. At one point during the descent, Simpson unexpectedly slips over the edge of a cliff; dangling from a taut rope, can neither lower himself down nor climb back up. Yates, holding onto the other end of the rope a few hundred feet up the mountain, is unable to help without also sliding off the cliff. After a few hours, Yates cuts the rope. Simpson falls into a crevasse, but miraculously lands on an ice table; knowing he's presumed dead, he spends the next four days dragging himself physically (and mentally) back to the base camp, arriving just before Yates' departure.

* Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston. The author does what parents always tell kids not to do: he goes hiking without letting anyone know where he's going or when he'll be back. While exploring a remote canyon in Utah, a boulder slips, crushing his arm against the canyon wall. The emotional drama isn't told with the same quality prose as Alive or Touching the Void, but the story is nonetheless riveting; near death after being trapped for several days with barely any food or water, Ralston amputates his own arm--and then manages to hike out of the canyon and several miles back to a trail for help.

* Into the Wild by master story-teller Jon Krakauer. This isn't really Survival Literature, since the protagonist doesn't survive, but Into the Wild would make a great replacement for Siddhartha, should the Canon Committee ever feel so moved. Christopher McCandless does what Aron Ralston did, to the nth degree: he not only goes hiking without letting anyone know where he's going or when he'll be back, but he does it for months at a time and on purpose, intentionally cutting himself off from family and friends to live an ascetic life in the wilderness. Whether he was seeking Nirvana or something else, no one will ever know, since he didn't have any maps with him when he died of starvation in Alaska in 1992.

A thank you poem for our local independent bookstore

Reason #412 to love The Regulator Bookshop: when your child is waiting for you in the car, bored, so he plays around with his brand new Regulator gift certificate so full of potential, leans it against the window to admire it, and it slips down the window and into the door, whereupon his lower lip trembles and salty tears leak out of his eyes, and the mechanic up the road laughs and tells you it's gonna cost way more than the value of the gift certificate to retrieve it, and, while your child stands by avoiding eye contact and feeling mortified, the kind folks at the Regulator listen to your story with a reasonably straight face, agree that it's too strange to make up, ask you to burn the gift certificate if you ever manage to get it out of the car door, and write your child a new one.

A Tale of Six Books

Am I busy finishing A Tale of Two Cities? No--but I interrupt my literary slackitude to bring you a tale of six books. Seven books, actually, but only six of them mine, and none of them fiction, thank goodness. This is one of those rare stories in which real life imitates a novel.

Here goes:

During the Great Purge, I made a lot of choices, obviously, about what to pull from the shelves. Some choices were easy, some were hard, and some took serious nudging and emotional support from friends. In the end, multiple boxes of books and CDs went to the nonprofit "Friends of the Public Library," from where they will hopefully find their way into hands and hearts that will enjoy them anew.

One particular set of books was too special for such purging while simultaneously too good to simply gather dust on my shelf: Sir Donald Francis Tovey's Essays in Musical Analysis--cloth-bound hard-cover printings from the mid-1940s, in excellent condition, all six volumes. Tovey was a musical jack-of-all-trades--musicologist, pianist, composer, conductor, analyst, and editor. The Essays in Musical Analysis were collected from his insightful program notes for the Reid Orchestra at the University of Edinburgh. They're classics.

I had coveted these books when I was in grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1990s, but the copies I had seen in the local used books store was beyond my budget. I acquired my set when a fellow grad student bailed from the program; he sold me a ton of books, all of them highly desirable to music theory geeks, for a mere $200, including the Tovey set.

The books moved with me to my first teaching gig in Kansas, and then to my second gig at Duke in North Carolina. I followed my friend out of the discipline in 2003, and all of the other books eventually ended up in the hands of a later generation of grad students, but I kept the Tovey Essays through every baby-step purge. The Great Purge of 2014 was different: the books had to go, but were too special to just give away to strangers.

I offered to ship them to former classmates who had remained in academia. No one jumped at the offer; as one explained, "thanks Liz, but I don't need any more unread books on my shelf mocking me (as [our advisor] used to say)." Some voted for eBay, but I feared a buyer would split the set up. One friend agreed, urging "c'mon, Liz. Keep 'em. They're classics. Beautiful little time capsules (in more than one sense). Every time you sell a volume, a program annotator cries."

So I put the books aside on the roll-top desk in the living room. Two months later, I was cleaning off the desk (we clean in our house largely by moving piles of stuff from one location to another) and decided the time had finally come for them to move on.

I had heard about a relatively new used-books store downtown. I've never been there, because, as you know, either I dislike reading or I'm too busy slogging my way through A Tale of Two Cities to buy more books. Whatever. I went to the bookstore's website, saw that they were in a historic city-center building with pressed-tin ceilings, and thought that folks who appreciate old urban architecture and old books might understand the emotional investment I had in a Tovey set I had barely read but nonetheless still cherished; perhaps they would be interested in them.

I started drafting an angst-filled email inquiry and wanted to accurately describe the condition of the books. They were in excellent shape for 70-year-olds, but I recalled that they did have some markings inside the front covers. I opened one volume to confirm that, and saw the Ex Libris plate, dated 1948--itself an antique. All six books had the same plate and date. I didn't recognize the previous owner's name, but thought it might be of interest, so I googled it. The search engine returned a few links, with More Familiar Name often included. Additional googling followed, plus a closer inspection of the pencil scrawlings inside the covers, where I found More Familiar's name written in cursive.

More Familiar is a former colleague of mine at Duke.

The books had belonged to More Familiar's first wife, a scholar in the performance practice movement who died, too young, in 1974. She had been a teenager when she put her Ex Libris plates in the books. More Familiar had taught in Madison for a few years in the 1970s before coming to Duke.

I emailed More Familiar and asked if he'd like the books. He wrote back that he had consulted volume VII just the week before and was wishing he had kept the rest of the set. I hadn't even known there was a volume VII.

So there it ended: the Tovey collection that was too good to randomly give away, too good to split up, and too good to sit unread was happily reunited with More Familiar, 1000+ miles and 40 years after he and the books had parted ways.

What kind of person am I? A Tale of Two Cities update

Maybe my 6th-grade teacher was right, and I shouldn't have written quite so effusively about A Tale of Two Cities before finishing the book.

As my literary experiment limps on, I am coming to the conclusion that I just don't much like to read classic adult fiction. After my previous post on the book, I let A Tale of Two Cities sit in the trunk of my car for two months, then picked it up again during one of E's band practices.

Did I previously write that Lucie Manette is "a little too diminutive"? That was mighty generous of me. She's so sincere and delicate and at-the-service-of-others that she's hardly human. She's earnest and pretty and boring.

I had high hopes for this book, especially following The Scarlet Letter. Where Hawthorne is just mean, Dickens is amusingly snarky. For example, whereas Hawthorne repeatedly harps on his Custom-House colleagues for tipping their chairs backward and snoozing their mind-numbingly dull days away, Dickens more vividly and cheerfully compares bankers to cheese:

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment. (Dover Thrift Edition, 1999, p. 40).

When Dickens coined the adverb "adverbiously," I practically swooned:

Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty to an indictment denoucing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and going between the dominions of our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation to send to Canada and North America. (pp. 46-47)

But somehow the excitement dropped off somewhere in France, especially as attention turned to the solemn and rather boring love between Lucie Manette and Charles Darnay. Thus I hid the book in the trunk.

Upon retrieving it, I wondered why on earth a teacher would offer this text to 11-yr-olds. The language is occasionally so oblique that even as a 46-yr-old skimmer, I'm not entirely certain I'm understanding it correctly. I picked up that Charles wanted to marry Lucie, and then that Charles was indeed going to marry Lucie, and then that they were married and off on their honeymoon; and then in the course of a page or so (pp. 161-162), I thought I read that Lucie maybe nearly died during pregnancy or childbirth, and they had a daughter, and then also a son, but the angelic boy died as a young child. What? Did I read that right? I re-skimmed the pages and still wasn't sure, so I tried googling for confirmation.

That was a mistake, because instead of finding confirmation, I found a SPOILER that indicates that the interesting, clever, revolutionary, strong female character--Madame Dufarge--is "the villainess in the novel," and as such, is going to get bumped off by Lucie Manette's proxy, Miss Pross. I haven't gotten far enough into the book to understand that Madame Dufarge is "a monster"--just far enough to admire her involvement in espionage and observant knitting. Dang.

This reminds me of another book I read (and actually enjoyed): Gregory Maguire's Lost (2001). I don't remember much about the book, other than that it had something to do with Dickens and Scrooge and ghosts or some such, but I do remember really liking the female protagonist, Winifred Rudge. The edition I owned had some questions for reading groups, and I recall one of the questions saying something along the lines of, "Many readers find Winifred Rudge to be extremely unlikable blah blah blah"--which made me wonder what kind of person I must be if I liked her. And here I am, enthusiastically preferring Madame Dufarge to the feminine ideal of Lucie Manette. Oh dear, oh dear, and I still have 130 pages to go.

The Great Purge

A friend named this photo "The Emperor's New Piano":

It's a beauty, no?

About a year and a half ago, my mom reached her limit. She and my dad had been nudging me since about 1998 to move the family piano from their house to mine. Between the two of them, my dad was the more persistent verbally. He died in early 2012, but he would be pleased to know my just-do-it decision-making mom finally achieved what he was never able to. To encourage the transition, she generously helped us get the piano refurbished.

Just before Thanksgiving last year, The Piano People (Urbana, IL) declared their work complete. Shipping was postponed until after the holidays, by which point The Piano People were having difficulty locating a moving company in Durham that could receive and deliver the instrument. This gave us time for the long-delayed Great Purge.

For better or for worse, I don't have a photograph of the study pre-Purge. What's deftly omitted from the post-Purge photo above are two bicycles and some large rolls of bubble pack. What you also don't see--because they are no longer in the room--are the futon we had since grad school, a desk, a printer cart, and a table. These had all been providing horizontal surfaces for Stuff, so moving the furniture out for the piano meant clearing shelf space for keeper Stuff, plus folding and putting away 75 cubic feet of laundry that we had been storing on the futon instead of in our dressers.

Clearing the bookshelves meant finally saying farewell to the academic detritus I hadn't been able to part with during the Lesser Purge of '11--the books I was still clinging to because they had offered glimmers of light in my previous incarnation as a depressed music theorist. Goodbye books: a Recovered Academic lives here now. Ten years out, and I'm healed.

Cookbooks, gardening books, travel books, textbooks, unused scores... The purging process was slowed by time spent imagining how much better and more interesting I would be if I dedicated myself to actually reading and studying all the books on the shelf.

I willingly parted with some gems, including a 25-year old German textbook that built a lesson, in Chapter 3, around the vocabulary words "der Kassetterecorder" and "funkelnagelneu":

Gisela: "Ist der Kassettenrecorder neu?" 
Susi: "Ja, er ist funkelnagelneu." 
Gisela: "Und hast du auch Kassetten?" 
Susi: "Ich habe fast 20 Kassette. Was hoerst du gern? Culture Club? Styx? Duran Duran?" 
Gisela: "Ich hoere nicht gern Rockmusik, sondern lieber Klassik. Hast du nichts von Beethoven oder Brahms?"

Gisela: "Is the tape recorder new?" 
Susi: "Yes, it is brand spankin' new." 
Gisela: "And do you have tapes too?" 
Susi: "I have almost 20 tapes. What do you like to listen to? Culture Club? Styx? Duran Duran?" 
Gisela: "I do not like to listen to rock music, rather classical. Do you not have any Beethoven or Brahms?"

Thankfully, I have a blog, so though the book has moved on, I can continue to revisit that dialog.

We also bid adieu to about 25% of our CD collection. Goodbye Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Messaien, and you other bitter Brussels sprouts of academe. I admit it: I never liked listening to you. (Well, OK, Wozzek has some freaky redeeming value, but I'll rent it on DVD if I ever miss it--which I'm sure I won't.) Other choices were a little harder. Goodbye, Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium and Matthäus-Passion; you were too long for your own good.

The futon moved across the street, the desk moved into a hall, the printer cart moved into the basement, and the table moved...into the middle of the living room...to hold boxes of purged Stuff. We'll get rid of them this week, I swear.

Adverbiously excellent

When I was in 6th grade, I discovered The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, and I swooned over sensitive Ponyboy Curtis. We had to write a book "report" for school every week--basically a formalized reading journal--and I thought The Outsiders was so fabulous that I asked my teacher if I could write a gushing letter to the author instead of writing my regular book report. She granted permission, then wrote critically on my letter, "You haven't finished the book yet?!" No, I thought, but who needs to actually finish this book to recognize it's GENIUS?

I'm only a third of the way into A Tale of Two Cities, and with my 6th-grade teacher's criticism still ringing in my ears, I won't write to Dickens yet--but I don't need to finish the book to recognize it's genius. Sure, it's a little melodramatic, and Lucie Manette is a little too diminutive, but it's so delightfully snarky, without being mean like Hawthorne, and so full of witty metaphors and imagery, and such a linguistically entertaining romp, that I'm ready to give it an A+. It still gets an F from 11-year-old me (the language was simply too challenging), but the experienced watcher of British period dramas, 46-year-old me, is already prepping the fancy gold-glitter-glue A+.

Sighddhartha

I've finished re-reading Siddhartha. Siddhartha fans all over the interwebs (and there are many--I know, because I have googled both "Siddhartha navel gazing" and "Siddhartha self absorbed" and have learned that while I am not alone, I'm part of a small minority: most folks love Siddhartha), yes, Siddhartha fans will call me unenlightened, but I'm giving it a D-.* I didn't care for it in high school (although caring for literature might not be the point of high school book selections), and I don't care for it now as an apparently jaded adult. Maybe I should have read it during that magical window of late-adolescent/young-adult questing and self discovery, only I'm not sure I ever experienced a window like that.

I'm impatient. It takes Siddhartha almost his entire life--71 out of 81 pages in the Dover Thrift Edition--to figure out that other people's feelings are as important to them as his own are to him, that his actions affect others, and that he just needs to, ya know, chill. Three years of asceticism here, 20 years of sinful high life there, and nearly an entire lifetime feeling superior to everyone else (save for a few days when he realizes the past few years have totally sucked and he wants to kill himself): well, those are long temporal investments for largely unsatisfying returns. Of course, Siddhartha enjoys a few rapturous epiphanies in between his career/quest-path changes, but oy. It's like a lifetime spent studying quantum mechanics, when your true love, fluid dynamics, is staring you in the face.

He saw: this water flowed and flowed, it kept on flowing, and yet it was always there; it was always and at all times the same and yet new every moment! Oh, if he could only grasp that, understand that! He did not understand or grasp it; he merely felt the stirrings of a premonition, a distant recollection, divine voices. (Siddhartha, 1922, Dover Thrift Edition, 1999, pp. 54-55). 

The river eventually reveals all. Hermann Hesse's first wife, by the way, was Maria Bernoulli, of the same family as Daniel Bernoulli, famous for "Bernoulli's principle" in fluid dynamics. So we see that it is just as Siddhartha explains to Govinda at the end of the book: everything in the world, past, present, and future, is connected, is one.

Women are scarce in Siddhartha, and they are represented by three main flavors: (1) mom, (2) voluptuous aroused seductress (a.k.a. "a female animal in heat," p. 28), and (3) sex teacher/courtesan (the only female important enough to get a name, Kamala). Kamala dies while on a trip to see the fading Siddhartha Gotama (the supreme Buddha), because a black snake bites her under her dress (p. 60). Is that retributive Freudian symbolism, or is an under-the-dress snake bite sometimes just an under-the-dress snake bite?

Reading to the end of Siddhartha's quest has brought me midway through my literary quest. My experiment--re-reading books I disliked in high school to determine whether they're why I don't much enjoy reading fiction as an adult--has brought me back to three books since April: The Scarlet Letter, The Odyssey, and Siddhartha (with a delightful David Sedaris detour and a whole lot of Ken-Ken and Sudoku mixed in). Next up: A Tale of Two Cities, which, based on other Dickens novels that I read during and after college, I entirely expect to enjoy this time around.

*56 words and a delayed verb! I clearly learned something from re-reading The Scarlet Letter.

Honey, I'm home!

I finally finished The Odyssey. After some slow spots midway through, the pace picked up again, but not without the occasional boring interjection.

An Example of a Boring Bit

My favorite example of a boring plot interruption comes in chapter XV (although I suppose if it's my "favorite," it isn't maximally boring). Here we meet a new minor character, the wanderer Theoclymenus. It takes one long paragraph and then some to introduce him before we finally learn his name, and the introduction goes something like this:

So as Telemachus and his crew are about to sail away, this guy comes up to the boat. His great great grandfather Mumblyjumblius lived on the island Whatchamacallit way back when, but for some crazy reason moved to Yaddayadda, where they held him hostage and took all his stuff, and he was harassed by the lordship's mean daughter, but he finally escaped, and to get revenge, he took the mean daughter home with him and made her marry his brother. Anyway, he eventually moved to Thatotherisland and got hitched and had a couple kids, and they also had kids, but the one kid's kids didn't live to adulthood, and one of the other kid's kids didn't either, but the surviving kid did; but oy, he argued with his dad too much and moved away. Anyway, it was that kid's kid's kid who comes up now to Telemachus's boat and says, "Friend, I entreat you! Tell me, and hold nothing back: who are you?" (Paraphrase of Homer, The Odyssey, ca. 8th c. BCE, trans. George Herbert Palmer, 1891, rev. 1912; Dover Thrift Editions: 1999, Chapter XV, p. 147.)

The study group question for this chapter should be, "at what point in this paragraph did you fall asleep?" Of course, I suppose if Homer had been trying to score points by dropping my family's names, I would have hung on every word.

Blood and Gore

The later chapters include descriptive gore on par with the cyclops' eye-pokering. Highlights include Odysseus contemplating whether to punch someone hard enough to kill him or just hard enough to make a point; he decides on the latter, therefore,

he struck Irus on the neck below the ear and crushed the bones within. Forthwith from out his mouth the red blood ran, and down in the dust he fell with a moan, gnashing his teeth and kicking on the ground....Odysseus caught Irus by the foot and dragged him through the doorway... (Ch. XVIII, p. 176.)

All the suitors who are looking on think it is hilarious to see an old man beggar beat up an obnoxious young beggar. I'm not sure if the listener/reader is also supposed to think it's funny; after all, the suitors are boors, so they aren't great role models. Odysseus, however, seems pretty pleased with himself, since successfully beating up a beggar bodes well for eventually massacring 108 aristrocratic boors. So two points for the home team, rah rah!

Two more gory descriptions of mutilation and death stood out to me. First: need to teach a traitorous goatherd a lesson? Here's how!

...tie his feet and hands and drag him within the chamber; there fasten boards upon his back, and lashing a twisted rope around him hoist him aloft, up the tall pillar, and bring him to the beams, that he may keep alive there long and suffer grievous torment. (Ch. XXII, p. 215.)

It is worth noting that I read this chapter out of a different edition, since I was visiting my mom in Illinois and it was really cold outside and my Dover edition was locked in the car trunk, so I read from another prose translation that we had on a bookshelf in the study. That one said that the goatherd's hands and feet were to be tied behind his back, which makes things sound more uncomfortable; but it also said he was to be tied around the waist to the board, which makes it sound a little less uncomfortable.

Perhaps Homer was aware of the potential confusion, or at least aware that some of his listeners might not have caught the details the first time around, because he repeats the description a few 
paragraphs later, when two of Odysseus's loyal servants carry out the deed (although the boards are omitted):

...then on him sprang the two and dragged him by the hair within the door, threw him all horror-stricken to the ground, bound hands and feet together with a galling cord, which tight and fast they tied, as they were ordered by Laertes' son, long-tried royal Odysseus; then they lashed a twisted rope around and hoisted him aloft, up the tall pillar, and brought him to the beams [and mocked him...] (ibid.)

Poor Melanthius.

The second really notable description of vengeful execution pertains to the ladies. When you're as mighty as Odysseus, you have a houseful of servants; and as long as they are in your household's employ, they really shouldn't get cozy with your wife's boorish suitors. Out of the fifty women servants, Odysseus's dear nurse Eurycleia identifies "twelve in all [who] have gone the way of shame."

The way of shame! The way of shame! Odysseus punishes the women by making them clear away the dead bodies, sponge down the hall, and cart out the blood-soaked flooring. Then his son Telemachus locks them into a narrow, inescapable space while he rigs up their death machine:

He...tied the cable of a dark-bowed ship to a great pillar, then lashed it to the round-house, stretching it high across, too high for one to touch the feet upon the ground. And as the wide-winged thrushes or the doves strike on a net set in the bushes; and when they think to go to roost a cruel bed receives them; even so the women held their heads in line, and around every neck a noose was laid, that they might die most vilely. They twitched their feet a little, but not long. (p. 221)

Let that be a lesson, ladies, on going the way of shame. The men then bring out Melanthius, the goatherd who has been watching the slaughter from the rafters. They cut off his nose and ears, disembowel him, and let the dogs eat his still-warm guts, and--because they're still very very angry--they cut off his hands and feet. He presumably dies somewhere along the way, but Homer doesn't tell us when.

Apparently traitorous employees and women are worse than boorish suitors, since the suitors pretty much all enjoy clean, swift deaths.

Forgiveness and Love

But the end of The Odyssey is not all blood and gore, no no! Odysseus has a gentle side too. During the massacre, two people beg for mercy: the seer Leiodes and the bard Phemius. Odysseus feels that Leiodes should have known better, so he drives a sword through the seer's neck and cuts off his head; but Telemachus puts in a good word for the bard and another man, the page Medon. Generous Odysseus, smiling, spares them both. We love our bards.

Odysseus scores some points for realizing that brutally killing the best and the noblest youths of Ithaca is not going to go over so well with the neighbors. He and Telemachus hatch a plan appropriate to their nobility: they will get the servants to create a diversion and will sneak out of town the next morning to their well-wooded farm, where they can hide until the gods show them a way out of this mess (Ch. XXIII, p. 224). Fortunately, the gods decide they've had enough entertainment. Athene intervenes with an angry mob, calling, "Hold, men of Ithaca, from cruel combat, and without bloodshed straightway part!" This scares the bejeezus out of everyone and peace settles upon Ithaca.

Homer also tells us that Odysseus and Penelope, once reunited, "came gladly to their old bed's rites," where they "joyed in happy love" before joying in talking (p. 227). The lovey-dovey stuff is kept to a bare minimum, because mushy love stuff is harder to speak of than head-lopping bone-crushing liver-stabbing slaughtering.

The Final Grade

I give The Odyssey an A-. The A is for being the ur-roadtrip narrative; the - is for the boring bits and name dropping. Good job, Homer! Like The Scarlet Letter, I think high schoolers might appreciate this book more in a history class or a world literature class than in an English class. (When I was in high school, we read The Odyssey in an English class, even though The Odyssey has nothing to do with English per se. Today, such classes are called Language Arts, and The Odyssey would fit in just fine.)

Dragging my feet

OK, NO, I have NOT finished The Odyssey yet. I brought it with me to Germany thinking I might finish it there, but I also brought Siddhartha to read afterward, thinking it would be good to read a book by a German author in Germany. I found Siddhartha boring and puzzling in high school--really boring and really puzzling--and Siddarthaangst served as a deterrent to ever cracking open The Odyssey. I finally got back to the book last week, but got bogged down in the chapter about all the dead people Odysseus converses with. You'd think speaking with the dead would be pretty interesting, but Homer doesn't get into any zombie stuff, just tales of woe. There is a bit in there about the proper way to get the dead to provide the information you seek, but the methods don't always work (some dead people are pretty strong willed, plus there are certain Laws of Deadness they can't violate), and the whole chapter ends up being kind of list-y. In good faith, I took the book with me to a doctor's appointment for E, figuring I'd read in the waiting room--but I didn't read, and the book has been in the back seat of our car ever since. But I promise, PROMISE, I'll bring it inside one of these days and actually finish it.

Odyssey check point

The experiment continues.

After finishing The Scarlet Letter, I took a hard-earned romp through some creative nonfiction with David Sedaris' latest book, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. It lasted but the blink of an eye, but what a good blink it was. I wonder what the world would be like if U.S. high schoolers had to read Sedaris instead of Hawthorne. Would today's teens relate any better to OCD and colonoscopies than they do to Puritanism and adultery?

And now, boldly forward to what the Muse spoke to Homer of the adventurous man Odysseus. I'm a little more than a third of the way into The Odyssey, having read 9 of the 24 chapters. I'm sure I failed to appreciate, the first time around, that The Odyssey is more than just a story: it's a fascinating guide to geography, family trees, hospitality, manners, recipes, entertainment, deities, monsters, marriage, honor, games, and supplication etiquette.

I started to notice this in chapter 3. Chapters 1 and 2 had been relatively breezy (at least in comparison to The Scarlet Letter), but 3 got bogged down with lineage and places--things like "royal Onomatopoeius, son of Anacoluthon, fleet-footed king of Litotes, set sail on the seventh morning, and spurred by fair winds, returned a victor from war only to be slayed by his plotting uncle Anastrophe of Chiasmus, Anacoluthon's brother, who had, after much effort and with supplications to the deity of extra-marital affairs, successfully seduced Ecphonesis's wife Homiologia," etc. Dear reader(s), if your eyes didn't glaze over and you actually read every word of that, may the deities bless you.

Mixed into this came an excellent lesson on how to properly sacrifice a young heifer to Athene--information that clearly begged to be written down some 2800 years ago because it's something that frankly everyone needs to know. I really related to this part of the book because its how-to-itiveness reminded me of another, more contemporary household companion. Compare the following texts, the ancient and the modern (pardon the genealogy in the former):

Ancient: So after they had prayed and strewn the barley-meal, forthwith the son of Nestor, ardent Thrasymedes, drew near and dealt the blow. The axe cut through the sinews of the neck and broke the heifer's power. A cry went up from the daughters of Nestor, the sons' wives, and his own honored wife, Eurydice, the eldest of the daughters of Clyenus. The sons then raised the beast up from the trodden earth and held her so, the while Peisistratus, ever the foremost, cut the throat. And after the black blood had flowed and life had left the carcase, they straightaway laid it open, quickly cut out the thighs, all in due order, wrapped them in fat in double layers and placed raw flesh thereon. On billets of wood the old man burned them, and poured upon them sparkling wine, while young men by his side held five-pronged forks. So after the thighs were burned and the inward parts were tasted, they sliced the rest, and stuck it on the forks, and roasted all, holding the pointed forks in hand. (Homer, The Odyssey, ca. 8th c. BCE, trans. George Herbert Palmer, 1891, rev. 1912; Dover Thrift Editions: 1999, Chapter 3, p. 27.)

Modern: If possible, trap heifer 'possum and feed it on milk and barley cereals for 10 days before sacrificing to Athene killing. Gild horns Clean, but do not skin. Treat as for pig by immersing the unskinned heifer animal in sparkling wine water just below the boiling point. Test frequently with pointed five-pronged forks by plucking at the hair. When it slips out regularly, remove the heifer opossum from sparkling wine water and scrape. While scraping repeatedly, pour cool sparkling wine water over the surface of the heifer animal. Remove inward parts small red glands in small of the back and under each thigh foreleg between shoulder and ribs. Roast Parblanch about 20 minutes each, in two or three changes of sparkling wine water, then roast as for pork...Serve with turnip greens. (Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, The Joy of Cooking, Bobbs-Merrill Company: 1975, rev. and exp. 1983, "Opossum," p. 515.)

Other how-to standouts in The Odyssey include:

How to select husband material for (a) yourself or (b) your daughter: 
(a) If Athene comes to you in a dream and reminds you that you're of marriageable age so wouldn't it be a good idea to go do laundry tomorrow morning lest your family's dirty clothes cause embarrassment, and a hungry naked guy washes up on the beach and you discover him in the shrubbery while you're playing catch while waiting for the laundry to dry, but it turns out he cleans up real nice, then declare admiringly, "Hearken, my white-armed women, while I speak. Not without purpose on the part of all the gods that hold Olympus is this man's meeting with the godlike Phaeacians. A while ago, he really seemed to me ill-looking, but now he is like the gods who hold the open sky. Ah, might a man like this be called my husband, having his home here, and content to stay!" (Chapter 6, p. 59)
(b) When you meet the shipwrecked stranger to whom your virtuous virgin daughter gave directions to your house, size up his noble dudeness, and then, even though you recognize it's a long shot, offer him your daughter and your wealth: "O father Zeus, Athene, and Apollo, that such a man as you, so like in mind to me, might take my child, be called my son-in-law, and here abide! For I would give you house and goods if you would like to stay." (Chapter 7, p. 68)

How to poke out the eye of a Cyclops with a stake: This is a real gross-out paragraph, not only for the graphic description of the deed itself, but also because the Cyclops, passed out drunk, vomits wine and bits of chewed up humans (whose brains, incidentally, had already been splattered on the cave floor once before, when Polyphemus slaughtered a pair of men for dinner the night before and another pair for breakfast. There's probably a rhetorical term for this sort of recapitulation, given that skull bashing and vomiting are both variations on the theme of How to Spread Human Brains on Cave Floors). I expect this level of goriness would appeal to pretty much any adolescent in any century; no wonder The Odyssey remains on high school reading lists. In the following excerpt, notice also the handy references to wooden ship building and tempering steel:

Out of his throat poured wine and scraps of human flesh; heavy with wine, he spewed it forth. And now it was I drove the stake under a heap of ashes, to bring it to a heat, and with my words emboldened all my men, that none might flinch through fear. Then when the olive stake, green though it was, was ready to take fire, and through and through was all aglow, I snatched it from the fire, while my men stood around and Heaven inspired us with great courage. Seizing the olive stake, sharp at the tip, they plunged it in his eye, and I, perched up above, whirled it around. As when a man bores ship-beams with a drill, and those below keep it in motion with a strap held by the ends, and steadily it runs; even so we seized the fire-pointed stake and whirled it in his eye. Blood bubbled round the heated thing. The vapor singed off all the lids around the eye, and even the brows, as the ball burned and its roots crackled in the flame. As when a smith dips a great axe or adze into cold water, hissing loud, to temper it, — for that is strength to steel,— so hissed his eye about the olive stake. A hideous roar he raised; the rock resounded; we hurried off in terror. He wrenched the stake from out his eye, all dabbled with the blood, and flung it from his hands in frenzy.(Chapter 9, p. 87)

And finally,

How to remind your audience to give you a big tip: Remember, you are da Bard. Whether the Muse motivates you to tell tangential tales about cuckolded deities or to provide brief recaps of the story so far, mention that there's nothing more satisfying than having a good bard around. Use adjectives like "sacred," "honored," "famous," "wondrous," and "noble" to describe folks in your profession, and have your hero compare you to deities thusly:

Then wise Odysseus answered him and said: "Mighty Alcinoüs, renowned of all, surely it is a pleasing thing to hear a bard like this, one who is even like the gods in voice. For more complete delight I think there cannot be than when good cheer possesses a whole people, and feasting through the houses they listen to a bard, seated in proper order, while beside them stand the tables supplied with bread and meat, and dipping wine from out the mixer the pourer bears it round and fills the cups. That is a sight most pleasing. (Chapter 9, p. 80)

The Scarlet Letter: B

I'm giving The Scarlet Letter a B--an embroidered B, gules, on a sable field.¹ I was sedulous² keeping to my commitment to re-read the book, though I wotted³ not whether I would find my adolescent animadversions⁴ justified. To my great joy, once I had slogged past the ponderous Introductory, I discovered the language to be readable and oftentimes even pleasant. Nonetheless, nugatory⁵ I now believe it is, to expect high schoolers to enjoy immersing themselves in Hawthorne's lucubrations⁶--though enjoyment be not necessarily the point. Of this book, perhaps in a U.S. History class, one wherein are studious youth needing to contemplate the strange and distant Puritanism of Old Boston, where arrived a crop of England's first Americans (their women less beautiful than would become subsequent generations of New Englanders, for not yet tempered were their visages by deprivation and rugged Atlantic weather,⁷ nor yet purged of joy through community shunning and self-denial)--or youth desiring, or merely instructed by pedagogical authority, to contemplate the sarcastic literary wanderings of the bored and apparently bitter descendants of those early settlers--yes, of this book in such a class (and not in freshman or sophomore English) perhaps more enjoyment and instructive use would be found.⁸

My recommendations: skip the Introductory (propose reading it as part of a possible book report project) and cut straight to the main story. Judge the Puritans harshly, forgive them if you will, and remind high schoolers to use protection when they engage in sexual intercourse if they want to avoid making babies.

=============================
¹"[A simple slab of slate] bore a device, a herald's wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:— 'ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES'"
²" She wondered what sort of herbs they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather."
³"Without taking overmuch upon myself my good word will go far towards gaining any strange gentleman a fair reception from yonder potentate you wot of."
⁴"[It] excited neither surprise nor animadversion when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the market-place in close and familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel."
⁵"According to these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels—had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man's own righteousness."
⁶"With his own ghostly voice he had exhorted me, on the sacred consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him—who might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor—to bring his mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations before the public."
⁷"Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not character of less force and solidity than her own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone."
⁸This sentence is only 118 words long. I don't know that I could get it up to 139, but I think I did a decent job of delaying the verb until the very end.

The Downward-Pointing Thumb: Introductory to "The Custom-House: Introductory to 'The Scarlet Letter'"

Present-day me thinks 13-year-old me was onto something when she disliked The Scarlet Letter. I haven't made it to the main story yet, because it has taken me two weeks to slog through the 31-page opening, "The Custom-House: Introductory to 'The Scarlet Letter.'" (On the bright side, needing a break, I read the first two chapters of George Herbert Palmer's 1921 translation of The Odyssey out loud to E, and we both thought it was pretty engaging.)

About halfway through "The Custom-House," I googled "scarlet letter narrator patronizing jerk" but didn't get any useful hits. One enthusiastic video claims that contrary to initial appearances, the Introductory isn't actually boring--Really! It echoes the book, in miniature! Isn't that cool? Such forced enthusiasm suggests the Introductory is, in fact, boring to its present-day primary audience of distressed middle- and high-school readers. (One wonders how Hawthorne's depressed narrator would feel about that; he'd probably just nod his head, knowingly.)

I took notes in the margins while I read and have culled the following five themes, which I offer here to any student desperate for an essay topic:

1. You can't trust the Federal government. That vixenly American eagle looks protectively tender, but she'll claw your eyes out in a heartbeat. Customs officers rely too much on Uncle Sam.

2. Salem is drab and decaying, and the narrator would prefer to be pretty much anywhere else. He has lived in other places, but repeatedly returns to Salem, thanks in large part to the pull of the bones of his imposing Puritan ancestors, who were cruel bigwigs in Salem's early days, and compared to whom the narrator feels like an unremarkable loser. Eventually, the narrator will make a break for it, either in actuality, or through his literary imagination, or by dying. He pretends to be dead near the end of the Introductory so that he can feel like less of a jerk for having written it: "...the sketch which I am now bringing to a close [i.e. "The Custom-House"], if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet!"

3. The men who work at the Custom House like to tip their chairs back against the wall, sometimes while they sleep on the job. The narrator offers this detail several times in the Introductory; perhaps he thought it was particularly funny, or so subtle that it bore repeating. To the forlorn high school student with an essay due tomorrow, I offer the following quotes and page numbers:
- p. 4, "[You would discern]...a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep."
- p. 9, "They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back against the wall..."
- p. 10, "...it was pleasant to hear them chatting in the back entry, a row of them all tipped against the wall, as usual..."
- p. 27, "[Might I not, like some of my loser colleagues, decide to make] the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or the shade?" The astute reader should conclude that in Salem, old dogs slept in chairs tipped against the wall.

4. Happy people should be mocked (or, the narrator is a patronizing jerk):
- p. 10, "Externally, the jollity of aged men has much in common with the mirth of children...In one case, however, it is real sunshine; in the other, it more resembles the phosphorescent glow of decaying wood."
- p. 12, "[The 80-year-old Head Inspector, despite outliving everyone else in his family, remained happy]....He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon: so perfect in one point of view; so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable, such a nonentity, in every other. My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart, no mind...."
- p. 12, in which the happy Head Inspector is compared to a dog: "One point, in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed brethren, was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat."
- p. 14, regarding the Collector, "Nevertheless, looking at the old warrior with affection,--for, slight as was the communication between us, my feeling towards him, like that of all bipeds and quadrupeds who knew him, might not improperly be termed so,--I could discern the main points of his portrait." Note, incidentally, the use of litotes here!
- p. 15, suggesting the General is a wuss by comparing him to females: "A trait if native elegance, seldom seen in the masculine character after childhood or early youth, was shown in the General's fondness for the sight and fragrance of flowers. An old soldier might be supposed to prize only the bloody laurel on his brow; but here was one, who seemed to have a young girl's appreciation of the floral tribe."
- p. 16, in which the narrator observes he's improving his own character by spending time with people he has criticized for being too happy, vapid, feminine, or sleepy: "It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate."

5. The narrator is fascinated by how a wig that was buried for 80 years has managed to hold up.
- p. 20, on how the remains of Surveyor Jonathan Pue were "recently" dug up and moved: "Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle, which, unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory preservation."
- p. 22: "It impressed me as if the ancient Surveyor,...wearing his immortal wig—which was buried with him, but did not perish in the grave—had met me in the deserted chamber of the Custom-House."
- p. 23: "'Do this,' said the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, emphatically nodding the head that looked so imposing within its memorable wig..."

One friend shared with me that she had also felt ambivalent about The Scarlet Letter in high school, but that when she re-read it a few years ago, Hawthorne struck her as a sort of punk rock feminist. I hope he will eventually strike me that way too, as I move into the main body of the book. In any case, given that the Introductory is supposed to encapsulate the story's central themes, I look forward to observing how the five themes described above unfold.

Cultural literacy, take 2

A confession: I have never much enjoyed reading. As a graduate student, I once found some early elementary school report cards that my parents had saved. My teachers praised my interest in writing, and my general congeniality; they had no complaints about my math skills and were impressed by the maturity with which I used clinical terms in sex ed (it was the 1970s, after all, and my mom worked for Planned Parenthood); but they sure wished I would show more interest in reading.

Part of the problem, as I recall, was that I was supposed to have been smart, so I always ended up in school reading groups for which the books were consistently 6-12 months beyond my developmental ability to grasp. In 4th grade, for example, I was in the "advanced" reading group that was going to read Ramona. I was dismayed to discover that instead of reading Beverly Cleary's Ramona, we were reading a different Ramona. I could relate to Ramona Quimby--remember the time when she wanted to make sure that all the apples in the bushel basket in the basement were OK, so she took a bite out of every single one?--but I couldn't relate to the other Ramona, the "mixed-race Scots-Native American orphan girl, who suffers racial discrimination and hardship in Southern California after the Mexican-American War" (to quote Wikipedia).

The earliest of Beverly Cleary's Ramona books was about 12 years old when I was born. Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona was 83. When I read the latter in 4th grade, it was 92. Even Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books (my essential resource for understanding what it was really, truly like to be caught out on the prairie in a horse-drawn buggy with your suitor and his handsome horses when the weather turned wacky and funnel clouds appeared on the horizon)--even those books were far newer, with Little House in the Big Woods published a mere 36 years before my birth.

OK, so maybe I enjoyed reading some books as a kid. I don't read much fiction as an adult at all, maybe one to three novels a year, and I tend to favor children's and young adult literature (loved Harry Potter, loved Holes)--easy reads, I suppose. Given how little I enjoy reading, I'm amazed I managed to get a PhD.

So where did my reading go awry?

A few years ago, leading some writing tutoring outreach in one of Durham's public high schools, I learned that kids were reading--and disliking--many of the same novels that I had read and disliked in high school 25 years earlier. I was a too-young white female small-town/midwest-university-town reader at an academically privileged high school when I first encountered Lord of the Flies, a 1954 novel (25-29 years old when I read it) about a bunch of kids from a British boys' school trapped in circumstances that revealed the innate barbarism of humanity (yeah, middle schoolers are mean, so what else is new?). I had a hard enough time relating to the book; I could understand how, 25 years later, inner-city Durham kids might also have a hard time relating. And The Odyssey--which, as a too-young reader, I found to be quite the slog--was still part of the canon--but then, what's another 25 years for a story that's ~2.8K years old?

Maybe, I thought, I hadn't always disliked reading; maybe I learned to dislike reading thanks to a school system that, in its interest in keeping me challenged, ignored my immaturity.

Yeah. So last week, I was driving somewhere in my car, listening to the classical music radio station, when on came one of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. This immediately triggered memories of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Around the time I read the book in high school, I was in the habit of getting to know my parents' LP collection, and I would put records on the record player to help make reading more pleasurable. When an LP reached the end of the first side, instead of turning the record over, I'd simply lift the needle up and move it back to the beginning. I memorized a lot of great music this way (to this day, I can mimic much of the Four Seasons on the piano, without needing to look at a score), but I also indelibly printed The Scarlet Letter onto Autumn and Winter.

Listening to the radio last week, I wondered: what if I were to read The Scarlet Letter now, as a 46-year-old with some significant life experience behind me? Would I like the book any better than when I was a naive, too-young high schooler?

(I keep writing "too young"; I really was too young for much of what I read. I started elementary school early, and I was 11 when I started 7th grade. My secondary school was a 5-year high school that combined 7th and 8th grade into one year, so everyone there was younger than students in equivalent grades at other schools, but I was younger than most going back to Kindergarten. I graduated when I was 16, and started college when I was 16, and it really was way too young--not academically but emotionally--and I wouldn't recommend that sort of path to others.)

Anyway, listening to Vivaldi on the radio, I hatched a plan: I would choose 3-4 books I didn't enjoy the first time around, and reread them, to find out whether they might be more enjoyable 30 years later. Doesn't that sound like a fun experiment?

Knowing how slowly I read, I decided library copies weren't the best option, but I didn't want to invest a lot of money in books I'm not necessarily expecting to enjoy. Imagine my delight, then, when ordering some cheapo music scores from Dover, I discovered that Dover publishes super duper cheap reprints of The Canonical Classics--$2.00-$3.50 each!

Arriving soon at my door will be:
The Scarlet Letter (eek);
The Odyssey (a 1921 translation rather than the fabulous new translation recommended by a friend, the better to reproduce high school conditions);
A Tale of Two Cities (which, OK, I didn't read in high school: I read it in 6th grade, when I was 10. Way too young.).

Lord of the Flies isn't available through Dover, but guess what I found instead--Siddhartha! Friends tell me this is a good book. I totally didn't understand its point in high school, although I remember the vocabulary word ascetic being significant. When I found the title in Dover's listings, my gut reaction was "dang." I guess that means this experiment will be good for me in some way or another.

Finally, I decided to give myself a bit of a break with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I read in high school but actually understood and enjoyed (so it only half qualifies).

E will likely encounter some of these texts at school himself in the next few years. Perhaps we can re-live one of the joys of his earlier youth by reading together out loud. Doesn't The Scarlet Letter sound like the perfect material for such mother-son bonding?

Generation upon generation

Part of the legacy of my brilliant grandmother Woozy is this story about my uncle Bob--a story for the generations. As Heinrich Heine put it in Dichterliebe, "Es ist eine alte Geschichte / doch bleibt sie immer neu" ("It's an old story, but it remains ever new"). Heine, of course, was poetizing about unrequited love, not good books on the john, but I like to think both Woozy and Heine would approve. E, we're on to you.


"Dinner time," Wooz called.
"I have to make a BM" said Ahbut Dafoots Botsybee. So they all ate up the soup and crackers and meat and potatoes and sweet corn and green beans.
"Dinner time," Wooz called.
"I'm not finished," said Ahbut Dafoots Botsybee. So they all ate up the lettuce and scallions and green onions and radishes and cucumbers.
"Dinner time," Wooz called.
"I'm not finished," said Ahbut Dafoots Botsybee. So they all ate up the strawberry shortcake with whipped cream.
"I'm finished," said Ahbut Dafoots Botsybee. "It was a VERY LONG BOOK."

Resolutions

I need to start an Etsy store. That will go on my list of New Year's resolutions, along with coming up with a way to take decent photos of my work, building a gas or soda kiln in the back yard, and learning to repair plaster walls. Can you tell which of the Klein Bottles below were photographed by a professional photographer and which were photographed by me using a low-tech piece of white poster board propped on a chair as a backdrop?

I didn't make any specific New Year's resolutions on January 1, 2010, but some goals did crop up along the way. I'm pleased to report that I have successfully renewed my devotion to Robert Schumann (to whom, incidentally, I dedicated my Master's thesis in Astronomy way back in 1989) by learning the six B-A-C-H fugues for organ. For those who question the absolute brilliance of the fugues, might I recommend several months of worshipful practice and analysis?

By comparison, I've been resisting my way through The Lord of the Rings, but with December 31 looming, I've bumped things up a notch and am now a mere 200 pages away from finishing The Return of the King (not counting the hundreds of pages of appendices). By New Year's Eve, I hope to call my cultural literacy oath to Tolkien fulfilled.

Hole hero 3

Louis Sachar knows holes. His excellent book suggests that when the whole world seems to be against you, it's probably not your imagination but rather an Old World cosmic curse. Deep down, don't we all suspect that's the case?