Snobbery

The fall semester has begun full-force and at this point I have already begun to feel the heavy blow of paper-grading. It is truly incredible how much time and energy it takes to grade and comment on student papers, especially when the intention is to give QUALITY feedback. Taxing! But I digress.

Today's post has to do with an attitude with which I have been typically associated with in my social circles; the attitude of literary snobbery. Far too many times I have found myself sticking my nose up in the air when a new popular novel has been recommended to me since, surely, I mustn't waste my oh-so-valuable time perusing a Terry Brooks novel or, God forbid, one of those overproduced and weary schoolyard rags printed under the Hogwart's banner. But as I have been teaching I have slowly been learning to reorient my otherwise derisive and dismissive literary views. This doesn't necessarily mean that I will ever get around to picking up a J.K. Rowling novel since I still believe, albeit stubbornly, that there are far better things to spend my evenings doing (provided no one asks me to justify the hours I've clocked at failblog.org). But as a professor of composition at two colleges I think I have recently learned the value of the pedagogical perspective.

About two years ago, before I began teaching, I found an article by a crotchety literary fundamentalist by the name of Harold Bloom. I call him crotchety but in reality I share a great deal of Bloom's views concerning the definition of truly valuable literature (I have, in fact, blogged on this very subject). This article, entitled "Dumbing Down American Readers" is essentially an ivory-tower literary critic's lambastation of two of our most prominent symbols of the commodification of literature, Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. As I read this article the first time I couldn't help but grin wickedly and tap my fingers together, imagining how I might use this very same article to indoctrinate my future students. Surely, young and impressionable college students reading the harsh derision of a figure so monolithic as Harold Bloom would be incapable of resisting his bludgeoning logic as he denounced two of the most read and, ironically, worst writers of the past decade.

But after a year of teaching composition I have realized something important about the function of an instructor in a college classroom. Beyond the simple fact that my opinion matters less than the intended product of any class, which is student proficiency, I believe I have also seen the real value of my position which is to aid students in expressing ideas that are uniquely and inextricably THEIRS. This is the first semester that I have actually used the Bloom article in my classroom and, despite my wholehearted agreement with the critic, I have been careful to present the article as a point of argument and have worked to foster a forum for open agreement or disagreement with Bloom's work. I have been happily surprised to find that a great many students are already in agreement with Bloom in that American readers have been served much softer and less nourishing fare in recent years. But the great part about it is that most of these students have expressed these views and are currently developing arguments along these same lines that they can claim whole ownership of. The same can be said for the students whom have reacted just as strongly in the opposite direction and in fact, strong disagreement with Bloom's essay seems to have been a more interesting starting point for class discussion. And I'm OK with it!

I had a recent discussion with a friend who will remain nameless (apologies if you read this) and she was expressing frustration at the notion that a friend of hers had become interested in reading a work that she (my friend) loved immensely for both its aesthetic and literary value. She was certain that her friend could not appreciate the novel the way she did and as we discussed this phenomenon (tragically common among literary types) we both realized the type of elitism that this very response demonstrated. I've done the same thing plenty of times but looking at it then from a second-hand perspective I realized the separation that I had developed between my teaching attitudes and my personal ones. Of course any literary type should do their utmost to help any audience appreciate a work of literature, even if they are incapable of accessing it on the same level or sharing the author's views. But that is what makes each of us individuals; the readers and the non readers, the literary bourgeoisie and the philosophical proletariat, the elitists, the humble, and everyone in between caught up in this marvelously picaresque game of "what did you read today?"

E-books

As usual I am a bit slow on the uptake, but I've recently felt compelled to share my views on a phenomenon that claims to have revolutionized the way we read (at least this is undoubtedly how Amazon promotes it). I am talking, of course, about the Kindle; the device that allows a single person to carry with them an entire library of books in one small tablet. There are any number of devices that have attempted, with various degrees of success, to imitate the same concept, but for the sake of our conversation here, I will focus on the Kindle itself.

Now, I am by no means a Luddite. Despite my stodgy, vintage, professory exterior I do, in fact, enjoy a great deal of technology. I have a smartphone, I love Garageband and my MAC, I have even seen the merit of using classroom technology, and I have even embraced certain aspects of electronic classrooms. But I also think it is important to approach each new leap in social and professional technology with a certain level of skepticism. Undoubtedly, part of this paranoia stems from a sci-fi geek's subconscious fear of a Matrix-like universe. But a great deal of it has to do with a separation of two concepts that are often conflated in a commercialized society like ours: technological advances and Progress. I use a capital P on purpose since we must realize that, when speaking of Progress, we don't simply mean that we have placed one foot in front of the other; indeed we might very well be walking backward. When I say Progress I mean that we have made advances that truly lead to the betterment of the world around us. The use of software like Skype to connect family members across the world would be a prime example of Progress; the use of a Flash media player to watch porn would not...but I digress. When thinking about a technological invention like the Kindle in terms of Progress I must force myself to consider what it is actually adding to the reading experience.

I have to admit that one of the most attractive aspects of e-readers, especially the Kindle, is the instantaneous and free access to public-domain material. Being a medievalist, this means that I have essentially gained access to every book I could ever want at no charge, provided I have the patience to read it on the screen of my Droid. Bullocks to the New York Bestseller's list; it has been ages since I have picked up a book that was written after 1950. I understand, of course, that I'm probably not the target market for the Kindle, those who live and die by those lists being Amazon's moneypot, but I have to admit that I do get a profound grin when I can download a digital copy of Chaucer's Troilus and Creseyde without paying a penny.

But is this access worth the price? "But" you will say "you just said that you didn't pay a cent!" This is true. But I think there is a higher price to pay for instant access to every book you could ever want. When you sit down and think about it logically, how many books can a person possibly be engaged in at any given time? I probably have far to many forlorn bookmarks on my shelves but in reality, I am only truly engaged in a single book at a time. Even when traveling I can hardly expect to make it through more than two volumes at a stretch. It took me nearly my entire 20-day European vacation to make it through Holy Blood, Holy Grail which I reviewed last month. But this kind of practicality is in neither part of the marketing technique, nor the burgeoning reading culture being fostered by e-readers. Amazon makes money based on the quantity of books you purchase. This is their primary reason for including a Wi-fi and 3G feature into their devices (despite the Siren call of automatically-updating e-newspapers). Does this mean, then, that each member of the reading public is essentially being encouraged to have their noses in as many different texts as possible at any given time? Probably. And isn't this simply an extension of the Attention Deficit being cultivated by websites with multitudes of hotlinks that will access countless pages of condensed information at any given time? I must again answer in the affirmative.

In my series of admissions I must also admit that I am a casualty of this very same culture. So often in conversation I find myself attempting to recall the source of a particular piece of information and wind up wondering if I had found it in one of the many academic articles that I have downloaded in PDF format (I may dedicate an entire blog to this alone) or one of my casual forays into Wikipedia. Undoubtedly this confusion has forced upon me a certain staunch sense of third-party-nostalgia since, as I understand so many of the intelligent men and women who existed in the days before sound-bites and streaming video, the ability to quote poetry and prose was so much more profound. I think this must be partially due to the fact that, when there was no Facebook to interrupt a reader after each chapter in a good book, there was only the book itself. When people read, they did so to understand. For some reason I imagine men like Ben Franklin or Winston Churchill sitting down in their respective studies and reading the first stanza of Milton's Paradise Lost. And when they arrive at the end of the stanza, rather than reward themselves by hopping on Netflix.com for a quick episode of Dr. Who, they simply sat and thought about what they had just read, or even went back to read some of the most profound stanzas and committing them to memory because the experience had been pure, profound, and uninterrupted. There was only the one volume of poetry in their hands; to get up and walk to the bookcase for another volume would be to break the poet's spell, and who really want's that?

Not Amazon, of course; the commodity of reading must demand the breaking of spells on a regular basis. God forbid a person grow attached to the physical experience of breaking spines (though, I don't agree with this practice), smelling paper, dog-earning pages, underlining passages, feeling through leaves, or simply forcing themselves to commit a portion of their time to a Book (capital B).

Holy Blood, Holy Grail - Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln

"Any responsible researcher must, like a detective, pursue whatever clues come to hand, however seemingly improbable."

As you may have noticed I have a tendency to include in each blog brief quotes from the books I write about to help give an idea of the effect that each book has had upon me. It is rare that I include this quote with disdain or irony but, sadly, this entry, which may appear more like a review, does just that.

The work of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln is the very same that, just a few years ago, inspired Dan Brown to write The DaVinci Code. The basic hypothesis is that Jesus in fact did NOT die on the Cross in Biblical times but lived to sire a family through Mary Magdalen and that this issue was transplanted across the Mediterranean to France where it eventually integrated into a French royal line known as the Merovingians who, when deposed by the Carolingians, went into hiding and have been so for the last millennium and a half protected by an offshoot of the Knights Templar know as the Prieure du Sion. Wow, that's a mouthful.

Now I will admit that I was intrigued by this particular book since one of its basic arguments is one that I myself had deduced in my experience with medieval romances; that the term Holy Grail, sometimes 'Sangraal' was a mutated form of 'Sang Real' or Blood Royal. This was as far as I had gotten in my own researches, which were only limited at the time having no real indication for what kind of Royal Blood the romances I had read could possibly be referring to. But the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail have developed one such conclusion, albeit tragically far fetched, so I picked it up from Amazon this past Christmas and have just gotten around to giving it a read.

Now I could spend pages nitpicking the many minor claims and questionable connections that these fellows have made but I would run the risk of treading trodden ground (the book is nearly as old as I am). Instead I'd like to simply meditate on these authors tragic misallocation of time and energy in the composing of this particular book.

For nearly twenty years historians, theologians, and literary critics have been avidly discrediting the claims made in this text. In fact even one of the authors governing  premises has been found to be a complete fraud (the existence of the Prieure du Sion was found to have been falsified). But in truth, it does not take a professional to notice the cracks in this edifice of pop-history; one has simply to notice aspects of the authors style.

It is probably worth mentioning that the author who received second-billing, Richard Leigh, was not a historian but a novelist. Accordingly, the book reads much like a novel; it is typically presented in first person as if the reader were looking over the researchers' shoulders as they discovered more and more intriguing "evidence" that eventually leads to an earth-shattering hypothesis in chapter 11. The result makes for an entertaining read but at the cost of grossly misrepresenting not only standard research procedures, but those of the authors as well. Now I may sound like a stolid college professor, but any freshman learns (ideally) that the hypothesis comes first and the writer must spend the larger portion of the composition supporting that hypothesis. The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail present their research as if each new piece of "evidence" were a trail of breadcrumbs that lead incontrovertibly to their hypothesis. The problem is; there are so many rhetorical leaps, so many instances of the least likely solution being favored, that one cannot help but think that, like me, they had begun with a simply grammatical transmutation and built their story around it.

I should mention that I can't say for certain that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail are entirely mislead. In fact there are a great many questions raised in their book that warrant further investigation. But the problem here is method. As you see in the quote included above the authors of this book are more than ready to justify any number of violations of established scholarship and therefore it is not surprising that established scholarship has spent the last two decades beating this book's theories into the ground; if not for the sake of Christian tradition then at least for the defense of their own professions whose faces are often spit in by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard

Rosencrantz: "I can't think of anything original. I'm only good in support."

I recently received a point of criticism from my wife who claims that I will lose touch with the modern world if I don't spend some time away from the ancient texts I love so much. As you may know, I am a medievalist and frequently take forays into the early modern world of Shakespeare, but rarely venture into literature more modern than that. Some of this may be due to the fact that, so often when I DO bravely decide to read something modern, I often end up bitterly disappointed and relapse into the safety of The Old (don't get me started on Beckett's Endgame). So, taking this criticism in hand, on the recommendation of a student from my recently ended Shakespeare class (this may explain my belated return to Blogging) I picked up Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The play itself was interesting in that it expanded upon two of Shakespeare's very minor characters and even pushed the limits of theatrical performance and for that I commend Stoppard. But two things specifically that left me rather leery of this piece of modern theatre:

The first thing I noticed was a rather overbearing intrusion of the playwright. Now I know that, when reading a play, one must remember that performance is far different than simply reading. Maybe it is all the time I have spent reading Medieval and Renaissance drama, which is rarely self-conscious and is always open for reinterpretation due to its very minimal inclusion of stage directions and heavy reliance on the language of the characters to convey the scene. Stoppard, on the other hand, takes nearly as much time to describe the physical appearance and movements of his play as he does to write the characters' lines. This seems drastically limit the artistic possibilities of the play, essentially leaving room only for a performance as Stoppard envisioned it. It all seems rather heavy-handed and makes me think that, if Stoppard had any confidence in the significance of his dialogue, he wouldn't need to so strictly define describe his play. And I suppose I can see why he may have this concern, what with characters who rarely speak more than two lines of simplistic dialogue at a time. All of this is undoubtedly a criticism that could be knocked down by any number of experts in modern and post-modern theatre. Perhaps I am basing my standards on Shakespeare and his ilk. But then, isn't Stoppard?

The most worrisome thing that I noticed about this play is its rather heavy reliance upon canonical literature. Now, this may be overwhelmingly obvious since the play essentially expands upon some of Shakespeare's own characters, but bear with me. It seems to me that one of the tendencies of modern and post-modern literature is their inability to separate from canonical works. In rewriting aspects of Shakespeare's play Stoppard admits that his play, as an example of postmodern drama, cannot exist without Shakespeare (whom some believe to have defined the canon). While it may be interesting for Stoppard to provide us with this very interesting piece of drama, in making it defy the conventions of Shakespearean theatre Stoppard only proves his reliance upon Shakespeare's prefiguration of his own. Much like atheists cannot exist without a religion to deny, postmodern literature, as much as it tries to define it self by NOT being what came before, it is inextricably bound to its predecessors. Perhaps this is why I always gravitate toward things that are old. Writers like Shakespeare and Chaucer seem, to me, less conscious of their place in the canon and simply preferred to write good stories. Yet in seeking to do little else than to entertain their contemporaries have become immortal figures. Maybe this begs the question: do postmodernists simply try too hard?

As a hilarious sidenote: in Act III multiple times Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern) say "We're on a boat"; I couldn't shake the image of Andy Samberg...
----
Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

I believe I have read this story four times total and in each the context was significantly different and my experience changed significantly as well. Oddly enough, I think each time that I have read the story I have done so in a different volume as well so this posting will be much more oriented toward the story than the physical object.

Each of the volumes in this picture correspond, from left to right, to each of my four readings below.

For anyone that doesn't know, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is an embedded narrative told by a character named Marlow who, during the height of British Imperialism, was sent up the Congo river in search of a London trading company's most profitable, but also most disturbed agent. As Marlow travels slowly up the river in his steamboat, continuously contemplating the white man's intended (but failed) efficacy on the African continent, he discovers more and more that, as he approaches Kurtz (the agent) he is departing more and more from what is considered civilized and is instead plunging into the savage and eponymous Heart of Darkness, a philosophy entity practically embodied in the powerful and simultaneously overwhelmed existence of Kurtz.

1. Oddly enough, my first ever experience with Heart of Darkness was by accident. My freshman year of college Dr. Reynolds had put Heart of Darkness on her syllabus for her World Civilizations II class. It seemed an odd choice for a History class but I went with it. When it came time to read the book for class, I sped through its entirety on a Sunday afternoon only to discover that, amidst her endless powerpoints Dr. Reynolds had forgotten to leave time to discuss Heart of Darkness (I might mention that she was by far one of the worst professors I have ever had. Don't use powerpoint, kids; every time you do a kitten is murdered). It is hard to remember my first response to Heart of Darkness since the entire event remains tinged with frustration at having read something that wouldn't be discussed in class (or even end up on the final).

2. The second time I read Heart of Darkness was significantly more relaxing. It was my semester in London and Conrad's work was a part of my British Short Fiction class with Dr. Carl Winderl. For most of the semester we had one of the most tranquil locations to meet; with only six or so students we would often gather around the garden terrace in the backyard of our Kensington hostel. Somehow here I began to see the significance of Marlow's gradual journey into 'darkest Africa' though I had not yet learned to put it into context (although a visit to the British Museum later that semester undoubtedly gave me a unique glimpse into Britain's persistent celebration of their own imperial age).

3. My third reading was the summer after graduation from college when I was studying for the GRE English Subject Test. If you do not know, studying for this test is an entirely futile endeavor unless you are somehow capable of matriculating every key work from all of Literature and synthesizing it into the format of an objective test (or if you are Harold Bloom). You will find, however, that as you inevitably embark on this futile exercise you will find that you come upon works of literature that you are happy, if not exhilarated to read once again. This time, I was not reading Heart of Darkness for any particular goal but to really enter into the world that Conrad paints; I even found myself becoming more and more immersed into the subtle yet powerful character of Kurtz and discovering what it meant, psychologically, to approach something that is primordial and savage and still attempt to maintain your supposedly civilized humanity. This is really what Conrad wrote about. Of course the book carries the dense overtones of the ugly side of British Imperialism and even earns a place as a transitional work that heralds the 'modern' age of literature. But it also represents something long buried in the dark past of humanity, something that we like to ignore and forget.

4. Finally, the reason that I have decided to discuss Heart of Darkness today is because I have just finished teaching it for the first time. I am confident that I have done a much better job than Dr. Reynolds and I hope that I have come close to Dr. Winderl's endeavor. My British Literature class is quite small, only six students, and as a result our discussions are often quite interesting and significantly more productive than a larger class might be (as seems to be the case with small classes). I did my best, of course, to communicate something of my experience with Conrad's work. Hopefully the next few times my students read this story (which I hope they do). They can grow with it as I have.


As a piece of literature Heart of Darkness holds a unique position in my mind. I wouldn't begin to say that it is the best piece of literature that I have ever read. It doesn't carry the same kinds of universals that we sometimes expect from really great literature nor are its characters as dynamic and interesting as some from more prominent works. But whenever someone asks me which book is most worth reading, Heart of Darkness is always at the top of my list. Perhaps because I feel that people need their psychologies and even their moralities to be challenged. Conrad does both of these things. He erases our notions of moral justification and, through the enigmatic Kurtz, seen through the eyes of a curious Marlow, reveals the embedded darkness, the primordial savageness within each of us.

England

I get the impression that a great many people find it confusing that anyone would spend their time studying the literature of the past and as a result I feel a need to work this inclination out in prose.
English as a discipline is already in a weird position to modern-minded people. Most folks see science as the way of the future ans wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to spend their time analyzing what they consider simply a glamorized form of escapism (I will save my rant on this particular brand of ignorance for another day). So when I tell people that I study the literature of the middle ages I get smiles and nods that bear the subtext of "why the hell would anyone do that." So, rather than try to convince you WHY it is worthwhile, I think it may be best to take a less defensive stance and simply explain my reasons.
One of my earliest literary memories was watching a pirated (thanks Dad) VHS version of the animated film The Hobbit. In my timeline the film had come first but I very quickly found the tattered copy that my parents owned from before I existed and tore through it. What I found in those old pages was a very different story than I had seen in the film. There was so much more happening in the book than the film apparently had time for. Yet, unlike so many malcontented Twilight and Harry Potter fans (there is another rant in here somewhere) I still loved the movie version. In fact I believe that this may have been what inspire my entire literary career in a weird way. In seeing the comparison of film and book and knowing which had been created first I felt a need to understand "the origins of the myth." Mind you, I was NOT seeking to compare the two and discover which was better (*ahem* Twilight/Potter fans) but to simply comprehend the transmission of a tale from one medium to the next over time.
Only in knowing one's origins can one truly see one's present. It is my belief that this philosophy rings most true with the cultural conception of language and so in college I found myself enthralled with Shakespeare. His language seemed so much older, more formal, more glorified than our boorish, modern American vernacular. Yet even in Shakespeare (who wrote in what we call Early Modern English, NOT Old English) there were echoes of history waiting to be discovered, origins to be traced further back than even The Bard knew in his time. I'm fairly certain that this is why I ended up so focused on medieval literature. The Middle Ages were a time when those who spoke English were only beginning to become aware of the significance of their speech and to record it in ways that established the structure of an entire cultural identity that is still standing today, albeit morphed and mutated into something so very different.
Sometimes I look at the modern world and this fervent gusto for progress and looking toward the future but it concerns me. While so many Americans are still enraptured with the concept of The Frontier and this exaggerated desire to tread the untrodden paths (a mindset that carried us all the way to the Pacific Coast, where we stopped with nowhere else to go but up, into the starts). I, on the other hand, feel myself called to be a curator of the past.
This morning I was looking at photographs of Skara Brae and thinking about the fact that so many people have come and gone through such a place, almost all of which are long dead, but despite the fact that these places were discovered long ago and offer very little to that modern drive for "progress" these are the places I most want to be and truly hope that I am capable of imparting some of this same desire to future generations if for nothing else than to help humanity remember where it came from so that it may better judge where it is going.

Book Buyback

At the beginning of the semester I had a short conversation with a student about textbooks. My college has a two-semester requirement for its freshman writing courses and uses the same book for both. Unfortunately this means that a lot of foolish freshmen sell their books back to the bookstore after the first semester only to rebuy it again in the spring at full-price.
I had run into this former student in the hall and had mentioned this phenomenon.
"I guess I'm lucky that I didn't sell my book back" she said.
"Well, if you think about it" I replied "even in a composition textbook there are a lot of essays that are worth re-reading"
She thought about this for a moment and replied, "I guess you're right. There are some good essays in there."
I then proceeded to share my philosophy on textbooks: "I'll admit that I've sold most of my general ed. textbooks back myself, but I've never gotten rid of an English or history textbook or at least one that contained any kind of literature. That stuff is timeless."
"You're right. I think I'll hold on to mine too. Thanks Mr. Eastin."
It was a rewarding exchange but it highlighted something funny that is apparently not nearly as common sense as I would hope. I understand that most college students are poor and an extra wad of cash for end-of-semester parties is nice. But the thing is, that small and usually pathetic amount of cash (pathetic, often because of the piddling prices that most bookstores offer) is entirely visceral. It may be because I am a Literature-person by nature but I cannot conceive why anyone would want to dispose of a Norton Anthology so carelessly. Is twenty bucks really worth losing some of the most significant ideas of all time? These anthologies attempt to capture what it is to be either British, American, or even a citizen of the World as understood through literature. Isn't there something empowering about simply having this book on your shelves, even if that same shelf is populated with soccer trophies, Twilight paperbacks, or Economics textbooks?
I can only hope that this readiness to dispose of this wealth of knowledge is a matter of foolish youth and that these same kids will one day realize what they have lost and possibly reacquire it through Kindle or one of Barnes and Noble's budget editions...but I doubt it.