Time check

But every year, my powers of recall get weaker

No, it’s really true: speaking as one somewhat older than you, I can testify that memory begins to go . . . Why, for some reason I can hardly remember the 60’s and 70’s . . .

You mean you’re supposed to update your course content periodically? Hmmm…. I’ll have to give that some thought.

Is there anywhere in the intertubes that we can find this essay on “The Intuitionist” and Colson Whitehead’s reply? Google is sort of failing me on this.

The reader’s situation has changed. Way back in the dim mist of the 70s, I was talking to one of my professors at Michigan about Ulysses, and he gently pointed out to me that Leopold Bloom, not Stephen Dedalus, is the main character. I pointed out to him that when I was 40 instead of 20, I’d probably see that more clearly.

I turned out to be right. (I was literally reading the same book.) He, of course, turned out to be a much better reader of Joyce than I was.

These may be crude examples, but I’d say that depending on your exact philosophical commitments, it’s not your memory that’s to blame, but your position in the world that changes.

I was listening to NPR driving home from my last class of the semester, and the author of the new biography of Ellison was talking about his new knowledge of what Ellison was doing and thinking during the composition of Invisible Man had changed his reading of the book.

I’ll bet the books on the disabilities list will be very different for each of us in, oh, say, fifty years.

A new motto: It’s the intertextuality, stupid.

I’m teaching Thomas Kuhn’s STRUCTURE for the first time in a graduate class next year. I haven’t read it from cover-to-cover since my own graduate school experience, 15 years ago, so I suspect that it will be like the first time for me.

Of course, I ain’t a literature person so maybe it is a different experience with non-fiction. If Kuhn can be considered non-fiction…..

Clearly, I need to begin daily blogging again, at a two-thousand-word minimum, in order to get my life back.

O, be still, my heart.

how people in other disciplines approach courses in which they’re teaching more than half the material for the first time

First with puritanical zeal, then with desperation, and finally with gleeful wild abandon.

Which is to say: first you decide, I’m gonna teach an all-new course, because I need to shake things up; I’ve been teaching for ten years and this year I’m twice the age of the freshmen. Time for something new. And with excitement you pore over monographs, dividing them into ones you could assign for reading and ones you could use as lecture material; you make up an outline of lecture topics and you write essay questions for the students. It all appeals to the organized sensibility.

Then after about the second week of the course, as you’re going along, you realize that writing three new lectures a week — that’s actually quite a lot of work. And the four hours or so it takes to write a new lecture, plus the time it takes to prepare visual aids, seems like rather a lot of time, too. And you begin to feel a little harried, because of course the committee meetings keep rolling along and so do the manuscripts you need to read and the reviews and survey essays you agreed to write and that book you signed a contract for, it’s not going to write itself, is it.

Finally, after another three weeks or so, you realize that as desperate as you’ve felt, you’ve actually delivered a string of comparatively coherent lectures, and the thing is actually going to come together after all! Not only that, the monographs you assigned the students to read turn out actually to deal with the themes you thought they did! It’s like, when a plan comes together! You love it!

But you probably won’t do it every academic term.

NB: In some of the foregoing sentences the pronoun “you” should actually be the pronoun “me,” or maybe probably “I.” As to which, that’s left as an exercise to the reader.

Man, you have no idea. Every time I go back to a course that I haven’t taught in a few years, I discover that there are entirely new laws of physics. It’s as if the very nature of physical reality is shifting as I get older, just to piss me off! Not that it’s a surprise, any more.

Why would reading be any different than any other part of life?

If you try to turn off your involuntary filters and pay attention to everything that is going on all the time you will go crazy and need to sleep 15 hours a day like those crazy filterless babies.

Good thing I’m not teaching German; they really have revised basic rules over the last few years. More than once, in several cases. (I’m also refusing to learn the new version, on the grounds that learning German once is enough for a lifetime.)

MB, after you do Three Behemoth Books, would you consider doing Comparative Odysseys? Say, Homer, Joyce, Kazantzakis and Walcott?

In my very close reading of your reading I get this:
a. despite meditaion and being “centered,” you remain a harried time-watcher.
b. you are delighted with the novels you taught but will in years to come look back and wonder why those books, so exciting at first read and when new, were on your reading list…most will be of little interest in a few years, and the Roth book is far from being anywhere near his top few.
c. when all things fail, watch reruns of American Idol.

Michael,

Please consider dropping Roth’s “Plot Against America”. Roth’s book, I thought, was a mess. There is no plausible scenario for Lindbergh to be nominated because he was terrified about formally entering politics. Why? His Dad, a Socialist and Congressman, was treated horribly (I seem to recall him being arrested at one point for opposing WWI), and Lindbergh sometimes laced his anti-war speeches with attacks on “capitalists,” by which he meant more than..ahem..Jews. The powers who controlled the Republican Party in 1940 were capitalists all the way, which is why the squishy and not really anti-war Wilkie was nominated instead. The grass roots had far less control of nominations at that time, something Roth seems completely ignorant about.

Worse, the ending is like some sort of dream sequence where the nation suddenly wakes up without any consequences or more permanent changes in either the culture or subsequent history, despite several years of a Lindbergh presidency. There is even a gratuitous reference to Robert Kennedy running for president in 1968, which I found completely ahistorical in the sense of what Roth had just concocted. He seems blissfully unaware of how, in our time, the Cold War came out of WWII and became a powerful engine of reaction against the New Deal. If the New Deal is supposedly vindicated at the end of WWII in his alternative history, then RFK is going to have a different trajectory, too, and so will the ensuing decades of the 1950s and 1960s.

In the middle of the book, of course, is Roth’s usual Jewish life in Newark stuff, which, frankly, is overrated in my not-so-humble view (My uncle, though, vigorously disagrees with me about Roth’s other writings about Jews in Newark). For me, Mordecai Richler is the King of the Jewish North American writers because his books on Jews, including his last and brilliant work, “Barney’s Version (1998), has a larger focus in how Jews and Gentiles interact, and a larger perspective than Roth in terms of history, economics, politics and culture.

Say, why not Richler to replace Roth? “Solomon Gursky was here” is a knockout, too, but alas, first published in Canada in 1989 (the US print was published in 1990, though).

Final suggestions: Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible”. I think it’s the best American novel of the past 25 years. Brilliant at all levels and prose that sings from its opening paragraph. But God, forcing your students to read another 600 page book on that list may be too harsh.

Alternative: “Hocus Pocus” by Vonnegut, so hated in many quarters when it came out, but has since become far more beloved in many of those same quarters. I did not read it for some years after it came out, finally read it, and loved it. It crystalized Vonnegut’s philosophy, his melding of autobiography and novel, and was funny and poignant at the same time. Vintage Vonnegut, in again my “humble” view.

My way of getting to know new course material is to teach it once. No matter how much I prepare, actually teaching it — fielding questions, reading student essays that teach me things about it — always makes me realize how little I knew going in.

So, I teach it badly once, and the next time I do well.

This might seem unfair to the first class that has to endure my bumbling, but I have solved that difficulty. I go into the holodeck for 16 weeks and teach a class of student-simulacra; then I go back in time to the beginning of the semester and begin again with the real students.

I had a history of science professor as an undergraduate who used the Behemoth Book as an answer to scientists who claimed that science was difficult and the humanities was easy.

Whenever he heard a scientist say that, he would hand the scientist the first volume of the SUMMA THEOLOGICA and say, “Let me know when you’ve finished that, we’ll discuss it and then you can start on the next volume.”

He claimed it worked quite well to make his point.

Well I don’t teach literature, so I’m no help, but I appreciate the suggestions for my summer reading. I got Native Speaker as a gift recently, and I think I’ll move The Intuitionist to the top of my wish list.

And can you get the eggs, bacon and spam without the spam?

I should have added that I lived in Santa Rosa for eleven years, and I even once went to a party at the Schultz’s, not to mention the kids’ ice skating parties at the House that Snoopy built.

It is wonderful to read all of this. How I have missed you, Berube, and your commenters.
I would love to know how your students respond to *Paradise.* I read it three times and made maps of the town and biographies of all the characters. Wonderful book. I think I will read it again soon.
And anything by Roth is important. I think of him as the most honest man in literature.
We are so lucky to have these writers in our time.