Bread Loaf Pictures

The Girls in front of the Bread Loaf Inn
Aurelie, Evelyn, Reshma, Patricia, Teresa, Sorina, Pat






Route 125, looking at some of the yellow buildings that comprise Bread Loaf: Cherry (a dorm) closest to the camera, followed by the Annex (a dorm) and the Bread Loaf Inn itself, where I live




Sorina in our dorm room, working on her independent reseach project, which would eventually comprise 120 pages discussing C.S. Lewis' sehnsucht, his longing and attempt to frame the longing through literature










David, modeling





Sorina and Susan with our extraordinarily handsome Milton and the Bible Professor - known for wearing T-shirts that say "Jewcy" (pronounced "Juicy" with a pun on his heritage)






SUPPRESSED DESIRES DANCE


Sorina as Aphrodite (the Greek goddess)




Teresa as Minerva (the Roman goddess)




Patricia as East Indian maid and Evelyn as American Indian maid




Masha in her pajamas as her "not-so-suppressed desire"




Pat as ... Pat, with a friend, and Tamar as the Birthday Girl




Sorina and David (the Egyptian)




Patricia with Aurelie as Titania, the fairy Queen from "A Midsummer Night's Dream"




Reshma and Pat shaking their booties on the dance floor

The Anxiety of Paper-Writing

I'm done! I'm done. Done, done, DONE. I am so exhausted and relieved. For the last two weeks, I've felt like reciting John Donne's "A Hymn to God the Father":

"When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more."

Ach, it was never ending. First I wrote Isobel's 15 pager for Romantic Poetry and Theories of the Sublime - not that many pages, per se, but an enormous task, considering we had only a week and a half to research and write as well as other readings/classes and a presentation to prepare. We were required to choose an attribute associated with the sublime - e.g., creation and destruction, fear, awe, solitude/isolation, unity, nature, the gothic, knowledge and ignorance, thrill - and examine that attribute in the works of three poets and two theorists, incorporating at least three secondary texts into our paper.

Well - I can write one ten-pager on a single poem and poet, so to incorporate THREE plus more was nigh impossible...needless to say I did quite a bit of cutting and slashing from the final draft. In order to discuss Anna Laeticia Barbauld's "A Summer Evening's Meditation," I needed to find out as much as I could about Unitarian beliefs in England in the end of the eighteenth century - particularly their conceptions of their relationship to God and the immortality of the soul - and fast, because I needed to be able to use that information when reading and analyzing the poem. Harder than you'd think to find a text analyzing English Unitarian belief around 1800.

I'm often asked why it takes me so long to write a paper when, after majoring in English, teaching the subject, and taking graduate courses, I should be able to pop out one of these babies without a sweat. The above should provide something of an answer: the more advanced I get in my studies, the more complex the assignments and the more research is required before I can just "sit and write." More and more I am required to engage with "secondary sources," which is what we call critical writing and theory that concerns the literature we're discussing. For example, I will find a book of essays that concern Salman Rushdie and read through them all to get a sense of the current critical reception of Rushdie and the issues in his literature that are being debated.

I finished my essay, "The Anxiety of Isolation: Can the Subjective Sublime Be Communicated?" Friday morning, literally just before class, and now turned in a second for my Indian prose class entitled "Identity as Fiction: Self-Authoring in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines" today at 2 p.m., once again editing up until class time. An essay is never really "finished" here as far as I am concerned; it's really a revised draft, because in the real world essays would go through several editing stages before being submitted; here we have only the one for a grade. Lots of anxiety riding upon that!

So I haven't gotten a lot of sleep these past two weeks, and was up until 2 am last night with most of my Indian Prose classmates having a "paper party" in the library (i.e. going a little insane trying to figure out how to articulate extemely abstract concepts). Yesterday morning my Romanticism group also read and performed six Romantic poems interpretively. For those of you who understand my fear of acting, that was quite the feat.

In the tradition of last year, I'm going to post the first two paragraphs from my Indian prose paper, should you care to read them. I've been told that my blog is too literary (pshaw!) and that no one knows what the heck I'm talking about most of the time, but hey - my little brother wanted to know what I'm doing, so here you are. And I'm proud of it!
Enjoy.

* * *

The title of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines contains levels of metaphorical meaning that reflect on concentric narratives within the text itself. The "lines" the unnamed Bengali narrator of the novel eventually refers to are, literally, borders between nations on a map and lines he draws with a compass, measuring relative distances; metaphorically, they are the lines that are meant to separate nations and therefore identities, but which ironically often cause those nations and identities to become interdependent by heightening tensions between them. The lines drawn on maps are fictions that we come to accept and even help to create, reinforcing “nationhood” through language and acts of patriotism. In this sense, lines—as in poetic lines or an actor’s lines—are also stories, the fictions we create that shape our identities. These lines are shadowy (as in shifting or indistinct) or shadowing (as in imitative) or, more frequently, some combination of shifting and imitative. In The Shadow Lines, Ghosh suggests that the only means of stabilizing identity is to consciously author oneself, recognizing identity as a social construct. He comments on the act of storytelling as part of identity formation in its meta-structure. Ghosh’s narrative technique in the novel is to present an event that then triggers many others, investing the first event with resonance and meaning. This reveals that the fictions of memory and history shape one’s identity as much as does the fiction of nationality.

All the central characters in the novel tell stories: Tridib, Ila, May, Robi, the grandmother and of course the narrator himself, a first-person limited narrator with powers of memory that occasionally make him seem omniscient. The novel is something of a Buildungsroman, in which the narrator comes to understand his own story by re-telling others’ stories and by consciously adjusting his own self-authorship in reference to theirs. He admires his erudite and mysterious older cousin Tridib, who seems to have achieved some level of wisdom, while he loves but pities his egoistic second cousin Ila, whose cosmopolitan upbringing has confused rather than expanded her sense of self. Thus he privileges Tridib’s stories and emulates them; they are more fluid, containing, but not confined to, Indian subjects and Indian influences and incorporating scientific detail along with wild feats of imagination. Ila’s stories, on the other hand, are less fulfilling to the narrator because they are rigid and keep her consciousness static.

While the narrator and Tridib consciously readjust their understanding of the world and their relationship to it, Ila less consciously divides the world into polarities of Western freedom and Indian restriction. Barely cognizant of other modes of perceiving, she is rarely the agent of her actions. Thus, though opposites in their way of storytelling, Ila and Tridib are arguably the most important influences on the narrator’s construct of his own identity.

Mint Tea and Birthdays

So today's the big day, and I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I don't think I've ever approached a birthday with less enthusiasm as this one. Normally I'm a little kid about these things--I truly believe everyone deserves to be spoiled on his or her birthday, and I do not take myself to be the exception! I love all of it: the hugs and the cards and emails and feeling part of a network united in love. August 1 is a special day for me, too, because it brings into mind Lughnasa, or the midsummer festival celebrated by the Gaelic (Irish) as the first of the harvest festivals with bonfires and dancing--honoring the fullness of summer but looking ahead to the scarcity of winter.

But despite the gloomy morning, things have brightened up considerably. My friends here surprised me with a gift and cheesecake, and the whole cafeteria sang Happy Birthday, so I got to blush and feel like an idiot, which is the way it's supposed to be!

I will spend today as I have spent the last two birthdays, working on a difficult and frustrating paper near the end of summer term classes. :) So what I really desire for my birthday this year is some inspiration! Come thesis, come into my brain, make the connections between all these poems...current topic is "tensions between the isolated self and the unified self in the Sublime in the poems of Coleridge, Keats, and Barbauld." My brain's in a big muddle right now...

So time for some mint tea! Delicious, nutritious, and refreshing. I drink a lot of it here, even though today the sun is shining and birds chirping and the weather is neither too hot nor too cold. The first month of the summer was rainy and chilly, and I spent quite a lot of it in front of a raging fire in the library. Now the sun is shining and here I am, still in the library with the tea. Sorina and I will go jogging this afternoon to break up the monotony and get the blood flowing through the whole body. We go almost every day up the across the field, looking out over the Green Mountains, past a white cottage and down a dirt lane until we hit the steep side of one of the mountains and start to run / walk up as fast as we can. It's a hard climb, but we talk so much about difficult concepts that it's hard to tell whether our legs or lungs hurt more. Then we turn, stretch, and jog the whole way down, flying past the trees and looking out into the mist.
Hope you all have a fantastic day!

Caveat

I'd like to add a few things to my last discussion, which was already way too long! First, I'm having a fantastic summer and am glad I went to the Middlebury convention - I learned much not only about the school but about myself and unconscious assumptions I make. Tears are one way I let off steam and frustration - perhaps not the most efficient method, but something I cannot really regulate. They seem to have had a cathartic effect, though, because I've been pretty peaceful ever since. Also, I did not want to open a can of worms with my discussion of racial tensions so much as make the subject less ... taboo. On the other hand, there's the risk of talking about it so much that we become extremely self-conscious (as I was) and start identifying each other by our differences and not our similarities. It's an issue I tend to avoid for those reasons - and also because 90% of the time I don't think about race in regards to myself or my friends; I'm more interested in cultural diversity. But perhaps I have that luxury, coming from a predominantly homogeneous town in Minnesota and working in a predominantly white school.

On another note, since I last wrote, an old teacher of mine came to read at Bread Loaf. Cynthia Huntington taught me a creative non-fiction course and also briefly served as my thesis adviser when I was set on a creative writing thesis. She remembered me and the first question she asked after we hugged and exclaimed over each other was, "Are you still writing?" to which I had no real answer, as the paltry few poems I've churned out in the last five years hardly seem to constitute "writing." But she reminded me of the joy I used to have in playing with words, with no intent to share or publish.

Hybridity but not Fragmentation - Bread Loaf Weeks 3 & 4

Food resources have been much more relaxed this summer than in previous years. Just ran down an hour after lunch to grab a cup of tea and a couple of plums for Sorina and myself, and was not greeted by either locked door or belligerent kitchen staff. I have been eating quite well, which I hope alleviates any fears that I might be here starving (Ben).

Interesting week ... I had a collapse into tears and frustration the weekend before last, which made me put things into perspective. It's wonderful and terrible being here at Bread Loaf -- a schizophrenic situation in which I'm both incredibly stimulated and yet unable to process anything. What frustration it is to get back an essay on which you had a total of one day to work and hear that everything there is excellent work but you should have noticed this and this and this as well, or done more with that. Which of course was true. But I'm trying to give myself credit for what I achieved; I'm amazed that I noticed what I did given the time constraint and the fact that I am a relatively slow thinker. I simply did not have the time to spend mulling over the poem.

On Thursday I gave a presentation on a theme in Midnight's Children, a novel I've come to appreciate more and more through study. Admittedly, the novel requires a lot of attention to read -- not like Harry Potter, which everyone was reading this weekend! -- and was probably not the best choice for me to start on immediately at the end of a hectic school year when I was getting over Valley Fever. So to give it a second chance, I chose this novel for my presentation requirement and did come to terms with my distaste for the main character. I realized in my study that Salman Rushdie is struggling with the question of whether a country (or an individual) can be hybrid and heterogeneous without becoming fragmented. It's a question relevant to the United States today, and inherent in all of our discussions of immigration and language. For example, can we allow Spanish as well as English language signs to go up without encouraging fragmentation within our society? And what after all is American society? The fear is based on a sense that to have a country one must have a shared set not only of ideals but of practices -- religious and cultural -- in order to have any coherence or solidarity as a country.

In the case of India, we have an incredible multiplicity of religions (Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and so on, though the latter are branches of Hinduism as I understand), many regions with different customs and languages (Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, etc.), and many social classes and castes. Moreover, we are dealing with a country that for hundreds of years was artificially held together by a foreign regime who encouraged cultural splintering as a way of keeping the natives from uniting and rising up against their colonizers. The caste system became more rigid under the British, not less, and the British tended to privilege Muslims over Hindus because they saw the former as a more civilized religion due to its monotheism. Then when the British left the country, they authorized the splintering of India into two countries, India and Pakistan (East and West Pakistan). Instead of calming the hostilities between Muslims and Hindus, this exacerbated their differences and caused rioting, since of course there were Muslims living in the area designated for Hindus and Hindus in the area designated for Muslims, and they did not necessarily wish to leave. And of course any Indians were opposed to the splintering of their country for any reason. (Please add to this if you have more to say about Partition and the British Raj...it's a complicated subject, but I'm just sticking to what's necessary for you to know about for my presentation.)

So my thought was that Rushdie was getting at the question of hybridity (as a positive thing - many perspectives contained within one body/nation) vs. fragmentation (as a negative thing - the many perspectives competing and destroying one another) through the metaphor of the physical body of his protagonist, Saleem. Saleem is born on the stroke of midnight the 15th of August 1947, when India achieved its official independence from Britain. Thus his life is linked to the country's and they mature together, suffer together, and fall apart together. In this way, we can read Saleem's personal experiences not only on the literal level but on the metaphorical level as representing the nation. His incestuous desire for his adopted sister (who becomes the symbol of a pure Pakistan) echoes India's desire to reunite with Pakistan. And so on.

Friday was the beginning of the Big Weekend -- called "mid-term break" here -- when the generous directors of Bread Loaf give us a whole day off of school to lounge and luxuriate in our freedom. Almost everyone took the opportunity to leave campus, and I did also, sort of, when I went down to Middlebury College to participate in a college counselors convention. For clarification, college counselors are not the Middlebury admissions assistants, but representatives from high schools who help their students apply for and choose which college to attend. It had been organized to introduce college counselors of particularly underrepresented groups to the college and also to get the counselors' opinions on what needed to be done to make the environment more friendly for these underrepresented students. Let me be frank: for students of color (although there was a brief nod to sexual, class and religious differences). For example, the counselors suggested that the college train its professors in racial / ethnic approaches, to alleviate the problems of a) professors misunderstanding student perspectives in their writing and in class and b) professors regarding students as THE representative of their color / culture / nation. I've seen that even a bit here, when my Indian Prose professor turns to the one student in the class of Indian descent -- who is as American as I am, and whose parents come from the diaspora -- and asks her for her opinion, based on her own experience.

It was a very hard day for me, because as much as I believed in the concept of what was being attempted, I felt that it wasn't happening within the group itself. Rather than encourage collaboration and hybridity, the college counselors there seemed to revel in their fragmentation and separation from the mainstream. To give two examples, none of the counselors of color wanted to walk with the white-looking tour guide and opted for the black tour guide, although it turned out that the white tour guide was actually an international student and half Argentinian. Tables at lunch and dinner were pretty evenly divided down color lines; one woman I sat next to got up after I sat down and moved to another table.

I feel strange writing this on the blog, but I need to get it out there: I have never felt so white in my life, even when I lived in countries where I was the ethnic minority. My comments were taken the wrong way - it was as though I were expected to behave in a certain way, and everything I said would just conform to expectations, regardless of intention. I still haven't fully processed the experience. I understand, on a cognitive level, that this situation was deliberately designed to get people to share their experiences, and that color for them represented culture as well. But I was hurt all the same. It was a relief to get back to the Bread Loaf campus and just feel like me, not a representative of my race and class!

Pictures from June 2007

The last few weeks in pictures; captions are below each photo, which can be enlarged by clicking on the photo itself:



The hay truck with Grace, Justice, and puppy Watch. What a lovely, pastoral scene! Look closely ...




The field (mountainside) after haying, with the loaded truck headed down to the barn




Grace and Justice in typical pose




At Dartmouth 2002 reunion with Andrea, Rabia, and Karin. More pictures from Reunion on the Reunion link to the left, which is finally written up!




Ben just before we began the climb up Mount Moosilauke (the tiny blue tiptop in the distance)





The view from the top of Mount Moosilauke: 4,802 feet from sea level.




A better view with the mysterious mountain man.




Ashton, Eleni's son, sliding out of the chair to play with the camera-wielding stranger. Ashton is quite the handful and kept us on our toes! At Eleni's apartment in Yonkers, north of the Bronx, New York.




Eleni and Teresa, two refugees in the Weil Gotshal & Manges corporate law survival society. Ashton is asserting his authority over some children in the sprinkler behind us.




NYC midtown buildings, sideways because I couldn't figure out how to flip.






Wall O' Kandinsky in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York City





Walking out of the interactive sculpture retrospective of Richard Serra, MOMA




Looking up through the Richard Serra sculpture, MOMA, NYC




On the 59th street and 5th Avenue south corner of Central Park, NYC, overlooking the pond




Acovio in front of the Museum of Art, Boston




In front of a pool sculpture in an area of downtown Boston, the Christian Digest (magazine) office behind me





Out of sequence, but a slightly out of focus picture of me with several of my good friends who live in Tucson, outside of Yoshimatsu, the day before I left Arizona for the east coast.

They Say / I Say - Bread Loaf Week 2

Whine. Whine whine whine. Big sigh ... it has been a tough week. To put it mildly. Turned in my first 5 page paper this morning for Romanticism (Yay) and had to show up both for that class and for Indian prose class not having read the novel and sit through three hours of discussion feeling like an idiot.

It's very hard for me not to participate. This might come as a shock, but I tend to dominate class discussion! :) In fact, during the break, the teacher came up to me to ask why I hadn't spoken yet in class and I came up with a lame excuse, then proceeded to sit through the second half of class. Turns out that the three novels I read in advance won't be discussed until the end of the term, and so I've been reading like a maniac since I've gotten here and barely made a dent. She also loves to toss giant packets on our laps on top of the already enormous amounts of reading for the next class. The first day of class she dropped four autobiographies in our laps and I managed to read only one by the next class. I can't even imagine how - with two other classes of work and another paper to write - I can possibly get it done. I suppose the lesson here is in prioritizing what is of interest and not trying to read everything; either that or never sleeping.

During the week we also have all school lectures in the evenings, Professors reading from their books or poetry or guest lecturers (usually famous scholars or authors). This Monday the guest lecturer was Professor Gerald Graff, who is soon to be president of the Modern Language Association (MLA). As anyone who has had to write an English paper knows, this is the organization that dictates how to cite your sources in bibliographies, etc. Author's name first, etc. They also handle issues of changing source materials in a technology boom.

Prof. Graff's lecture was titled "The Unbearable Pointlessness of the Literature Essay Assignment." And he wasn't being ironic. He has just published a book called They Say / I Say, which essentially discusses how literature students are often trained to write in a vacuum when they should be engaging in an on-going discussion with critics. In other words, he wants us as English teachers to include more critical texts in our classrooms regarding the literature we're reading and get students to debate with those critics. The example he gave us was the difference between a thesis that states, "The Sopranos (the TV shoW) contains complex Italian-American characters" and one that disputes an argument, "Some say that The Sopranos stereotypes Italian Americans. Actually, The Sopranos has very complex characters."

This garnered a lot of discussion amongst the professors, who felt their close-reading, textual assignments were being denigrated. However, I agree that in order to learn to write good criticism, students should be exposed to more argumentative literature at younger ages. The problem is finding genuine arguments (rather than fake, "straw man" arguments, of which I think the Sopranos above is one -- in which you set up a pretend opposing view just to give you something to argue against), and moreover, genuine arguments that are written clearly and simply enough for people untrained in literary discourse to understand. Most critical writing is extremely advanced and written for other literary scholars, not high school students.

The other problem with this model is that it does not recognize that the real argument of the Sopranos issue above is not whether the Sopranos has complex characters or not, but why complex characters make a show worth watching. Who cares whether they're complex or not unless you have a point to make about the complexity?

I'd like to hear what others think about this. Do you wish your teachers had brought in more discussion about whether Huckleberry Finn should be banned from classrooms because of its vulgar language? Or critical debates about the use of language or ideas in your texts? Is the exercise of having students make an "argument" (really a defendable suggestion) about why a poet for example would choose to use personification and certain symbols in his poem completely pointless unless connected to an already on-going discussion about the poet?

Bread Loaf - Week 1 Reflections

At the commencement of Bread Loaf School of English Summer 2007, the associate director gave a rather disconcerting speech surrounding the question, "Why do I go to Bread Loaf?" She pointed out that we are often hesitant to tell outsiders that we go to a place named after a common food item or to explain that we go there to study English literature (since, as English literature teachers, aren't we supposed to know it already?). She suggested that we respond cryptically, "I go because of the giraffe." Due to its obscure and arrogant literary reference, this would stave off further questions on the subject and make us seem appropriately random and haughty. She also suggested that she hoped we would not respond by saying, "I go because I want a master's degree."

But I *do* want a master's degree! Not only as a symbol of the study I've completed and the grades I've achieved, but as a ticket to places I want to go in the future. I don't see anything wrong with that, and it makes me tired that the academic community continues to insist on intellectual separatism (for what else does such a cryptic response induce?) and an unrealistic vision of study for study's sake. Of course I'm here because I love studying - but I would probably not be here, at least right now, if there were not the pragmatic aspect of it as well.

Anyway, I do usually say I'm going to study at Middlebury College, since Bread Loaf does lack some academic ooompf (though the Simpsons parodied it wonderfully in an episode when they go to study at "WordLoaf," and once you make the Simpsons...). Bread Loaf is the name of the mountain we can see as we walk to and from class, the shape reflecting the title, and it's a respectable institution that's been around for 88 years, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Paul Muldoon, and other such notable writers and scholars spending their summers teaching in the mountains of Vermont. So there! :)

This year I'm rooming with my friend Sorina from Pennsylvania, next door to the girls from France, Aurelie and Patricia, and below the Kenyans -- all of them friends I made while studying in Oxford last summer. Though the academics on this campus are more rigorous than they were at Oxford, I miss Oxford as OXFORD! We are all a bit nostalgic, and take every opportunity to get in a car and drive to "downtown Middlebury," which is a contradiction in terms but definitely less isolated than this mountaintop retreat.

Classes have begun, and my first quandary was deciding whether to audit a third class and whether to drop out of Indian Prose to take a Theory and Criticism course - since the latter is a gap or hole in my understanding of literary criticism. By theory, I mean the categories under which critics organize themselves: Marxism, Feminism, Freudian - Psychoanalytical, New Historicism, Deconstructionism, Structuralism, and many more. No, I'm not certain what these all mean, but Indian Prose won out after all, even though the Professor dropped tons more reading in our laps on the first day!

BOSTON 2007

What a clean, quiet, quaint little city in comparison to New York! So much smaller; trees down the streets; streets emptying out and quiet at night (except in a few choice areas). The town seems more like a collection of small towns than one big city, though there are the requisite tall buildings in the downtown area. But you'd hardly know it if you enter Boston Commons and walk down to the river, past stately brownstones and down nicely manicured paths.

Though I haven't seen Dara for two years - since leaving New York - it hardly seemed that long, and I got to spend some quality time with her cute doggy Tails, too. She passed her first year qualifying exams so she can get funding for the next year in her Economics doctoral program at BU. The first night there, I played Taboo into the wee hours of the morning with Dara, Louis, Jess, and Vivian. Possibly my favorite group game -- what a way to get to know the intricate workings of someone's mind when he or she is trying to get you to say "Stuart Little."

Then on Saturday Acovio took me out and about. I know this city hardly at all outside of Boston Commons, whereas I'm completely at home in New York. We walked through a blooming rose garden over to the Museum of Fine Arts to view the Edward Hopper exhibition, and I feel like I saw pretty much everything Hopper ever painted, water-colored, etched and sketched. It was very thorough. (Susannah, eat your heart out!) I spotted from across the room a painting that hangs in "Susannah's Museum" -- the U of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson -- that Susannah had explicated for my creative writing students just the month before. Felt a little deja vu -- like paintings are following me around the country. Also saw paintings I've seen in the MET and in the London Tate Museum and the Louvre. Makes the world seem smaller.

Acovio, Dara, Jess - miss you guys already!

Dara and I also saw the recent Edith Piaf biographical film, La Vie En Rose. I knew relatively little about the '40s French cabaret singer, so the movie was enlightening for me. I loved it for its acting and singing alone, through Dara wasn't a fan -- she objected to the editing and the cliched biographical technique of "starting at the end of the person's life and flashing back and forth to give perspective." It's true, it did get heavy-handed, but it's an affecting movie and I hope the actress wins the Oscar, even if she is a Frenchy. :)

The Journey to Boston

This is getting posted a little late (again) ... am now at Middlebury, after a weekend jaunt to Boston to visit Dara and Acovio.

When I travel, I indulge in all the food vices I eschew the rest of the year: white bread, doughnuts, pop tarts, pizza, ice cream shakes. Normally the aberration in my diet, these become my staples, mostly because there is no other choice. McDonald's. Dunkin' Donuts, and Sbarros are the names I associate with bus station fare. But partly there is the abandonment of the tourist: just this once, just today.

Today I am eating a cinnamon sugar pop tart aboard a Greyhound bus traveling from Port Authority in Manhattan to South Station in Boston. I am freezing in the gray rain, just after adjusting to the heat in NYC; I am reading The Shadow Lines and, as this four hour ride just became a five hour ride due to traffic, have almost finished, happily, so that I can cross off another novel from my lengthy list. This is the third novel I've read since school ended, after Midnight's Children and The Inheritance of Loss. Still, I feel under-prepared for Bread Loaf, having hoped to finish all of my reading ahead of time, partly to be ahead of the game and partly to spend my time reading critics. I want to put my finger on the pulse of criticism today, and see what I make of it. Am I ready to become such a critic myself?

NYC 2: The MET and the Opera

The MET. Always overwhelming, though today it struck me as particularly dark, the paintings bleeding into one another. I was happy to escape the crucified christs of the medieval rooms and move into the modern art section to be enlivened by light and color. Today I spent time contemplating Renoirs, Hoppers, and Matisses in the Clark Collection. After the museum closed, I spent some time sitting on the steps and watching the street show below, probably my fourth street show in two days: three African Americans doing a street dance and some jumping hijinx as well as a comedy routine: "We're professionals. That's why we work on the streets."

This trip I've taken much more time to stop and observe, to talk to strangers. The first day, I started in Battery Park and moved up to 14th street - Union Square, then walked over to Washington Square Park in west Greenwich Village. There I was called over by a bongo player, Terry, who showed me how to keep rhythm on the bongo while his friend Kevin played me a song on his guitar: Allman Brothers. We talked for some time. I met a girl on the corner of Columbus Circle, near where I used to live, and we discussed New York in the summer, when it is somehow more relaxed though overrun by tourists.

In the evening I returned to Ben's apartment in Bed-Sty, Brooklyn. The neighborhood is not great - across the street is a giant laundry factory - but it is surprisingly quiet. The neighbors behind his building have a giant garden, and the apartments on his street have been lovingly renovated. The wood flooring is new, the kitchenware new, and each of the five members of the two-floor apartment have their own rooms. I was not expecting anything nearly so spacious! One roommate works in television, helping to arrange sets (as I understand), and the apartment held the abandoned leftovers from various commercials and TV shows: new mattresses, hanging plants, a dressmaker's doll, a giant wooden daisy, numerous melonballers and paring knives.

Tuesday night I attended the opera in Prospect Park with Ben and Vik (guys, please feel free to add your thoughts on the show). I missed the English translations from the opera house, which led to guessing games as to which act we were in, but the evening was gorgeous and the voices stunning. Vik asked me why I liked the opera when I was not so keen on musicals - they both have cheesy and improbably story lines - and I think it is because the voices are incredible - they send shivers down my spine. That the human body can produce such sounds!

NYC Summer 2007

I have been continuing a great love affair with this city. Every corner I turn, something falls into place -- a little haven of trees, chairs, and falling water, surrounded by skyscrapers, so I can eat my hasty lunch in relative peace. The entrance of the MOMA blinking at me in welcome as I cross the street, wondering if I am going in the right direction. Babies running through a fountain in Battery Park on the south tip of Manhattan, escaping their nannies, sticking their heads into the water and screaming at the unexpected force of the stream.

Lights change as soon as I reach a corner, so I can walk quickly from block to block, admiring the window displays and the rapidly changing crowds -- office workers on their lunch breaks, tourists, street hawkers. I stop at Lincoln Center to check out the operas and ballets playing this week (perhaps my Middlebury student ID will come in handy) and discover that the MET Opera is conducting their free "Opera in the Park" series; Faust will be playing at Prospect Park in Brooklyn on Tuesday night. Andrea arranges for Ben and I to attend a dramatic performace for free. I love being a tourist in New York!

I realize the city is not revolving around me, but it is nice to luxuriate in such a thought -- as when I stepped into the Klimt-Kandinsky-Chagall-Kirchner room at the Museum of Modern Art and felt the stars align. In Tucson, I had selected my favorite artists to place together in my classroom, and here again they were, arranged by the best curators in the world: Gustav, Wassily, and Marc, winking at me with love.

It struck me as I wandered how much of a modern art buff I am, as other favorites appeared: Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse. I love the old school modern art, not the new Minimalism and Post-Structuralism, that allows artists to paint canvasses black or leave them untouched and call it a revolution.

The new MOMA building has open, white walls ending in floor to ceiling windows; these open out onto the city to let in reams of white light, the space of the place as much art as the works themselves.

Dartmouth 2002 Five-Year Reunion

Celebrity Sighting Report: The first day, Friday, I arrived extremely early - the Wilsons dropped me off in front of the dorm, Topliff, and so I spent the morning wandering casually around. Waiting in line at the Hopkins Center for a blitz computer, a current student turned to me and asked when Clinton was arriving. That's how I discovered that Hillary Clinton was speaking at Dartmouth that afternoon, and how I managed to be in the garden outside the Hop when she addressed us on the topic of stem cell research, which she supports and hopes to get federal funding for. Interesting. Her main point was that she believed that science, reason and logic were being abandoned in the government and she is the one to bring it back.

Reunion was a pleasant surprise. I guess I went just hoping to hang out on the green again and see a few people I'd lost touch of; I hadn't expected there to be as many people as there were (nearly half of our graduating class, i.e. 500 grads plus various significant others) and so many of them old friends. It was overwhelming - moving from moments of intense social interaction at meals that went something like this: meet one friend, try to encompass five years of experience in a five minute conversation, then see another over his/her shoulder, run off to greet and hug that friend, repeat action until stumble off into corner to reflect.

I felt as though four years of self-searching were collapsed in this two-day retreat, since each group of friends -- distinctly cohesive -- represented a different year or different term in my college career, a different stage in my life or in my self-identification. At reunion, I was a satellite to these groups, floating between them and feeling both part of and apart from each. I used to be somewhat proud of not belonging to any one "group," but there's something to be said for feeling fully part of a group, which is what I have here at Bread Loaf and is what keeps me stable in the midst of this chaotic summer.

I loved seeing everyone again and luckily got to spend more time with a few friends in New York and Boston after the condensed weekend. Pictures below!




Teresa and Acovio the first morning




With Acovio and Vikram at the final dinner




With Sabeen, Aly and his wife ... Zaileen?




With Vik, Barbara and her husband Leon, the latter two visiting from the Netherlands. Barbara's new last name (from de Kruijf) is de Barbarason, so yes, that makes her Barbara de Barbarason. It was meant to be!




Relaxing on the Green in front of Sanborn Library on a steamy afternoon: Me, Sabeen, Robert, Dara and Jen

Haying

I helped the Wilsons gather two truckloads of hay today from their own hayfields--fields being a relative term here, as they are perched on the side of a mountain--and unload them into their barn. Piddling amount of hay compared to their normal work day and overall season, only about one hundred forty-pound bales. I can't say I wish I was around to chuck more into the barn, though I am glad to give the Wilsons an extra hand; it is extremely hard work. I haven't figured out the best way to stack the bales so they don't tumble off the truck, and I don't have the back and arm strength to toss them ten feet over my head, so I did a pushy-shove thing that resulted in a spray of hay in my face. I got hay everywhere and found it to be a rather gritty and painful exfoliant, and not too tasty (don't tell the sheep).

There is always an enormous amount of work to be done on the farm, including weeding the massive organic gardens, feeding the sheep, and basic household duties; I always feel I'm quite the lazy one when I arrive. The Wilsons were a second family to me when I attended Dartmouth, and since then I've spent several summers helping hay (though the mystique has worn off!) and knitting and playing with their children Aurora, Dave, Grace and Justice. They are often kind enough to drive me up to Middlebury, a college that's impossible to get to without an automobile, as no trains or bus services connect to it. Argh.

For those not in the know, I will be spending my third of five summers at Middlebury College in the wilds of upstate Vermont this summer, working on my master's degree in English literature. Technically, of course, I am taking classes through the Bread Loaf School of English (so named because a nearby mountain top is shaped like a perfect rectangular loaf). Bread Loaf is a spin-off campus that is located on the top of a mountain several miles from the actual town of Middlebury. Not being one to plan all the details, I did not discover until my arrival that not only is it impossible to reach this little eden without a car, but also there are absolutely no stores or kiosks there at which one can purchase such necessities as toothpaste, granola bars, or sheets for one's bed. No tvs, no cell phones, and no snacks between meals seems to be the rule, and although I can abide by the first two, I'm definitely not sticking to the third! (I never go five hours without at least a snack - I mean, I've got to keep that metabolism up!)

I am much better prepared this year and looking forward to taking my courses on British Romanticism (Keats, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, plus some lesser-known, non-canonised poets) and Varieties of Modern Indian Prose. Am happy to report that I finished Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which got interesting around page 250 and won me over by the end. It could alternatively be titled "A Brief, Self-indulgent History of India Since Partition" in 1947. Worth it once I got used to the highly stylized, repetitive, self-pitying narrative voice.

In other news, my AP syllabus was approved by the College Board and I am now officially allowed to teach my AP course in the fall! Very good news.

The Liberal Arts

I am tired of hearing people denigrate the liberal arts - including my chosen field, English Literature - without knowing anything about it. I am tired of hearing - as I did just yesterday - that all liberal arts professors could be dumped in the ocean and "nothing would change" in our world; in fact, our world may even be a better place because those artsy-fartsy people with such high esteem for themselves and yes, with liberal politics as well as liberal arts, would be gone, and we would be free to live in a word where no opinion need be challenged.

Below I am listing my main three points on the issue of liberal arts as a field of study (avoiding the political issue for the moment, though I don't suppose it can entirely be separated), and I would like to hear more comments about this.

1) I submit that the ultimate goal of teaching is to encourage critical thinking, and that to reach a higher level of thinking in our chosen subjects, we need to provide the basic tools of our subject. Those would be the seemingly useless facts and figures. To be able to have any sort of idea what a scientist does in a lab, we need to work with the formulas, and to be able to use the formulas, we need to understand the basics. This can be applied to the humanities as well - it bothers me that the skills necessary for science and math are seen as separate from English. English, like those subjects, is a discipline. You need certain skills and facts to be comfortable working in this discipline. Scientists look for patterns in nature; the literati look for patterns in novels and poetry.

And while we're at it,

2) People who claim that they will never "use" the information they learn in high school - like Calculus equations and the language of literary analysis - cannot predict the future. I have plenty of friends who thought they'd never need high school or college chemistry but later discovered a desire to practice medicine. I have friends who thought they hated a subject until they took it with a teacher who inspired them. Who knows when (or if) that knowledge will be needed - and if not the knowledge itself, the way of thinking and imagining that the acquisition of that knowledge required you to learn. In Calculus, I had to learn to work with a line that never ended; multidimensional planes; imaginary numbers. In Literature I had to break down complex sentences, formulate arguments based only on a text in front of me and with a time constraint, find evidence for my arguments, recognize ways an author was trying to manipulate my emotions or my ideas. Are these not "useful" skills?

And finally,

3) Do the people who constantly look for a "purpose" to everything dislike sunsets? In other words, do I have to have a reason for admiring a rainbow, or a poem, or a perfectly balanced equation? My friend Dru, a theoretical (as opposed to experimental) physicist, is often asked what his work is "for," or what practical purpose the equations he works on can be put to. He can speculate, but the honest answer is that he does not know. But he is still discovering - patterns, puzzle pieces. And perhaps one day these patterns will have a purpose, but for now, they are just beautiful.

Please add your own comments on this subject!

Somewhere in Vermont

East Topsham, Corinth, Barre.

Baskets and baskets of yarn. Sharp manure smell. Crunch of stick, leaf, and stone beneath my boots.

May I always forget the superlative beauty of northern Vermont, always be surprised again by its lushness.

This morning we drove down dirt roads past rippling creeks and spied a fawn, less than a week old, by the side of the road ahead. Instead of running, the little deer hunkered down right next to the road, so close that I could have opened my door and touched its white spots. It stayed very, very still, and finally we moved along, afraid to shoo it away lest its mother smell our human smell, but hoping it would run and hide from the road.

This evening, after a pot luck, we stopped the car to stare at the sunset falling behind the mountains, and to disperse with our breath the mist that had settled over the fields. Ahead, on the mountain side, sat a small farmhouse and a barn; in the yard two black horses chewed thoughtfully, then frolicked along a fence. Below them, the mist shielded the ground, so it looked like they danced on clouds.

I flew into Burlington on midnight following Friday the 8^th of June after the usual airport trouble. I was originally scheduled to fly out on Thursday, but storms—hail and hard winds—in Chicago delayed the flight until I missed my connection, so I spent another night at the Langs’ (who drove me back and forth to their home; thank you, Leon!) and flew out the next day—once again delayed in Chicago. The one positive note is that all that time allowed me to plow through the remaining 250 pages of Midnight’s Children, which got interesting at that halfway point (after I became used to the author’s artificial, discursive style).

It is hot, cold, warm, then cold here again. I confess . . . I miss sunny skies. Yesterday, Justice (Aurora's 9 year old brother) asked when summer would come; he's homeschooled and doesn't mark the date by the last day of school. We had just gone swimming in the lake (dipped into the cold water and out) and gotten ice cream at the Pink Shack homemade ice cream stand. Swimming and ice cream are two other ways to mark the turn of the season if you can't tell by the weather.

I’m connected with the internet again after a welcome week’s hiatus, down at Dartmouth to meet with Professor Alexandra Halasz regarding graduate school. I respect her perhaps more than any other professor in the English department, and I can’t wait to see her again. In the meantime, I’m sitting in Collis’ dining area, where I had dreams of chocolate chip scones and fruit smoothies. But they’re closed for the summer interim, and the weather is so chilly that a cup of tea sounds better at the moment.

Midnight's Children's Soporific Powers

School ended (finally) on June 1st. For such a busy, stressful year, school always peters out on a long, anti-climactic note. Regular instruction ends the last week of April, when all non-AP classes have finals; we head into AP review weeks, which allowed me plenty of time to quiz and drill and chill with the sophomore AP Lit kids; then the students take their APs and we move into "Projects," which this year was two weeks long.

I don't know the reason for Projects week(s) at the end of school, and though I've been told that it's a time to reward the students for having studied hard all year with fun, hands-on activities, I suspect it has something to do with state-mandated number of school days. Since our calendar revolves around the AP schedule, we try to get all instruction done before that time, and the remaining days are left for play.

Misha's projects are clever and relaxing (once she's figured out the logistics, which take her hours upon hours in the last weeks of school) arts and crafts. Ali does something with either musicals or electronics. And I have done the AmeriCorps Volunteer Project for two years now.

For AmeriCorps, I partner up with the Volunteer Center of Arizona and hoodwinkle some poor young AmeriCorps volunteer into contacting all the agencies and organizing the dates. My job is to coordinate drivers ... which is rather agonizing and impossible. This year I was responsible for shuttling 36 students around Tucson for 8 days, including up a mountain and back, and making sure they did not throw cans at each other at the Food Bank, poke out an eye while clearing brush on the mountain, or sand-off a finger with the electric sander at the cat shelter.

The two most exciting events of those weeks were the day when little Anthony--a 6th grader--pulled out a tooth while at the cat shelter and asked permission (!) to go use the bathroom to clean the blood off and out of his mouth. He returned to tell me that there was a giant cat in the sink and he couldn't get to the water. The second event was when Carolyn -- who had generously loaned me her SUV that seats 8 - called on Saturday to ask me who had vomited in her car. Apparently somebody had gotten sick on the way up or down Mount Lemmon and neglected to mention it.

I love that AmeriCorps gets the kids out and volunteering -- I think it is one of the most important things for me to introduce to the kids. At the same time, they are still kids and need a fair amount of supervision.

So school's over and I'm still in recovery mode, so tired I take naps every day and can barely see through the fog in my head. Maybe it's not school stress recovery; maybe it's the Valley Fever (a fungus whose spores I apparently inhaled) or maybe it's that I am also doggedly plodding through the 500-plus pages of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which has sent me to sleep so many times that Misha's lost count. I would have given up on this wandering monsterous book a long time ago if I hadn't had to finish it for my summer course, Varieties of Modern Indian Prose.

Quotes that make you go "aw"

Ali (the physics teacher and my friend) tells a story that I love for a multitude of reasons. J. one day told her that he'd seen another student wearing a button that said "Jesus is the reason for the season." Ali beams with pride when she relates that J. told them that actually it was "the tilt of the earth."

***

This winter, a few students ran up to me excitedly. "Oh my gosh, Ms. Harings! Last week we didn't even know who Tennyson was, then we read 'The Lady of Shalott' and 'Ulysses,' and Tennyson was quoted on Boston Legal last night! He really is famous!"

***

Some yearbook messages (If you'll indulge - these are too wonderful not to share):

"Ms. Harings, your class was always fun because I could relate everything to Frankenstein. Thanks for preparing me for the AP. love, A. p.s. I will miss you."

"Ms. H - Well, I may not be the best orator ... or writer ... or reader ... or have any sort of comprehensive ability whatsoever, but I still think you're one of the hardest working teachers I've ever known. I'll miss you very much and ... thanks for listening." - B.

"I really loved being in both your classes. I was having a hard time for a while and then you would say something and cheer it up. I will really miss having you next year." - M.

"I really enjoyed your class. I think this is the first time I've actually enjoyed literature! love, S."

"Although it may have not seemed that I enjoyed your class, I really did. Hope to see you next year for another wonderful (crazy) yearbook season" - M.

"You have been one of the best English teachers I've ever had. Every class period was an enjoyable and eye-opening experience. I look forward to the years ahead. I will always use the valuable lessons you have taught me." - K.

"I'm looking forward to seeing how hard AP lit is going to be." - X.

"I'm really going to miss having you next year. I really like you more than the other teachers. And I really didn't like A Passage to India...Have a fantabulistic summer! - C. (your #1 large word abuser)"

Yes, they said it

The First Installment of

Yes, they said it: Student and Teacher Comments IN SCHOOL

“If that computer catches fire, can we sacrifice someone to it?” – X

“I’m all over it like spandex.” – Dr. Z

After reading the line, “Your thighs are like apple trees” from William Carlos Williams' mock ode, C. responds (in all sincerity), “So what, he’s telling her that her thighs are hard and round and easy to fall out of?”

Upon reading in Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath” of the Pardoner’s anger at submissive husbands: “I wouldn’t have any problem submitting to a woman.” – D. to his entire 9^th grade class.

“When does he find Kurtz?” – C., while reading A Passage to India

Memories from my 2nd year

I am often reminded that there's only so much I can do as a teacher.

Here are two stories from last week - neither happened to me (but I'm sure I can come up with a few).

Misha, the 8th grade higher algebra teacher, was checking Emilio's homework. Emilio had written 3 + √1 (square root of 1). She asked him to simplify his answer. He responded, "But I don't have my calculator." She said, "Okay, I'm going to turn around, and when I turn back, we'll have pretended you didn't just say that."

--

The 8th grade English teacher, James, was reading Walt Whitman's "O Captain, My Captain" with one of his classes. He reminded them of metaphorical imagery and discussed with them the extended metaphor of captain and ship as Abraham Lincoln and the Union/United States. He asked the class why Whitman would choose this particular metaphor -- captain of a ship -- to commemorate Lincoln.

After thinking about it, Sam raised his hand and said, "Well...the Civil War did happen overseas. Maybe he just wanted to commemorate sea battles."

* * *

One of the only "moments" that comes to mind right now is from my 10th grade class. I laughed in those classes with the students almost every day, feeling a rapport that I'm not sure I'll ever match. One of my successes, I think, is the fact that the students felt least comfortable with poetry essays at the beginning of the year and more comfortable with poetry than prose at the end. Robert - a student who places English near the bottom of his least-liked classes - told me, "I think I can understand poetry now." Stephen said that reading John Donne was one of his "formative experiences" (and yes, those were his words - that's Stephen). Molly and Blake, the Physics maniacs, even joined Creative Writing and became two of my best writers.


Blake in one of his many soulful moments, with Molly and Cate.


This "moment" occurred when reading I think a Yeats poem, and discussing the literary devices he'd used. When I agreed that a certain set of images was metaphorical, Duncan disagreed, and we proceeded to argue our various sides (wish I could remember what the poem was!). Anyway, suffice it to say that I won, using the definition of metaphor and another example, to which Duncan, conceding, replied, "I hate you, Ms. Harings."

Of course, later that week he invited me to Roller Derby, and is consistently one of the students who just "hangs out" in my classroom after school, so I don't think that was said with too much heat. He's also the student who will raise his hand in class and say, "This reminds me of a Violent Femmes lyric" or "of a dream I had on Saturday night." Which -- shh - I find just as amusing as the students.

* * *

It's sad how quickly my memories of events from this year are fading. I wish I'd kept up with this blog throughout the year - although for those who spoke to me this year, I was happy to get sleep and have more of a social life (discovered all kinds of restaurants and curiosity shops just blocks away!) - but I'm going to try again.

This year was oh, a zillion times better than last. I did not miss teaching middle school, though it was fun to catch up with the eighth graders (my former seventh graders) once a week when I substituted for the overscheduled 8th grade English teacher. They suddenly all loved me because I no longer gave them homework assignments and I reminded them of their halcyon days of yore (last year), when of course everything was better/easier.

I taught 9th grade Honors World Literature, a separate 9th grade Writing and Critical Analysis course, 10th grade AP British Literature, and Creative Writing. Next year I'll also teach a senior seminar on Post-Colonial literature, film, and art. I think my 10th graders rocked the AP exam (with a few notable exceptions), but the results are TBD.


Julia Toews, the 11th grade teacher, and I re-creating the "stressed out look" popular at BASIS Tucson Upper School.


For two years in a row, BASIS Tucson has made Newsweek's top ten high schools in the nation list (#3 last year, #6 this year) based on the number of AP exams our students take. This is not surprising, since all students at BASIS - without exception - are required to sit 6 AP exams, and to take at least 8 AP courses. The idea is that all students, regardless of ability, will benefit from taking college-level courses even if they receive low scores on the exams. They will be better prepared for college and college testing practices, and they will have the study skills they need to survive in college. Since our school has only graduated four classes of seniors, though, we're still not recognized by most elite colleges and universities as a distinguished college prep school. This year our two top students broke some of the barriers and will be entering Williams College in Mass. and Emory University in Georgia. I imagine -- and hope -- that the trend continues, since the students in our school are light years more prepared for college than I was. It took me a year of guiding from various professors before I learned how to study and how to write a proper college-level paper at Dartmouth. I don't blame my teachers, who had too many students to give me the individual attention I needed. I blame the fact that schools seem to be getting larger and larger. Kids aren't cars, and teachers aren't robots. We need the time and ability to treat students like the individuals they are.

Not sure where I'm going with this. But here's a picture of me with the Yearbook committee.