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?