In which the Counseling Center is no real match for John Webster

So our Counseling Center is offering a new service, called "Don't Cancel Class!" Basically, one of the counseling staff is offering to go around to classes on days when the professor is absent and conduct a workshop for the class.

Which would be nice, since I do have to miss a class this semester -- except the class in question is, um, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. And the list of available workshops ("Stress Management," "Body Image and Eating Disorders," "Finding Your Place at [Our University]," and so forth) seems entirely too mundane.

Forthwith, a list of workshops I think the Counseling Center should totally consider offering:

-- Revenge Management
-- Choleric, Melancholic, Sanguine, or Phlegmatic?: What Your Humours Say About You
-- What to Do if the Devil Speaks to You
-- How to Fake a Mental Illness Convincingly
-- So You Killed Your Twin Sister and Now You Think You're a Werewolf
-- Coping with Grief by Carrying Around Your Dead Girlfriend's Skull
-- How to Turn Your Gender Identity Crisis Into a Successful Stage Career

"Chees now": some thoughts on the Wife of Bath's Tale

Wife of Bath's Tale in Brit Lit I today, which seemed very apposite. I didn't bring up current events -- I almost never do in class -- and neither did the students, but I've been thinking about the tale all day.

When I first encountered the Wife of Bath's Tale, at the age of twenty, I fell in love with it at once; it seemed like an awesome badass fable of female power. I've noticed a shift in the last few years, with this newer, woker, generation of students. They want more from it. They want the rapist to be punished more harshly, and his victim not to simply disappear. One of them, last year, wondered whether Chaucer had ever actually met a woman. I can't really fault them for wanting these things, but I still love the tale as it is.

The Canterbury Tales -- along with most of Shakespeare's plays and Joyce's "The Dead" -- is one of those rare works I can teach year after year and still notice something new every time. This time, what I noticed most was the verb chese: choose, or chose -- Middle English spelling makes no very consistent distinction between the present and the past. It's all over this tale; the Wife of Bath uses it at least nine times in 400 or so lines. So many choices. Most of them are from a limited palette of options: either / or, and sometimes neither choice is very good. Our rapist-protagonist -- who is very young, very privileged, and very entitled -- suddenly discovers, when his crimes land him at the mercy of a jury of women, that "he may not doon al as him liketh." He has to choose whether to be executed then and there, or go on a twelve-month quest to find the answer to a riddle that may or may not have one. Conversely, some of the choices in this tale are radically free: Jesus, who could do anything, "In wilful poverte chees to live his life," and we're given to understand that Jesus wouldn't choose anything shameful. (There's a lot about social class in this tale, and a lot of play with words that were originally class descriptors but come to have moral connotations: gentilesse, vilainye, cherl. Our protagonist's elderly and undesired wife tells him that "men may wel often finde / A lordes sone do shame and vilainye," which has got to sting, and goes on to argue that such a man has no claim to gentility.)

And, in the end, the word becomes a present-tense imperative: chees now. The "now" matters a lot, I think: we are always making fresh choices, even when we're also constrained by our previous choices. And in the end, whatever he may have done in the past our protagonist chooses rightly (a third option, not one of the "thinges twaye" that he was originally presented with): Cheseth youreself.

It occurs to me that all three of the Norton Anthology standards that I teach regularly -- the Miller's Tale, Wife of Bath's Tale, and Pardoner's Tale -- are about justice on some level, and this is the only one that offers a vision of justice that is redemptive and not retributive, where people can be educated into choosing better. I think that may be why I like it so much.

I feel like we are being governed, at this particular moment, by people who are making choices again and again, and still and still choosing worse. I like to hope that there is still time to choose better. Even now.

On the performativity of "What have you been reading lately?"

So, for some reason they seem to have made me a full professor since the last time I posted here, and the new president of Misnomer U. hosted a dinner for everyone who had just been hired, tenured, or promoted, which was nice of her. There was one bit where we were supposed to go around the room and introduce ourselves, and also say what we had been reading lately. Forthwith, some observations:

-- If you are a humanities professor, you say something that is clearly pleasure-reading, but at least vaguely cerebral. Witty mysteries about British academics are good, or the sort of science fiction that doesn't have aliens on the cover.

-- If you are a scientist or social scientist, you name a book related to your field of study.

-- If you are nursing faculty, you disclaim having any free time at all for reading, and pivot to talking about your children or grandchildren.

-- If you are in business, you also disclaim any time for leisure reading, but you make a joke about spreadsheets instead of talking about grandchildren.

-- If you are a university administrator, you say that you are reading the university Common Reading book, or something by one of the writers who will be visiting for the Writers' Symposium in October. Either way, it is very interesting and you are enjoying it very much.

-- If you work in tech support, you are allowed to read the kind of books with aliens on the cover.

Clueless Class

So, I have just finished calculating midterm grades (they are due at 9 a.m. on the Friday before spring break for some reason), and the results confirm my impression that one of my two comp classes is the Kingdom of the Clueless. Thirteen of them, out of twenty, have a grade in the C range or lower. One of those is a classic "ghost student" who showed up to the first day of class and then disappeared, but the rest have fully earned those grades. I don't think I'm that tough. There are three students in my other section of comp with Cs, and none with anything lower. They've had the same instructions, the same activities, mostly-the-same everything. This particular section simply ignores all directions, spoken or written, and all examples.

I can understand how visible bad habits, like arriving to class late or doing the bare minimum in peer workshops, spread among a given group of students. If you see other people doing something, it becomes normalized, and you figure you might as well do it too. It's a bad dynamic from the instructor's point of view, but at least I understand how it works and where it comes from. In this group, though, all but a handful of the students seem to have become identically clueless in ways that ought to be invisible to each other. For example, one of the assignments in this class is to read, summarize, and evaluate an academic journal article in your intended major field. I've been using some variation on this assignment for over fifteen years. They see multiple examples from previous students. There are some predictable places where most students have difficulty -- no freshmen are very good at the evaluating part, and lots of them struggle with identifying main ideas and central arguments -- and the occasional one-off error (there's always that one kid who decides an alternative-medicine website is a journal article). But mostly, they sort of do what they were asked.

This semester? An amazingly high percentage of students -- but only in this one section -- seem to have interpreted this assignment to mean "Write a personal essay about why you're interested in your major." I have literally no idea how they GOT this notion.

And why is the Clueless Class always the one that meets at 11:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Is that time slot jinxed?

In lieu of a substantive post, a round of Bardiac's Game

Guess the poet!

Athletics comes to Misnomer U.

So we have an athletics program now. This is new; or rather, new-old, since the program has returned after a hiatus of fifteen years or so, but at any rate, this is the first time I've had to deal with student athletes since I was hired.

I was hoping it would be better than I remembered. It isn't: there are still lots of annoying bureaucratic forms to fill out tracking athletes' progress and grades, even though they're mostly online now, and all of these absences that we MUST accommodate, even though the student is inevitably missing important stuff. And there is still an astounding level of apathy among most of the student-athletes toward anything remotely academic, coupled with an insistence that they MUST MUST MUST get at least a B. (Back in the good old days, the apathetic students were as apathetic about grades as they were about everything else; adding athletics to the mix seems to amp up their extrinsic motivation without doing a bloody thing about the intrinsic part, which is the part that counts. So, for example, they will insist loudly that they don't want to do peer review in comp class because they want MY opinion, and then flake out on a round of required conferences which is their big opportunity to get my opinion because they can't be bothered to complete a draft on time.)

One of them stole a paper draft from his roommate, which is a type of academic dishonesty I haven't seen before. (He "rewrote" it, but not well enough to cover his tracks.) Somehow, this seems like a much, much more serious level of wrongdoing than ripping a paper off the Internet.

And it feels like there is a kind of, I dunno, cult of performative apathy in the one class I have that's majority-athlete? That happens sometimes -- students feed off each other, and a small critical mass of visibly participatory or non-participatory students can set the tone for a whole class -- but it's noticeably worse with this group. (Due to the demographics of Misnomer U., it's very rare to have a class that's majority-male; this one is, and I feel like there's a crucial difference between the way guys act when they're trying to impress girls and when they're trying to impress each other. At any rate, I occasionally read complaints from people at other schools about male students talking too much and dominating the classroom, and this phenomenon is so utterly foreign to my own experience that it feels like a dispatch from Bizarro World. Where are all of these guys who WANT to talk in class? Can we please, please get a few of them over here?)

Grump. These kids today!

The new Norton Anthology, by the numbers

Years since the last Norton Anthology: 6. This seems awfully short, and I can't help wondering if we really NEED a new edition at all, but on looking up the publication dates for the last three editions, I guess it is their usual interval.

Versions of the Norton Anthology I will have used in my entire teaching career, once the new one comes out: 3. This is making me feel old.

Number of werewolves, compared to the last edition: +1. Yay! Who doesn't love a werewolf?

Number of plays about living with integrity in a world where the king is old, mad, and capricious, his vicious and venal children and children-in-law are running the kingdom, and the world is lashed by violent storms: -1. I will grant that I would never actually teach Lear in a survey course, and its replacement, Othello, is undoubtedly more accessible, but the timing seems unfortunate.

Number of gay Elizabethan poets with a taste for elaborate mythological allusions and silly wordplay: -1. (What the hell, Norton? Am I the only one who likes Barnfield?)

Number of other texts I will miss: No idea. They mark the stuff that's new with stars, but they don't call attention to the texts that have quietly disappeared. However, it looks like this revision is less of a bloodbath than the last one, in which at least FOUR pieces that I used to teach regularly, including a full-length play that is still under copyright and not available online, suddenly vanished.

Number of texts that survived the axe, but I have no idea why: Several, starting with most of the longer works by nineteenth-century poets. Like, does anybody actually teach Manfred or "The Scholar Gypsy"? (Undoubtedly, after the last edition, some Victorianist somewhere wondered whether anyone actually taught Richard Barnfield. Sigh.)

Number of texts I asked for on Norton's faculty survey that actually made it in: Two! "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" and A Christmas Carol. Woo hoo!

Number of new short stories by contemporary writers whose works I have actually read voluntarily: 3. (I don't know any of the stories, but given that I dislike most contemporary "literary fiction" and haven't really taken to ANY of the Norton's prior selections, this is a hopeful sign.)

Jeopardy and hazard

In my two lit classes this semester, I'm doing ... not quite full-on-game-based-learning, but something close to it, with a few competitive role-playing activities, some theater-games-type performance stuff, and, in the case of the Brit Lit survey, a few days set aside for playing actual historical games, and thinking about what they reveal about the cultures that played them. (Plus, we'll be reading a lot of texts that are essentially gamey -- from Anglo-Saxon riddles to the storytelling contest in The Canterbury Tales to George Herbert doing fun, playful things with words.)

It's fun and creative and energizing, and I need that after ten years of teaching these classes -- but it's also deeply scary. I'm starting to understand, on a gut level, how apt it is that our modern English words jeopardy and hazard come from medieval gaming terms. (And Jeopardy!, of course, is a game today as well!) You can't always control how a game will go, even if you're theoretically the one in charge of the game. Just ask Chaucer's Host. The stakes are sometimes different from what you thought they would be; ask Gawain.

I'm hoping that this will all coalesce the way I'm envisioning, on a thematic level -- that we'll have enough time to talk about the physical and moral hazards of play (sometimes the Baron steals your hair; sometimes you're so busy dicing in the tavern that Death catches you unaware), as well as the ways it can work as a proxy for bigger cultural issues and culture wars (Herrick's holiday-games are particularly good for this). I'm not totally sure I will manage to pull this off, because I have a tendency to get distracted while teaching, caught up in the moment like Chaucer's squabbling pilgrims, and often never do reach the bigger points I intended to make; I feel like I lack an inner Parson to illuminate our pilgrimage's larger meaning.

In the meantime, we had a nice lively round of jeux-partis today, which meant everyone at least got used to talking in front of the class and defending a position; and we will be trying our hand at hazard in a few weeks (with handmade replica medieval dice, which are one of the many awesome things you can buy at Kalamazoo).

Some sensible rules to keep me from getting hopelessly muddled

1) If your legal name is Michael but you prefer to be called Jacob, please introduce yourself as Jacob and put your name on all your papers as "Jacob." It will be much easier for all of us if I never learn the name "Michael" in the first place.

2) Do not change your hair for the first month. Exception: if you have exactly the same hair as the two girls sitting next to you, please cut or dye your hair IMMEDIATELY, before the second class, and don't change it back for at least another month.

3) Hayley, Bailee, and Kayleigh are not allowed to be in the same class.

4) Identical twins are forbidden to have matching names. In fact, identical twins are forbidden.

5) The ENTIRE BASEBALL TEAM is not permitted to enroll in the same section of freshman comp.

Now, if people would only follow the damn rules. Grump.

On teaching Caesar in the age of Trump

So I have been in Green Country for almost three weeks, and one of the nice things is that the time difference and the geographic distance mean I'm not bombarded with American news first thing in the morning. In fact, while I haven't absolutely unplugged from American politics, it all feels less urgent and outrage-making here.

Until the latest culture-wars outrage du jour turned out to be about Shakespeare. Shakespeare is always urgent around here. (OK, I'm sort of amused and baffled that a production that has been running for three weeks without anyone paying much attention is SUDDENLY urgent as far as the rest of the world is concerned, but whatever.)

Other, better Shakespeare scholars have weighed in on why nothing about the Public Theater's production of Julius Caesar is particularly new or outrageous; I will note, however, that this play definitely seemed to have more bite when I last taught it, a few weeks after the election, and I plan to teach it again this fall, and probably again every year for the foreseeable future.

It is, in fact, really HARD to get students to read Caesar's assassination as justifiable, so I doubt that a "go assassins!" reading of this play is likely to come naturally to anyone. They don't, as a rule, want to see the conspirators as people they should like. (Particularly Cassius. I really like Cassius, but students in general do not -- they tend to accept Antony's judgment of Cassius, and the other conspirators who aren't Brutus, as acting "in envy of great Caesar," without considering that Antony has political reasons of his own for holding up Brutus as the Great Exception. What we actually get in the text is more nuanced; Cassius is so damn right about most of the questions of strategy, and perceptive and clearheaded about the consequences of letting Antony live and speak, and any successful political movement needs manipulative pragmatists as well as idealists.) As a rule, students tend not to see small-r republicanism as something worth killing to preserve. Politics, at the grand history-making level, are not quite real to them. Friendship is real, and they tend to fixate on the "Brutus literally stabbed his friend in the back!" part, even though Brutus and Caesar's friendship is something we're informed about rather than something we actually see. It's not clear that the Caesar we do see on stage is capable any more of friendship, in the sense of a relationship among equals. (Contrast with the Brutus / Cassius friendship, which is messy and stormy and tender and substantive, to the point where Cassius is the only person with whom Brutus gets to be really human by Act 4, and Cassius noticeably doesn't exploit or take advantage of that vulnerability.)

The idea that reasonable people might be willing to die or kill to protect a tradition of self-governance feels more charged, these days, like something my last crop of students could feel on a gut level.

I don't mean to suggest that the conspirators are right; the point is that we don't know whether they are right. Brutus agonizes over the unknowability of the future; he can't be sure whether Caesar will hatch into a poisonous snake until it's too late to do anything about it. We see farther than Brutus does; we know what he will choose, and what the consequences of his choices will be. But what we don't, and can't, know is what would have happened if he had chosen differently. It's a play about the difficulty of choosing and acting rightly when the information we have is necessarily imperfect (even in a world where omens and soothsayers and prophetic dreams are real, they can pretty much all be read in multiple ways, stymieing everyone's attempts to foresee the future; how much more difficult it is in our world). Moreover, the really fatal choices, from Brutus's point of view, are not the big ones but the little ones, not should we kill Caesar? but who gets to speak last at the funeral?

Some students have a hard time with this, too. They want the messages about right and wrong, and what people should have done, to be clearer. They aren't. They never will be. And I think we desperately need to know that, in a culture that tends to overvalue confidence and decisiveness and undervalue questioning and thought.

Three more days...

... and I will be on my way to Green Country with my colleague from the history department, her family, and 16(!) students from the Honors program. This is more than double the number we had last time, and even though a couple of the students are technically peer mentors (i.e., juniors / seniors with prior study abroad experience, who aren't taking the classes but are instead along to help with interpersonal stuff, RA-style), it's starting to feel a little overwhelming.

I hadn't even really thought about the logistics of getting twenty people with all associated luggage onto buses / to our lodgings / to the right meeting points for our various excursions until yesterday, and now I am thinking about it, and ... OMG. Also, in just over a week I will be teaching a whole class that I also haven't thought very hard about since the last time I taught it.

There seems to be more parental involvement, and more anxiety, with the Honors students. I taught Honors comp for the first time this spring, and I noticed the anxiety thing there as well. I mean, I sometimes wish our non-Honors students were MORE inclined to stress out about their grades, but ... there has to be a happy medium somewhere, surely? (I don't remember my parents getting this involved when I went to Spain for a semester in college, although my mother definitely has the right temperament for it -- but maybe I've blotted it out? I think it also helped that my parents had both lived in Europe, and were very comfortable with travel as a concept, whereas for many of our students / parents / SOs, this is all New and Strange territory. It's cool in many ways -- you can see the horizons getting wider -- but it also means they think everything is much scarier than it is.)

One of our students was apparently cautioned by her family not to drink any alcohol on the trip, because it is VERY DANGEROUS. (Whether drinking alcohol in general is dangerous, or just drinking it in Green Country, was unclear.) As these are all nineteen- and twenty-year-old students, going to a country where they will be able to drink legally for the first time ... good luck with that.

I hope they are less-stupid about drinking, and about walking home alone at three or four or five in the morning, than I was when I was their age. But I also hope they learn to explore, and to be fearless.

Shrew'd

The theater department's first performance of The Taming of the Shrew was last night, and I got to join the cast for a talkback. It was a bit disorienting being on stage, especially in a theater where I've been dozens of times as an audience member (those lights are really bright! Blinding! And people are looking at me!), but I enjoyed it. The actor playing Petruchio seemed to have come, independently, to a very similar take on the play to mine, so that was nice. And I got to say some things about feminine-obedience-as-performance and playtexts-as-literature that were, I hope, at least vaguely coherent.

I like the way this production shaped up. It seemed more energetic, and more broadly comedic, than the early rehearsal I'd seen. I suppose that is one of the things the process does: makes everything a lot bigger. Or maybe it's audiences that make plays bigger, like mirrors reflecting a space back at itself.

Shrew reminds me of The Importance of Being Earnest, in a weird way. It's all about using language to break social rules and shape alternate realities (this is one of the things the Petruchio-actor and I agreed about, that Petruchio is first and foremost inducting Katharina into a game where words mean whatever the heck you want them to mean), and sometimes those realities grow out of control and take on lives of their own. I really wish it had been possible to fit the Christopher Sly framework into this production, but I had to cut it down to 90 minutes.

I am, as always, in awe of actors. They do something magical.

The Conspiracy Theory

So, as many of you probably know, there is a moderately popular conspiracy theory that touches upon my field of study. Every now and then, students ask me about it, and I try to explain reasonably and neutrally that there isn't any evidence for it, and then move on. Less often, somebody makes a movie or TV show about it, or a complete stranger e-mails me out of the blue to Discuss Their Theories, both of which are situations that can be ignored.

Anyway, this particular conspiracy theory is relatively benign as such things go; that is, it doesn't involve denying historical atrocities, or accusing real people of fictional atrocities. (In its most common form, it does have a certain level of classist subtext, although there are a few variants that don't have the classism, and one or two that would be awesomely feminist if they weren't, you know, wrong.)

So why -- why -- do I always get Someone Is Wrong On The Internet Syndrome whenever I encounter it, such that I find it hard to concentrate on anything else? Aargh.

Mid-semester miscellany

I'm sorry I haven't been around much, somewhat to my own surprise. There's a bit on Phil Ochs's Live in Vancouver, 1968 (an album I've been listening to quite a bit lately, because it feels like 1968 has so much to say to 2017) where he says, "When I came back from Chicago, I thought I'd write thundering protest songs, and I didn't ... It was exhilarating at the time and very sad afterwards, because something very extraordinary died there, and that was America." And, yeah, that's pretty much how I feel; I thought I was going to write lots of blog posts about Teaching in the Trump Era, and ... not so much. I don't even know yet what I think about Teaching in the Trump Era, or whether this is the Death of America or just one of those silly seasons of history that comes along every so often.

So, some non-political bullet points of mid-semester:

-- I'm teaching an Honors section of comp for the first time. It feels like being back in grad school, in some ways: a much more international-student-heavy population, and a level of grade-consciousness, anxiety, and perfectionism that I'd almost forgotten how to deal with. On the other hand, they are very good at paying attention to detail, taking peer workshopping seriously, and actually understanding what they read. I'll take it.

-- This summer's trip to Green Country is mostly coming together. It feels easier the second time, and I'm beginning to be properly excited about it. At first, it felt like "oh joy, all this planning and budgeting and filling-out-of-forms AGAIN," but now that the date is drawing closer, I'm remembering why I liked this the first time and want to do it again. And it will be all new for the students; I need to remember that.

-- My students think Edward II reminds them of Game of Thrones. I cannot wait for Tuesday, when they will encounter Lightborne.

-- The theater department is doing The Taming of the Shrew this spring. They wanted me to cut it down to 90 minutes, so I did. (Poor Christopher Sly and the Hostess and the Lord naturally got the axe, which I feel bad about, because Christopher Sly is important, dammit.) I went to a read-through last night, and got handed the part of Katharina, which I had not bargained for (Katharina and Petruchio will be played by professional actors in the actual production, and the actors haven't arrived yet). I hope I didn't sound too awful. I did get a compliment from one of the theater professors, which was nice, but I was impressed by how good most of the students sounded, already; they clearly knew what they were saying, for the most part, and were ready to put some natural-sounding emotion into it. I'm kind of in awe of actors. I think it's a good way to be.

Trading Austen for Auden

So. The world is changing -- in ways that I didn't will, and can't do much about -- and I am trying to plan out syllabi for classes that will be taught in that new world, without fully knowing what it will look like. Perhaps it will be very much like the Bush years; perhaps it will be very different from everything we've ever known, and very scary.

I asked one of my colleagues if she could cover my Shakespeare class on January 23rd, the Monday after the Women's March on Washington, just in case I got arrested. That is definitely something that I have never said, or had to think about, before.

But Shakespeare class will probably look much like it always has, only with more Coriolanus, and with the "you must needs be strangers" speech from Sir Thomas More to start off the semester. I just realized I'll be teaching that speech in the very last hour of Barack Obama's presidency, which is both very right and very wrong.

Brit Lit II is shaping up to be ... different. It was always going to be different this year, because I've been doing some new stuff in all of my gen ed classes, but it feels like it's been wrenched out of shape these last few weeks, woken from summer dreams. There are a couple of contemporary texts (one play, one novel) that I've ordered secondhand from Amazon and am planning to give away, because the deadline for ordering books had long past by the time I realized that I very much needed to teach them this semester. The rest of the syllabus is ... skewing later, away from the hopeful Romantics and confident Victorians, toward the catastrophes of the twentieth century and beyond. (For ages, I didn't really do much with the twentieth century. A couple of early Joyce stories, sure, and Woolf's A Room of One's Own, but the class often stopped in the 1920s. That's going to be different next semester.) I feel like I'm axing a lot of the readings I love to make room for these new ones -- maybe not forever, because I change things up all the time anyway -- but maybe it is forever. Maybe we are not going to have time ever again for comedy, or for beauty for beauty's sake. Maybe I'm not going to have this job until retirement, like I thought I would. Maybe our profession won't exist at all in a few years (because God knows, there seem to be some concerted, very specific, rhetorical attacks on universities just now, and someday it won't be just rhetoric). I don't know. I have no idea about the shape of this new world.

I have been looking over the dates on this new syllabus -- that list of as-yet-interchangeable Tuesdays and Thursdays -- and wondering if some of them will end up being Dates That Matter, like September 1, 1939, or whether they will all, perhaps, be days that we will forget, like the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875. I hope that we will, after all, be given the grace to forget.

Hermione; a parable

So I have this one student in the quieter of my two freshman comp sections. I'll call her Hermione.

Hermione talks a lot, in a class where almost no one wants to talk. She raises her hand virtually every time I ask a question. I don't always acknowledge her right away, because I want to hear from the other students, but the truth is that Hermione is modeling exactly the right sort of student behavior, so I'm reluctant to ignore her. She does the reading; she's prepared; she has relevant and thoughtful things to say. Hermione is very politically outspoken, and very obviously liberal and feminist. Occasionally she expresses opinions that are slightly daft, in the way that idealistic eighteen-year-olds are sometimes daft, but they are always thought-provoking, the sort of ideas that should start an interesting conversation, except most of the other students don't want to talk about ideas.

We were doing a thing in class yesterday (I have to be vague here), where students had to propose some things, and then vote on the proposals. Hermione, naturally, jumped in with a nomination every time; perfectly reasonable ideas, in all cases. After a round or two of voting, I noticed a pattern: she was having a hard time getting the votes from her classmates (all but a handful of whom, for the record, are female). I could see what they were thinking: We don't like this person. She talks too much. She's too opinionated. We think she's showing off, and showing us up. We don't want to vote for her stuff. Maybe there was a bit of we don't trust her lurking behind it all.

I wonder how it would have gone if Hermione were Herman. I wonder if they would simply have accepted her as a leader, the sort of person they could trust to have good ideas.

Feeling utterly heartsick and angry and frightened for so many reasons.

Because everyone has already done the Miller's Tale comparison, here's some Macbeth

Macduff: Dude, you should totally be king. You'd be way better at it than Macbeth is.

Malcolm: You don't want me to be king.

Macduff: Why not?

Malcolm: "Your wives, your daughters / Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up / The cistern of my lust, and my desire / All continent impediments would forbear / That did oppose my will." In other words, "you know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful ... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet." [Enter Arianne, a serving-woman.] Got a Tic-Tac?

Macduff: You know, that's a bad thing to do, but it might not be so much of a problem when you're king.

Malcolm: Really.

Macduff: Yeah, being king is kind of awesome that way. You can do "whatever you want." You won't have to assault women any more, because they start assaulting YOU. Hey, Arianne, how about a hug for The Malcolm here?

[Arianne exits in haste.]

Malcolm: I'm also really greedy for money, and I cheat good people. The more I have, the more I want. Don't you think that's a bad quality in a king?

Macduff: That's pretty bad, too, but ... we live in the real world, here. Kings are often corrupt. Being king gives you lots of opportunities to enrich yourself. As long as you don't go overboard with it, it's something the country can live with, as long as you've got other good qualities.

Malcolm: But I don't have any. I totally lack "the king-becoming graces / As justice, verity, temperance, stableness, / Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, / Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude ... Nay, had I power, I should / Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell, / Uproar the universal peace, confound / All unity on earth."

Macduff: Oh. Well ... THAT shit actually matters.

Malcolm: So you'd say I'm not fit to govern, then?

Macduff: If that's really true, then HELL NO.

Malcolm: All right, NOW I believe you've got integrity. I'm going to tell you the truth: I was testing you the whole time, I'm not really a bad person at all, and I'm willing to go back to Scotland and be king.

Macduff: Whew!

Malcolm: I wonder what would have happened if we'd played this whole scene backward, and I'd led off with all the OTHER bad qualities first, before we got to Arianne.

Macduff: Don't be silly, anybody would have realized right away that someone with those qualities wasn't fit to be king. Why would we even need to get to Arianne?

Fall, and cease

One of my college professors died yesterday. I found out the modern way, while taking a social media break in the middle of working on my syllabi, and it seemed right to put aside the work, and pause. This isn't the first time I've heard about the death of a former professor, but she was the first one who was clearly too young. In her photo on the department site, she doesn't look any older than she did in the fall of 1997, when I was her student in Shakespearean Tragedy.

I remembered the papers I wrote for her right away. I must have been going through a Weird Contrarian Theory phase, because in one of them, I argued that Gertrude pushed Ophelia, and in another, that the handkerchief in Othello was literally magical. The third one was about love and material wealth in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, and I don't think it had any weird theories, but it was twice as long as it was supposed to be, because I needed a writing sample for grad school. I remember that she agreed, very graciously, to let me write a paper that exceeded the bounds of the assignment, and to critique it carefully. I realize now that this was a big and somewhat presumptuous request to make at the end of the semester. If she was thinking oh no, not more grading!, she didn't let on.

I remembered, also, that she'd described Titus Andronicus as "sci-fi Rome," and when the Julie Taymor movie came out a few years later I realized just how apt that description was.

This afternoon I took my old Complete Works of Shakespeare down from the shelves. It had been my textbook for that course, but I'd also used it in freshman-year Intro to Shakespeare, and in a graduate seminar about the history plays, and another graduate seminar about revenge tragedy, and while writing my master's thesis and dissertation. So, out of the ten plays we'd read that semester -- Titus, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra -- the only ones where I could be sure my notes and underlinings were from her class were Julius Caesar, Othello, and Lear. I leafed through them all, anyway, trying to remember what was hers, and what was some other professor's, and what was mine. She was interested in inwardness, I think, in the mind. A note beside a Macbeth soliloquy: mind more compelling than reality. At various points in the margins of Brutus and Cassius's first conversation: introspective dilemma; don't look at self to see self -- look at me!; like Caesar, B. makes the mistake of looking for himself in other people's images; Stoicism is not enough. (Also, more amusingly, some instructions on how to celebrate the Lupercal: sacrifice goats, smear yourself w/blood, & run around naked striking women. Sounds like fun!) Beside Antony's "Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish" speech, one quote that I know was from her, because I labeled it: "theater of the wind" - Prof. B..

The passage that brought back her most vividly as teacher, though, had no notes at all beside it, just underlinings: King Lear's three-part threnody: Is this the promised end? Or image of that horror? Fall, and cease! I remembered being asked to write about that. Remembered that she began nearly all her classes by asking us to write about a quotation or a question; and that I'd picked up the practice in my first few years of teaching Shakespeare, and then dropped it once I began to have too much to say about the plays and too little time in which to say it.

And then I realized there was something I'd learned from her that I still do; she was the first professor I ever had who did much with film versions of Shakespeare, and in particular, the first one who showed contrasting film versions of the same scene. (On VHS, played on a tiny, wall-mounted TV; I think it was the Laurence Olivier and Mel Gibson versions of Hamlet 3.4.) I am glad that she is still, in some way, part of my teaching, as I think most of my undergraduate English professors are. Perhaps we all live on a little in our students, and in the margins of our students' books.

Godspeed, Professor B. And thank you.

further grumpiness

This is surely one of the silliest, most grad-student-blaming things I've read in a while -- and I say this as someone who actually agrees that most scholarship in English isn't very interesting and that the really important, valuable work we do is teaching.

But, dude. "Research" doesn't actually mean "something that produces reproducible results, just like they do in the sciences." (There's glory for you.) Also, there might be some dissertations out there that follow the pattern “Concept X borrowed from theory Y is applied to works A, B and C that have something in common: time, author, country/group of origin, leading to this result: Z,” but this strikes me as a straw man that is about twenty years out of date, and in any case, you don't have to interview candidates with boring, formulaic dissertations. I guarantee you there's no shortage of applicants who don't. Some of them have even been adjuncts for years, and know exactly how to motivate a bunch of bored eighteen-year-olds with weak reading and writing skills.* Also, you don't have to require the candidate to do a research presentation if you aren't interested in their scholarship. (In fact, none of my campus interviews required any such thing; every single one of them required a teaching demonstration.) If you do ask candidates to give such a presentation, you're sending a clear signal that you are interested, and you have only yourself to blame if they choose to tell you about it.

Finally, if you want to see enlivening a classroom, try giving your students a bunch of cue-scripts for a scene in Shakespeare and asking them to put the scene together, early-modern-actor-rehearsal style -- which is something I wouldn't have known to do without all of the people doing research on early modern theatrical practices and uncovering facts about the objective world.

* Also, if you're at the Naval Academy and the average verbal SAT score among your entering class is 630, you've got no idea what a truly underprepared and unmotivated student population looks like. Just trust me on this one.

An irrational pet peeve

You know what I find unreasonably infuriating? Hypercorrection. For example, when students (or non-students) write "The introduction of this paper was well," when they mean it was good. Or "Mrs. Harris, whom was my high-school English teacher..." or "Give the forms to Mary and I."

For some reason, these constructions make me want to stab somebody, although other types of grammatical error do not. (I think this might have something to do with the fact that it drives me nuts when people try to be sticklers about rules without understanding the principles behind the rules.)

What are your irrational writing peeves?