Anglophilia and other social diseases, part I

I'm always surprised when people assume that because I studied and taught English, I must be an Anglophile. For one thing, lots of people study "English" without spending a whole lot of time reading English literature; lots of undergraduate English programs are set up to facilitate that--for better or worse.

Anyhow, if I remember correctly, I wrote my dissertation on some books written by an Irish writer ... and even though he was born a British subject and--correct me if I'm wrong--remained one by choice until (and presumably after) his death, he certainly wasn't English. Most 20th century British literature worth reading is likewise not precisely English.

So ... I haven't been to too many exotic and foreign places, and certainly the UK is someplace I'd like to visit, but I don't expect to love it exactly. I don't feel drawn there or anything. I just don't get that--it's not like I'd get to live in any of the books I've come to know and love of the years.

Once I read a paper to the ladies of a local Jane Austen Society chapter, and they were all dressed in some semblance of period costume for their post-lecture "high tea," during which I--trying modestly to avert my eyes from the little old ladies in their Empire dresses while leaning down close enough to hear their enthusiastic discussions--realized that they were engaged with Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in a way that I just couldn't be. I could live in London for the rest of my life and never be invited to a party at the Dalloway home, is what I'm saying. I don't read the stuff because I want to experience it. Most of the stuff I read about I'd hate to experience firsthand.

It might be that pretend history is easier for people to swallow in places like in the very historical southern town I used to live near, because about that same time I also met a person who had a pronounced--yea, even mispronounced--British accent he had somehow picked up after spending ONE SUMMER in the UK as an ADULT, defying everything anybody knows about dialect acquisition. Embarrassing--to everyone but the one who should have been embarrassed.

That's the kind of thing that makes me leery, to say the least, of Anglophilia.

To be continued ...

After long silence

I did, I confess, think about quoting in its entirety the Yeats poem "After Long Silence," but upon reflection I'm not fond of it, and it's not relevant. I might as well have quoted "After great pain, a formal feeling comes," which I also don't like much and which is also irrelevant. And from there it's only one short step to the After the Fire version of "Der Kommissar."

Go ahead, you know you want to. We'll wait.

Well, it's been an eventful month: one campus interview right on the heels of another, with a job offer from the first interview coming as I was waiting to begin the second interview. For a short while there, I felt like I was a very hot commodity indeed ... hotter, in fact, "than hell itself." As Tom was wont to say.

If you bothered to follow the link, you might also want to check this out. I would live in that world if I could--that trumpet, that voice.

The (self-perceived) hotness was mitigated only a little by the subsequent revelation that the second interview will not result in a job offer, that I will not be the subject of a battle royale (with cheese) amongst my current employer and two prospectives. I wasn't the top choice in Georgia, and I couldn't string the other place along long enough to see whether Georgia would work their way down to me (it happens), so I gladly accepted the first offer and will be starting there August 17. I'm sure it would have been my first choice in any case, but it might have been good from a negotiation standpoint.

I'm not putting the details here because I like to keep this space separate from my professional life, at least in the search engines. But folks, if you're having trouble getting yourself mentally ready for an interview, it's always helpful to watch this clip (it includes some not-safe-for-work language). Even if I shared this with you recently, it's worth watching again:



I also like to watch Apocalypse Now before a campus interview. Gets me in the right frame of mind to go up the river and into the heart of darkness.

YMMV!

Interstices

I woke up this morning not thinking about blues songs that begin "I woke up this morning," but rather about interstices, which are yet another unacknowledged casualty of the so-called digital age.

Cast in cement or etched in stone on a building where I work is the maxim "Wisdom is the fruit of reflection," and that might be the wisest, truest thing I've heard there (though it was probably merely an attempt, in a pre-digital age, to console students and faculty making the long trudge from one end of campus to the other ... of course now, instead of reflection in service to wisdom, we have cell phone conversations: "Where are you?" "I'm walking on the sidewalk." "Where are you?") You're not going to get wiser with ear "buds" in your ears, or talking on a cell phone. Wisdom is not the fruit of banality.

So whence wisdom? Beats me. Maybe people used be wiser because they'd use the time their bodies were busy and their minds weren't to think rather than to be entertained, to be amused to death.

All I know is, I sat down just now to talk about certain interstices, certain special moments of silence: between "Heartbreaker" and "Living Loving Maid." Between "Waitin' for the Bus" and "Jesus Just Left Chicago." Between "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions." Hell, even between "Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'" and "City of the Angels." Maybe that's where we can find a few seconds of enlightment: between the tigers and the butter. Think about it.

You're never going to attain enlightenment with your Ipod on shuffle, people.

Happy Bloomsday!

And for those of you who've never found time to read the greatest novel ever, this. Listen live starting at 7.

Cat People, Dog People

I've always considered myself to be a cat person, probably because I've always had cats. I like cats and I have trouble understanding why some people don't. Cats crack me up. They are graceful but unwilling to act within the bounds of grace. And if you have a pack of cats, you have a whole that adds up--in ways that can actually be kind of creepy--to something more than the sum of its parts. It can be ominous, if cats can be ominous.

Some people, apparently, hate cats. I don't get that. I love cats.

And yet, as it turns out, I'm also a dog person. I had a friend in graduate school--and so did many of you--who claimed, credibly, to prefer dogs to people, and who claimed, not so credibly, that if she had to choose between running over a dog or running over a person, she'd probably hit the person. This was all the more perplexing to me because her dog was the one dog I've ever met that didn't like me.

But, you'll say, that dog didn't like anybody. That's not the point. Animals love me, dammit. Did you ever see a statue of St. Francis with his hands outstretched and birds flying around him? Well, I can assure you that birds are more likely to crap on the statue of St. Francis than they are to crap on me. So there.

I resisted letting my family get a dog, because I knew from experience that dogs are a lot of trouble. They have to be outside a lot, and their interactions with strangers can be problematic (as I experienced as a youth when my dog Max, a rescued doberman, had an altercation first with a horse, and then with the angry Amishman whose buggy the horse was pulling). Funny looking back on it, and a little funny even at the time ...

Everybody in the family insisted that the dog would be no trouble to me ... they'd walk it, they'd feed it, they'd clean up after it, etc. Suuure. But I knew that I'd be hearing that "my dad wouldn't let us have a dog" line for the next 50 years, so I relented.

Well, Annie (how did we end up naming our dog after the one dog I've ever met who didn't like me?) sure was a cute puppy, and I held the family to their promise. And of course fell in love with the dog. A year or so later, the family took a vote and said that the dog was too much trouble, that I had been right, that they wouldn't mind giving her away. My response was this: "If we start getting rid of things that are too much trouble in this house, we're NOT starting with the dog." I glared significantly and waggled my significant, even Dickensian eyebrows (ah, the joys of ageing), and everyone got the point. The dog stayed, and so did they ... so far.

And so, seven or so years later, I'm an animal person, not a cat person. The dog is sweet-natured and not overly brave, so I'm all the more impressed when she responds assertively to perceived threats (a noise on the porch that isn't somebody ringing the doorbell, for instance ... or the wheelbarrow in the yard, which she apparently thinks is a very slow-moving three-legged bear). She maintains order amongst the cats by breaking up their wrestling matches and naps. She recognizes about five words, and if you say one of them, you can watch her slowly checking down through her short list of concepts to see which one might be relevant: Out? Treat? Snack? Cookie? Toy?

So while I guess I continue to value human life over animal life in general, I do find myself prefering the company of animals. They might be sneaky, but they're honestly and frankly sneaky. They don't lie, and they don't want more than they need. And they're not big complainers.

Hooray for animals!

Birds, though ... I'm not big on birds.

Never too busy to rock

Well, it's been a busy time out here in the Wordshed ... I've been working the Richard III and MacBeth angles in the workplace to some positive effect. Add to that the impending graduation of the elder child, including a weeklong visit from biodad et al., and a visit from MY folks with all of the frantic housecleaning that entails ... and it's been exciting.

Not, however, as exciting as hooking up with fellow WSRD fans on Facebook. If you grew up in or around Youngstown, you might remember how cool that station was. I can honestly say that it made me what I am today, for better or worse.

It's nice remembering the lost classics. If you're from Cleveland, Youngstown, or (dare I say it) Western PA and of a certain age, you may remember these guys.

When I was back there in middle school

I loved this book when I was a kid. I can't wait to read it again. For free. On my Kindle, baby! Also available as a free audiobook, if that's the kind of thing you go for.

I don't remember much about it, so it will be interesting to see if I can remember why it spoke to me or what it said when it did.

What I remember most about middle school is hating middle school. I remember a kind of creepy PE teacher who, in my imagination, looked and talked a lot like Col. Kilgore. Rumor was, he was still going overseas and flying missions on the weekends.

We didn't have recess; we had "Recreation" every other Wednesday, and it was a pubescent version of the prison yard. There was a kid who was called "Dirt Ball," and he had a game named after him. Somebody would yell "dirt ball!" and everybody would pelt him with footballs, basketballs, baseballs, whatever. And he would cry. I don't know if he was dirty, but I'm pretty sure his family was poor. Ah, the innocence of youth.

Not my scene, even though I wasn't Dirt Ball. I hated it, so I asked Kilgore if I could spend recreation in the library instead. He looked at me as if I were a pathetic, greasy-haired little punk in clothes his mom made him. Which, to be fair, was not far wrong. He let me go, though, probably because I was beneath his considerable contempt.

As an aside: this was recreation, not PE. PE was worse, because Kilgore could not tolerate lazy, idle little schemers who wore their underwear under their shorts rather than a jock strap. There were spot checks. And he was very concerned with cleanliness. After PE, the communal shower was excruciating, and if there was horseplay in the shower, the punishment was to assume the pushup position, unpleasant enough at the best of times, even worse when you're twelve, in shower with twenty other twelve year olds, in six inches of plugged up drain water, holding yourself in the "up" pushup position and hoping your hands didn't slip out from under you in the scummy water. There wasn't a lot of horseplay in the shower under the watchful, watchful eye of the PE teacher.

I loved the library though. The librarian was a younger guy, soft-spoken, patient, tolerant. Polite but not personally friendly. I and a few other unathletic types would sit there and listen to records ... Bill Cosby and Elton John are ones I remember. Once we "accidentally" pulled out the headphone jack while "The Bitch is Back" was playing, and this got us into a little obligatory trouble.

I signed out books by the armload and spent as much time in the library as possible. The librarian let me spend a ton of time in there and made sure I picked books that would make me want to read more books.

For this I am truly grateful.