Life after teaching

Dear Paisley and Plaid (are you one or two?),

I majored in English, and by your erudite commentary and precise, exquisite style (and lots of time to blog) I suspect that you, too, may be an English major. I recently resigned my position teaching eighth-grade speech and rhetoric because of, well, it was the principal of the thing!

What do I do now?

Well, English Major,

Here are some jobs with real possiblilites for people like us — lovers of literature and all things written or verbal. Starting pay may not be up to scale with what you are used to as a teacher and therefore the greatest influence on the nation’s future, but as they told us in Intro. to Education I,, II, and III,  ”Money isn’t everything!”

Many of these TOP TEN jobs can be done concurrently.  Good Luck!

Bohemian artiste — with a perpetual scarf — make commentary on the bourgeois masses
Novelist writing from personal experience — make that a novella-ist – you only taught eighth grade
Ghost writer for people with experiences
Elopement planner — It’s much more than just load up and go!
Student at  Online Law School — Go OLS!
Guru — field TBD
Consultant  — all trades (How hard can it be? You’ve read Dostoevsky.)
Amish clothing designer
Torch singer - You enter, late of course, 9:20, sing, sleep till noon
Academic advisor –pass out free t-shirt s–  ”For Heaven’s Sake Major in Computer Science”
Mansion sitter — 15,000 sq. ft. and up

Out of the question list. You should stay away from this field:
Anything medical including dental work — the sounds, the smells, the sick people, mouth insides, nurses

And be sure to check out this link to 25 very odd jobs that you might pursue as well –
http://blog.sixwise.com/blogs/vaszily-brian/archive/2007/03/08/the-world-s-25-oddest-jobs.aspx

 

Why Prufrock?

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Sad, isn’t it? T.S. Eliot has J. Alfred Prufrock say this as he contemplates his ineffectual attempts at living. Prufrock symbolizes modern man. From the first image of the poem man is anesthetized, spread on a table ready for life to be done to him, around him. He can’t connect with others including women though he admires them and woud approach them if he dared.

He is a city man: no rural farm boy or man of the soil here. The unfeeling concrete and murkiness of the foggy air, the dim lights through haze, city living rooms are his territory. People he sees at parties are as vain as he, “talking of Michelangelo.” He isn’t effeminate, but he lacks qualities that we admire in a man: courage, forthrightness, resolve. He is timid and lacks the nerve to break out of himself, his comfort zine, and relate to those around him. His world is sterile and superficial — a world of “coffee spoons.” Starbuck’s fans might recognize (and maybe take offense) at the image of one’s life being hanging out in coffee shops with strangers or “friends” coming in through wifi.

So Eliot gives us this picture of modern man  - monied, sophisticated, working, urban, informed — but feckless, paralyzed, and intimidated by real relationships. He has all the accoutrements of humanity needed for life, but lacking any spiritual force, the potential for real significance lies dormant. 

 ”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” isn’t a love song at all. There’s nothing about love in the poem. Eliot summarizes modern man here:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous–
Almost, at times, the Fool.

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/eliot.html  

 

How to read a poem

Here’s a method for reading a poem that I use. It works pretty well though poetry is “slippery” sometimes by nature. My LINKS page has helpful sites for terms and examples. Here’s  a terms site. Check out the NYT RSS in the sidebar for more about a current poet and poetry in general.

1. Read the title then read the poem. Silently is good but aloud is better. Follow punctuation rather than line ends. Read sentences, thoughts.

2. Determine the speaker and his situation: Paraphrase.  ”The speaker is a man who . . .” This is akin to plot.

3. Examine the poet’s figures of speech (metaphor, apostrophe, allusion, etc.) Look for connotative language. — “fair” may be complimentary while “pale” usually isn’t. Also look at sound features such as alleration and assonance. Are they functional? Decorative?

4. What is the attitude or tone? Use an adjective or two. Here’s a list of “tone” words. Be exact. Is the poet being ambiguous? They like that.

5. Consider the structure and rhetorical mode: is it dialogue, argument, a lyric, a narrative, descriptive? How are the parts arranged? How does the form fit the message?

6. What is the theme? or “What’s your point? “we ask. Is it traditional, original?

7. What is the poet’s revealed bias or worldview? His theme should let us know. This is where many explications fall short.

8. Return to the title. It should now be significant and enlightening.

Remember that poetry isn’t a hobby for little old ladies’ sewing circles. Nor is it the domain for literary snobs. It is a time-honored means of self expression — art — and an important part of culture. Both men and women appreciate it. A Renaissance man would beat somebody in a sword fight, sail the Atlantic, and then write a poem.  Poetry is accessible for most people (nursery rhymes) if they use a good method and practice. 

Why the sonnet?

What do Keats, Shakespeare, Frost, Millay, Plath, Browning, Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, Poe, Emerson, and Milton (I could go on) have in common?

They wrote sonnets.

Why the sonnet?

Originating in Italy in the 13th century, the subject of the fourteen-line poem was idealized love expressed in iambic pentameter. The Italian version rhymed in an abbaabba — cdcdcd scheme with an 8 - 6 division into problem - solution or situation  - comment structure.  Sir Thomas Wyatt having encountered the sonnet on his travels, transported the form to England and into an English version, and, of course, that was developed further by Shakespeare — 154 oif them. The English or Elizabethan sonnet developed into 3 quatrains and a couplet rather than the octave  — sestet Italian version.

So, for 700 years the form has thrived in periods Romantic, Victorian, modern, and postmodern. Why? Because the tradition is so rich with so many poetry canon contributors, most poets want to give it a go, add their stamp. Shakespeare added the friendship love theme. Romantics added politics. Modern poets alter the form and use most any subject. Some are just barely recognizable as sonnets. Then there’s the prescribed limits to work within. Or not. There’s even an anti-sonnet. Guess when that happened?

Ever tried to write a traditional sonnet? It’s a great exercise for appreciating what the masters did. Kind of like looking at The Night Watch and then trying your hand at oil painting.

A good, friendly site? http://www.sonnets.org/  sonnets grouped by chronology and by country, a reading room, submissions, and more

Dead is worse than “Expelled”

Ben Stein’s documentary now showing in theaters had a timely opening with election upon us. The first segment of the film is Stein’s interviews of several professors who lost their positions with distinguished universities. Incompetent? Immoral? No, they all made the fatal error of examining ID, Intelligent design, as a possible explanation for the origin of the universe. This on campuses where claims of academic freedom are made, often embossed in stone and heralded in mission statements.

Stein effectively draws an analogy between the supression of ideas such as ID and Nazi Germany, crematoriums, and goose-stepping. Several shots of the Berlin Wall, before and after, are included, also symbolic of the fear of competing ideas in the marketplace.  The grim reminders that we’ve all seen before — the emaciated POW’s, the bones piled high, the gas showers — inspired my blog title. Loss of a job can be bad. But dead because of ideas that one is willing to allow into the discussion, upheld or not, is worse.  Several interviewees clearly did not want to allow ID and the possiblilty of a God onto the “freedom” table. This is America last time I looked.

Stein and others make the connection from Darwinism to ideaologies like Hitler’s and Sanger’s. If natural selection is followed to its logical end, eugenics makes sense. Good breeding is good for humanity. Why protect the weak, the disabled, the sick, the elderly, or the unborn, who may all be drains on society’s resources?  In fairness, the argument is made that right after the quotation from Darwin on the weak and imbecile, he advocates the protection of such people, thus making Stein’s quotation out of context.

The film’s structure is somewhat choppy, but easy to follow. Interspersed throughout the first section are black and white clips of kids being bullied and such.  Images grow more distressing as they include the all-familiar death camps and patrol guards.  In the middle these images and dialogue are outlined in old filmstrip style, the main points concerning how a Darwinist would best secure his message. According to Stein he’d enlist education, the media, and the government. Examples are provided.

Finally, Stein meets with whom he calls the foremost Darwinist of our day, Dr. Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion.) Dawkins has reportedly been angered by the interview on film. It does make him look less than trustworthy when he says that life could not have been created by God, but another type of intelligence might have done it– perhaps an ALIEN being.

My own stand is with those who favor intelligent design: I believe in the Bibllical God. That said, I want the best inquiry that science offers. I want to know what Charles Darwin did and said that set the world on its ear. I will not dismiss nor deny the Holocaust. I want to know why there was a big gash of concrete running through Berlin. I may be misinformed at times, but within my scope I’ll search out the truth. Most importantly, I don’t look to science for proofs of what I believe through faith (and a certain amount of personal objective and subjective experience.) It won’t matter to me if science “proves” that there is no God. They’re too late.

First attempts by Ayn Rand

  I picked up an old, yellowed copy of The Early Rand (Signet, ed. Leonard Peikoff, 1984) and have thoroughly enjoyed reading from her early unpublished fiction. Peikoff and Rand were friends. In fact, she was influential in his move from studying medicine to philosophy.  He was one of those invited into the salon circle of disciples where Rand discussed her views.

For one thing, what the unpublished writings offer is her early struggle with the English language. She had emigrated to America from Russia in 1926 at 21 and had to learn everything from scratch. But the stories show the maturing of a great writer. In “The Husband I Bought” the language usage is rough, and the diction is imprecise.  The plotting is immature with more telling than showing. But the men and women, her characters, are predictive of the giants of fiction that Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden are today — people of strength and integrity and self reliance.

Having read Buckley’s Getting it Right, an enjoyable and fairly accurate fictional account of the formation of the conservative movement, I know that Rand didn’t support Buckley or The National Review. She thought it “the most dangerous” publlication in America since she felt that Buckley wanted to merge conservatism with religion. He didn’t favor some of her views, which were conservative, but Godless. The novel is just plain good reading.

I reject Rand’s views of religion and some of her views on man. I thoroughly relish her postulations that show man as heroic, purposeful, determined, the ruler of the world, capable of anything for his own self interest and thereby the good of others. It’s a vision that lauds man’s creativity and ability to produce and to derive from his efforts a deeply abiding satisfaction, confidence, and love of life — capitalism. (Some of the works in this anthology are vehemently anti-Communist.)

In her fiction, the evil characters are the lazy, inferior men who resent and envy those who do produce and are successful. Her fictional situations show people who are despised for their want of vision and talent — characters who function best in at atmosphere of regulation and bureacracy enforcing status quo operations and considering anyone who is not content with that and cannot abide mediocrity a threat. The bad guy is a jealous, petty man.

Peikoff recommends reading the novels first and then trying the early work. I agree that this makes a fascinating study.

You might enjoy these articles:

From The Atlasphere, bio and some good articles on social and political topics, mostly conservative

On Rand  — http://txpayervoice.blogspot.com/2008/01/ayn-rands-birthday.html

Manybooks.net has only Anthem available free online and as an audiobook here.

 

Digitized reads - a plug

I discovered Manybooks,net four years ago when I was venturing outside the publisher’s literature anthology in search of readings that would better suit my students’ needs. The site is clean, only a few ads, and easy to navigate. Matthew McClintock maintains the site as a service to the Internet’s reading community. He reports that most of the works come from Project Gutenberg.  Amazing — no library card or gas, no time linits, no late fees, and 20,259 free texts from classics to dictionaries to pulp.

Users can search for a particular work or browse by author, title, categories, recent downloads, most popular, reviews, or new additions.  I find that “categories” is useful as it lists 56 areas such as science fiction, history, banned books, biography, and philosophy.  There’s mystery, poetry, psychology, young readers, and reference. The Harvard Classics is its own category.

Once you locate your ebook, you’ll need to either download it or read it online. Downloads are available in formats for your cellphone, iphone, Kindle, Palm, Blackberry, PDF, and many more. Most of the books are public domain or Creative Commons. Visit the “About” and the “Site News” links for more information.

Manybooks is completely free, but it does have a donations button. Why not? Another way to serve is to volunteer for Digital Proofreading. There’s a button for this program, too, and it’s an interesting read on how a text gets read, edited, and finally delivered. They ask for as little as a page a day, but readers may do a little or much.

I should note that in casually browsing through 20,000 texts, I’m unfamiliar with a most. Still, intriguing titles and sheer volume are compelling to a reader. But as you browse, some of the “household words” emerge: Shakespeare, Bacon, Freud, Barnum, Huxley, Webster, Franklin, Doyle, Montaigne, and more.

When people discuss etexts, the subject of comparison to traditional print formats arises. Articles abound. How often do you read electronically? For what types of reading: information or pleasure? What advantages or disadvantages do you see?

 a few articles
http://www.readingmatrix.com/articles/horning/article2.pdf 

http://www.unf.edu/~tcavanau/presentations/SITE/ElectronicTextsasCourseTextbook.htm

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0096.html

 

http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/archives/Electronic.html

 

 

Sonnet 130 and Shakespeare’s Wit

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

If Shakespeare had followed sonnet tradition, he would have cataloged the sundry and timeless aspects of his beloved’s beauty. He would have been admiring her from afar without her knowledge. (No, it doesn’t sound like Renaissance stalking.) He would have been faint and overcome, mastered by her untutored charm.

In sonnet 130, he delights with self-parody — humorously imitating the sonnet and the sonneteer. First-time readers often comment on his lack of sensitivity and insulting observations. Sonnets, after all, are supposed to be about love. Forsaking the stock flatteries, he describes his lady’s wiry hair, her paleness, her discolored breasts, her heavy step, and her bad breath.

But Shakespeare knew his audience. The men and women that he wrote for were sophisticated enough to appreciate both irony and parody. And this audience would imagine, as I do, that the particular woman, his “Mistress,” would be a woman bright and clever enough for a man with the intellect of William Shakespeare. She would read his poem and be insulted? No. She’d smile and throw back her head. Then she’d make plans to get even.

How do I love thee? — not like that!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a talented poet (Sonnets from the Portuguese), but her best known poem, the sonnet “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” is not her best. I suspect it’s her most popular because of — let me count the ways 1. familiarity and 2. conventionality.  Here it is. It also appears in cross-stitching kits and greeting cards. It may be why, early on, some students learn to dislike poetry.

Most poets try their hand at writing a love poem.  Some describe love in the traditional vein employing flowery sentimentality. Nothing wrong with that. But some offer an unexpected, more realistic view of love, as in, for example, Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, “My Mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun.” It gets its own post. 

John Frederick Nims’s modern poem “Love Poem” is about love, but it’s not the conventional Disney “it could happen to you,” hearts-and-flowers take that has, let’s face it, led to disillusionment for more than a few.

From the beginning Nims applies deprecating terms to his beloved calling her his “clumsiest dear,” who basically wrecks whatever fine things  (glass, linen,) she touches. Then he compliments her with, not a declaration of her beauty, but with her humanity, her care for less-fortunate people, drunks and refugees.

Cataloging her faults, the speaker says that his beloved is careless, unpredictable, and a nuisance to “taxi drivers,” those just going about their business, and then confesses that her real expertise lies in words, people, love, and wit — these he knows are superior traits which keep him and those who know her devotedly at her knees.

Despite the coffee stain on his “flannel,” the lipstick on his coat, and the “spilt bourbon” that symbolizes her tendency toward mishap, he characterizes their relationship as glorious in their “unbreakable heaven,” a place safe even from her.

In the last stanza in an image of delf-denial, he volunteers to study “wry music” to please her. And then in what I think is one of the most memorable images in all poetry, he says that should her “hands drop white and empty/ All the toys of the world break.” Toys symbolize the fun, joie de vivre — the loss that her death and her absence from his life would mean.

Nims’s lover has a realistic view, but it is arguably just as passionate as the conventional, “romantic” view — indeed, more so because it allows for faults and doesn’t expect conformity to a manufactured image.

The last stanza

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses—
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

Millay’s Figs

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote two short poems, “First Fig” and “Second Fig,” which are both often quoted as was the case of “First Fig” by Heath Ledger’s father on the death of his son.

First Fig
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
It gives a lovely light. 

The poem is little more than applying a cliche to the carpe diem theme. Most interesting is the speaker’s addressing both her foes and her friends. Why must her enemies know of the frenetic but exhilarating “lovely light,” her life’s burning up? So that they will envy her, living well being the most delicious revenge.

What about her friends? They have played a part in her passion play, and she tells them that it’s okay - that a short but sweet life has been “lovely.” No regrets.

Somewhere along the way emotional and psychological “burnout” has become fashionable - even sought after. The brief, spent, wasted lives of celebrities are romanticized. Audiences, friends and foes, can’t get their fill of the “lovely life.” Millay knew this having lived allegedly as a promiscuous bisexual in an era when such behaviors were kept private. Two lengthy biographies of the poet, born in 1892, were published a couple of years ago.

Also from her A Few Figs From Thistles (1922) collection is “Second Fig,” a darker poem taking its imagery from an allusion to Jesus’ parable of the wise man who, able to plan ahead and arm himself against trouble, builds his “house” or life on a solid foundation, the rock. He is contrasted to the foolish man, who builds upon the infirm, shifting sand.

Here’s Millay’s take”

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand! 

The speaker is clearly familiar with and even understands the parable’s lesson, but shuns it in favor of the flash of her “shining palace” while fully knowing its instability and hence its danger. And as in First Fig, she involves others: “Come and see,” she beckons. This is the darker side of the carpe diem philosophy.