Coriolanus Corollary

So I'm reading a bit of Shakespeare's later plays: The Winter's Tale was for class, and now I've dipped into Coriolanus. It starts with a mob of angry Roman citizens who are starving because of the rich folks' greed. 


Here are some lines that should sound familiar (I've broken up Shakespeare's line breaks so that we can see the sentences):

FIRST CITIZEN:
We are accounted poor citizens. . . .
What authority surfeits on would relieve us. [Sounds familiar!]
If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely;
but they think we are too dear.
The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance;
our sufferance is a gain to them.
Let us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes;
for the gods know I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge. (I, i, ll.13-22).

Later, the crowd is calmed by a smooth-talking friend of the dastardly Coriolanus:

MENENIUS:
I tell you, friends, most charitable care have the patricians of you. [yeah, right!]
For your wants, your suffering in this famine, you may as well strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them against the Roman state . . . .
For the famine, the gods, not the patricians, make it, and your knees to them, not arms, must help.
Alack, you . . . slander the helms of the state, who care for you like fathers, when you curse them as enemies.

FIRST CITIZEN:
Care for us? True, indeed! [Yeah! Right!]
They never cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain;
make edicts for usury, to support usurers;
repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statues daily to chain up and restrain the poor. [sounds like Gov. Walker!]
If the war eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us. (I, i, ll. 61-82)

The Bard knew about politics - but this play is a tragedy, and Coriolanus is killed. I hope we have no tragedy on our hands in this era, but I'm not so sure . . . .

That's George Eliot?

When I was in grad school, I had a seminar on Victorian literature with Professor Robert Lougy. It included George Eliot, and I didn't like her novels much: too long and mannered for my taste. I don't really remember much from that seminar: we read Middlemarch, I know, and The Mill on the Floss. Did we read Silas Marner? Probably. What else? I can't remember.

But these days I assign my students an Eliot short story in our British Women Writers class: in our anthology is "The Lifted Veil," an atypical Eliot story that includes gothic elements. The supernatural isn't the only thing that's atypical, as far as I can remember from that long-ago seminar; it's the darkness of the narrator's vision.

Here's what the narrator, Latimer, says in the beginning of the story -- it's been bothering me because it seems so timely:

While the heart beats, bruise it,--it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brother recognition,--make haste,--oppress it with your ill-considered judgments, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.

Mary Astell

For my British/Colonial women Writers class, I'm reading a biography by Ruth Perry called The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist.

An early footnote lists "[a] selection of classics of early scholarship on learned women and women writers and the conditions that shaped their lives" (p. 471, emphasis added). These "classics" go back quite a ways - historical scholarship about literary women is not a modern invention.

I'm listing the dates here and hope to get the titles of the articles/chapters/books at a later time:

• Two from the 19th century: 1861 and 1862
• Two from the second decade of the 20th century: 1913 and 1919
• Six from the third decade: 1920, 1925, three published in 1929, one in 1929-30
• Five in the fourth decade: 1931, two in 1933, 1935-36, 1936
• Four in the fifth decade: two in 1942, 1946, 1947
• Five in the sixth decade: 1954, 1956, two in 1957, 1958-59
• One in the seventh decade: a volume spanning 1965-67

Overall, Perry claims 25 *classics* re. women and creativity: where have all these classics gone?

Doing the math

I've just added up the number of students I'm teaching this semester: 144.

Yikes.

That's 28 and 26 in my two sections of FYC. That's 30 and 31 in my two American literature courses. That's 29 in my WGST course.

All of them will be writing a lot for me, so I will be reading a LOT of student work. Not to mention all the reading I've assigned them: I re-read every semester, especially for the literature courses, because 1) I need the refresher and 2) it's fun!

I have *such* a great job, really -- I get to READ great literature (okay, and mediocre student essays) and then talk about what it might mean . . . with and to human beings who might not have a chance to talk about literature anywhere else but my class.

Yay.

Bill Holm, RIP

Bill spoke at Century -- and Lakewood -- more than once. He, like I, hated the name change, saying it sounded like something a committee of executives would make up, not a college name at all. He's right.

Here's a photographic tribute of him by the photography Jonathan Chapman, courtesy of my pal Cullen Bailey Burns.

What does this sentence mean?

Here's the opening sentence from a student's "field trip report," where s/he is supposed to analyze the experience of going to an independent bookstore, Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, and connect it to the course we've been in: Engl 2061 - Women's Literature: British and Colonial:

"There has been a long, withstanding tradition of preserving women through literature."

I have to say that I get images of orange marmalade in my head . . . :-) And what word should the "withstanding" in that sentence be? I can't figure that one out at all.

Another Good Book

Louise Erdrich's new novel, The Plague of Doves, is getting good reviews. I heard her read from in on Friday at Birch Bark Book's reading space, Lake of the Isles Lutheran Church -- powerful and intriguing.
While waiting for her to sign my book, I watched her gracious greeting of every person: a kind professional.

Good Book

Friday night's reading at Birch Bark Books: Nine of the 21 contributers to Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers. The book's edited by a community college colleague and pal, Kate Kysar, who's done a marvelous job bringing together lots of Minnesota writers, many of whom I've met either as acquaintances, teachers, colleagues, or because I've read their work: Jonis Agee, Barrie Jean Borich, Taiyon Coleman, Allison McGhee, Heid Erdrich, Wang Ping, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, Morgan Grayce Willow.

More Morrison

It's a complete cliche to say that Toni Morrison's novels stun and jolt and amaze the reader -- I mean, she's a Nobel Prize winner -- but it's completely true: the early two, The Bluest Eye and Sula, are teachable (and frequently show up on reading lists, in online paper mill repositories, in Cliff/Sparknotes) because they're more-or-less chronological, focus on young people, and have a clear, if unsatisfactory, ending.

The next two, Song of Solomon which I read in college and Tar Baby which I reread last week, are less . . . what: I wrote "tidy" and realized that's not accurate, then "packaged" which gets at what I mean a little bit (they're not "coming of age" novels in the way the first two are), but ultimately the next two are not as concerned with youth. And I like that: I'm tired of the first two, having read each at least four times so that I can teach them well each semester I teach American Women Writers. But let's see Morrison's progression as an artist.

Then we get to Beloved, the novel that knocked me out for two days after I read it; I was such a wreck emotionally that I'm afraid to read it again, but I suppose it'll impact me differently this time since I don't have young children any more.

To follow Morrison's chronology, Jazz is next, which I just finished this week for the first time. What a perfectly-named novel. And I'm thinking I'd like to teach it in conjunction with Gatsby: same time period, basically; same city (Harlem vs. Long Island); same iconic American story, author, genius. I should have paired them this semester, but I didn't know Jazz. Next time.

Next is Paradise, which I'm currently rereading having forgotten I'd read it, a lovely set of chapters like beads on a chain but brutally broken. Brutally. Then I see her next novel is called Love, and then this year's A Mercy. If these titles are any indication, we can expect more intense emotionality. Pathos in spades.

Listen to her read - and to her friend the poet Reynolds Price - at Duke University. I heard her speak once at the U of Minnesota, in Northrup Auditorium. She wasn't sweet, was strong and brave and irritating. She made us uncomfortable and energized. We need these voices.

Poetry's power

I'm a poetry fan, and I like to teach students about sonnets: they're an example of formal poetry that most students recognize (think Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From The Portuguese, especially "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"); they're also more sophisticated than the nursery-rhymey four-line stanzas that students think of when they think of formal rhymed poetry.

The writer who gets me most excited about sonnets is Edna St. Vincent Millay, who's a master of the Italian form (also called "Petrarchan" after the 14th-century Italian poet who perfected the form, some say). Sure, she uses ten-syllable lines instead of the strictly Petrarchan 7 or 11 syllables, but she uses the classic rhyme scheme: abba abba for the octave, cdc dcd for the sestet.

She also uses the classic content structure: a problem or predicament in the octave and resolution to the problem in the sestet, with the "turn" at line 9. The whole point of sonnets is to juxtapose contrasting ideas, to subvert expectations. Millay's a master at that. But we have to read her sonnets slowly, looking for the grammatical sentences instead of end lines to find her meaning: she's bold!

Here's "Sonnet xli" from 1923 - imagine giving a one-night-stand this kind of brush-off!

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,--let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

What I love about this poem - and Millay in general - is her full acceptance of her corporeality: she's joyful and insistent about being fully human, with all the contradictions and complications that come with living.

Forgetting and remembering

I've been forgetting to update the list of "what I've been reading" that appears at the end of this blog page. (Perhaps because it's at the end of the page! Design really is everything.)

Right now, I'm working on Grace Paley's short stories; she's our bookclub writer this month. Her Collected Stories is out, but I have two old copies of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and The Little Disturbances of Man. I hadn't opened them in years, and when I did yesterday, I happily found that Grace had signed them to me. I saw her read when I was at St. Kate's - probably 25 years ago now. Wow. I remember her energy and wit and white hair - and especially how different she was from any woman, younger or older, that I'd ever known or seen. I'd never met a "city woman" before, and she made me want to visit New York City.

In this 1998 Salon.com interview, she claims that "all my habits are bad." You've just gotta love a writer (or any person) who claims this identity.