The Painful Nowning Process

And time yet for hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions

says T.S. Eliot, and time to read those neglected classics. Or, perhaps, time to forget about them and give it up as a bad job, like these famous authors who confess their literary blanks to Slate, along with some page-turners they’d rather read instead of, say, Middlemarch or Moby-Dick.

All right, I have read Moby-Dick, thanks to Professor Louis Rubin’s American Literature course at UNC-CH, but I probably would never have gotten through it without his guidance and the combined carrot/stick encouragement of a grade. Middlemarch—sorry, but I have read a boatload of Dickens.

What’s the point of this kind of feature? I’d say—read all you can, at least give the “great books” a try, but few of us will have time or inclination (or, perhaps, ability) to read everything. If you’ve found at least a few authors and books among the “greats” that feed your soul, you’re well on your way.

Novelist Tracy Grant blogs about the works of Dorothy Dunnett, a mutual favorite author, and how great books can bring people together and lead them to discover other good books and works of art—music, visual art, films and television.

“That time of year thou may’st in me behold” when entropy starts to overcome order and things—such as this blog, and grading student papers from several weeks ago, and submitting my conference expense report—start falling through the cracks. If you’re reading this and I owe you something, I apologize. Eventually, and probably before anything truly dire occurs, it will be done. The good news is: we had rain today. The bad news: the weather postponed my appointment with the HVAC guys—see? Entropy!

On the other hand, while we need rain desperately, one day of it can’t overcome the severe drought situation of the entire state. Although  major cities are imposing water restrictions on their denizens, our rural county of loosely organized farms and villages seems to be in the “What, me worry?” zone. A colleague remarked to me this afternoon, “I wonder what the University is doing to promote water conservation?” Good question. So, if any students, faculty, or administrators are reading this, I recommend this editorial on saving water from the current Biblical Recorder.

One of the great privileges of living in a wealthy society is that we can so willingly entrust matters of our survival into someone else’s hands. We trust the grocer for food; the state for roads; the department store for clothes; and city or county planners for water.

When we trust others to provide our most basic needs we lose track of the reality that we bear responsibility for what happens from here….

Can you skip a shower some day? Don’t let the water run when you shave. Use the water you run down the drain waiting for it to turn hot. Don’t flush that bug you caught.

It’s easy to let things go, but we should be working to live a life in which all the pieces connect—an integrated life. And now, I have some papers to grade…

You could be my former student Michelle Burford. Currently working on her Master’s degree at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE), she was a founding editor of O: the Oprah Magazine, and has also been an editor and feature writer for Essence and Latina. Michelle worked her way up from regional publications to the big-time, and while working on her degree she continues to write features and has also completed a summer theology program at Oxford University. Michelle has worked hard to achieve all she has so far, and she isn’t done yet!

Recently I somehow managed to compare medieval studies definitions of literary sources and analogues, specifically Chaucerian sources and analogues, with some ways contemporary TV shows function as sources and analogues. So perhaps I was still thinking along those lines when I came across Joss Whedon’s take on a rhetorical scheme Chaucer uses frequently (which he learned from any number of other authors), the inexpressibility topos (among several stylistic devices). Here, with Whedon’s peculiar combination of poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, he shows us how NOT to describe the saddest song in the world. Genius is where you find it, I say. Or else, possibly, poetry is poetry.

“What?” (alternatively, “Hwaet!”) or possibly “Who knew?” or maybe “Who could resist?” Certainly not me, as a scholar/fan of two TV series that posit any number of alternative dimensions (including a world occupied entirely by shrimp [Angel 5.17 "Underneath"]). Yet while I kind of like the idea of a Nobel Prize in literature “in which genre writers have a chance,” some of the choices on the alternative list are a bit too general. I mean—Zane Grey? Ian Fleming? Theodor Seuss Geisel? And while I may not be the greatest admirer of Doris Lessing, I draw the line at J.K. Rowling, even if I have enjoyed all the Harry Potter books.

So I’m putting together a reading list for a course I’ll teach next semester on “Postcolonial British Literature.” One title that occurred to me was Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, which I read this past summer not long before I saw the movie—twice—the second time with my dad—and enjoyed it both times. Since Lahiri describes herself as Indian-American, I guess I can’t quite justify including her novel in a British lit course, but I can still recommend it, and Lahiri’s eloquent description of her experience as a particular type of third-culture-kid:

While I am American by virtue of the fact that I was raised in this country, I am Indian thanks to the efforts of two individuals. I feel Indian not because of the time I’ve spent in India or because of my genetic composition but rather because of my parents’ steadfast presence in my life….

I have always believed that I lack the authority my parents bring to being Indian. But as long as they live they protect me from feeling like an impostor. Their passing will mark not only the loss of the people who created me but the loss of a singular way of life, a singular struggle.

No, not NBC’s Heroes–though I recommend them. Barbara Nicolosi on Heroes in Storytelling. She’s got some very good things to say, though I believe she’s completely missed the point of Napoleon Dynamite.

During my years in the Congo, we frequently heard the name of Henry Morton Stanley, whose statue used to stand in Kinshasa (formerly Leopoldville), looking up the Congo River. This review of a new biography of the famed explorer reveals that he was both less and more than he seemed. Sounds fascinating.