Camping Without Kiddos, A Solstice Reflection

We ran away to the mountains again this weekend. We have a few spots we like—a favorite beach campground, an inland canyon campground, and a lovely mountain campground—close enough to skip town for a weekend without too much hassle. This weekend the beach was full, so off to the mountains we went.

It was also the first campout we went on without kids or friends in the last eighteen years or so. Our kids are both off on a two-week school trip to Europe, and we were left to think about that empty nest that’s coming sooner now, rather than later.  Our eldest is starting college in the fall. But we live in LA. He’s not moving out; he can’t afford it. But it will be different nonetheless, and it will bring a series of shifts.

So we are getting a taste of what our future holds.

I’m delighted to report we still enjoy each other’s company. (We did take the dogs, too.) But it was quiet. There was less to pack, less to cook, less to clean. Also fewer helpers, fewer games, and zero ghost stories. We did ok.

We took a lovely hike in the morning with the goals of tiring out the dogs, looking for deer, and reaching cell signal. It was a little pathetic, but we were concerned about the kids’ activities that day, and wanted to receive a text reporting that no one was injured on the bike tour of Munich or too damaged by the concentration camp museum at Dachau. I feel like we were justified, but we really did go hiking with the intent of looking for cell service. Twice.

The kids were fine. They’ll have lots to talk about when they get home, of course, but for now, they’re safe and sound and enjoying adventuring.

On the way back down the mountain I took some pictures. There are always the requisite oak pictures; I love sprawling oak trees. And then there was this one with the busy community of trees.

The middle of the frame is filled with mature, dark grey-green trees.  These are the grown ups. They are thirty foot tall Live Oaks, some with what could be nests or clumps of mistletoe in the branches. These trees are providing for others. The foreground is filled with bright, spring-green, new growth. These are the kids—fresh, green, shooting up, vying for sunshine and sucking it up like sponges until they seem to glow with it. And then there are the old ones. There are a couple of dry, leafless trunks still standing, a stump and a log on the ground. The old trees are nearly as tall as the middle-aged ones, still offering support, but also adding a different quality and texture to the photo and the biome.

It is so with animals too, of course, and with people. On this solstice weekend, when we were thinking about the changing seasons, it was a lovely reminder to think about the cycles of our lives, not just the year. We were grateful to be together, still happy, and to have the opportunity to give our kids this boost toward independence and introduction to the larger world, so they can see too, how different and how similar we all are.

When the kids get home, we’ll listen to their stories and share ours—thankfully the worst thing that happened to us was the crows ate all the dog food; we had to feed them sausages, the poor dears. They’ll tell us about what it was like to ride a gondola in Venice and walk the grounds at Dachau, and we’ll do that thing people do so well—weave a history of community and a web of stories, build a scaffold to support the next phase of our lives.

Postmodernism is Medieval, and How My Students Rock

I have often observed that Postmodern literature is very medieval. But this is the first year I have had trouble separating my pride in training up some medieval lit lovers and coaching the next generation of postmodern writers.

Let me back up. Postmodern literature (literature written after World War II—technically the literary movement that follows Modernism) is characterized by a sense of upending the rules of literature. In novels it can mean disregarding or breaking away from the Grand Narrative tradition—telling a story from a different perspective, or out of order, or with a narrator who is self-reflexive to the point of discussing how the book is progressing with the reader. Julian Barnes’s History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters tells the story of the great flood from the perspective of a woodworm. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler breaks up a self-reflexive narrative arc (where the Reader is a character) with ten other narratives-- aborted “books” the Reader is trying to read.

Essentially, writing fiction becomes play.

How is Postmodernism medieval then?

Many of the tricks Postmodern authors use--playing with order of events, perspective, and amplifying the treatment of relatively small subjects—are all outlined as tricks to help one write in the blindingly contemporary (c. 1200-1215) Poetria Nova, The New Poetry of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. And Geoffrey says he got his best stuff from the Roman rhetorician, Cicero.

Geoffrey advocates taking a small subject like the love affair of one of the lesser known Trojan princes and telling that story as its own narrative. Something that got maybe four lines in The Iliad turns in to the Old French Romance of Troy, then Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, then William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. This is how medieval authors came up with new material.

It’s also how Postmodernists do the same thing.

It’s also how a significant number of my senior literature students made me particularly proud this quarter.

I taught an Introduction to Folklore class this spring. It had a pretty sweeping scope, from the “depth” text of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion, on which we spent nearly three weeks, to the “breadth” of an anthology of folktales from The Arabian Nights to the 20^th century. Along the way I have students write an analytical paper, so they can figure out how these tales and conventions work well enough to explain it to others, and then they can choose to write more analyses or to write their own “folk tale,” since they know all about how it works.

What I got in several cases far exceeded my expectations. I got stories that made use not only of the folk motifs we studied in this class, but the literature and conventions some of them studied in other classes with me earlier in their careers. Some reused characters from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Old Norse myths. Some borrowed scenes from the Odyssey  and Volsunga Saga. One told a tale (including Ovidian characters and fairy tale motifs) using tarot cards, a trope used by Calvino in his Castle of Crossed Destinies. One wrote a fairy tale for her second paper and then an analysis of her own tale for her final paper.  Without my prompting, students took my assignment and ran with it in all manner of cool directions.

I am overjoyed and so very impressed. I am grateful. I am giddy. I am never going to stop giving students creative options. This kind of work means they’re not just learning the stories—they are—but they are also learning techniques, internalizing values, making the literature of the past their own. Nothing gives me more hope for a bright future than students who create boldly, applying what they learn to their own world, and ultimately imagining new worlds.

The kids are going to be ok, everyone. I promise.

(The image is the promotion image from the 2005 Terry Gilliam film The Brothers Grimm, which is also a Postmodern pastiche of multiple fairy tale sources, and this class's last text.)

Once More to Graduation

This weekend ended my sixteenth year at my current position. That’s a lot of graduations, really, but I never get tired of it.

I never get tired of seeing people reach their goals, sometimes after many years, and so all the more richly appreciated. I never get tired of families shouting the names of their young folks (and some not as young) as they cross the stage. I never get tired of hearing the stories of graduates as they thank their families and loved ones for helping them get there.

Ok, I’m a sap. But it’s the best day of the academic year.

In a very real sense, it’s the reason we do our jobs. It’s the reason the university exists—to give students a solid foundation in learning that they can apply the rest of their lives. To open the doors to the universe and see where they will go.

This weekend’s graduation was spectacular again—so many wonderful students crossed that platform; so many hands to shake, so many wishes to share.

And then there was one more.

All weekend long, there was commencement after commencement, from Friday evening through Sunday evening. The one I attended was Sunday afternoon. But I was back this morning, because in the most ruthlessly, beautifully efficient use of resources, the high school my kids attend--which happens to be annexed to my university campus--used the still-erected stage and already-wired sound system for their own graduation. And my oldest child marched down that aisle.

His hat didn’t fit and kept sliding to one side. His medal was twisted around to reveal a 20-sided die from Dungeons and Dragons taped to the back, as if that were his award. He looked uncomfortable, but also excited, anticipating. He was perfect.  

I just sort of assumed my graduation stance and cried. I kept seeing him as a baby, as a kindergartner, as a miserable middle-schooler, and none of that fit with the vision of the tall, handsome young man he was walking down from the stage, diploma in one hand, doofy, ill-fitting hat in the other. He didn’t care about the hat. He was over it--moving on. He was happy.

That’s why graduations are great. No matter what happened on the way, they are crystalline moments where we get to pause and just be happy. Yes, tomorrow will bring more work, and we’ll have to set new goals and carry on. But to pause and recognize good work, to be content for a moment and celebrate success with those who have the most vested interest in your happiness, to breathe in a sweet breath of completion and accomplishment and not worry about what comes next for a little while: that’s worth a lot.

And to share in that feeling with hundreds of people at the same time—that’s some powerful magic.

Congratulations to the Class of 2018. We’re ready for you.

Damn Nature!

I may have my best excuse ever for not blogging last night. I spent three hours at Urgent Care having a bug flushed out of my ear.

It was awesome. I was batting around ideas yesterday as I collected final papers (I usually write on Mondays, so was thinking of a few things that merited a reflection), and End Of School Year thoughts were forming, when I felt a buzzing in my ear.

I asked my husband to come and listen, to see if he could hear it too, or if, finally, I was going crazy. He couldn’t. Not helpful. But I felt it move, so I was convinced.  I had taken a nap and gotten up to write, so it was conceivable to me that something visited while I napped. So, you know...on a scale of 1 to Death, how bad is a bug in your ear?

What followed was the Fairly Recent, Really, But Nonetheless Time-Honored Tradition of the Frantic Internet Search.

I lay down on my side, hoping my visitor would exit of his own accord, and Rob asked The Great and Powerful Google what to do if your wife has a bug in her ear.

Two things. Put a blade of grass in the ear, hoping the bug will grab on like a life preserver, and then drag it out. Failing that, drop olive oil in the ear until you drown the little sucker and it floats out on a wave of gold.

Sure. We did both. The grass was monumentally uncomfortable, for those interested. I don’t recommend.

Then my 15-year old daughter figured out there was something wrong with mom and came in to the bedroom as the hubby was peering purposefully in to my ear. She rushed to the bed and shouted, “Oh my god, mom!” as if there were half a dozen tentacles threading out of my ear. We need to work on her Crisis Voice.

Sure enough, Rob saw “something.” So we called Kaiser.

I was told to go to Urgent Care, not wait until tomorrow, which is always heartening. On the other hand trying to sleep, knowing you have a squatter in your ear canal probably wouldn’t be easy either.

The nurse saw “something” as well. The doctor did not. He just asked how I could be so calm and pleasant with a bug in my ear. Sweetie, this is nothing, I didn’t say, but thought. But it wasn’t. It was uncomfortable, disconcerting, deeply annoying, but not painful or bloody. Dude. I’ve had worse.

The good side of him not seeing anything was that there wasn’t, you know, a cockroach or a wombat in there. The bad side was that he relinquished duty to the nurse, who was awesome, and who flushed the living daylights out of my ear with four power blasts like a Super Soaker Battle Royale. 

These assaults produced a little soft ear wax with what may have been bug parts and an ear canal so raw and inflamed, I now have to put antibiotic/anti-inflammatory drops in there four times a day for a week.

But there’s no more buzzing.

In retrospect, it wasn’t bad. My sweet husband administered the grass blade and olive oil with jokes and gentleness. He grabbed his chemistry tests and graded them in the waiting room with as much grace as if that were what he’d planned on doing with his evening. And he quoted fabricated statistics on the way to make me feel better--"No, seriously, it's way more common than people think--something like 1 in 6 people. Thanks for taking one for the team." He’s amazing.

The friend I texted to gripe about it was just as cheerful and supportive. “Damn nature!” she said, when I told her we were on our way home.

Hey, it gave me something to blog about.

Revisiting Reading to Kids

This is a shameless repost from October 2016, but because I hope it bears repeating, because more people read this blog now than did then, and because I graded twenty-eight papers in the last two days and am wiped out, here it is again. I hope even those who read it a year and a half ago aren't too disappointed. Good evening to you all.

The best thing I have ever done for my kids, and probably for myself as well, is read to them. When I was pregnant, I had my husband read to me. (People told me that was a good way to have the baby recognize daddy’s voice when he or she made her appearance.)  When they were too tiny to scoot away, I held them and read to them, pointing at pictures and making big faces along with the book. By the time they were able to scoot away, they didn’t want to.  Storytime was such a warm, happy place that we could sit for an hour by the time they were one, when everyone was telling me babies had no attention span. A few years of books bringing close, loving, quiet time, and my kids associated books with happiness. Neither one of them has lost that, even during those perilous ‘tween years, when pressure increases to do more and be more cool.They are 14 and 16 now, and they both read more than I do. And while we don’t have faithful, nightly storytime (starting about a year ago), I still read some--just bigger books: The Odyssey and The Iliad. A Tale of Two Cities.

There have always been books all over my house. My parents used to talk about “decorating with books.” They had whole walls of bookshelves in most rooms of their house, so I grew up knowing books as a part of daily life long before college--where I first dubbed myself a reader. My house looks like that too, now, but with a lot more kids’ books, and a lot less order. There are books in every room, and some of them are not neatly stored on shelves, but stacked on tables or desks, resting on the couch where they were last read, or piled on the floor, practically becoming furniture themselves because we can’t bear to put them away and have them not close at hand. That was the one request I could never refuse, if I had the money. I could say no to the Nerf gun or the latest Littlest Pet Shop critter, but if they wanted a book, that was something else.That was an investment.

And it has paid off more than I could have anticipated. At the end of third grade, my daughter was testing at 12^th grade level, and her teacher thanked me for doing all that “enrichment” at home.  Reading to her?  Really? I certainly never did flashcards or drills or any overt reading instruction. All I did was read. We talked about the books, defined unfamiliar words as we went, and talked about anything scary or troubling as well as laughed together about the funny moments. And we built a repertoire of stories that became our shared frame of reference for the world. That kid is just like Ferdinand the Bull; he just wants some quiet time to himself. Today I feel like Angelina the mouse, when she submarined herself and missed her chance to be in the big ballet. Poohsticks is just like Calvinball is just like our made-up games. 

Both kids called the shots on their relationship to storytime, in addition to helping choose the titles. The girly went through a phase where she wanted to “be” the people in the stories.  She would point and assign: “I’ll be Frances, Mommy. You be Gloria.” (Can you name that picture book series?)  And we would start from the plot of the book and make up new adventures for the sisters. My son left the couch at around 8 years old and never came back. He built stuff with Legos on the living room floor while we read; his sister eagerly followed along with the words, but he was happy to listen and keep his hands busy.

I don’t think there’s any right way to read to kids. I think any time we spend reading to kids is good. If we ham it up with voices and emotions, they get involved viscerally, but if we don’t do so much, they bring their own faculties to bear. If we let them read some too, they get to feel like they run the show too, but if we don’t, they get more time listening to an experienced reader, and their skills improve more quickly. Kids benefit from being exposed to a wide variety of genres and cultures, so it helps if the reader brings in new stuff the kids have never seen. But kids also thrive on repetition, the familiar, and the power to choose texts for themselves, so reading time is best when it’s a mix of both impulses. In fact, the only way I can think of screwing up storytime is simply by not having it.  

Words of Power--the knotty beauty of the Kalevala

The Finnish national Epic, The Kalevala, begins and ends with the image of a skein of stories. The narrator talks of pulling one thread out and seeing where that story goes. One story connects to another, as we know, like drawing out more and more yarn from a skein.

I love to teach it at the end of our epics class, when people are well-versed in the distinctions between primary and secondary epics (primary being orally composed, the accretion of hundreds of years of story-telling finally written down, like the Odyssey or Beowulf, while secondary epics are authored, like Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost). I ask them on the first day which pile the Kalevala falls in to, and the answer is both.

Not really, but close enough to be interesting. The Kalevala was collected and edited in the 19^th century in a nationalistic effort comparable to the Grimms’ in collecting their fairy tales. And just as folklorists chide the Grimms for not being completely authentic in their reproduction of the tales they collected, Elias Lönnrot shaped, edited, and generally intervened in the song of the people much like an author would, even if not to the same degree.

The result is amazingly cool. Yes, I love it that much.

It’s got stories that feel achingly ancient, like the creation of the world by the water mother, Ilmatar. She is alone and lonely and begs for companionship, so allows herself to be impregnated by the sea. But when her child takes 730 years to gestate (!), she kills the time by shaping the heavens and earth from broken egg shells, the sun and moon from a yolk and some egg whites.

When her child is finally born, he is already an old man. He is a World Singer like Orpheus, capable of calling things in to existence, transforming things, and moving rocks and trees and animals with his songs. His name is Vainamoinen, and he is a rock star.

But he’s also old as the hills, so no one wants to marry him. In fact, the first girl we see him woo (and she is a girl—Merida from the Pixar film Brave leaps to mind), essentially kills herself rather than marry him. Aino goes to the edge of the water and is swept down in to the waves. It seems like she drowns, but she actually transforms in to a salmon that Vainamoinen catches later and must release. He mourns her twice. Like Orpheus.

So it feels old—very old—primal… creation of the world and human society sort of old. When Vainamoinen is wounded, he seeks the origin of iron, so he can write a spell to staunch the blood. The ancient motif of knowing “true names” or true history as a source of power over something feels prehistoric, almost. But here it is in a 19^th century poem, where they’re also concerned about controlling the iron in his blood. It’s a beautiful mishmash.

These stories are so strange and so unsettling, they remind me what it felt like to be a child, when everything was new and therefore strange. But also marvelous. Also full of magic and potential. And because they elevate storytelling to the level of spell-casting, they remind me of our always present power to transform our world through words. Weaving is one of the oldest metaphors we use for storytelling. Text and textile are related. And we all have the ability to weave our words into wisdom; all we do is tug on that thread and see where it takes us.

Slow Reading: How What We Read Becomes Who We Are

I went to my annual conference last week. I have spent twenty-two long weekends in May in Kalamazoo, Michigan at the biggest annual international medieval conference in North America. Coming from the West coast, I always think it should take me half a day, and the last few years it has taken upwards of 16 hours. This time I pretty much decided I’ve had a good run, but I don’t have time for the chaos of travel.

So it was important that I got good stuff out of what might be my last run. So the universe obliged me. This time I came home thinking big thoughts about Slow Reading.

As my university converts from a quarter schedule to semesters starting in the fall, we are all thinking about how our courses will change. Mostly, as a literature instructor, I’m looking forward to adding some texts back in to my syllabus. I certainly took things out when I moved from fifteen-week semesters to ten-week quarters.

But as I think about my Chaucer class, and as I met with Chaucerians and other folks who teach literature (I went to a particularly great session on teaching literature in translation), I think I won’t add text so much as add depth. I’m going to embrace, model, and flex my Slow Reading skills.

My session was a workshop on pronouncing Chaucer’s Middle English. We spent 90 minutes on 220 lines of the Wife of Bath’s prologue. It was awesome.

With that much time, you can figure out what everything means, then figure out how reading it different ways changes that meaning. You can talk about performance issues—tone, pacing, what words you stress or scumble, and what all that does to build an understanding of the character.

I’m just getting my head in to this mode, but since a recent article tripped across my social media feed reminding us that “slow reading” helps us think deeper and cultivate empathy, I started a list of things I want our slow reading to do.

Here’s the preliminary list.

Slow Reading is:

Knowing what every word means and does;
Looking at connotations in double entendres;
Understanding the context of the work;
Reading with attention to sound and visual rhyme;
Reading for musicality;
Reading for voice/persona;
Knowing your language;
Knowing your lit;
Knowing your history;
Knowing your shit.

Ok, I got a bit carried away at the end. It’s a work in progress. But it’s important, and I’ll keep thinking about it and working on it. This is how the words become a part of us. Skimming doesn’t do it. We need to read some things really deeply and let them change us. We cannot overstress the importance of the process of reading.

I’m starting to get really excited about semesters.

(The article I was referencing above is “Reading Literature Makes us Smarter and Nicer” by Annie Murphy Paul, published in Time, and available here: http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/03/why-we-should-read-literature/ )