reveries - literature

13.17. Book #6 2013

Some of my students have a hard time with the playfulness of post-modernist literature--especially with its tendency toward deconstruction. We read this immediately after reading Homer, and some of them have a hard time having the rug pulled out from under their notions about Odysseus and Penelope. But Atwood is only doing what "Homer" did a long time ago. She does a little "story-making" with mythic characters.

I try to tell them that this kind of intertextual gamesmanship is pretty much how all literature works. There's only one real "author." The rest of us sub-creators simply take what has been given us, rearrange, rewrite, and retell.

There's only one story. Infinite variations, though.

Some of them think this is primarily Penelope's story. But Atwood allows the chorus of maids to subvert and maybe trump Penelope's narrative at every step along the way. In the end, theirs is the final word--at least in this novel.

→ 12:37 PM, Feb 17

13.13. Book #5 2013

A re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-read.

And it gets better every time.

→ 8:27 PM, Feb 1

13.9. Book #3 2013

A re-read of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.

It's a story about the love for a place, about hospitality, about friendship, with a great chapter wherein Mole and Rat have a mystical experience I find lovely. The chapter is called "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn."

Here's an amazing Van Morrison song based on that chapter.
[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np66auTlsOw])

→ 3:17 PM, Jan 19

13.4. Book #1 2013

Dog-Heart by Diana McCaulay

As an experiment (and who knows if this will last), I'm going to post a picture and brief reflection on each book I read (cover to cover, that is) this year.

Dog Heart is the first book I finished reading in 2013, and it's a good one. You can read some reviews here.

I knew a lot of Dexter's when I lived in Kingston; they came to the basketball court we'd helped them build--after school, Saturdays. McCaulay has so many details just right. The relentless heat, the smells, the all night noise, the crowded buses, the impossible conditions within Kingston's all age schools. And though I am not a middle class Jamaican single mother like the other main character (Sahara) in the novel, and though I knew much less about people like her, she strikes me as believable and more like me than I might care to admit. She sees a hungry boy and she wants to do more than give him a few coins this time. But her going beyond the few coins unintentionally sets the stage for an unhealthy one way dependency that becomes difficult to move beyond.

What I most like about the story is that it doesn't offer any easy answers, because there really aren't any. Kingston's ghettos are--what little I experienced of them, especially the one I knew best--are places in desperate need of worldview transformation as preparation for receptivity to the gospel. And yet there are more Christian churches in those ghettos per square mile than almost anywhere on earth.

I look back on my time in Kingston and I wonder what difference it made to the Dexter's I knew. I do not know. I also wonder what difference that time has made for me. I am still trying to figure that out.

p.s. We were missionaries in Jamaica from 1997-1999 with RENEWED ministries, a ministry committed to multiplication discipleship through sports ministry.

→ 8:30 PM, Jan 4

82. On the Importance of Imagination

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.”

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

This is one reason to read great literature, or so I tell my students. Literature isn’t going to make us better people necessarily, but exercising our imaginations by entering empathetically into the lives of characters, feeling their pains and pleasures, can be a good “Christian” practice. It prepares us to do the same thing in real life. But reading a lot of imaginative literature doesn’t guarantee that we will do what Shelley recommends when it matters most (in real life) or that we will respond with the appropriate and loving actions even if we do manage to use our imaginations empathetically.

Still, I suspect that–like the person who regularly practices anything–the person who regularly exercises the imagination in this way has a better chance of becoming more actively compassionate than the person who doesn’t bother with the practice.

→ 3:46 PM, Sep 7

43. Mastered by Truth

"The act of knowing is an act of love."
"The known seeks to know me even as I seek to know it; such is the logic of love . . . I not only pursue but truth pursues me. I not only grasp truth but truth grasps me. I not only know truth but truth knows me. Ultimately, I don't not master truth but truth masters me." (Parker Palmer, To Know as We Are Known)

What would happen if each day I prepared to teach I remembered this?

What would happen if each day in class I reminded myself of this?

What would happen if each course I teach were designed with this in mind?

What would happen if each class session I taught I reminded myself and my students of this?

What would happen if I always read literature fully conscious of this?

Would my college have the truly "vibrant community" we say we're committed to in our Vision Statement if we embraced this notion of education as our communal pursuit of Truth--the Truth that (or who) pursues us even as we pursue it (Him)?

How does one assess things like "content knowledge" if we embrace the fact that "to know something is to have a living relationship with it", and that "the act of knowing is an act of love"?

→ 9:40 PM, Mar 4

35. Nothing
1. Someone named Adele won a bunch of Grammy awards the other night. I did not watch the show. I had never heard of this person until the next morning when they mentioned she won a bunch of awards.

2. I am a professor of English. Consider the so-called “classics” I’ve never read. This is not an exhaustive list.
- Every novel written by Charles Dickens except A Tale of Two Cities.
- Every play by Shakespeare except for Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing . (Note: I have a prejudice here. I think Shakespeare wanted people like me--who cannot act--to see his plays performed.)
- Moby Dick.
- To date, I've never been able to finish a novel by Jane Austen. I've tried. She's funny, but after awhile I just don't care about the characters anymore and would rather watch X-Files reruns.
- Paradise Lost. I know what it's about and I read "excerpts" in college. Reading excerpts usually helps convince me that I don't really care to read something.
- The Faerie Queen. Ditto.
- The Brother's Karamazov. Once again, I tried more than once. Then I read what Nabokov said about the author and agreed. Here is what he said in an interview:
Interviewer: Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar." Why?

VN: Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.
- War and Peace. Someday maybe. Someday.
- Any novel by Faulkner or Hemingway.
I could go on. Enthusiastic students sometimes ask me for a list of books they ought to read. I really have a hard time producing these lists, since lists like these already exist. I tell them I can make a list of books I've enjoyed, but that "ought" seems so dogmatically prescriptive. And the truth is, there are so many good books to read, that I gave up trying to read the ones I "ought" a long time ago. If I'm not enchanted in the first fifty or a hundred pages, I put the thing aside and move on to one of the thousand other good books waiting to be read. It doesn't mean I won't come back to it someday in a different stage of life and give it another go. I might. I've done this. I couldn't tolerate Toni Morrison the first time I gave her Beloved a shot, but it was an assignment and I plodded through. I read it again years later, and really liked it. By the sixth time reading it, I was utterly in love with it. I think it may well be the great American novel. You should read it.

3. I do not understand how NFL football, this barbarous, uber-specialized, ultra violent, war charade, which leaves young men crippled in body and mind later in life can be more popular in America than major league baseball, nba basketball, nhl hockey, wnba basketball, major league soccer, word cup soccer, champions league soccer, or even youth league soccer. Especially considering how many so-called "exciting games" end up getting decided by place-kickers.

4. In May of 2010 Glenn Beck, in his commencement address at Liberty University, said this:

"It is God’s finger that wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is God’s country; these are God’s rights."

Such "mormonic" (pun intended), jingoistic, American exceptionalism coming from this particular evangelical university should not surprise me, I guess. What does bother me is how many Christians still listen to this lunatic as if he speaks the very words of God. I cannot begin to understand this, and find it, quite frankly, a little terrifying. American exceptionalism makes sense as a Mormon doctrine--it fits that narrative, and Romney and Beck are free to spout it all they like. But for crying out loud, biblical Christians ought to expose it for the nonsense that it is. And then get busy with something more worthwhile like ignoring the two of them and reading War and Peace. Or listening to Adele on Pandora. Or watching UEFA League soccer.
→ 11:57 AM, Feb 18

29. Odysseus and I Agree

"My Lord Alcinous, what could be finer
Than listening to a singer of tales
Such as Demodocus, with a voice like a God's?
Nothing we do is sweeter than this--
A cheerful gathering of all the people
Sitting side by side throughout the halls,
Feasting and listening to a singer of tales,
The tables filled with food and drink,
The server drawing wine from the bowl
And bringing it around to fill our cups.
For me, this is the finest thing in the world."
                                     -Odysseus, Odyssey Book 9
If it were solely up to me, this quote would appear on all of our English department promotional literature. I realize what students and parents want to know when they consider a college major is far more utilitarian, and I can probable make some reasonable claims about the utility and uses of literature, but for me, the reason to choose an English major has far more more to do with pleasure than with anything else.

Let's play Jeopardy.

A = "So what are you going to do with that?"
Q = What is the question an English major gets any time they tell someone their major.

One good answer to the question is "whatever I would have done otherwise, only better." Another good response deconstructs the question and its reductionistically utilitarian assumptions about a college major and about college education, and reveals the bankrupt theological anthropology of the questioner.

For instance, maybe a college major is about considerably more than training for some job. And maybe a college education is, too. Maybe the most important outcome of an education is most significantly a more educated person. Isn't it better to be educated than not? Shouldn't a good education in the liberal arts--especially one that is robustly Christian--enrich the whole person and serve as a catalyst for human flourishing? Shouldn't that kind of education have a way of deepening all life experiences?   And even if a college education and a college major does prepare a person for a lifetime of work, it is quite likely that most of us will do a lot of different sorts of things with our lives after college and after majoring in English. And maybe, and most significantly, people are created in the image of God as human beings rather than mere human "doers" as the question implies.  And maybe a major in English--the study of the theory, history, consumption, and production of literature--teaches how to bear God's image and to be like God as creator (as sub-creators) as well as almost anything one could spend her time studying in college. Maybe spending significant time for four years developing one's Christian imagination--significantly what reading and writing literature at a place like Bethel can do for us--can serve one for a lifetime.

But my best answer is still Odysseus' appeal to the pleasure we get from literature. Call me a hedonist. I'm in good company, I think. Not just the company of Odysseus, but the company of the authors of the Bible, who created beautiful things, and intended not merely to edify us, but to delight us. Consider Ecclesiastes 12:9-10 (ESV).

"Besides being wise, <sup class="xref" value="(C)">the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging <sup class="xref" value="(D)">many proverbs with great care. ¹⁰ <sup class="xref" value="(E)">The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth."

Why so much poetry? Why so much story? Why so many delightful stories? The Bible could have come to us as a series of inelegant propositional claims. But it doesn't, thank God. Instead, these author's reflected their Creator and made lovely things for us to enjoy, stories and songs that would enchant us. Surely there was some of the pleasure in the composition of the pieces that make up this great anthology of literature we now call the Bible that we note in God's words when he paused and called his grand creation "very good."

"For me, this is the finest thing in the world."   Me too.

→ 10:48 AM, Jan 29

18. On Literature and Confession
Every semester I have to come up with some new idea for a literature seminar. Every semester I agonize over this decision–over choosing a topic to spend fifteen weeks with, over finding something that I’ll be energized enough by to enjoy and to facilitate, and something that maybe a few students will find interesting enough to want to explore together. I’m not as successful in my choices as I’d like to be, and sometimes I’m surprised by the responses. There have even been times when I’ve feltl like something wasn’t going so well, but it turned out by the end of the semester the students were expressing much more appreciation than I could had sensed throughout the term.

Anyhow, here's a list of seminar topics going back several years.
- Post-modernist literature
- Myth and Archetype in Literature
- Nobel prize winners
- Nietzsche and the novelists
- Clashes of culture
- Survival literature
- Love and friendship
- Literary Friendships
- Bringing life to literature
- Modern European masterpieces
- The Sermon on the Mount and Story
- C.S. Lewis, Samuel Johnson and the Great Conversation
A theme that has run throughout virtually every course I teach has finally surfaced in my mind and now I can't shake it. This April I'm presenting a paper at a regional conference on Christianity and Literature up at Calvin College during the Festival on Faith and Writing. The paper's title is "Bringing Life the Text and the Text to Life: Case Studies from the Literature Classroom as Confessional Space."

My own encounters with literature almost inevitably spark "confession." And for a majority of my students who take the time to really engage the literature I assign for classes like these and others, it tends to have the same effect. I'm not sure I know exactly why, but I aim to explore this in the paper I will co-write with a colleague.

Meanwhile, I came up with a topic for the fall seminar in literature. "Literature and Confession."

So much for indirection.
→ 12:48 PM, Jan 18