Eng. 180: Arthur Conan Doyle

What a whirlwind week of Sherlock Holmes it has been--and I'm actually really sad to see him go.  Since none of my students signed up for the Conan Doyle author presentation (not really surprised, since it came up really fast), I did it--and that meant I got to watch the British Sherlock series and call it "research."  The movies themselves I didn't watch again until this week.  I love my job.  Watching the Robert Downey, Jr./Jude Law Sherlock Holmes yesterday, I picked up on a lot of things I hadn't on previous watchings--like Holmes wanting to dissect Blackwood's brain (Victorians were big on phrenology), etc.

Monday started with the author presentation, which was lovely if I do say so myself.  Then we jumped right in and talked about "A Scandal in Bohemia."  Whether it was Monday, only the fourth time we'd seen each other, the first day of a new author (and era), or something else, my class was sleepy and difficult to engage in conversation.  But we did get to talk about gender and class, as well as narrative structure and other fun things.

On Wednesday, I changed my tactics for our discussion of "The Speckled Band."  I divided them up into groups (hopefully covering those who didn't read their assignment), then assigned each group a specific question.

• What role does the built environment play in this story?  How is it being used?  Where can you identify where it is playing an active role in the plot (making things happen or preventing them from happening)?
• What purpose does the natural environment play here?  Where is it being used, to what purpose?
• How is the environment itself literally a part of the narrative structure?  (After all, this is actually a locked-door mystery.)
• Where can you identify where what Conan Doyle/Holmes/Victorian society values?  And how is what they value being threatened by the crime?
• Where is class reflected by how Conan Doyle uses place in this story?

I let them go for a while and then we came back together--and while we're still stuck in the question-and-answer stage of awkward discussion (rather them talking with each other), they mostly got what I was hoping they would.  The built environment--mostly in the use of Stoke Moran--plays an active role in the plot, because without the renovations that Grimesby Roylott is making to the house, Helen Stoner would not have been moved into the room where her sister died (and she suspects was murdered).  I just love that.  Nature is regarded as threat here, not a pastoral paradise.  Even when Grimesby Roylott shows up at 221B Baker Street and he is described in terms of the natural world (bird of prey, etc.), he's also described in terms of how he fills the doorway.  Brilliant.

Today, we finish up our Holmes unit with "The Red-Headed League."  We talked motive today, as that was our specific theme for the day.  Why do we do what we do?  I told them the story of my college math professor who once told us that the root of all conflicts was either money, sex, or power.  Yup.  In our class, we questioned not only why the criminal-villain does what s/he does--but an even more interesting question we rarely consider is why does the detective do what s/he does?  Holmes, for the most part, does it because it saves him from being bored, it's a mental challenge.  He doesn't do it for the greater good, to clean up the streets, for justice, or any other more noble calling.  I can't wait to talk about motive further as we keep reading--should be interesting when we get to Raymond Chandler... 

In the classic detective stories we've been reading, and specifically Conan Doyle this week, the mores of Victorian society, the ideals of honor, class, and gender roles are incredibly important--and a lot of the villain's motives are related to those elements.  That John Clay is the bastard of a royal duke is important, because it puts Clay outside accepted society--even as he invokes his grandfather's blood to get better treatment (and the aristocracy would have received better treatment anyway).  It is also important to remember that Holmes only investigates crimes of the "higher order," not the lower class of crimes, which I term to be crimes of survival (like stealing because one is hungry).  Murder is fairly rare in Conan Doyle, so the idea that more is at stake than the body is incredibly important.  In only one of the three stories we read for this week is there a murder.  Murder is much more common in contemporary crime literature and in many cases, motive is moot, simply because the villain functions as simply "evil," a psychopath or sociopath whose mind does not operate on the same wavelength as "normal" people.  Also, the theme of revenge/justice is also more common as a motive for crime in contemporary crime literature.  Should be interesting to explore as we move into Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" next week.

"The Red-Headed League" is different in the narrative structure itself--generally, there is no interaction of Holmes with the crime.  In this story, the crime he is investigating has not happened yet and his goal is to foil the plot.  In the classic detective stories of this type (and in modern times, the tv show Monk is a good example), the story is divided in two:  the story of the crime is self-contained and the story of the investigation is self-contained and never the twain shall meet.  Mostly.  But writers break their rules all the time.  Almost never in this type of story does the detective have a personal relationship with the criminal he is tracking--but in this story, Holmes has been after the culprit for quite some time.We spent the first part of class talking about all the rules that Conan Doyle is breaking here, narratively, what makes "The Red-Headed League" different from the other stories we've read--and the first thing one of my students said was that the crime hasn't been committed yet, that the plot is about preventing the crime, not catching the villain after the fact.  The other major thing my students observed is that Holmes has a personal relationship with the villain, John Clay--and this is another breaking of general rules, where the crime and the detection are separate, that the detective has no personal stake in catching the villain.  

Note to self:  this group does not say much when we're in a large group.  In the future, lesson plans must include some sort of group work.

In other news, congratulations to William Kent Krueger on the release of his new Cork O'Connor book Trickster's Point, which debuted at #12 on the New York Times bestseller list!  Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy and a better writer--and I can't wait to introduce him to my students, both in the first book in the O'Connor series (Iron Lake) and via Skype when we get to talk to him face to face.

And the good news this morning is that Dennis Lehane has agreed to do an email interview with my class (hopefully next time I teach a class like this it will fit better with his schedule)--so we still get to ask him questions about Mystic River!

Life is good.  I picked up some Ken Bruen and Declan Hughes at the library a couple of days ago, so if I get some free time this Labor Day weekend, I get to spend to take a tour of Galway's seedy side with Ken Bruen and Dublin with Declan Hughes.  And we (hopefully) get the bad guys.  Interesting to see how the literature of social order functions in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland...

Eng. 180: If It Bleeds, It Leads

Today, as I prepped to teach my English 180 Lit students about Edgar Allan Poe as the father of crime literature (though I actually sort of disagree with that, because crime lit can be traced back to ancient literature like the Bible), the father of the detective story (more people agree on that), I opened my Safari to see that Lance Armstrong will be stripped of his Tour de France titles and banned for life from the sport.  A gunman has shot several people at the Empire State Building.  If it bleeds (even it's emotionally), it leads.

Today's Reading:  Edgar Allan Poe.  "A Cask of Amontillado," "Fall of the House of Usher," and "Murders in the Rue Morgue."  Also, Margaret Kane, "Edgar Allan Poe and Architecture."

But that was a good way to segue into my class, as we're questioning what constitutes literature--and I referenced how many of them wrote in their Short Histories about preferring to read articles and such online.  Most of the exposure we get to crime "literature" is actually on the front page of our newspapers.  Food for thought, if nothing else.  And, I said, what I saw today just in those three articles is an extension of what I talked about on Wednesday.  If crime literature is the literature of maintaining social order, then to see that Lance Armstrong is being punished for cheating (regardless if you think he's guilty or not), to see that Anders Breivik is being punished for killing 77 people--that simply reaffirms that crime disrupts the social order and the purpose of whatever we write about it (of course, that's a huge generalization) is to reestablish that social order.

I started class by asking my students to free write for a bit, about where they're starting to see connections, where they're starting to see things showing up in what they're reading that becoming familiar.  I always find that students participate in a discussion much more willingly when they've had a few minutes to think through their pens and have an answer of a sort in front of them.  Had I just asked that question point-blank, I would have gotten nothing.  When we came back together, they had some good answers (and I hope they use some of them in their first Think Pieces, which are due on Monday) about being able to pay attention to what Margaret Kane was writing about (we read her 1932 article on Poe and architecture).  I came into class this morning, admittedly, pessimistic, wondering how many of my students would just read the Cliff's Notes...

Today's shocker:  when I asked how many had read Tom Clancy, nobody raised their hands.

We talked our way through Margaret Kane first, because this is their first exposure to a critical article.  Yup, not anybody's idea of fun.  But not all writing is here to entertain you (a dig at how many of them said they hated reading and literature because they expect to be entertained by it, they expect to be able to relate to it)--and I was fairly pointed on that fact.  And in the scheme of things, Kane is pretty tame.  I asked how many of them read the information about where and when it was published (nobody) and the looks of surprise when I said it was published in 1932, priceless.  Of course, I needed to mention that a woman writing literary criticism like this in the 1930s is pretty rare--and thus important.  I drew a map of sorts on the board (ironically, with a red marker) of Kane's article as we deconstructed it, made an outline, sort of.  My outlines never follow linear patterns.  They loop, they have arrows that go different places, and this article outline was no different.  But by the time we got through it, and I asked how many were starting to see what she was doing, I got nods from most of the class.

This is good.

I asked how many had read Kane first (not too many) and it's definitely a different reading experience when you read her first and then read the Poe stories, knowing what to look for.  So after we talked about the exteriors Poe uses, huge and old and decaying, and the interiors (the ways he uses irregularly shaped rooms, windows to control light, etc.) I divided them up into groups, gave each group one of the stories, and had them look for these things.  Because about half my class showed up without the stories or the article, it was hard, and by this point in the class I felt extremely rushed, because I hate 50 minute classes.  I feel like we just get into something and then we have to shut it down because the class is over.  So I rushed through what they found--and I also didn't want to make any more of how many of them did not bring their texts to class--and then I talked through the stories.

I started with "A Cask of Amontillado," mentioned various things about class and the built environment--and that it's a good example of what I talked about on Wednesday about early crime literature being in the realm of revenge/justice.  (Heads nodded when I said that--yay, connections!)  But the whole point of me assigning this story is not just the built environment leading to Fortunato's death, or that this is a story of murder without a detective--it is the story of the perfect crime.  Montressor never gets caught, not even after fifty years.  Admittedly, Gothic is not my specialty, but this strikes me as an anti-Gothic story--that a secret from the past that should threaten Montressor's present doesn't.  This is a story of the perfect crime.

In "Fall of the House of Usher," I asked my students how many of them knew what a "tarn" was.  Nobody.  How many looked it up?  Nobody.  Google is your friend, people.  In this case, it's important.  A tarn is a mountain pool that is formed in the circque created by a glacier.  (And in my head I could see Hart Lake at Holden Village, up in the Cascades of Washington State.)  The reason it's important is not just in terms of the natural environment, but it is a shaped environment, a built environment of its own.  We made the easy connections of equating identity with the built environment of the house, even to questioning whether it is the house itself which is killing both Madeline and Roderick.  I told my students that gender is really interesting in Poe stories, because the women are generally dying, dead, or completely off stage.  We didn't get time to talk about all the interiors Poe uses here, which made me sad.   We get the juxtaposition of pre-Enlightenment superstition against the post-Enlightenment reason--against the Victorian obsession with death.  (I talked about Victoria and Albert, but when Usher was published, Albert still had two decades in front of him.)  We talked about the Victorian fear of being buried alive (as this was an extension of the pre/post-Enlightment conversations about what happens after death.  We talked about how the good crime/suspense writers play into the contemporary fears of its audience.  For Poe, it was being buried alive.  For Tom Clancy, it was the Cold War.

And then we only had a precious few minutes to get through "Murders in the Rue Morgue."  I told my students that if they only skimmed this or if they didn't read it, go back and spend some time with it, because this is the first detective story.  This is the root from which everything else grows--either follows and imitates or goes the other direction.  (I got some nods.)  I talked about the divide between the police detective and the private detective.  The emphasis on reason.  The importance of physical data as a means of deciphering truth.

All in all, I was fairly satisfied with the day, our first real time together talking about the page.  I did assign too many stories, and maybe I'd choose to spend my class time differently next time so we could actually talk about the stories--but the reality is that it's Friday, most of my class didn't bring their texts so they couldn't really talk about the stories, so even if I'd assigned something different, I don't think it would have mattered in the long run.  On Monday, we start Arthur Conan Doyle--and I'm doing the author presentation for that one.  Should be interesting!  Might have to watch some Robert Downey, Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch for extra research.

Eng. 180: On the Student Need "To Relate" to "Like"

On Monday, the first day of class, I assigned "A Short History of Your Reading Life" to my Intro to Lit class, due yesterday (Wednesday).  The assignment served several purposes for myself as the teacher--diagnostic, to see if they could follow basic instructions (like MLA formatting), as well as getting insight into what they were bringing into my classroom.  I just finished reading and commenting on their histories--and the results are mostly what I expected, but a few things that shouldn't have surprised me did.

Across the board, the number of students (a great majority of them) admitted to flat-out hating reading.  Some of them used that as a springboard to talk about a parent or a teacher who then inspired them to the greatness of reading--but even as I wrote "have you told your teacher thank you?" in the margins (because I know that most of us don't thank our teachers, since we're so far gone from that atmosphere when the reality of what they did for us kicks in), I kept getting stuck at "I hated/I hate" reading.  (I got a lot of "I hate nonfiction," which was disconcerting to me as a nonfiction writer, though I'm pretty sure they have no idea that creative nonfiction exists, that they have a similar mindset to my sister K3, who once told me that "When I think of nonfiction, I think about books about sharks.")

What was clear, though, wasn't that they actually hate reading--they hate being told what to read.  And they're completely unaware of the irony of some of their favorite books (that they've identified) as coming in a class where they were required to read it...)  But I just wanted to write "tough shit" in the margins, because who says that who cares if you actually a like a book or not?  For myself, as I have said elsewhere, I loathe Norman Mailer, but that doesn't mean I didn't learn how to put a sentence together from him.  Sometimes there's a great teacher who teaches them that Shakespeare is relevant, that To Kill A Mockingbird is brilliant--but if these students can't relate to the character or the plot, then their default reaction is hate.  And this disturbs me on many levels, on a word-choice level as well as the default reaction itself.  One great observation was "I don't always enjoy assignments over lame books in class."  Sigh.  Not an isolated opinion.

When they talk about hating books and hating reading, about lame books that have no relevance to their 21st century life, the reality I am coming to understand is that that means the books should always be written to entertain them, on their terms.  The main characters should be people that my students should be easily able to slip into.  If you can't relate to Odysseus in The Odyssey (and they're reading that in high school these days???), who's fault is that?  How much responsibility do you, as the student, bear for making something relevant, important, thought-provoking?  But as their teacher, I see that as part of my great opportunity and challenge.

I suspect this mentality started in my generation and has trickled down to this Millenial generation, but I have no research to back this up--and I haven't done any research to see what we as teachers do to combat it, except teach better.  And since this is my first time teaching literature--having only taught creative writing and composition before--it's something I hope to gain more insight about as the semester goes on.

So, for those of you who are following along at home, here's your writing assignment for today:  in the comments section, write me a paragraph or two that encapsulates "A Short History of Your Reading Life."  You could choose to concentrate on a single book, a single person, a specific episode in your reading history--but really, it's wide open.  Can't wait to see what our histories look like!

The Night Before Christmas, I Mean, The Semester

It's the afternoon before the new semester and all through the 400 sq ft apartment, nobody is moving, not even the furballs who haven't budged since 9:00 this morning and who I occasionally check to see if they're still breathing.  The sun is brilliant through my windows that are not west-facing and it's just a great afternoon.  I spent the morning chatting with a friend I haven't seen for the summer and now I'm wondering what I do with the rest of my time before I head to bed, dream of dancing syllabi, and wake to the butterflies of the first day of class--and hope it's not the dream where I show up to the first day to a class I didn't know I was supposed to teach and I'm naked.

This semester, I'm trying something different:  I'm sending my reading list (and my syllabi) to various friends and family, in hopes that they might be interested enough to read along with my class and me (because what we're reading is really interesting, if I do say so myself)--so when I talk to them about what I'm doing in my classes, they'll know what I'm talking about.

So.  Here's the reading lists:

151H:  Silent Spring, Rachel Carson; The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot.

180:  Poe ( “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “Fall of the House of Usher,” “A Cask of Amontillado” ); Arthur Conan Doyle ("A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Speckled Band," "The Red-Headed League"); Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap"; the 1946 version of The Big Sleep (with Bogart and Bacall); Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca; Dennis Lehane's Mystic River; William Kent Krueger's Iron Lake; Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation.  And we'll read an excerpt of Joy Castro's novel, Hell or High Water, because she's kindly agreed to come to our class to talk about it.

There it is.  If you're wanting a more specific reading schedule, let me know and I'll send you one.  Otherwise, keep checking in here and feel free to comment when we get to a book you're reading along with us.  Here's to expanding our community of readers and writers!

On Re-Reading Andrea Barrett's "Ship Fever"

I returned from Montreal on Tuesday night, after a truly excellent conference meeting of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures. An amazing ten days in a city I'd never been to before, exploring not just the newer downtown areas of Montreal but Old Montreal as well, the sites of the World's Fair and the Olympics. But then, after the conference, I went on the post-conference tour to Quebec City and Grosse Ile. It's been nearly a week since I was there and I'm still struggling to find words for the experience. And so, as I'm unpacking my Jeep in Lincoln and trying to remember where things go in my apartment after being gone all summer, I pulled out Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever and felt the need to reread the story "Ship Fever."

 I've written before about that strangely intimate experience of reading a book in its setting--and if you haven't tried it, you must--and that experience doesn't change much if you read something after you've been to the setting.  Most of my memories of Grosse Ile right now are sensory and tactile, the absolute oppression of the sun, the way the wind picked up at a very specific moment (more on that in a moment), the movement of the ferry on the St. Lawrence River, the notes that Patrick pulled from his pipe, his flute.  I have much to write about Patrick, our musician, and Grosse Ile, but that's for another time, another place.

Patrick.

We arrived at Berthier Sur Mer about 45 minutes after leaving Quebec City and we had about an hour before the ferry would take us to Grosse Ile.  Grosse Ile is one of several islands in an archipelago in the St. Lawrence River, not the largest, and it was the quarantine station for the port of Quebec from 1835-1937.  It was never an immigration station, like Ellis Island; its sole purpose was to evaluate the immigrants for illness, specifically the ones most likely to lead to epidemics (cholera, typhus), quarantine them on the island until they passed inspection, and then they could go on to Quebec City or Montreal.  As we approached the island, an immense stone cross dominated our vision.

Grosse Ile, from the ferry.

This is the Irish Memorial Cross, erected in 1909, to honor the nearly 5500 Irish who are buried on Grosse Ile.  Here's the thing about Grosse Ile that stung me first:  In the whole of the island's 105 year history, there are 7553 buried on the island (they are very deliberate about saying buried, not died--more on that later) and 5424 of those died in 1847 in a six-month period.  These were overwhelmingly Irish, fleeing the worst of the Great Famine.  Reread that.  Three quarters of those who are buried on Grosse Ile died during six months, mostly of the typhus epidemic.  Most years, Grosse Ile processed 20,000-30,000 immigrants--but in 1847, the number was closer to 100,000.  There wasn't room for that many healthy people, let alone sick.  This is intellectual knowledge, not knowledge in your bones.  There's a difference.

We got a very brief history of the island from our tour guide, Pierre-Loup, and then we walked in the incredible heat, the umbrellas we'd brought against warnings of rain raised against the sun.  Then the rise of the landscape changed and at first all we could see was a mowed expanse and a picket fence.  And then the wooden crosses inside the fence came into focus, large white crosses placed at odd intervals.  We followed Pierre-Loup up the hill until we could fix the entire expanse in our field of vision.  What we were seeing was still not clear--I mean, I assumed it was a cemetery, but then Pierre-Loup told us what we were looking at.  

Yes, this is the Irish cemetery and there are nearly 5,000 people buried here.  I could probably have figured that out on my own.  But what I couldn't comprehend was what I was looking at and I blamed it on the heat, the fact I had no personal connection to what was happening here.

And then, what Pierre-Loup was saying finally clicked:  yes, this a the mass grave.  That much I could understand.  But I assumed that the people were buried on the raised portions of the cemetery--but that's not right.  Everyone who died on the island got a coffin and they all got their own coffin.  The coffins are buried three deep here.  And when the coffins and the bodies began to decompose, the land collapsed.  So the people are buried in those spaces where the land dips.  For some reason, that froze my mind in place.  I had no more thoughts, no more associations.  

Memorial for the physicians who died tending the sick, 1847.

And then Patrick began to play a lament.  Margaret read a poem.  And some of our group began to weep.  I did not.  But I let Patrick's music grieve for me.

Cholera Bay, 

where ships carrying cholera docked, away from the main wharf

So, then, rereading "Ship Fever" after seeing the landscape for myself was, again, that incredibly intimate experience I've come to recognize as what happens when you know a book's setting.  I tried to imagine the St. Lawrence choked with tall-masted ships, the water thick with debris tossed overboard in an attempt to ease the quarantine inspection, all the human voices, the smells of the bodies, the sickness, the death, the constant burials and the constant hammering of coffins.  But as I read the story of Lauchlin Grant, Nora, Susannah, and the other characters, I knew the landscape of their stories, knew it as it was windblown into the pores of my skin and baked by the sun.  It matters that now I know what the approach to Grosse Ile looked like, felt like.  It matters that now I know what happened here, how it happened, because now I know what Grosse Ile felt like, to me.  It's a type of empathy, but not quite.  And so "Ship Fever" is all the more affective to me, because now I know the bedrock of Barrett's words planted into that soil.

So, today's question:  what works of literature have you read in its setting (or works whose setting you know intimately)--what is your experience of reading when you know the landscape the writer is writing about?

Montreal Prep!

I think I just finished cutting down my paper for the IASIL conference, so I don't become one of those annoying people who goes over her time...  But in the process of that, I'm also packing and such, having texting conversations with Dawn Duncan, for last minute help (going both ways).  I think we're pretty much ready!

I'd been sent this video weeks ago, and meant to post it--better late than never.  It's a video profile of her from Concordia and it's just wonderfully done, captures what makes her such a great teacher, a great colleague, and a good friend.

 

State of Mind: Hot Enough Fer Ya?

The sadness with which I have left the lake is immense, but I'm in my parents' new house in Minneapolis, putting the finishing touches on my Focus Portfolio, which I hopefully will submit this afternoon.  The weather outside we have stopped describing as "hot" or "humid" and just reduced our adjectives to "gross."  I mentioned to my father this morning that it's too bad that the crops can't just suck the humidity out of the air.

This last weekend was Muskie Days, the annual celebration in my hometown of Nevis, and it corresponded with the 100th anniversary of the Nevis School.  Such great fun.  I saw so many people I haven't seen in years, caught up with classmates, got to see their kids.  And I got to hang out on Sunday with my high school history teacher, Larry Smith, and his wife Julie--their daughters are the same age as my sister K2 and me.  I sometimes still have a hard time calling Mr. Smith by his first name.  But we got to talk history and politics and as we did, I was reminded of how much difference good teachers make.  The last of my English teachers retired this year, after 38 years.  Another of my English teachers MC'd the opening ceremony.  I reread my senior yearbook and saw that my science teacher wrote that he hoped he hadn't turned me off to science--and I wished I could have seen him this weekend, because I think he'd be as surprised as I am that most of the classes I'm teaching are science related in some way.

But Mr. Smith--Larry--told me a while back that he was curious about my Natural Disasters class and wanted to see some of my materials.  I'm in the process right now--as I'm still trying to pry my eyelids open and focus my eyes--of sending them to him.  But the reason for this post is that the universe seems to align when it's supposed to:  last night on the Daily Show and last night on the Rachel Maddow show, two different segments on energy policy.  I wish I could consider the Daily Show segment funny (though I will always love John Oliver), but it hits too close to home, too close to existing arguments about the value of land, resources, and commodities.

So, here's your food for thought for the day:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A Discussion Starter: Derek Hand and Ken Bruen

Last night, while hiding out in my bedroom at the cabin, which is the only room with AC in it, trying not to die of humidity poisoning, I opened my iPad to Ken Bruen’s Sanctuary.  I’d seen the title in a few of the articles I’d been perusing for my Irish Noir syllabus that I’m in the midst of creating, but I’d never read it.  To my delight and irritation, I finished it in one sitting.  This morning, I’ve got my pot of Earl Grey to ward off the grayness of the rainy morning, and Tana French’s Faithful Place is staring up at me from the coffee table.  Nope.  I have to read Eoin Flannery’s book on postcolonial Ireland and Mark Allister’s book on nature writing and autobiography.

The book is set in Galway, which may be one of the reasons I wanted to read Bruen as much as I do, because as we all know, Galway is very important to me.  (Those who know me will remember that my cat’s name is Galway…)  So reading Bruen’s landmarks was as much fun for me as one who knows those places as it was for the story.  The plot surrounds PI Jack Taylor, who’s been sent a cryptic note, a shopping list of victims.  The first has already been killed, a hit-and-run.  Taylor slips off the wagon in this novel (and I did enjoy the tour of various Galway pubs, incluing The Quays, which he describes as a tourist haunt) and spends most of the book either drunk or on some sort of drug (Xanax is a favorite).  The sad truth is that when I closed the back cover (metaphorically, since I was reading it on my iPad), I was hugely disappointed.  I felt like it should have been a first draft, with an editor going back and marking through it with notes like “Develop this further!” and “This is not earned.”  Some major stuff happens to Jack in these pages, and yes, it’s true, he’s on Xanax for most of it, but there are two major revelations here—one that involves the murderer and one that involves a past trauma in his own life—and Jack’s reactions were not believable to me. 

But—and this is a huge but—yesterday I finished Derek Hand’s book on the history of the Irish novel and this might be only the second time I’ve finished a book of criticism with a smile (the first would be Mark Tredinnick’s The Land’s Wild Music).  Dang.  Really, really good stuff.  Hand’s style is very readable and the points that he makes about how the novel developed in Ireland is right on, as far as I can tell.  (Remember, I’m a nonfiction writer first…)  I appreciated the attention that Hand paid to the role of place and landscape, even though that dimension was surprising to me.  I also appreciated that the book is new enough to cover some of the books that are on my focus list.  And for the most part, I agreed with him for most of his book.

Except for the section where he addressed genre fiction.  In that section, I strongly disagree.  I haven’t completely articulated my position yet, but this is a movement towards a position—and I absolutely welcome any discussion any of my dear readers might have.  I have no problems with people disagreeing with me either.    

Hand’s admiration of John Banville—which I share—is evident throughout those sections of his book and it makes me want to dive back into those books (which I can’t, not right now, dang it).  When he transitions into Benjamin Black, this is what Hand has to say:

“For Banville himself, who in his fiction often employed the figure of the double and the twin to manifest his sense of rupture, the obligation to artistic selfhood and authorship was itself exploded when he began to write in the thriller genre under the pseudonym Benjamin Black with Christine Falls (2006) and The Silver Swan (2007).  While his decision to enter this thriller marketplace could be argued to be a materialization of a crisis in identity that is so central to his ever-doubling heroes, it has more to do, one imagines, with a desire to connect with a lucrative wider readership” (263).

As a creative writer myself—and this is actually something I’d love to ask Banville himself—I disagree that the choice to write in a different genre is motivated by the desire for money.  I’ve a novel that I’m working on, of the serious literary variety, but I also would very much like to write a thriller set in Fargo during a flood.  Were I to finish both of these novels, I would not feel like I’m selling out.  I mentioned briefly in a previous post that there are questions and ideas that literary fiction makes difficult to discuss.  Genre fiction—which has long been eschewed by capital-L Literature—can and often is as well written as any Literary fiction.  One might point to the historical romance author Eloisa James, who in addition to having a PhD in English (and she teaches Shakespeare at Fordham University), she also comes from the impressive literary lineage of Robert and Carol Bly (which makes me want to claim her as a Minnesotan.)  And the contemporary chick lit author Jennifer Crusie (though I really hate that term, chick lit) also has a PhD in English.  And if the point of genre fiction is to address issues and questions in a format that Literary Fiction is not willing to do—if it can do so at all—then it fills a niche that is needed.  But since the critical study of crime literature is very thin, I can understand the position that Hand is working through here.

Hand writes of “chick lit” that it “is concerned only with the immediate moment in terms of theme and also in terms of reader response” (275).  And of thriller fiction, “And the increasing proficiency in the thriller genre by Irish writers, for instance, suggests a means for middlebrow authors…to connect with like-minded middlebrow readers beyond Ireland” (281).  And later, “Whereas a previous generation of Irish novelists might have aspired to self-expression through art, the situation is now altered and the writerly self is subsumed into the conformities of plot and the necessities of the literary marketplace that accentuates cold and calculating conformity.  Even those widely celebrated novels and novelists that apparently play with form and offer seemingly endless challenges to traditional narratives become tiresomely jaded and orthodox rather rapidly” (281).

I strenuously disagree, to the point of waving my hands to punctuate the tone of my voice.  If our purpose in reading (and our purpose as writers in writing) is to understand something of the world that we didn’t—and couldn’t—before, to add to our understanding of the world’s complexity, then genre fiction is not lesser than literary fiction.  It simply fills a different purpose.  (I also suspect that the censors and the publishing of literature in Ireland has something to do with why genre fiction is late in coming to the game, but that’s a supposition I can’t support with facts.)  Some of the thriller writers I like best write better sentences than some of the Literary writers I read.  The highest compliment I can give a book is “S/He sure knows how to put a sentence together!”  And I believe that the role of genre fiction—particularly crime literature—is to draw society’s attention to issues that we would not have been able to talk about any other way. 

For instance.  In Bruen’s Sanctuary, things come up that seem innocuous on the surface but could be excellent starting points for discussions on current topics—inside and outside of a classroom.  (I don’t think I can teach Sanctuary, but the point still works.)  We could talk about drug use.  We could talk about gays and gay rights in Ireland.  We could talk about the obesity epidemic that came with the Celtic Tiger (it’s just a tiny moment with Ben, but still an important moment).  We can talk about corruption.  On a writerly level, we can talk about the role of Galway in the plot (and if I do end up teaching Bruen, you can bet we will.  A lot.)  We can talk about how Bruen’s Jack Taylor fits into the pantheon of hard-boiled PI’s and the noir genre, right down to the femme fatale.  (That was a plot twist I didn’t see coming, though it came way too early in the story for me.)  I read Declan Hughes’s The City of Lost Girls—and we could talk about violence against women and violence against women used for entertainment value.  Since I’m working on Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, and that can be considered a murder mystery, we can talk about the failure of systems, class, race issues.  Genres and subgenres are not mutually exclusive.  And thank God for it.

It’s entirely possible that Hand and I are talking apples and oranges here.  He’s concerned with the originality of plot and the form that takes in the history of the Irish novel.  By its very nature, genre fiction is largely formulaic.  But that doesn’t mean crime literature doesn’t have its own history and its own genealogy, the same sort of history that Hand is tracing in his book.  If you read any crime fiction scholarship, it’s clear that there is a progression and a reason for that progression.  Each generation of crime writers fits their work into the particular time and place and issues it’s facing.  Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are fitting into a very specific time and place, working against the corruption of the legal system and the moral corruption of the city.  And that’s just one example.  I could go on.  And on.

Is the explosion of crime literature in Ireland a symptom of literature being devalued?  I don’t think so.  But then, a lot of the crime literature I’m reading is extremely well written, extremely well plotted.  The innovations that crime literature brings to the table may not be in terms of plot, but of content and the way that they offer up for public consumption a more realistic view of what is happening in the contemporary world.

Eng. 180 and Beyond: For the Love of Irish Noir

I’m finding my academic ADD to be particularly irritating right now.  I’m three weeks out from my deadline to finish my Focus portfolio for my comps (the one on contemporary Irish prose) and for the most part, I’m on track to do that.  Of course, that does not preclude the stress dreams of late (I’m mostly prone to the ones where the brakes in the car fail or my teeth fall out).  But then I get up in the morning, make my tea, sit down in the brown chair in my grandparents’ living room, listen to the wind in the leaves, the loons on the lake, try to ignore the irritating buzz of boat motors and jet skiis, drink my tea, and remember that my life is pretty dang good.

My ADD right now has to do with this corollary thing I’ve picked up in the last few months (mostly because the book I’m writing my paper on, what I’ll present to the IASIL conference in three weeks, is on Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, billed as a murder-mystery)—Irish crime literature.  Naturally, I see this as a gorgeous hybrid of the crime literature class I’m teaching in the fall and my focus list.  Contemporary Irish crime literature?  Yes, please.  I’m reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in my spare time (yes, that’s sarcastic) to get ready for the class, as well as anything else I can get my hands on to build up a better base for what I’m going to teach.  But I keep getting side tracked into Irish noir.  I don’t have time to be side tracked, but I can’t stop, so I’m trying to make a productive something out of it, so I can justify the time I’m spending on it.

This is not a small genre either, as I’m learning—enough going on there that I’m going to work up a syllabus on the subject, partly for the fun of it and partly to build up my folder of ready-to-go classes to teach.  I’ve got a creative writing class worked up (which I taught Spring 2012) and I will work up an introductory Irish lit class for my Focus Portfolio requirements—but I also want to work up an advanced Irish lit class.  The dream class, as it were.  Just as I think that teaching crime literature—both classic and popular—provokes us to conversations that we might not have otherwise, narrowing that idea to a specific place is right up my place-conscious alley, so to speak.

But when I came across Andrew Kincaid’s article “‘Down These Mean Streets’: The City and Critique in Contemporary Irish Noir,” a couple of puzzle pieces I hadn’t known I was missing fit into place.  Kincaid wrote of the eminent Declan Kiberd’s questioning (in 2005) where the literature that reflected the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger—and Kincaid argues that the literature has been written, but not in a form that Kiberd recognized:  crime literature.  Crime literature, especially of the noir/hard-boiled variety (pioneered, of course, by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others) is the genre that reflects the “violence, ugliness, the distrust, the moral conflicts, and tempo that are inherent in the moment” (41).  Later, Kincaid writes that “In noir the city is not a mere physical backdrop in which the plot can unfold; the city itself functions as a central character, frequently determining the emotions of the hero as much as in any naturalist narrative” (41).  This is true.  And something I’ve based a lot of my teachings on, no matter what kind of text we’re looking at and no matter what type of class I’m teaching (composition, creative writing, or literature).  Looking at any type of writing through the lens of place studies then opens up the opportunity for students to question how place functions in their lives, what kind of role it plays.  Of course, this type of looking-outward is the goal of any class.

I’ve written here before of my deep and abiding adoration for John Banville and his crime-writing alter ego, Benjamin Black.  I found Elegy for April in a thrift store recently, which was rather exciting, and was a welcome return to the world of Quirke (since I was disappointed by The Silver Swan, though I might have to reread it to be sure I disliked it as much as I remember).  And also the amazingness of Tana French’s In the Woods.  I haven’t gotten a chance to read more of her work, but I can’t wait till I do.  I picked up Declan Hughes at the library yesterday (surprised that the little library had any of the names on my list), but I’m only a few pages in, so I have no opinion yet.  I did lend Christine Falls and In the Woods to a lady I’m cleaning cabins with this summer—and she was nearly speechless with adoration for Christine Falls when I saw her the next week.  She said she’s halfway through In the Woods and will be hard-pressed to say which one she likes better.  (This, given my Chocolat savant dreams, made me exceptionally happy.) 

What teaching—or taking—a class in such a narrow area offers is beyond the benefits I’ve mentioned, because one place is not like another place.  Crime fiction set in Los Angeles is not the same as that set in Boston or northern Minnesota or Dublin.  Each place has its own character, its own particular set of cultures and problems.  It’s like I wrote when I posted on Benjamin Black’s Silver Swan—I know that 1950s Dublin is a very specific place with its own very specific issues and cultural expectations and gender roles.  (Which is why I loved Christine Falls more than Silver Swan, because those pieces played a role in the plot.)  And being able to teach these things on a literature level (or a creative writing level) means giving them the tools to be aware of everything they take for granted when they read a book “for fun.” 

A friend did her project in our Women’s Rhetoric class this last semester on sex trafficking in popular fiction and in her presentation, she talked about who the protagonists were, what they tended to do for a living, how the law was involved (cops, lawyers, or journalists, generally made up the bulk of careers)—but the thing that stuck with me was how she said even if a woman was the protagonist, trying to stop this trafficking, she more-than-frequently fell into the hands of the bad guys herself and needed the male protagonist to save her.  So even though we had a strong female in the lead of the story, she still needed to be saved by a man.  And now I’m on the lookout for whenever I see that happening in any story I read—and awareness is the largest challenge of academia, that moment where my student says, “I never thought about it that way before” the sweetest.  If our students don’t recognize that something is happening, we can’t have any sort of a discussion about it.

Eng. 151H: Scientific Miniatures

Last night, I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in one sitting, the book I'm teaching for the third Writing Project for my Fall 151H.  Amazing, as I knew it would be.  It had finally stopped raining--and this morning, as I'm in town for internet and seeing the damage that ten inches of rain wreaked on Duluth, I'm feeling grateful that we only got four inches.  I have hopes that the blue sky and sunshine today will dry out the lawn enough that I can mow it this afternoon.  Seems like every time I think the lawn has dried out enough, it rains again.  But there are worse things to be curled up at the lake with tea, fleece, and a book.


I'm still working on formulating the syllabus for my Eng. 151H (Honors Rhetoric as Argument), but things are clearing up there.  I still remember when I assigned The Greatest Invention argument when I taught at Bowling Green and one of my students wrote maybe the best paper I'd ever seen for that assignment:  she argued that the telescope was the greatest invention in all of human history, the one thing that changed our lives and our world the most.  She argued that with the optics that allowed us to see so far away, we began to understand the true size of the universe and began to question our place in it (something that the Catholic Church had worked very hard to prevent).  And when we flipped the telescope and were able to examine the tiniest things, we began to question what else we didn't know.  It was a truly great paper.  So I'm thinking in terms of miniatures, of the microscope, and that's how I came up with this idea (it would be nice if I could make some sort of Scamp or tiny house comment here, but maybe I'll have to work harder to fit it in.)


And so, as my goal during my PhD is to never teach the same class twice, I've formulated this Scientific Miniatures 151.  The purpose of the class is to consider the importance of the small things we overlook--specifically insects (Silent Spring), animals and food systems (Omnivore's Dilemma), and human cells (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).  I want to talk about the various systems that these tiny things are a part of, how our understanding of them is colored by gender, politics, history, ethics, and more.  One of the things that was most interesting to me about Silent Spring was not simply the subject matter--and its importance in the scheme of things--but how much of the rhetoric of destruction came out of a post-WW2 mentality of American Exceptionalism and the beginnings of The Miracle of Modern Science.  We have the capability to do this, so why shouldn't we?  This sort of questioning I want to form the basis for the entire semester.  I'm not interested in asking students to pick a side or form binary arguments on what we're discussing--I want them to explore the complexities of the entire argument, because it's not as easy as swatting a mosquito.  Mosquitoes that I'm sure are absolutely loving the puddles left by this week's rain around the Cabin...


With Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, as we talk about the miniature world of plants and and animals, I have no interest in trying to convert my students to vegetarianism.  That's not the point.  The point is that I want them to start to understand how they function in the food systems that run our world.  We're in Nebraska, full of farms and farmers and Montsanto, but they don't know what that means.  I want them to consider the complexities of water and the Ogallala Aquifer (as my 150 class last semester went to Don Worster's lecture, which was awesome), I want them to consider the implications of Montsanto, I want them to become aware of local food.  It's excellent that during this part of the fall semester, the farmer's market down in the Haymarket will still be going on.  Excellent opportunities for interviewing people.  I may or may not add a blog component to this project.


And for the final project, as we read Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, we'll talk about the miniature world of the human cell.  This book will offer a great opportunity to talk about issues like gender, race, and class--since Henrietta's cells were taken without her knowledge, used without her or her family's permission.  Henrietta's cells, known as HeLa, have been used in nearly every significant scientific and medical advancement since 1951, yet her family cannot afford health insurance.  There is much more to this discussion than simple ethics, the complexities of what we bring to the conversation are endless, considering the contemporary state of research.

On that note, I'm going to close up the internet, go home to the Scamp, make up the bed and stock the cupboards for my (probably) only Scamping trip of the summer.  Oh, how I adore 60 square feet.