Category Archives: common reading exam

>Academic Hazing

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Last night, I completed the last in a line of important milestones towards my MA: my comprehensive exam. 
The exam was a six-hour ordeal stretched over two days in three-hour sessions.  It was a series of essay questions based upon this list of readings which I’m sure by now you’re all sick and tired of listening to me talk about.  Day one we had to choose to answer two questions in each of three sections (so we could omit one entire time period) for a total of six questions.  Day two we were give a series of essay questions which spanned the list of which we had to answer two; one in one hour and the second in two hours.
Really, what this amounts to is an age-old hazing ritual unleashed upon graduate students designed to test their mettle, their stamina, and their ability to pull things out of their butt under pressure.
That being said, I think I did pretty well.
The exam is graded upon a Pass/Fail system with marks given for Fail, Low-Pass, Pass and High-Pass.  The mark itself goes nowhere on any official documentation, it is for your own edification only (unless of course you fail, which would mark the beginning of panic-time for you and denote the fact that you are utterly incapable of preparing for a test and aggressively stupid to boot). 
I’m not going to say it was no big deal, because it was a big deal.  But I am going to say that it wasn’t the most rigorous exam I’ve ever been through.  Because of the amount of preparation, forethought and stress that I put into this, I went in well-prepared and all of that preparedness paid off.  The test itself, while long and stressful due to its innate ability to set me back in my life-plans, was not stressful because of its content but rather the pressure exerted upon that content.
I would be curious to know how this sort of thing goes in other departments.  Is it really something worth the amount of stress that we few, we happy few put into it?  Is it something that is seriously failable without being laughed out of the department?  Is it just a right of passage that our mentors had to go through and so subject us to on principle?
I’m not saying that comps exams don’t have a place; I’m just wondering if they are as important as we make them out to be.  And if they are, aren’t they worth being an actual measure of something more than a student’s ability to spew forth focused BS on command?  If a department has faith in its students (and its own ability to prepare those students for the rigors of higher education), shouldn’t the test be crafted to reflect that?
I’m not going to say that it was a piece of cake, it wasn’t.  But I will say that it felt like a shot at the doctor’s office; a whole lot of dread, a whole lot of build-up; some mild cases of panic; then when it’s over you wonder why it was exactly that you were so worked-up in the first place.
…and then you get a lollipop.  Or a beer.  Or a whole lot of beer.
Needless to say, I took last night off from doing any other work to celebrate the fulfillment of this educational landmark with my fellow graduate students at our local dive bar.  I woke up this morning and a few things immediately occurred to me in quick succession:
1)    I was done!  Yes, done!  No more scrambling to scrape together time to read items off of that god-forsaken list!  No more wondering and worrying about how the hell I was going to study for the exam when I had so much other stuff going on in my life!  Yippee!
2)    Oh bloody hell.  I have a paper due on Sunday.  I’ve started researching that one, right?
3)    Yes, I’ve started researching…. But I haven’t started writing… I’m going to need to beg another extension.
4)    I had a paper due two weeks ago!  I’ve started writing that one, right?
5)    Yes, that one’s actually done.  Thank god.
6)    Did I do the readings for tonight’s class?
7)    No, but it’s just a couple Poe stories.  Should be fine.
8)    I have three more papers on top of the two aforementioned papers to write and then I’m done… and a presentation to give… when is that presentation?
9)    Next week.  Crap.
10) It’s snowing.  What the hell, New Jersey?
11) I really shouldn’t have had so much beer last night.

>A War Story

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Ladies and Gentlemen, another winner off the Common Reading Exam List.
I find that I’ve been going through cycles with these works.  Most of the time, my selection of what to read next is influenced by several random factors: which time period from the list do I feel most lacking in?  Which work and/or author piques my interest at any given moment?  Have any of these works been brought up recently in conversation/class/the media?  Which title intrigues me the most?
One is always bound to like certain literature over others.  We all have taste.  Certain things appeal to us, certain things do not.  My waves of “love it” “hate it” could be influenced by any (or none of) the above factors.  I like to think of it like karma; here, you read something awful, then have a few good books before jumping into the fray of something that will feel like self-flagellation for a thousand pages or more (Doris Lessing, I’m looking at you).
By far my weakest section of the exam list is the modern section.  Incidentally, this is also the section which has been bolstered the least by my classes.  It’s probably a statement on the classes I chose to take over anything else (at this juncture, I’ll be an Eighteenth Century gal before you blink an eye thanks to the ever-wonderful best professor in the world).  In any case, I picked up Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods for a few reasons: I had actually purchased it (so I felt that I had to read it), it was from the modern section of the list, and it was a whippy three-hundred page slip of a thing.
And oh man. 
The novel is a purposefully fragmented account of the disappearance of fictional politician John Wade and his wife, Kathy.  It is told in chapters alternating between hypotheses about how the disappearance may have occurred, bits of evidence from subsequent trials/investigations, narrated bits of the couple’s life in the past as well as their life in the book’s “now”.  It is also one of the most noteworthy literary attempts to deal with Vietnam.
O’Brien was a Vietnam vet and his book downright screams of themes also present in Slaughterhouse Five, another account of war, its dangers, and an author trying to cope with the inhumanity of it.  The two novels are scarily similar in many ways.  O’Brien was a Vietnam vet present at the massacre of My Lai.  His tour ended in 1970.  In the Lake of the Woods deals heavily with the My Lai Massacre and was published in 1994, twenty-four years after O’Brien’s tour ended.  Vonnegut was a World War II vet and witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden while a prisoner in the city.  He was repatriated in 1945 and did not publish Slaughterhouse Five (which, surprise surprise, deals heavily with the Fire Bombing of Dresden) until 1969 (twenty-four years after his tour ended). 
Beyond these cosmetic similarities, the two novels are structured in nearly identical fashions.  Both are purposefully disjointed accounts of events which may or may not have any sense to them.  Both claim, up front, that there is no sense to be made from the contents of their pages.  Both remain unresolved in the minds of readers as they similarly provide no resolution to us.  Both struggle with the meaning of life-within-war and the humanity (or lack thereof) innately involved in the waging of a war.  Both are obsessed with the concept of losing something essential to one’s humanity and the inability to retrieve it after the war.  Both feature empty shells of people trying their hardest to go on with their lives despite the fact that they simply cannot reconcile what it is that they are missing post-war. 
Both beg us to re-examine ourselves and declare what it is that we couldn’t live without.  To witness the horrors and atrocities that Billy Pilgrim and John Wade have witnessed and committed is to sacrifice something essential of ourselves.  What is that something?  Where, within our souls, are the parts that make us human?  What would we lose that could make food taste bland and love become an empty word?
And are we to pity or condemn these “heroes”?  To me, this is a major point of divergence between the two stories.  I have always sympathized with Billy Pilgrim, though I know others find him whiny and his apathy difficult to stand.  The more I learned about John Wade, the less I liked him.  Like other characters in the book, I constantly felt that he was trying to pull the wool over my eyes (despite a quasi-omniscient narrator).  I did not trust him.  The narrative seems to pit the reader against him, attempting to sway us to some nefarious conclusion about him (though it is difficult to determine what, precisely, that is).  Even armed with this knowledge, I still found myself not wanting to sympathize entirely with him.  Bottom line: he was creepy.
The similarities between these two novels document the important creative process which seems to accompany the artistic processing of any great calamity.  It makes me wonder if a study of literature wouldn’t prove fruitful to the treatment of PTSD patients.  Through literature, we are allowed an (albeit obstructed) point of view into an author’s mind.  That point of view, it seems, could prove invaluable to helping those going through a similar situation. 
Overall, this book kept me wanting to return to it, despite how disgusted or appalled I may have been with its subject matter.  I even pondered trading in my read-at-the-gym non-literary fantasy novel for it a few times… though concluded that while I could read on the stationary bike, I definitely could not take notes, and read, and cycle at the same time.  Maybe that’ll be a trick for next time.
Rating: A Real Page-Turner.

>In Springtime (the only pretty ringtime)

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> Yesterday was my first day of school for Spring 2011.  Once more into the breach.  The first week of class is a peculiar experience spiced with all manner of conflicting emotions which waft through it like the daintiest of storm clouds.

First and foremost: WHERE DID MY WINTER BREAK GO!?  It seemed like such a long time period when I was looking forward to it like the light at the end of the tunnel of books and papers.  I didn’t get a break at all!  What did I even do with myself?!  Oh…. Right… wrote that one errant paper, celebrated holidays with my family, put together publication and conference proposals (not as many as last year, but still), worked, took weekend trips, read as much as I was motivated to for the MRE, cooked, slept, karaoked my little heart out…. Damn.  I guess this isn’t some trick of the cosmos or a time vortex caused by errant Time Lords.
Sigh.
Then there’s the excitement.  A new semester is a fresh start in a lot of ways.  Even though I’ve had two out of three of my professors before, even though I am going to be continuing the same ideological work that I have already begun, there’s new books, new notebooks, new pens and pencils, new theory, new classes, and new authors to explore and analyze.  It’s like opening up the doors to a new playground; your playmates by and large remain the same, and the same type of equipment is available to you, but there’s a new set-up and some new toys to tinker with.  Have I mentioned the new books?  The beginning of a semester is the only time when I feel justified in spending several hundred dollars in one go on books.  And oh man… do I love books.
There is also this feeling of tension upon walking into a brand new class.  The classroom dynamic for any given course is entirely different depending on the professor, the students, their backgrounds, and their relative interests in the topic at hand.  Prepping for the first day of class is like arming to step onto a battlefield for the first time not even knowing if the fight will ever begin.  You must prepare for any given situation.  Like a boyscout.  Or a good hitch-hiker.  Know where you towel is, and don’t panic.  There’s also a certain degree of feeling one’s way through things, a tentativeness about what you should and should not say and what that will spur from other students in the class (or the professor).  What hot buttons should you press?  Which should you avoid?  What will set them into a downward spiral of ranting?  What will spur interesting conversation?  Any good tactician knows that there are things you should show up front and there are things you should keep to yourself.  Secret weapons.  What should be yours in this class?  Your area of expertise is almost always written on your sleeve, but that most recent paper you wrote may be a good option… or the influential bit of theory that you have been contesting in your mind for the past few weeks….  In any case, chose wisely.  The course of your entire semester may remain in the balance.
Then, of course, there is the mental checklist.  As you glance down the syllabus for the first time you can begin to see how your semester will play out.  Where will you be busy?  Where will you have time to relax for a bit?  What other events do you have planned surrounding the dates before you that should influence your decision in when you should give oral seminar presentations?  What do you need to accomplish this semester?  When you have read everything that is before you, what will you really take away from it?
This semester, for me, is a big deal.  It’s my last semester of my MA.  It’s the semester in which I have to take my Master’s Reading Exam (March 21 and 22… shudder).  It’s the semester in which I discover what the next year or two (or seven) of my life will hold.  It’s a semester in flux, with very specific dates and deadlines which must be met in order to proceed with whatever it is that I’m going to do with myself in the near future.  So many questions, not so many answers, and it’s only the second day of class.
One thing is for certain: they’ll be seeing a lot more of my face at the gym and the bar.  Because really, what can life bring this semester that a good workout, a beer, and writing an emo poem or two cure?

>Puerto Rican Love

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As the winter break winds draws to a close, I’m busy attacking the Common Reading Exam List with a vengeance.  Last week, I got through passages from the Bible, three Nathaniel Hawthorne short stories (“My Kinsman, Major Molineux”, “The Minister’s Black Veil”, “The Maypole of Merry Mount”), and Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”.  This week already, I veritably blew through Jesus Colon’s A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches.
This is miraculous in several respects: the first being that I had absolutely no inclination to read the book based solely upon the title.  Criticism founded in any singular nationality is not something that I do, it’s not something that I’m comfortable with, and overall it represents a plethora of literary fields that I just do not connect to in any way, shape or form.  The closest I’ve come to any nationalist reading has been Irish literature, and that’s only because of a summer spent living in Dublin and my deep-seated adoration of Wilde and Yeats.  The title of this piece put me off; I have found by and large that any book based in a precept of national identity is just something I simply cannot relate to.  As a result, I find such books drab, boring, and perhaps not pointless but certainly without a point that I care to read about.
This book was gifted to me for my birthday, so even more than the other items on my CRE list, I felt obligated to read it.
And I have to say, I’m so glad that I did.
Jesus Colon came to New York from Puerto Rico as a stowaway in 1918.  He weathered some difficult times as one might imagine, but for that (if his writing is any indication of his actual temperament) never lost the spark of intellect, humor, and national identity that this book is steeped with.  It is noteworthy in that it is the first book-length work on the subject of Puerto Ricans in America to appear in English.  The vast majority of the book was written during the 1950s and it wasn’t published until 1961.  It is written in a series of short sketches (ranging in length from one page to seven pages), some of which appeared in print in various periodicals which Colon wrote for but most of which were never seen in print until the book’s publication.
Noteworthy to me is the amount of wit and humor in what could easily turn into a sob fest (not without reason, mind you, I’m not trying to trivialize the plight of the immigrant worker).  Colon’s style is light and quick.  Like a fencer, he never beats a point over the head.  He will touch and go, leaving you understanding, but still thinking.  He is subtle while remaining explicit and that is another part of what I love so much about this book.  I don’t feel talked down to, I don’t feel preached at, rather I feel taught.  He is educational without being didactic and entertaining without being trivializing.
I also connect with Colon as a person.  Colon paints himself as an educated man caught in a world set to minimize him.  He lovingly embellishes details of himself as a reader/writer/man that any not-so-closeted literary geek will connect to.  Things like feeling not fully dressed without a book tucked under his arm, his love for reading in the bath (and his method of doing so), and being able to recite Don Quixote because of his nostalgic childhood connection with the text appeal to me as a book nerd.  Things like his sneaky usage of his wife’s decorative bathroom towels, his examination of the practice of singing in the shower, his propensity to spend his day off riding the bus lines to their very last stop then journeying back on another bus, and his hesitancy to liken a woman to “a goddess” because he has never seen one appeal to me as a human being. 
Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel, to me, is entrenched in an incident which occurs at the book’s very beginning.  In Puerto Rico, cigar-factory workers would hire a man to read to them as they rolled cigars.  This man, called the Reader, would often be more of a performer than a straight reciter.  He would act out important passages of the books, commit them to memory verbatim, and perform them for the workers throughout the day.  Colon admits that, despite the years which separate him from his childhood in Puerto Rico, he can still hear the voice of the Reader reciting key passages to him from famous works of literature.  These books, these recitations, seem keystones in Colon’s interest in literature.  They are his first exposure to books (at least as presented in A Puerto Rican…) and he admits, “I can still see that window and listen to that voice reading from the adventures of Don Quixote or the miseries and persecution suffered by Jean Valjean, books and characters that will be remembered many years after the latest ‘whodunit’ has been read and forgotten” (12).  The performance, suffused in Colon’s bones, stayed with him over any contemporary work he read for himself.  It made the literature longer-lasting to him and provided scaffolding for the rest of Colon’s literary career.
To me, this is utterly indicative of the power of literature in performance.  You can read a book, certainly, but how long will that book remain with you?  How long will that reading be called into your memory?  Unless you are among the lucky percentage of the population with photographic recollection, chances are it is not that first reading which will stick but rather subsequent readings and conversations that occur from it.  On the other hand, you can go see a play.  A performance.  Something that can (and will) never be repeated in exactly the same way again, and how long will that remain with you?  A truly memorable performance is easier to digest, more suffusing, and easier to remember than a truly memorable read.  Colon’s experience stands testament to this. 
Overall, if you are at all interested in old New York, equal rights, Puerto Ricans, the labor movement, writing, reading, or just good literature, you should really give this book a go.  It’s a two-hundred-page-slip-of-a-thing divided into perfectly digestible bite-size bits, so it’s an ideal commuting buddy, bed-side book, or on-the-go-waiting-for-random-things read. 
Rating: I will cheat on the bard.
Works Cited
Colon, Jesus.  A Puerto Rican in New York And Other Sketches.  New York: International Publishers (2002).  Print.

>The House that Biswas Built

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Well… that did it. 
All seasonal holiday cheer I may or may not have previously been overflowing with has promptly vanished.  This week, in another attempt at sneaking up on the Common Reading Exam before it sneaks up on me, I finally managed to conquer V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mister Biswas. 
Seriously… this is a best-seller?  Praised as one of the leading novels of the twentieth century?  What do people see in this rambling hunk of misery?  To me, the characters were all the same, the events were utterly unexciting, and I was unenthused to read a story that I knew was going to end poorly.  All I could think the entire time was Hamlet IV v; “When Sorrows come they come not single spies, but in battalions”.  The novel consists of calamity upon calamity ushered upon an unsympathetic protagonist who, while perhaps endearing in the book’s first hundred pages, becomes increasingly more grotesque as the events of his life pile upon him.  Why do I care that bad things are happening to this person?  I don’t want to read about characters who I can’t sympathize with.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s a requirement of SERIOUS LITERATURE to be brooding, emo and otherwise utterly miserable.  Is all it takes to write a New York Times Best Seller a little bit of angst and a whole lot of luck?  In speaking with a colleague about this novel, he told me that he really enjoyed it.  It reminded him of real life.  The protagonist, no matter what he did, just couldn’t seem to get ahead.  I said that that was exactly what I didn’t like about the novel.  Why torture myself by reading about this?  Isn’t my own life full of enough bad stuff that I don’t have to read about some fictional character’s bad stuff? 
Don’t get me wrong, without conflict and obstacles a novel is nothing… but if there’s going to be conflict it had best be conflict that I care about solving.  Something that the hero can win.  Something that makes him a bigger, better man.  There is no growing in A House for Mister Biswas.  The action of the book does nothing but to make its primary hero into a jaded, bitter, old man who is taken advantage of by everyone and dies before he can really achieve the only goal he ever has.
In one regard, the story is an allegory about an artist’s life.  Mister Biswas is clearly someone who should have been an artist.  He is only truly happy when his job involves painting, writing, or some other form of creative application.  He finds fulfillment from these things, and the real tragedy is that he simply cannot make them work for him.  Society bends and hones him to its own idea of what he should be.  Whether it is his over-bearing in-laws or the supervisor at his current position, there always seems to be someone available to beat the spark of life from this man and use him to their own ends.
The only truly sensible character in the entire book is Shama Biswas, the protagonist’s wife.  She is a woman who has simple wants, simple desires, and simple needs.  Despite being physically and mentally abused by her husband for countless years, all she ever does is cook for him, balance his accounts, and try to make their life together work.  Mister Biswas never seems to admit to her superior judgment, though by the very end of the book the narrator seems to.  It is fairly clear to me that, without her, Biswas’ entire existence would fall apart at the seams.  He is a man with his head in the clouds, blinded by his one dream (to have his own house, hence the title).  There is something admirable to that, but it requires someone with feet firmly planted to rein him in.  That someone is Shama.  She enjoys balancing accounts, dealing with sums and figures.  When things go wrong in the household, she knows how to fix them.  She knows when more money is needed and when it isn’t.  She is the voice of reason, though one that Biswas continually ignores through the entirety of the book.
I’m debating whether the circular story-telling method that Niapaul employed made things better or worse.  The book’s first scene depicts a dieing Mister Biswas discussing with Shama the massive amounts of debt they have incurred to purchase the second-rate house that the family lives in and how to deal with this debt.  The novel then circles back to Biswas’ birth and picks the story up from there.  I can’t decide whether knowing that Biswas does get his house (though it leaks and creaks and needs work he can’t afford to put into it since he is stuck under a mountain of debt that his widow has absolutely no hope of ever re-paying) made me more or less angry that I was stuck reading about the way he got to this ending.  Many times I threatened to put the book down and never return to it; I knew how it ended anyway, why was I putting myself through this torture?  Somehow, though, I held out hope that it was a feint on Niapul’s part… that something… some little thing… would work for this man.  Of course it did not.  In the end (and during every step to get there) it all fell to pieces, just like Biswas’ house.
I guess the bottom line for me is what I am left wondering after reading so many of these books; why am I reading them?  What makes them any better than any other book ever written?  If it’s not engaging and it tells me nothing about life (other than it’s hard and the good are systematically shat upon until they accept their stations), why is it a New York Times Bestseller?  Because at this rate… I’d almost rather read Twilight.  At least that has a happy ending.