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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.
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>I had a plethora of things to blog about this past week but none of them are going to make it into this post. Instead, I wish to issue an apology.
I apologize profusely to anyone who was on line behind me at the Dana Library Computer lab this morning. Moreover, I apologize to the poor computer technician who was stuck with a jammed printer not once but twice due to my stack of printing making the entire operation explode. To be fair, I have a feeling the technical malfunctions had more to do with the printer duplex being bad than my Jubilee-like Mutant powers.
Today, I took the dive and invested a great deal of time into creating something pivotal to my continual perseverance and eventual conquest over the Master’s Reading Exam List. Flash back to about a year ago when I first encountered the list. As my eyes scanned down the page I was struck by a sudden lightheadedness, a dizzy sensation compounded by the gravity of the situation at hand. “Good god,” I thought, “this is a lot of stuff to read.” After the brief I-wasn’t-an-English-major-in-undergrad heart attack passed, I realized something else. “Good god, this is a lot of stuff to buy.”
The rising cost of living has demanded many things from the poor graduate student. Amongst these things is a sad truth; we very rarely have money for spare books. I know that the books on the Master’s Reading Exam list aren’t exactly “spare books”, they are required reading for my degree. For all intents and purposes, they qualify as course books. I need them. I can’t do without them. The fate of my diploma rests in their hands.
I know, I know, my mother said it too. “But Danielle, you could just go to the library and borrow these books for free!” Well, no not really. If I am going to retain any of the information in these books, if I am going to read them critically, if I am going to have anything to say about them when all has been said and done, I need to write all over them. Word to the wise English major: get over your phobia of marking up texts as soon as humanly possible. Glossing a text makes it yours and moreover allows you to process what you are reading as you are reading it. It gives you the ability to interact with the reading thus making the reading experience into a conversation rather than a one-way entertainment situation. So no, I can’t just borrow them from the library. I need my own copies.
Luckily, there is a fabulous resource for this sort of thing. A wonderful magical place where information is freely and plentifully available. A place where texts abound in all sorts of scholarly and non-scholarly forms. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the internet has revolutionized text acquisition.
After several hours of googling, copying, pasting, printing, causing printer jams and binding the resulting spoils into adorable binders organized by time period, I now own at least two thirds of the Master’s Reading Exam list.
Part of me feels guilty. Like this stack of papers is ill-gotten goods. Piratical booty which required a parrot and an eye patch to acquire. I am not joking when I say that the resulting pile from my marathon printing session was at least a ream and a half worth of paper (printed double-sided by the way… oi vey…). Then I realized: this printing isn’t free, it’s part of my tuition. I paid for this in my semester bill. This isn’t piracy, this is smart business practices. I’m not stealing, I’m simply making the most of my hard-earned loan money.
So, I’m sorry lab guy. I’m sorry adorable undergrad who only wanted to print a draft of her summer research paper. I’m sorry whomever has to re-stock the paper (I cleaned out at least two drawers worth in two different R2D2-sized printers). But my wallet just couldn’t handle the MRE list without this.
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>Today, friends, I take a much-needed break from rambling incessantly about teenaged vampires. This may be because my shame finally caught up with me, but I will choose instead to lend it to the fact that I have succeeded in diving back into the Common Reading Exam List.
This past weekend, I got through the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I will admit first and foremost that I don’t have a great deal to say about this book. To me, it is a landmark piece about a time in history that is now not much more than painful memories and curling yellowed paper. Slavery was horrendous, of that there is no doubt. This book must have gone a long way towards proving that to individuals of the time and perhaps even individuals of a generation or two after the time. However, to me, modern liberal-minded girl that I am, it just is. I don’t feel more intellectually enlightened having read it (though I ate through it like it was a pound of chocolates… except without that bloated guilty feeling afterwards).
I suppose I should at least try to say something scholarly and insightful about it despite my current difficulty with thinking DEEP THOUGHTS. A few things did strike me. The first of which being that Douglass’ most salient simile for slavery was to piracy; the hard-won fruits of an honest man’s labor are then heartlessly and cruelly taken from him so that the thief may prosper. The pirate image stuck with me and has left me really pondering it. Doubtlessly, this simile is a romantic notion, but perhaps that judgment is simply my modern mind projecting anachronisms onto a dated piece. Still, I can’t help but imagine that Douglass was a man to whom pirates were all but myth. What I mean by this is that Douglass would never have met a pirate, even if they were perhaps more common in his world than in ours. To him, pirates (though very much real), were fictional characters and figures in stories told by his fellows rather than day-to-day realities.
Douglass was a highly trained caulker and worked on shipyards for many years, both before and after his emancipation. This nautical-centric life he led may also lend insight as to the curious choice in analogies. Perhaps putting things in terms of the sea came more naturally to him as this was how he lived his life. Perhaps the shipmen around him were so full of such analogies and stories as to pepper his speech and mind with images of the ocean. Perhaps this notion of the formation and source of Douglass’ choice in imagery is as romantic as the imagery itself.
A second thing which was prevalent to me throughout the narrative was the dichotomy between men and beasts. A “good slave” is essentially a man turned into a beast; a savage, someone whose sole focus is work, someone who has been stripped of any higher notion of hope for his life. Most importantly lacking from these beast-men is education. In a curious and fortuitous amalgamation of circumstances and ingenuity, Douglass was able to learn to read and write while still a slave. This knowledge, one comes to understand, is what drove him forward in his pursuit of freedom. With it, he could not ignore what was around him: that he was a man and thereby should be subject to the same freedoms as any other man. After all, he was capable of higher reasoning. Clearly there was no difference between him and the white street urchins so pivotal to his ersatz education. Despite this, Douglass himself admits several times that he wished he could return to ignorance. Once enlightened, there was no way for him to forget these lessons and thereby no way for him to be satisfied until he had attained absolute freedom.
“Knowledge is power”, certainly, and to me Douglass’ realization stands as a powerful statement about the importance of higher education. While something as simple as literacy could empower Douglass to understand his own innate worth as a human being, in modern times an individual must stretch further to find this empowerment. When my parents graduated from college, they could begin careers with merely undergraduate degrees. The fact that they chose not to speaks towards the values of my family, but that is besides the point. As the job market becomes increasingly competitive, education as a whole becomes devalued. In these times, it is well near impossible to get a high-paying career-type job without a Graduate Degree. Certain fields do bend and/or break this rule, and there will always be exceptions for extraordinary talent, but as a general rule getting one’s foot in the door increases with ease in direct proportion to the number of degrees one can list at the top of one’s resume.
While higher education is certainly vital for job-hunting, it is equally vital to the improvement of the human spirit. In school, we do not simply learn about books and formulas, we are also working towards the ultimate goal of expanding (and growing into) our potential as human beings. If literacy could unlock this for Douglass, think of the compounded factor of less fundamental knowledge on the human psyche. We learn about the world and we learn about ourselves. As the world devalues our education as it stands, we must counter with greater degrees of education to expand our worth and potential.
….as I read through this it sounds like a public service announcement. Coming from someone who does teach college and hopes to continue doing so in the future, it also sounds like a desperate plea to keep myself in a job. While I can’t deny the validity of either of these thoughts, I will also ask you to consider more deeply the value of your own education. What did college teach you? Okay, fine, what did it actually teach you? I can nearly guarantee that what you really learned had little to do with what the piece of paper on your wall tells you that you learned.
>So I’m officially a week into the semester and I still haven’t re-cracked good William (Faulkner not Shakespeare). He sits on my desk and mocks me occasionally, but then I realized that I could just cover him up with a pile of other work. He’s been smothered in political pamphlets from the Revolutionary era ever since and occasionally I put my keys on top as a paperweight in case he gets any ideas about wriggling out from under. With the semester underway, reading Faulkner is the last thing on my list.
I did read Utopia this week (which is also on my list). Okay, I’ll admit it, it was for a class, but it still counts, right? Just because I’m reading of a syllabus doesn’t make it any less literary.
On dear Sir Thomas’ 1516 foray into a perfect society I have surprisingly little to say. The natural question that springs to mind whenever one picks up a work entitled “Paradise” (be it Dante or More) is how Utopian is Utopia? Naturally, I have little inclination to talk about this (though I’m certain we’ll be discussing it in class on Wednesday and I may or may not have an update after that as per how that discussion goes).
Oh, in case you were interested, Thomas More actually coined the word “Utopia” (OED). A small foray into our favorite encyclopedic volume of words tells us that in 1613 it came into wider use to mean “a place, state, or condition ideally perfect in respect of politics, laws, customs, and conditions”. It has been used steadily in that capacity ever since, but most people aren’t aware that they are referring to More’s pamphlet whenever they speak of ideality.
What I am intrigued by is the fact that More basically describes a communist state. Every place looks exactly the same, every person works the same amount of hours, every person receives what he requires. As More explains it, “…and seeing they be all thereof partners equally, therefore, can no man there be poor or needy” (148). I suppose what really struck me about this idea is how very ancient it is. Communist states were already being discussed as an ideal in 1516 England and have been pervasive throughout the minds of men since. I’m no historian, and certainly not a political historian, but this seems a very long time for such an idea to percolate. And nobody yet has gotten it right… the “communist” states of today are not More’s Utopia and never will be, when did the idea become sullied?
Now granted, More’s Utopia is not an enactable policy. Here is a country with wealth in store because they (as a society) hold no store in traditional signs of wealth. Here is a country whose foreign relations depend entirely upon the foreign countries thinking the Utopians curious and quaint. Here is a country where lawyers are banished (as deceivers, much like actors were in the days of yore). This is not reality, nor can it be. But I am dubious at best to say that there is nothing to be learned from Utopia.
Another thing Utopia does not account for is the nature of mankind. Utopia would like to believe the best of man, or at least that nurture will win over nature. I’m not entirely convinced that it will. However, given no evidence to back my claim, I wish to avoid delving further into the land of speculation. Suffice to say that I have a fairly pessimistic view of human nature, that way I can only be surprised not disappointed. For Utopia to hold, man as a society must behave as creatures of innate good.
But why bother discussing unattainable perfection at all? What is so fascinating about pretty things that we can’t have? I suppose the answer is that they are still pretty, whether real or not. Even if we can’t have it, we can still want it, and we can still wonder how to get it.
Works Cited
More, Thomas R. Utopia. Ralph Robynson Translation 1556. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. Print.
“Utopia” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 4 Apr. 2000 .
>Oh Ms. Lessing. Oh my good Ms. Lessing.
I may feel differently if I was more in touch with the generation of women whom your novel so (apparently) accurately describes. I may feel differently if I had any care for the importance of political movements throughout history. I may feel differently if this novel didn’t have me thinking so bloody much at moments in my life when I’d really rather not be thinking.
But as it is, I found The Golden Notebook to be torturous to read.
Perhaps this is part of the point. Certainly it details the downward spiral of Anna’s life as she struggles with her writer’s block as well as her relationships.
To me, the greatest question posed by the novel is about a woman’s life and its meaning. Can a woman be happy without a man? The answer, undoubtedly, is “no”. The men of Lessing’s Golden Notebook are perfunctory creatures who could never hope to fully satisfy any woman. It is no wonder Anna struggles so terribly to find true companionship.
The book seems to be written along strings upon strings of affairs, none meaning anything to the invested male party (though some do mean something to Anna). Anna’s life lacks guidance and definition without a man in it, she requires the presence of a man to give her meaning. Without him she becomes lonely, depressed, self-loathing, and entirely un-woman. The perfunctory relationships she does find cannot hope to give her the depth she requires, and she struggles throughout the novel to figure out why. This struggle, to me, is very deeply linked to sex. Anna certainly has a lot of sex, though she nearly never enjoys it. It is a function. A part of life. She craves it but when she receives it is unable to find pleasure or true fulfillment within it.
Certainly this is due to the superficial nature of the sex which Anna does have. She seems to be a magnet for gentlemen callers looking to get away from their wives, for men who are terrified of commitment, for blocked writers looking to find meaning in another blocked writer. In short, it is the entirely wrong people whom Anna attracts into her life.
The friendship between Anna and Molly is further exploration of this lack of male companionship. Both lacking a man, Molly and Anna begin the book in a deep relationship. Best friends. They even live together for a time. Can two women, lacking male partners, supply each other with ersatz companionship? Can a relationship between two women be as deep or as pervasive as that between a man and a woman? The book seems to imply no- this friendship between two single women cannot hope to replace what both women are missing out on without a man in their lives.
The entire story can be summed up, to me, in a passage from pg. 607, “Then I woke into a late afternoon, the room cold and dark. I am depressed; I was entirely the white female bosom shot full of cruel male arrows. I was aching with the need for Saul, and I wanted to abuse him and rail at him and call him names. Then of course he would say: Oh poor Anna, I’m sorry, then we would make love”.
In short, I really REALLY don’t understand why I spent the last few weeks reading this novel. Here’s hoping the next one is better.
Next up: Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner.
Work Cited
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. Perennial Modern Classics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.
>Ms. Lessing,
I am so sorry that you are being put on the Margate Atwood list. I just had a crisis at work today… granted a crisis at my job involves spending hours in a private library pulling plays in hopes to find just a few more monologues for a class I’m TAing…. But a crisis nonetheless!
So I didn’t spend time with you today. I am sorry. Truly and deeply sorry.
And it’s not just because you’re book is so damned long and time is running out for my winter break.
….impressions so far are pretty mixed. I don’t think 150 pages is enough to really give an accurate assessment of this work of literature. I’m hoping that I have something to say before long though, otherwise I’ll just be scratching my head at the end of all of this wondering what the point is…. Again.
Most sincerely,
Danielle