Friday, February 24, 2012

Manilla Madness

Nevermind why that photo's upside-down. It's a photo of a page of notes on a piece of literature that I just finished teaching in my "Journeys, Voyages, Quests" class. Now don't know what to do with it. I keep all my daily notes in folders on my desktop. Like this:
           
For literature courses, such as the one above, I arrange my notes into folders by author/title. For instance, in the "Odyssey" folder above, I find individual Word documents for each selection of Homer's classic epic poem. When I teach the Odyssey, I open the folder and find the document that corresponds to the passage designated on the syllabus' daily schedule. I open the document containing my notes and reread the passage while the notes document is open. That way, I can add to and change my notes as I reread the literature.

I've been using this system for years. It's a good system. It keeps my notes fresh and easy to find.

Another system I have (and any student who's taken a writing course from me knows that I'm dead serious about the virtues of this system) is my manilla folder system. I have a single manilla folder (or is it now called a "file folder"?) for each class that I teach. As I prepare for a given class period, I gather the needed documents (quizzes, notes, visual aids, etc.) into that folder. The folder also contains all relevant course documents, like a copy of the syllabus, a roster, presentation signup sheet(s), etc.

Inevitably, by week five, the folder is awash with loose sheets like this.
They're printed copies of updated notes to which I've add marginalia. This marginalia exists only on the single, separate sheet. It's unique, and it contains some wicked insights and/or successful schemes around which to organize class discussion. In other words, it's not something I can throw out. But I hate the clutter that these loose pages produce. 

Tell me there's an app for that.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Everything but Fight Club is Illuminated

I just sat down at a coffee shop with a couple of new books, and I made a conscious effort to place one book on top of the other.
Everything is Illuminated (2002), by Jonathan Safran Foer, is on top because it looks more like a serious book than the book I covered up, Fight Club (1996) by Chuck Palahniuk. I guess I don't want to be seen on a late Friday afternoon in a coffee shop, alone with a new copy of Fight Club. Not only is that novel less "literary" than Foer's, it's also more likely to suggest to strangers that I am strange, or at least that I'm more receptive to apocalyptic fantasies than I actually am.

The reason I'm carrying these novels around is because I have honors students who are writing about them. One student is writing about Palahniuk and social criticism in the contemporary American novel. This project really interests me. I'm a big novel-as-social-criticism guy. And I missed the boat on Palahniuk. In 1996, I was wading through the Western canon. I actually had little patience for "popular" fiction back then. I even hated Jack Kerouac (a writer who's since become very important to me); he was too unserious about the craft of writing for me to bother with. In short, I spent the late 90s as a literary snob. I've since reformed, middled my high-brow quite a bit. I now have a vast collection of Kerouac and have spent many hours thinking and writing about the Beats. (look for a future post on this topic.)

In fact, I'm curious about Palahniuk in precisely the same way as I first grew interested in the Beats--I'm curious about the conditions in which people discover and read him. I know that his books are not for the faint of heart; I know that students assume that professors don't like him. I can conclude, then, that his readers read him in an unofficial (even clandestine) capacity. Maybe they even sneak his books around to one another like Jerry snuck George that copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1961).
Maybe readers of Palahniuk represent what Michael Davidson, my favorite Beat scholar, calls the "alternative communities and constituencies" that form around books that are circulated outside of, or in opposition to, the imprimatur of the institutions in whose context they get read. Such communities are cool because they're like reading under the covers with a flashlight, only the covers expand into a blanket fort the size of your whole adolescent world, a fort into which you might escape the dull safety of daily life. 

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Prospero's or Prosperous?

Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of local, independent bookstores. In fact, "local" and "independent" are among my favorite words. But I just ordered three books from amazon.com and I'm not sorry about it.

The books, I'm excited to say, are books that students inspired me to buy. In fact, they're books that I totally have to buy and read so I can help three really smart, really self-motivated and curious honors students bring to fruition three really cool honors projects.

I love Prospero's book store, that mainstay of midtown KC culture. I also like Half-Price Books, that favorite of frugal and/or university-bookstore-averse RU students. But I rarely buy from either place (though I browse plenty).

According to Richard Russo, I am part of the problem. I am feeding right into the nefarious scheme hatched by amazon CEO and evil genius, Jeff Bezos.
  
[couldn't resist]

I love Richard Russo. Love him. His New York Times op-ed about the death of bookstores made me think about my favorite character from Russo's best novel, Empire Falls (well, the son of my favorite character from that novel): Miles Roby. Miles' ambition was to move to Martha's Vineyard and open a bookstore. Nice dream. Why am I killing it by feeding Bezos' Moloch? 
via Ed Drooker
Why don't I feel bad that I don't buy more from local bookstores? 

Farhad Manjoo knows why. He argues against “bookstore cultists like Russo,” who mystify the experience of book buying. Now I’m no unfeeling automaton, but I do recoil a little at the stereotype that English profs love books in some fetishistic way. I also protest too much. Heck, I once walked into a dank, spore-filled old bookstore in Omaha, NE (a casualty of the indy market contraction, btw) and loved it so much I begged the owner for a job. I also worked for a time at Barnes and Nobel (best near-minimum-wage job ever).

So I’m not anti-bookstore culture. What convinced me to not feel bad about not buying books from local bookstores is this: To buy from a local store is actually to be less supportive of local culture than to buy from amazon. (Dig that counterintuitive thesis statement.) 

Here’s how: Because books are cheaper at amazon, I have more money to spend on what Manjoo calls “authentically local cultural experiences.”

Because I got that 39% discount on that Jonathan Fafran Foer book, I now have more money to go to the Unicorn or the Met or the Kemper or City Market or that funky vintage place that’s only open once a month. I retain the means to support more local cultural institutions than I would if I did all my book-buying at a local bookstore. I know what you're thinking: "But supporting a local bookstore is a way of supporting a local cultural institution." Sure. But books ain't broccoli. They're not local to KC (unless they come from BkMk press). Most of the books I buy come from one of a half dozen NYC-based publishing houses.

In a way, by saying no to Prospero's, I'm saying yes to a prosperous (rimshot) cultural life in KC.
Don't cry for local bookstores, giant sculpture in the front of the Kemper
Most importantly, because I can follow student recommendations in real time, and order the books that they inspire me to read as they inspire me, I have more time to do things like write blog posts that buzz-market cool things to do in KC.