March Madness, erudition edition

I'm about to introduce the final paper assignment for my Studies in the American Novel course.

Here's what it is: Students will treat the final two books of the semester, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Ben Marcus's Notable American Women, as though they are competitors in an NCAA-basketball-style tournament of books.

vs.

There's a precedent for this kind of thing: It's called, surprisingly enough, the Tournament of Books and it's totally fun and I totally owe my colleague Dr. Margot Stafford lunch for introducing it to me. 

Here's what students will do: 

1. Determine a "bracket" of the tournament. Something like this:

Students are going to have to look back at the novels published during the 2001-2002 academic year. Could there be a more turbulent, poignant period of time in contemporary American history?

2. Determine the "seed" of each book in the bracket. 

Side-note: I only recently learned of this agrarian metaphor "seed." I guess I'd always assumed the word was "seat." That's the more intuitive (less inventive) metaphor. A team acquires a "seat" on a particular ledge of a bracket. But, no. Jocks be taking liberties with figurative language. Guess what, jocks. The literary people are back and we're taking all our metaphors. We'll plant them and care for them and their fruits will nourish the young and the curious and these fruits will not be stamped with corporate sponsorships. (Nevermind that Oprah logo on Franzen's book.) 

3. Determine the criteria for such a thing as a national "tournament of books" (How do you decide who advances? The better book? What's "better" mean? The more important book? "Important"?) 

My guess is that some students will try to rig the game--basically write the criteria to fit the book they prefer. That's a high crime that only the President of Columbia University circa 1921 would get away with. (That's right, an inside joke, literary-history-style.) 

4. Judge which of the two books (Franzen's or Marcus's) should advance to the next round.

Now, this section will be the most English-papery part of the project. Here, students will flaunt their interpretive acumen--they will 360 dunk on some analysis of specific content from each novel. 

5. Pair up with another student and, during final exam time, write a "commentary" dialogue on some third student's judgment. 

I'm excited, and a little anxious, about this paper. I normally don't assign final papers that are not assertively rigorous, let alone that seem mildly fun. But bear in mind--this is no game! 

Why, just last month an Ann Arbor man was punched during a literary argument. Literary interpretation is getting serious.

Yeah, yeah. I know that last week, two dialysis patients came to blows over the upcoming Kentucky-Louisville game. Fine. We have a way to go to match the sincerity of basketball fans. But we're getting there. We're punching now. 

Here are the English-professory reasons why I like this paper idea: 

1. It will make palpable the civic engagement and intellectual synthesis that comes from debates about what constitutes “good/important literature.” 

2. It will make reading an overtly social activity and not a solely individual one. 

3. It will represent some of the grunt-work that it takes to earn cultural authority.

If successful, students will leave the course confident that they have the chops to do the difficult, rewarding work of caring about the world they live in, of wanting to see it enriched by the very genre of literature that evolved out of the many courageous, crackbrained commitments that novelists have made to the worlds they've lived in. 

At least that's my hope. But I'll settle for a student who learns how to spin a novel on the end of his finger, like a basketball. 

Take it to the previous level

Way back in the twentieth century, I read this essay by George Orwell and it changed the way I talk forever. The essay's called "Politics and the English Language" and it's the bomb. Here's why:

Orwell is crazy mad at clichés. He doesn't want anybody using any analogy without at least having a clue as to how that analogy works. That kind of prohibition is hard to implement.

It means you can't ever say "I'm going to take it to the next level." Well, not unless you're in a stairwell and you're carrying a box up the stairs and responding to the question, "Where are taking that box?" 

I have to admit it, I hate the next level. Why not take it to the previous level? Or better yet, take it outside, give it some fresh air and sunlight. That's what Orwell wants us to do with the language we use. He wants us to freshen it up. Bury our dead metaphors and hope that they have enough compost-nutrients to grow some vitamin-packed way of expressing ourselves.

When we give zero thought to what that "next level" is, we end up with this Guy-Ritchie-dierected Nike commercial:

At the start of the commercial, the meaning of "next level" is pretty tangible: the difference between an amateur and a professional soccer team can certainly be understood in terms of "levels." But the commercial undermines the logic of its own message when it includes such incongruous actions as losing a tooth and signing an autograph in an inappropriate manner as both signifiers of "the next level." 

At this point, some of you are thinking, "What's the problem with 'the next level'? It is what it is." And if you are thinking that, I thank you because you just named the other cliché that if George Orwell were around he would put a Chuck Norris-style smackdown upon.

No sentence has less meaning than "it is what it is." In fact, the equivalent speech act to saying "It is what it is" is to say nothing at all, to stand with lips pursed for the 2.5 seconds that it would take to say that sentence. Indeed, the only reason why this sentence is ever spoken is to fill dead air with a human sound that resembles a thought, which is why this sentence is so common among athletes and coaches who suddenly find themselves standing behind microphones. 

So why do people and corporations use such meaningless sentences as "take it to the next level"? Indeed, why do those who use such sentences tend to value them so much that they hire Guy Ritchie to direct the commercial based off of the empty sentence? Here's why: When one uses this sentence, he gets to gain the agreement of his audience without actually revealing the concrete terms of that agreement.

So be careful before you agree to take anything to the next level. You don't know where that level is. You probably don't know what "it" is. And (most importantly) you don't know who'll be doing the schlepping.

Guess what, it'll probably be you.

Where are the bands (from)?

I recently had a conversation with my Journeys, Voyages, Quests class about bands.

I said that American Idol had killed bands in America (not wanting to consider the possibility that rock music, a typically band-centric genre, may simply be losing favor). 

I asked students to name the bands they liked. I got two responses: Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band that was popular when I was in high school, and Foo Fighters, popular when I was in college. 

Then I looked up the 2011 Grammy Nominees and found that, of the 25 nominees for the top 5 awards, only 2 are bands: Foo Fighters and Mumford & Sons.

Are bands over? 

Are they simply the curios of such culturally-marginal things as documentary film festivals? Maybe. But, man, are they alive and kicking at documentary film festivals.

Dubb Nubb (folk/roots trio from Columbia, MO)

The bands at this year's T/F fall into two categories:
(a) bands that mentioned where they were from and
(b) bands that never mentioned where they were from.

Dubb Nubb is is in category b. They were great. Like if Davendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom had a baby and named it Bjork.

Pearl and the Beard is in category a. They totally rocked, and they totally mentioned five times in a 20-minute set that they were from Brooklyn, New York. That's right, flyover people. Brooklyn. Don't forget it.

I also saw the band, Run-On Sentence. They let us know they were from Portland, OR, both in words and in the resplendent beard of the lead singer.

Nick Jaina and his band

This band never mentioned once that it was from Portland. It also didn't have a band name. Coincidence?

The Toughcats were from Maine, but I had to look that one up. I could not believe how much energy that drummer had. Holy cow. Even during a solo acoustic number, wherein the guitar player sang and played by himself, the drummer started playing the guitar player--slapping him and his guitar. My friend Jeremy said that that kind of energy probably made for a great drummer and a not-great friend. He also sweat a lot. He was the best person I saw on stage all weekend. And I saw some awesome people on stage: 

Like Morgan Spurlock and a woman wearing
a video-game-character-inspired costume.   

And the very cool directors of Undefeated. I think that's them.
I still had tears in my eyes from the movie, that way emotional movie. 

T/F

must pack!

This is one of those blog posts that acts like it’s about one thing but is actually about something totally different. I’m acting like it's a post about film, but it’s actually about how cool the woman I married is. (Skip four paragraphs to get right to the evidence of coolness.)

I’m teaching a film course in the fall. It’s called “Literature and Cinema.” It’s about “adaptation”—the process of translating a verbal narrative (i.e., a short story or a novel) into a visual narrative one (i.e., a movie). I’m excited about the course. I have a million ideas about which films to include, and I haven’t taught film in a couple of years.

When I last taught film, I lived in Columbia, MO, home of the Mizzou Tigers, sure. But it’s also home of the True/False film festival. It’s like the Sundance for documentary filmmakers (which I am not) and documentary lovers (which I am). I always required my film students to attend that festival. They always complained before they went and then thanked me afterward. The experience of being outside of the undergraduate comfort zone always proved fruitful.

And the T/F has consistently awesome films. It’s kind of a bellwether festival—only once the past five years has T/F not screened the film the later, or in the case of this year, already, went on to win the Oscar for best documentary.

But the films are only half the fun. The musical acts that play before the films and the droves of non-midwesterners walking around downtown Columbia is the other half. The third half of fun (?) is the Herculean task of actually attending 10+ movies in 2+ days. The films’ directors are always present at the films, and they answer questions after, which is pretty cool.

And I'm lucky. My birthday falls during T/F season. This year, I totally scored: 

T/F themed birthday!

... complete with personalized itinerary ... 

... and dossier on each film (printed on letter stock).

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.

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. 

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.