Bringing in the Color

I've thought, recently, that I want to be more visually creative. Not because I think I'm wonderful at it or that I can make anything anyone else would like (oh, listen to the fun negative self-talk!), but because I enjoy sitting and thinking about colors and shapes instead of words sometimes.

With that in mind, I've decided to start keeping a watercolor illustrated journal. I bought a set of Winsor and Newton watercolors, a water brush (so handy!) and a Moleskin watercolor notebook. My goal is going to be to make one illustrated journal entry every day in October.

In the meantime, to practice, I painted a kind of weird-looking pumpkin. But you know, I sort of liked it.

I'm a firm believer that being creative is for you, not for anyone else. If you like to sing, draw, write, whatever, then you should. It's about what makes you happy, not what other people enjoy.

Good Surprises

Teaching is full of surprises, and, frankly, a lot of them are bad. But this morning, I wanted to talk about the good surprises: the quiet student who knocks a recitation out of the park, the lazy-looking kid who turns out to have a brain, or just the moment when one student actually thinks with you rather than having you cram ideas into a vacant space.

It's so easy to be frustrated by the bad surprises, and so easy to forget the good ones. But I've had a couple of good ones already this semester. The first one happened when I assigned a peer editing session. Sure, half the class just basically went through the motions and did their thing as quickly as possible. But the other half took their time and really worked to help each other, to the point where one group actually stayed after class to finish up.

Another small, simple surprise came when two of my students emailed me to ask where the homework that I had (embarrassingly) forgotten to post was. It would have been easy for them to keep their heads down and hope to avoid homework--but they didn't.

So this is my thank you to those students who surprise me in the best way possible. You make teaching bearable.

Childhood for Sale

In his eloquent The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard wrote, "I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."

I have known, in my life, two places that fulfilled this ideal. One was my grandparents' home, where I lived for most of my teenaged years. It was a historic home, built in the thirties, with lovely art deco touches, surrounded by palms and fruit trees. They sold it nearly ten years ago.

The other was the cabin. We spent summers there from my infancy up. It's a little, rustic place in the heart of Arizona Rim Country, which, for those of you not in the know, means it is surrounded by pine trees in a basically alpine climate. There's a creek that runs along the border of the property (it is, technically, the East Verde, I THINK), with two waterfalls.

In late summer, you can pick blackberries there and, with the proper guide, wild butter mushrooms. There's a wild, inedible pear tree on the property. I learned to roast marshmallows over an open fire there. The ruins of my childhood fort can still be discerned.

Many of my nocturnal dreams are set there because it is the kind of place upon which the mind fixes. I know every rock and bush on its slopes.

Yesterday, my grandfather took a prospective buyer out to look at the place.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Silly Rabbit...

In 1959, Joe Harris created the Trix Rabbit...one of the most enduring and poignant emblems of humanity's struggle for the sublime. For those who have never seen a television, the plight of the Trix Rabbit is something like this: He wants the cereal. He dresses in various disguises to try and get the cereal from the mean spirited children. They catch him, taunt him, and deny him cereal.

As a child, I was always deeply disturbed by these commercials, as, I suspect, were many others. Some burgeoning sense of...well, decency...made me feel that if a rabbit was capable of walking around and expressing his cereal preferences, you should damned well give him a bowl of Trix.

Certainly, in the few contests wherein children were permitted to vote on whether the rabbit should get cereal, the answer was always an overwhelming "Yes." We may have been mean-spirited little bastards, but I think we saw, in that plucky rabbit, ourselves, denied just one more bite of that sugary breakfast confection.

To Tweet or Shut the Hell Up?

So I've been vaguely considering making a Twitter account. What's stopping me from doing it yet is mainly that my life is, at present, very boring. I don't think the world needs to hear "Cat threw up again" or "Time for another nap."

BUT at the same time, I believe that it is possible to be creative and interesting even in the midst of the dullest life. The question is, is it possible to do so in so few characters? How does a person create interesting content in such short space? I mean, I value constrictions of form and think they can provoke inspiration and innovation. I'm just not sure if this one DOES.

So let's think together. How interesting could a twitter post be? What could I post on any given day that might be...well, not boring?

Perhaps this: "Lots of green apples on the tree outside." No? Maybe, "Filled with dread about syllabi." Hmm, still not what I'd call catchy.

Really, what I need is Joss Whedon to write my twitter feed for me. He's the master who came up with the following response to the challenge to write a short story in six words: "Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so." Now there's pith for you!

I'll bet many of you out there have awesome and inspiring Twitter thoughts and experiences, so fill me in! What am I missing?

In Defense of St. John Rivers

I've been rereading the latter parts of Jane Eyre as I work on my current chapter, and one of the things that struck me was that yes, I (and, as far as I can tell, I alone) adore St. John Rivers.

Two disclaimers before I get down to business. First, this is not going to be a piece of literary criticism with lots of German words and some Franco Moretti citations. For that, read my dissertation. Second, I'm not going to argue that Jane should have married St. John. If Jane had married him, Jane Eyre would not be the masterpiece that it is, because it would have been pretty much exactly like all Charlotte Bronte's other novels. Stern, righteous, more or less pedagogical figures abound in the Bronte oeuvre, and usually, they get the girl.

So, then. Why my unusual passion for St. John Rivers? We'll lay aside my idiosyncratic tendency to like unpleasant literary characters as a rule, because St. John, I argue, is not in fact particularly unpleasant. He is cold and demanding, yes. But St. John is, as his name implies, the bright reverse of the disturbing John Reed early in the novel--a figure who, along with his sisters, can redeem the concept of family for Jane.

It occurred to me as I was conceptualizing all this that I might just as well write a defense of Romney Leigh as St. John Rivers. I chose not to because Romney is not as widely known and therefore not as widely vilified. But Rivers shares key features with Barrett Browning's hero, most particularly impassioned idealism. I think that's a feature that's too easy to overlook because too obvious. St. John Rivers goes to be a missionary in a dangerous and far-off India because of his zealous Christianity--the same quality that led to him saving Jane from death by exposure and starvation.

I believe that what makes St. John unattractive to modern readers lies in two key facets of his characterization. One, rampant early Victorianism. There's no getting around that. Two, he represents the icy Puritan control that Jane has imposed on herself as a kind of defense throughout the novel. In resisting St. John's claims on her, Jane is actually resisting her own tendency to self-denial.

So, with all that said, why do I still find such charm in his character? I could wiggle through by saying something about the higher value of the Apollonian over the Dionysian for me. And it would probably be true (if horribly, horribly dated!). But I also believe that idealism and self-denial are underrated qualities in modern society. We could do with a few more St. John Riverses in our world--not too many, that wouldn't be any fun--but certainly a few more.

As a final tidbit, in Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the heroine's evangelical mother reads her Jane Eyre--but somehow makes up an ending wherein Jane marries St. John and goes off to become a missionary. Frankly? I find that way more disturbing than the novel as it stands, bigamists or no bigamists!

Crafting a Memorable Meal

Last night my mother made tacos and began waxing nostalgic about the "taco nights" of her youth. I couldn't blame her: my own thoughts had been drawn in a similar direction. There's something about taco dinners that sets them apart from ordinary meals--what is it, though?

When I began considering the question, I asked myself what other kinds of meals had a similar kind of valence within my memory. My answer was artichokes and crepes (on different occasions, not as an ensemble!). Artichokes always stood out for the way we lingered over the table, peeling them slowly until we finally came to devour the heart, while crepe suppers were a relay race from stove to table as long as the batter held out, with a host of different toppings making their way onto the gauzy pancakes.

What do all these meals have in common? They extend the pleasure of dining. You can't simply poke them in your gullet and race off. In the case of the tacos, someone has to be at the stove frying the corn tortillas in shifts, and then everyone participates by adding their favorite tacos. These dinners are both leisurely and interactive. They bring people together in the way that a good meal should, but without being enormously labor-intensive or at all fancy. Sometimes it's easy to get hung up on what we eat, but in the end, it's really all about how we eat.