The Maypole

We had a warm day here on Sunday, and now the lilacs in back and the apple tree in front are all leafed out, and the grass is turning green.  I was leafing through a new volume of poetry by Linda Pastan and found this one that's just right for the time of year, a reply to one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems, The Snow Man:

The Maypole
after Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of spring
to regard the cherry tree burdened
with blossom;

and have been warm for days
to behold the boughs of the redbud
prickly with color in the glint

of the April sun; and not to think
of any cruelty in the difficult birthing
of so many leaves, to feel only pure

elation at the sound of the undulant breeze
which is the sound of every garden
with a breeze blowing among its flowers,

the sound the listener hears, watching the buds
which were not quite here a week ago
pushing up from oblivion now.

Since we're still in the middle of "the cruelest month," it rained yesterday and got cold again last night.  Our elderly gentleman rabbit who spent most of the winter in our dining room is still coming in at night, because the breeze is still more of a cold wind.  But there are a lot of buds. It looks like there are good things to come.

Chess

One of the four books I brought along to Walker's chess tournament this weekend, the Ohio high school championship, was Stefan Zweig's novella entitled, simply, Chess.  I had read about it at Farm Lane Books and probably some other blogs, too, but as usual I can't remember which ones.  Anyway, it sounded like a good addition to my chess tournament book pile, a kind of psychological thriller that had to do with a game of chess.

I pulled it out at the end of the first evening, when I was looking for something new to distract me from the nail-biting end of a long game that eventually turned out to be a draw.  It took me twenty or thirty minutes to read the entire novella, and afterwards I had time to sit there amid the empty tables set with chessboards, still waiting for the outcome of one of the last three games in the room.

One of the things I've said about chess recently that earned me the stern, nodding agreement of my resident chess expert is that it's a little bit like law, in that if you know the precedent, you can use that to win.  The resident chess expert (I'm using the term "expert" in a technical sense, as he's now rated 2065 by the U.S. Chess Federation and therefore falls into that category; only "master" is higher) reads a lot of books about chess, so he has an advantage over other young players who may have had more experience playing games.  He can look at algebraic and other kinds of chess notations and picture a chess game, and he's learned to see the results of many possible moves all the way to the end game.  This is fairly routine for chess players at his level.

So when I read Zweig's story about a man who, in solitary confinement by the Gestapo, finds a chess book and teaches himself to picture the board and all the possible moves by players on each side, it did not strike me as terribly odd.  That it drives him to a state he calls "chess poisoning" did strike me as a little odd, but perhaps not under the circumstances.  The interest of the book, for me, ended up being in its historical significance, not in terms of what it had to say about chess.

There were a couple of interesting and, I thought, accurate observations for laypeople:
"I learned to understand the subtleties of the game, the tricks and ruses of attack and defence, I grasped the technique of thinking ahead, combination, counter-attack, and soon I could recognize the personal style of every grandmaster as infallibly from his own way of playing a game as you can identify a poet's verses from only a few lines."

This is certainly true, even at the high school level; each player knows his opponents and has studied their moves in previous games.  Sitting in a room with high school chess players yesterday, I overheard a conversation that included the information that "so-and-so usually opens with King's Indian," which is a series of moves that has its own name and methods of counter-attack.

The other interesting bit, for me, was one that echoed my situation as I read the passage:
"But to be perfectly honest, the gradual development of the situation was something of a disappointment to us laymen, as it is in every real tournament game. For the more the chessmen became interlocked in a strange, intricate formation, the more impenetrable did the real state of affairs seem to us. We couldn't tell what either of the opponents intended, or which of the two really held the advantage. We just noticed individual pieces being advanced like levers to break through the enemy front, but we were unable--since with these first-class players every movement was always combined several moves in advance--to see the strategic intention in all this toing and froing."

I was told (by other players) that the draw at the end of the day was slightly disappointing for Walker, since he had a "superior position" for most of the game and was "ahead on time."  His opponent, however, did not make any mistakes.

The only thing I can ever tell about Walker's game when I walk into the tournament room is that if he's walking up and down and smiling, he has a--sometimes momentary--advantage.  If he's sitting down holding his head in his hands and looking stern, it's business as usual. As in poker, good players put on a "chess face." And parents try to strike the right balance between supporting the tournament play and letting the players alone.

Walker played good chess all weekend.   He drew with the highest-rated player (a 12th-grader who speaks Russian to his chess teacher) and they were both in a 5-way tie for first, which was decided according to an arcane and precise method of "tie-breaker" points, according to which the 12th-grader came in first, and Walker came in second. His friend who went into this tournament with the exact same rating and who shares the Ohio 10th-grade championship with him, came in third. Walker has an embarrassingly big trophy and is happy because he played well, winning four games and drawing two.  

After the awarding of the trophy, we went out to dinner with the family of Walker's chess student, Joe, and Walker replayed one of his games at the restaurant table to show Joe what happened and why.  Then we drove home, and Eleanor played a song from the musical "Chess" in Walker's honor so we could all sing along: "one town's very like another when your head's down over your pieces, brother."

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

Children's: What John Reynolds Gardiner tale tells of a lad's science project that turns him green and leafy, and the Feds who want him kept in the dark?

Classics: What J.D. Salinger novel drew its title from a misquoted Robert Burns line?

Non-Fiction: What U.S. government agency saw its dirty laundry aired by former employees in the tell-alls In Search of Enemies and Inside the Company?

Book Club: What biblical patriarch stars in Joseph Heller's God Knows?

Authors: What best-selling self-help author is, according to fellow psychologist Robert Butterworth, "like your mama, without hair"?

Book Bag: Which of John Grisham's first 10 novels did not have a title beginning with the word "The"?

American Fear

Harriet mailed me some volumes of poetry that arrived last week, and one of the volumes is so suited to my current temperament that I suspect her of picking it out especially.  It's about gratitude and wonder, but also fear.  It's funny on the way to being even more serious.  By Robert Wrigley, it's entitled Beautiful Country, and the epigraph accurately forecasts the tone of the entire volume:  "This is a beautiful country."--John Brown, seated on his coffin, as he rode to the gallows, December 2, 1859.

My favorite poem in this volume, the one that made me laugh out loud several times, is "American Fear."  It's about the things we fear, and how they're connected to the things we love... written from the point of view of someone who loves words and poems. I thought that even those of you who suffer from a mild case of metrophobia (fear of poetry) would enjoy it.

American Fear
"Such as we were we gave ourselves outright."--Robert Frost

What it is is a company selling "clothing
for the disaffected youth culture."
T-shirts and sweatshirts, mostly black,
someone's marketing vision for a new world,
a twenty-first-century Henry ("You can have
any color you want so long as it's black") Ford,
that old-time anti-Semite, his once nearly bankrupt
namesake corporation supplanted by this other.

A button on the Web site reads "Ready to Order Fear,"
but everywhere you look it's free: fear of wolves,
bulls, and bears: fear of the sun, fear of that one
or this one, fear that all it takes is one. Storm fear,
house fear, fear of frost. Fear of gravity is barophobia.
But there's also Cape Fear, Camp Fear,
and Fear Mountain: you can visit those. There's fear
of God, fear of the odd; fear of night, fear of air.

Fear of hair is chaetophobia. Eleutherophobia's fear of freedom.
There's First Encounter Assault Recon,
"a survival horror first-person shooter developed
by Monolith Productions and published by Vivendi,"
a video game, a generation's modus vivendi, a way of living
in which we agree to disagree violently.
Ephebiphobia is the fear of teenagers; melanophobia,
fear of the color black; caligynephobia,

fear of beautiful women; and anthrophobia, fear
of flowers. You can spend hours on a list like this.
Pantophobia is the fear of everything. After
230-odd years the republic crawls
through its slow-motion youth, democracy requiring not
only equality but a vast sameness many fear,
as some fear guns and others fear their guns
will be taken away, their beautiful guns,

poetry in them, shining assemblages of articulate parts
in which ammo is the main idea. Consider the idea
that a thing can be beyond perfection, as in a more perfect
union, as in the sky and its endlessness
--astrophobia, that's called: the fear of stars
and celestial space. As for fear of oblivion,
there is no word for it. Come home late, Robert Frost
rattled the key in the lock and left the door open

until a light was on, a way of allowing what was inside out.
Later, on his farmhouse porch, Frost trembling,
frightened of the dark, a shotgun in his hands. He thought
he could talk Khrushchev into nuclear disarmament
(nucleomituphobia, bomb fear) and sulked because
JFK didn't call him back. The fear of poetry
is metrophobia, and melophobes fear music, cringing
at the ballgame through "God Bless America."

Regarding the disaffected, the OED suggest they lack
first of all affection. Put that with logophobia,
the fear of words, and philophobia, the fear of love.
Parthenophobia is the fear of virgin girls. WTF
is internet slang and the initials of the World Taekwondo
Federation, member of the International Olympic Committee.
Why is there no word for the fear of committees,
which are so much to be feared? Fear of Germany

is teutophobia. Vestiphobia is the fear of clothing.
The fear of flags is vexiphobia. On American Fear's
logo, you can find the flag's stripes resembling a bar code.
Gringophobia is the fear of Americans, the ones
who fear America ends far north of Tierra del Fuego.
Fear of a white god is leukotheophobia. A snowclone
is a "cliche or phrasal template, multiuse, customizable,
instantly recognizable, timeworn, and open

to an array of variants"--as in, What Would Henry Ford Do?
American Fear's best-selling design:
a mandible-less skull enwreathed by bullets, bunting,
and feathers, on a base of fifties-befinned bombs.
There is no word for the fear of growing up,
though gerascophobia is the fear
of growing old, and old men fear not
how others might read them by their clothes.

Kings wear robes and senators wear suits. The word senator
comes from the Latin senex, meaning "old man,"
and gerontophobia is the fear of old people.
Chronophobia is the fear of time.
Some old men do not wear T-shirts,
because putting one on can be exhausting
and taking it off worse. Imagine fearing a shirt.
Why is there a word like bathysiderodromophobia?

Subways are beautiful in their tunnels and troughs,
their soiled, palatial stations. "Go in fear of abstractions,"
Pound said. He suffered not from metrophobia,
but from madness. "To fear" in Italian is temere.
"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross,"
wrote Pound. "Better to go down dignified
with boughten friendship at your side than none at all,"
wrote Frost. He had a lover's quarrel with the world.

Among American Fear's other shirt designs, one called
"Your Pretty Death Bed," a young woman,
her wrists slashed, looking asleep and covered
by the Stars and Stripes. There is no word
for the fear our daughters will commit suicide
beneath a patriotic blanket. Robert Frost's son, Carol,
shot himself with a deer rifle on October 9, 1940.
"I took the wrong way with him" wrote Frost,

who would outlive all but two of his six children.
A citizen opposes the reintroduction of gray wolves
to the American wilderness, because they are Canadian,
as though they might harbor within their genes
a disinclination for revolution and a soft spot
for the queen. Freddie Mercury was a gay British genius,
and homophobic sports teams all across the nation sing his
"We Are the Champions." He's number 50

among the 100 Greatest Britons, four slots ahead
of George Harrison, twelve ahead of Jane Austen,
and a whopping twenty-three in front of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Ronald Reagan is number one on the American list.
The only poet in the top twenty-five is Muhammad Ali,
who comes in just above Rosa Parks but well behind
Elvis, whose pelvis was censored from the television screen.
No word for the fear of free speech,

but a man was not allowed to board a flight at JFK
because his T-shirt, in Arabic and English, read,
"We will not be silent." American Fear's shirts
will not alarm the Transportation Security Administration,
also called the TSA. The fear of silence is sedatephobia.
The TSA is also the Tourette Syndrome Association,
and based on Boswell's descriptions it is theorized
that Samuel Johnson suffered from the malady,

making frequent odd grunts and muttering
under his breath "too, too, too" meaning also
and yes and more, meaning many,
meaning he meant to know all the words,
and the problem with all is everything. All men, all words,
all fears. This beautiful, fearful,
and fearsome country, such as it is,
such as it might yet, someday, become.

Bathysiderodromophobia, by the way, is fear of the subway, which the poet reveals in the next line.

I was laughing out loud about the "fear that our daughters will commit suicide" and the bit about Freddie Mercury.  Also, I love the word "ephebiphobia" and think I will be using it frequently over the next month.

After I read "American Fear" I went on to the next poem according to the way I was reading through the volume, which was backwards.  "A Rumor of Bears" left me with tears in my eyes. And then I got to the title poem, "Beautiful Country," and "thought about what was wrong and more wrong" but ended up being "promised another day when everything would be better," courtesy of what has become of the American military since Vietnam.  And I kept reading and becoming more like Wrigley's picture of Johnson, thinking "also/and yes and more, meaning many,/meaning he meant to know all the words."

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

Being an adjunct isn't all bad. That's one of the conclusions drawn by the "accidental academic" who wrote In the Basement of the Ivory Tower about his own experiences doing what I have done for the past 27 years, trying to teach first-year college students to write and to enjoy some of the fiction and essays that are put into Introduction to Literature anthologies.

I found the book completely unsurprising, a little discouragingly so, since it seems that things are tough all over, and in pretty much the same way. Nowhere does anyone really know what an adjunct does in the classroom.  Nowhere is an adjunct able to turn to a colleague for advice, and infrequent workshops on things like "Learner-Centered Assessment" are little help.  Everywhere adjuncts get exactly the same kinds of comments on course evaluations:  "before I would of never voluntarily read a book" and the teacher is "enthusiastic...which helps make the three hours go by quicker."

This book was written after the June 2008 article in The Atlantic made such waves, spurring criticism of the anonymity of "Professor X" and much caviling (mostly from the tenured) about the observations he makes about the classes no one else wants to teach or even knows very much about.

What he says about the isolation in which he works rings true to me:  "I have worked as an adjunct instructor now for a decade. I have been observed twice, once by each school."  I myself have worked as a teaching assistant and then an adjunct instructor for four different colleges over the past 27 years.  As a TA, I was observed once, the semester I began teaching.  As an adjunct, I was observed for the length of one 50-minute class by two of the three colleges I worked for during the first semester I worked there.  (At the other one, I received a phone call from the hospital bed where I had landed after an emergency to verify that I wouldn't be teaching that week, so the personnel department could "adjust" my pay).  As Professor X observes, "no one sees what goes on except the students, and their judgments are fallible."

My favorite part of the adjunct discussion is always the obligatory point at which a tenured faculty member declares passionately that the college is "taking advantage" of the adjuncts and not paying them enough, which, as "Professor X" points out, strikes the adjunct as "not honest but smug."

My least favorite part, the part this book explains very well, is the despair that writing teachers witness and perpetuate.  "Unsuccessful students grow up thinking not just that their work has no value, but that it never can have any value, and thus they cannot put in the wholehearted effort that college demands."  So what they write, as he says, is full of the "commonplace...and the lack of ideas makes for a prose that churns in place. The reading assignments are attempts to "make up, with a small clutch of baby steps, for a lifetime of not reading."  Many of the students hand in work that is "just an assignment, with no relevance to the real world. For the indifferent student, all work is busy work, empty effort to occupy time and, hopefully, garner some credit in the end."  The attempt to grade these assignments "rankles and depresses" Professor X, who knows that "when I give a failing grade to a student, I am not just passing judgment on some abstract intellectual exercise. I am impeding that student's progress, thwarting his ambition, keeping him down, committing the universal crime of messing with his livelihood--not to mention forcing him to pay the tuition charge all over again....any poor grade I issue may mean disastrous economic consequences."

And as he says, "we're not talking nuance here. My students who fail do so with an intensity that is operatic."  He talks about giving quizzes on whether characters are alive or dead at the end of the work.  I didn't know this was universal but am not surprised; I have a quiz in my files entitled "Othello killer quiz" on which there are three questions:  Who kills Desdemona? Who kills Emilia? and the last one, the sort-of-trick question: Who kills Othello?

The parts of this book I like best are when he talks about the details of teaching writing, how it's easy to spend "40 minutes on the first paragraph" and how "writing is thinking."  It's hard work, teaching writing.  It can be immensely satisfying, but it's exhausting, walking others through all those turns and twists of logic and suggesting ways to find evidence for it.  Writing teachers, who are like computing experts and medical doctors in being continually asked by friends and loved ones for a little help on the side, are always having to balance their exhaustion with their fondness for the petitioner.

The parts of the book I find least convincing include his conclusion about who should be in college and who shouldn't. Oddly enough, in a book fighting against all sorts of elitist ideas, I found his views a bit elitist.  It's true that for some of the students we adjuncts see "the classes are more difficult than they could have dreamed, and there is simply no time to complete all the work," but I disagree that this means those students might not belong in college at all. If it means anything to me (as a person who's gotten out of the game rather than try to reform it), it means that 15-week semesters are too short for writing classes...and I speak as someone who tried to do that kind of work with students during a 10-week quarter.

There are several other things I don't agree with Professor X about.  He tries to teach students to write the "composition," something "built, crafted, worked on, composed."  I favor teaching the essay--a piece of writing that is a trial or attempt from a personal point of view--because I'm more interested in teaching critical thinking than in teaching the craft of writing.

I don't necessarily think that using Aristotle's various invention techniques, so often featured in composition textbooks as assignments in themselves (narrative, description, compare/contrast, analysis, cause and effect) is the best way to teach writing in college.  I find it curious that Professor X doesn't even question the set-up of what I like to call the course in "writing without content," even when he cogently describes the complications inherent in helping students come up with a topic for a research paper.  However interested he may be in the topic of the research, it's still a paper for which the research doesn't really matter. It's what he talks about elsewhere, a paper in which the content is not important, but proving that the student can follow the steps is the whole point of the exercise.  I think that this kind of assignment is one of the problems with the way we teach writing in college today. Who wants to write for a grader?  College students, like other humans, want to write something that will be read.  There are ways to balance the requirement that writing be graded with the necessity of finding ways to read some of it, but Professor X doesn't seem to have discovered any of these yet.

Professor X confesses that his acquaintance with the guidelines for teaching writing put out by Writing Program Administrators and his reading of some of the experts in the field of rhetoric and composition is quite recent (since the Atlantic article came out), but he tries to draw conclusions from it anyway, as if anyone who actually goes to graduate school to learn this stuff is wasting their time, even admitting that he "was looking for some magic, for a tool kit."  A writing teacher should know that there are no shortcuts.

I don't agree that "women are more empathetic than men" as adjuncts (and wonder why someone who presumably teaches the avoidance of generalization in writing would include one like that in his own writing).

And finally, I wonder why he includes the story of one plagiarizing student only to illustrate the danger he feels alone with such students at night in the "basement," rather than to discuss any of the issues a writer might find interesting about the wide range of options for paper-writing by hire available on the internet today.

I admire Professor X for starting this discussion, and hope that it doesn't end with this one book. There's a lot more to say about this topic, and I applaud his bravery in caring enough to stand up and tell it like it is for one of the people who other Professors don't usually notice except to say what a shame it is that so much of our higher education system depends on his hard work, conscientiousness, and enthusiasm for his subject matter.

Shadow Box

Fred Chappell's volume entitled Shadow Box contains poems reminiscent of the cleverness of John Donne's Songs and Sonnets because of the way he both incorporates and reinvents form.  Each part of the volume (there are five) has a prefatory note explaining what kinds of experiments with form the reader will find therein.

Part One contains "poems-within-poems (enclosed, inlaid, embedded, double, nested)" including "curtal sonnets in which sestets are embedded in octaves."  This is the best part of the volume, and the longest section.  My favorites from it are "Neverland," "A Face in the Crowd," and "Narcissus and Echo," in addition to this one, a curtal sonnet:

Stopping by the Old Homestead

The Interstate is audible from here.
Five miles east, its low, autonomous hum
disturbs the stillness that then stood, the calm
you found when you came here last time, eight years
ago, climbing the same hard road you toiled
in youth that slants a steeper grade today,
this path by the twisted apple tree whose shadow
tensely holds a darker tone. You breathe
harder than when you stopped to see this farm
back then, where claims your life had made against
the future and never paid to own decayed.
Old times shriveled and largely gone, you think,
and trudge all down the hill to find your Chevy
rust-eaten, blind, jacked up on cinder blocks.

You see how the octave (the first eight lines) has a sestet (six lines) within it, consisting of the italicized words?  And then the last six lines, the traditional sestet, has a quatrain consisting of italicized words within it, like half an octave.  And isn't it lovely how the back and forth within the logical progression of the sonnet moves us in time as the speaker pictures "you" moving down the hill?

Part Two contains poems which "center upon visual images," of which I think the one entitled "Fireflies" is the loveliest.  The poet gets a little too cute alluding to Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar" with "Anecdote of the Ironweed," at least for my taste.

Part Three contains "reliquary" poems.  This one, I think, is the most finely-turned, the best-sculpted:

Pearl

Her hands were gentle about the ills of children,
Her speech was measured amid the quarrels of kinfolk.
She held the sorrow that had grown unspoken
Till it was perfect as a sphere, a token
Of her secret, with a light that shone within
And stood, in an undropped tear, a sign
Of what enwrapped itself upon the wound
Again, layer on nacreous layer, around
The hurt till it transformed to stone, mild jewel
Priceless, modest, calm, and pure and cool.

Here lies the lucent Pearl on black sateen
That shall not often enrobe her like again.

Don't you like the eulogy of the woman in her coffin, and the image of the pearl within?

Part Four is "counterpoint," and this is the section in which you'll find the title poem, a debate between body and soul with a tribute to Hopkins' poem "Spring and Fall" embedded in it ("Poor Ghost, you are no more than guess").  Flesh and spirit take turns surrounding meaning, culminating with a memorable resonance for the words "sheltering" and "grave."

Part Five is a section "in which ancient Christian Latin hymns provide context and subject matter."  This is my least favorite section, and it is the shortest.  One poem, elaborating on "noctium phantasmata," can't resist the reference to A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"A strumpet image appears in guise
Of Love once lost to compromise;
A taloned Fury in sharp silhouette
Advances, by moonlight ill met."

These four lines are particularly disappointing after my interest has been roused by the wording in previous lines, where "spectral accusers demand/ empathies he cannot profess."

Overall, although there are some moments in the volume that strike me as clunky--mostly to do with literary allusion--there are many lovely moments in these finely-crafted and clever little poems.  This is a book I will pick up and occasionally reread with pleasure, finding another turn of phrase to admire, another hidden shadow within these nested boxes.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

Children's: What name did Russell and Lillian Hoban bestow upon their heroic badger?

Classics: What novels' seven commandments include: "Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy" and "No animal shall wear clothes"?

Non-Fiction: What personal-finance guru promises to give folks The Courage to Be Rich along The Road to Wealth?

Book Club: What Barbara Kingsolver novel gives Kentuckian Taylor Greer a flat tire just a few blocks away from Tucson, Arizona's Jesus is Lord Used Tires?

Authors: Who churned out thrillers under the name John Lange, to pay his Harvard Medical School tuition?

Book Bag: What Mark Leyner novel concerns a seventh-grader named Mark Leyner who is reviewing a screenplay called The Tetherballs of Bougainville?