The Classroom Conservative

Nick Cave, The Death Of Bunny Munro

Would you wait 277 pages to read about the end of one of the most reprehensible characters encountered in contemporary literature? The book's title and its opening lines set up the demise of Bunny Munro, and so the only tension is whether it refers to grandfather, father, or son: all three share the same name. There is much depravity to go around, as the middle-aged Bunny Munro sells beauty products door-to-door and preoccupies himself in taking sexual advantage of his customers, a practice that drives Libby, his long-suffering wife, to despair. If Bunny Senior was not a lothario, he was certainly as bad a role model.

In some ways, the most interesting sequences in Nick Cave's new novel follow Bunny from assignation to assignation, as the reader marvels at the depths of depravity. The author has fun, too: how much time can one spend describing Bunny gleefully lighting cigarettes? But as Bunny has to take more responsibility for his young son, he must modify his behavior, grudgingly. Happily, this is not a simple bad-boy-makes-good story. The "new" Bunny has threatened his physical well-being, and that -- as much as anything -- changes Bunny's ways. Still, the ladies man does not go quietly, and his shambolic decline almost matches the energy of the book's first chapters.

Cave does a nice job drawing the sensitive, thoughtful Bunny Junior, a young man who thrives in spite of his surroundings. And while I would have liked a little more detail in the Brighton surroundings, it was great to read something set in one of my favorite British locales. And The Ass Saw The Angel, Nick Cave's first novel, was written in the baroque style of late Faulkner or early Cormac McCarthy, but The Death of Bunny Munro is more approachable, if no less disturbing. It is obvious that the creativity that feeds his best work with the Bad Seeds runs just as dark through his prose.

Not at all recommended for those sensibilities easily offended.

When You Do Not Know Where You Are, The Terrorists Win

We know, of course, that the damage caused on 9/11 spread immediately beyond Ground Zero. As an attack on capitalism, the destruction of the World Trade Centre was but a prelude to the real costs associated with our response, including the tremendous amount of money spent on new security measures. Cynical (neo-conservative) politicians, fearing that our habits would change, used the goodwill that arose after the attacks to reinforce a return to old patterns: if you do not shop, the terrorists win. But I am reminded that Al-Qaeda's lasting success, beyond hobbling entire systems by which we organize ourselves, is in changes that are made to the small, reassuring comforts that make life livable.

I am not a happy airline passenger. It is not that I grip the armrests with white knuckles, but I do not wake on the morning of a trip filled with the excitement of hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour. I accept fully that if I want the convenience of flying, I will have to submit to a ritual undressing at security. The proliferation of hijackings through the twentieth century scribbled that writing on the wall. I accept fully that the financial pressures on the airlines, evident before September 11, 2001, will make it so that I cannot expect anything like creature comforts on the airplane, itself.

But for those of us who do not love to fly, the loss of control is much of the problem. I understand, and I really believe, that I am more likely to come a cropper on the highway between Calgary and Edmonton than I am to encounter real problems in the hands of Air Canada. But, psychologically, getting strapped to a small seat, facing forward, unable to see where I am going, as I shimmer and shake with turbulence, is difficult to endure. One of the small comforts I have had is the ability to track the progress of our trip. I used to be able to see on a map how close we were to our destination. After the failed exploits of the Christmas Underwear Bomber, this facility has been removed from entertainment screens on the seat-backs in front of passengers. Where, previously, I could watch an airplane roughly the size of the length of Saskatchewan move across the Great Lakes, I now get a "This Option Is Not Available," removing as well our height, our speed, and the "estimated time to destination" data. The idea, you see, is that a terrorist cannot use even this rough approximation to know when to time, for maximum effect, any act of mayhem.

On a recent journey from Calgary to Halifax, I knew only when we were planning to leave and when we should land at our final destination. Not reflected on my itinerary was the timing of a scheduled stop in Montreal. We left a little late, and I nodded off while my plane taxied. We were delayed on the tarmac, and we had a slight tailwind. About what seemed to me three hours into the journey, where were we? Were we almost to Montreal? Were we just half-way? Journey times include getting to and from the gate. How much of what happened on the ground in Calgary should be factored into my estimation?

Now, I recognize that, for many people, nothing I have written above compares to their discomfort at getting rubbed down at security, something I simply accept. But, for me, the response to the Christmas peril makes a real difference to my experience, without delivering anything tangible to safety, in my view. How long will it take before these new measures are quietly restored -- or before we acclimate once more to knee-jerk reactions? And the big question might be: are these changes simply designed to make us feel like someone is doing something, causing more harm than good in practical implementation?

Fewer Mass-Market Paperbacks In University Classes

Just before Christmas, we bought a couple of "leaning" bookshelves, those "A" shaped things whose tops rest firmly against the wall. One has a desk, which is convenient for work, and I welcome the opportunity to store more books. The two or three middle shelves are most dynamic, in that they can hold just about anything. But the lowest shelf is very deep, and the top shelf -- the one that rests against the wall -- is very narrow. In fact, it is only five inches deep.

A five-inch shelf will hold only mass-market paperbacks, and when I went hunting for some titles to relocate, I was surprised that we had very few. There are no romance novels lying about, as you might guess, and for recent titles in the smallest format I could find nothing more recent that Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. These must be at least ten years old. For older titles, I have a mass-market copy of Harry Hansen's The Civil War, and a memorable student once gave me a copy of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat.

Just about everything else, I discovered, was from my undergraduate days. I have copies of The Canterbury Tales and Cellini's Autobiography. The Canadian courses I took used mass-market paperbacks: Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game, Margaret Lawrence's A Jest of God, and Alice Munro's The Lives of Girls and Women. Some American titles from those days, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, and John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent, have been replaced in my teaching by trade paperbacks.

Now, if trade paperbacks are soft-bound from sheets from the hardcover edition, there is no obvious reason to elongate Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Yet, I hold in my hand two copies: one small, and one larger. And, yes, the larger one is as large as a number of the "new" trade paperbacks I bought last year. The larger one is more expensive, but much of that, I assume, has to do with the fact that the smaller copy is much older.

Some of the cheapest books you can order for classes -- wonderful Broadview editions and much-less-wonderful Dover reprints -- are larger than mass-market size. How did the old books we mark up, throw in our backpacks, and dog-ear during examination week get so big, anyway?

Back From The Republic Of Doyle

Before the second episode of The Republic of Doyle screens, I wanted to lend my voice of comment to the discussion about CBC's latest "slice of life" dramatic comedy from Newfoundland.

Like everyone else who has opined, I find series star Allan Hawco a worthy descendant of James Garner's beloved private investigator, Jim Rockford. But if the series stars are going to develop the kind of chemistry Rockford had with his father "Rocky," things will have to pick up between Hawco and Sean McGinley. The use of a veteran Irish actor is better casting than we usually see -- with earnest "come from aways" looking into the camera and asking, "How are you, then, my old cockie?" -- but in the first episode, at least, he was just one of Jake Doyle's dysfunctional friends and family members. On the other hand, if we must have a tedious "will he, won't she?" love story with Constable Bennett (Krystin Pellerin), I like it as two corners of a triangle -- with the third provided by Doyle's estranged wife, played with edgy elan by Rachel Wilson.

The plot of the first episode was script-thin, though, wasting an excellent performance from Shawn Majumder, reminding us yet again of his range. Pilots seldom have the luxury of proper exposition, so we could not expect (and did not receive) much more than an introduction to the players who will take us through the half-dozen episodes on offer. But if you expect me to believe that St. John's can make private investigation compelling, do not ask me to accept that a salacious murder/drug/sex scandal will fall open in a matter of minutes.

Ah, St. John's. I hardly knew you with your edgy pursuits and raucous party boats. How much things have changed in fifteen years. The city is a rightful co-star: so bright and colorful. But just tell me the weather will not always be so pleasant. Having solved his first case in the sunniest stretch the Old City has likely ever seen, Jake Doyle deserves some rain, drizzle, and fog.

Patricia Highsmith, Found In The Street

I have had languishing on my bookshelf for some time Found In The Street, a late Patricia Highsmith novel. The perception, of course, is that early Highsmith represents her strongest work, while her later stuff is derivative, at best. At loose ends over the holiday, I pulled it down and was quite surprised. I am a huge fan of her five "Ripley" novels, but this one more than holds its reader's attention.

Highsmith is described as a mystery writer, or at least that is how Heather Reisman would have her shelved at Chapters. In fact, there is no mystery to unravel here, no "whodunit?" quality. There is only one murder over these 277 pages, and that casual act of violence is only pieced together after the fact. Instead, Highsmith is concerned with the darker elements of the human condition. She questions how we get how we have become, and her prose marvels at the great diversity of humanity.

The protagonist of the novel is Jack Sutherland, born of a well-to-do family but shiftless, for the most part. Having run into a little trouble with drugs on a trip to Europe, he has spent the ensuing years trying to redeem himself in the eyes of his family; Jack is, himself, a fine father to his young daughter Amelia. After toying with journalism in New York, he begins to get some traction as an illustrator. What is unconventional in this story of respectability sought is Jack's marriage to Natalia, a fellow blueblood who splits her time between their apartment in Greenwich Village and her parents' home in Pennsylvania. Natalia has made it clear that she must stay unfettered, child or no child, and she drifts in and out, spending time with her friends. Her "soul mate" is Louis, a gay man of whom Jack seems quite jealous. But this irritation is displaced by the Sutherlands' new fixation, Elsie Tyler.

Ms Tyler is discovered by Jack in a local diner, talking with the neighborhood eccentric who found Jack's wallet and returned it without pilfering the hundreds of dollars it contained. Ralph Linderman is Jack's foil, a man whose paternalism masks a dangerous obsession with Elsie. As she is drawn into the Sutherlands' circle, Linderman assumes that Jack has coerced her into an affair. In fact, Elsie begins sleeping with Natalia, demonstrating that human relationships are far more complex than the puritanically judgmental Linderman can even imagine. And, interestingly, Jack is not at all jealous of either his wife or her lover, both of whom define his erotic longings. These disconnects, the discomfort the action hides, is the most intriguing part of the novel for me.

Highsmith describes in great detail the four or five streets in the Village where the novel is set. But her New York could be New York of the 1950s as easily as it might be the 1980s in which this action is supposed to take place. There are but awkward references to video cassettes and new wave music, and -- of course -- Linderman finds enough money to take Tom Ripley to Europe. So, it is as if Highsmith's narration, displaced from the 1950s, argues uneasily for a progressive tolerance of the Sutherlands and their friends that reflects her experience as an expatriated lesbian while Linderman, a figure who too seems to walk out of an earlier time in American history, cannot fathom at all the social realities of the contemporary United States.

Reviewing Teaching Evaluations In A Crisp, New Shirt

In advance of the start of the semester, I am reviewing the teaching evaluations for our sessional instructors in Calgary and Edmonton. We are very fortunate to have some fabulous teachers in those cities, individuals who are available and willing to undertake part-time work for us. Evaluations are not available to instructors until grades are submitted, of course, and so it is nice to provide quick turnaround on the data after that so instructors can make necessary adjustments early in the new semester.

For tenured and tenure-track faculty, there is no established schedule for reviewing evaluations. I like to look at mine as soon as they are available, but I will admit that they can be depressing if read, say, just before Christmas. I am fortunate to have had 97% positive responses over fifteen years, but one comment from a disgruntled student can stay with you through multiple egg nogs, I assure you. I have a colleague who compiles all his evaluations and has a look every two years, just before our progress reports are due with the Dean. Imagine the shock of ten or fifteen disgruntled students all presented at the same time.

Now, I am not suggesting that there is no practical value to these forms. Indeed, as I have said, I am reviewing them promptly so that their benefit may best be felt by our sessional instructors in the north. But evaluations are not without problems, and our faculty is looking to improve the questions asked. One of my pet peeves over the years has been how students have used more general questions to comment on the physical appearance of instructors.

Women and men, old and young, get the same feedback: complaints about hair, clothing, body odor. I think university instructors are less vain than your average professional, but having a nineteen year-old who lives in a cap comment on your favorite sweater seems to be universally galling.

As I was steaming my woolens and pressing my cottons over the holidays, I could not help but remember a spring day years ago when, walking between the physical education building and university hall, I ran into a graduating student, a young woman who had completed successfully, and with some elan, a number of my courses.

"You must be happy to be done," I said.

"Yes. No more having to listen to professors in cheap suits day in and day out!"

I was stunned.

"Cheap?" I thought to myself. "Cheap?"

Perhaps I am more vain than are my colleagues.

The Passage Of Time: A New Year's Ode

With the weather outside truly frightful, or at least prohibitively cold, I have been using some quiet time to catch up on ripping some albums for iTunes. I was surprised to find, for example, that I had neglected to add Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska or any Kinks to the list. How, with only twelve thousand songs in my pocket, could I have missed "Celluloid Heroes"? Just kidding. But pulling out these old CDs demonstrates to me just how flimsy a grasp we have on time. It seems like an appropriate New Year's observation.

I recall so vividly, for example, the release of David Bowie's Let's Dance in 1983. It was a smashing success, of course, and Bowie has not had as successful a studio album since. But, at the time, it was hailed as a significant "comeback" in the United States. Station to Station had been an American hit in 1976, but his next four records failed to crack the top ten. Let's Dance hit #4, ending a seven-year drought, just when people apparently thought that Bowie would be forgotten. I recall that impression. A big star from the 1970s had lost all significance by the middle of the next decade. Seven years to a fourteen year-old boy just discovering popular music seemed like an eternity. Of course, Let's Dance has now been out for more than a quarter of a century, and to a middle-aged man its release feels like last summer.

I had the same response today when I was reminded that XTC's Skylarking was released in 1986 or that Sinead O'Connor's second record was supposed to make her the first superstar of the 1990s. The nostalgia industry has already begun to repackage the fleeting stars of that decade: Fiona Apple, Shawn Colvin, Deep Blue Something, Divinyls, Duncan Sheik, Joan Osbourne, Tonic.

The modernists whom I teach struggled to find a better way to represent the passage of time in their literature, of course. The meticulous hour spent in class should not be represented in the same way as the easy hour spent in leisure, but how best to achieve this literary sleight of hand? For many authors, they sought only to draw their readers' attention to this paradox. Pages and pages were devoted to the inner workings of a man or woman experiencing a moment, and years could then pass through the words of a single paragraph.

This seems apt, as I realize that the students joining us next week, after taking a few extra months to work, were born in 1992, just as I was making application to graduate school. They feel to some extent as if they have lived whole lives, struggling through years of restrictions, navigating secondary school -- and those years, like this one past, has passed for me in the blink of an eye.

Some Christmas Cheer For Stephen King

This year, I got two books for Christmas: Nadirs, a collection of short pieces from Nobel laureate Herta Muller, and The Death of Bunny Munro, the new novel by Nick Cave. I have been getting books for Christmas for as long as I can remember, and this memory takes me back to one of my first holiday traditions: reading whatever Stephen King brought out in the autumn.

Now, this is not a post about high art and low art. I am arguing neither that Stephen King deserves more attention than he gets from the academy, nor that his literature warrants that attention. (I have had students petition for King on American literature surveys; I cannot remember, in depth, any plot of a King book that has not been made into a film.) I am simply giving credit to Stephen King for igniting in me a love of reading.

Walking through the bookstore this holiday season, I noticed that Stephen King has released the 1088-page Under the Dome, precisely the kind of doorstopper I loved to open on Christmas morning. The challenge was to finish the book before I went to bed on December 26, giving me approximately 24 waking hours. This could mean, for hours at a time, I was averaging a page a minute. Our tree was always placed in front of the window in the living room, temporarily displacing a stuffed chair, and I would take up residence in that chair -- in the middle of the hustle and bustle -- reading Stephen King. I think of it now as an exercise in concentration. I was not cloistered away; rather, I participated in two full days of visitation, meals, festive films, all while immersing myself in a world vividly drawn by Mr. King.

I did get video games and all other manner of trendy gifts for Christmas, and I would have to wager, to judge by the bounty of my friends, that my Christmases were utterly "normal" in this regard. But this experiment in extreme reading was, in retrospect, very important to my development, and whether or not they are reading the current equivalent of Stephen King, I would like to think that kids today are still reading, assiduously, through this holiday season.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Teaching, Week Fourteen: Final Examination Questions

The questions I set for a final examination, like all the senior-level questions I set, require students to respond to a quotation and draw a comparison between two texts they have studied. This accomplishes two things: first, they bring focus to their thoughts by engaging the thoughts of others; second, they demonstrate that by reading one text, they bring something unique to the reading of another.

The quotation is inevitably the more difficult of the two tasks. Another discipline might demonstrate best. Imagine that I wanted you to discuss municipal politics. (I do not mean to suggest that the study of Political Science is any easier than the study of English: only that while not everyone has an opinion on Gertrude Stein, everyone has an opinion on garbage collection!) The basic question could be, "Discuss the management of services in your municipality and the one down the road." Such a broad question might solicit responses that discuss specific issues like garbage collection, snow clearing, or potholes; some responses might look at more global issues like ward distribution, business taxes, or budgeting policies. Some responses might try to address all these things.

If I was asking the question, it might go like this: "'Towns and cities are preoccupied with neighborhood issues,' claims Some Expert, 'so council members are too distracted by potholes to make good decisions when new businesses want to relocate.' Discuss the management of services in your municipality and the one down the road." The idea would be that students could narrow their discussion of services to those provided by third-party businesses. They could contrast small and large service issues, and they could raise the issue of parochial ward conflicts. There is probably more meat in my imagined quotation, of course, but the general idea holds: students can begin by agreeing or disagreeing with "Some Expert," and they can use her assertions against which to compare their own ideas. This, to me, is preferable to a free-for-all.

The question of comparison is also interesting, as I demand of my students a "staggered" approach. For my question, above, I would expect that students would discuss businesses in their town and in that of their neighbors; they would discuss small and large service issues in their town and in that of their neighbors; they would discuss ward conflicts in their town and in that of their neighbors. I have discovered that the instinct of too many students is to tell me everything about their town and then tell me everything about the other one. This is a less effective comparison, of course, as the contrast is tacked on in haste at the end, or -- worse -- is left for the reader to do. So, done improperly, an essay may demand that its reader flip between two or three pages to see how potholes are filled in two adjacent municipalities. The larger assumption, of course, is that by considering how potholes are filled in the other town, students gain a new perspective on how they are filled in their own.

Essays without focus, essays that present as two separate descriptions stapled together get a "C" or a "D." Papers scoring "A" or "B" engage the quotation in a staggered comparison.

Teaching, Week Thirteen: Grading Term Papers

The problem with a course that requires students to sign up for presentations and responses is that, as I have shared before, there is no time in the semester when everyone is working, and there is no time in the semester when everyone is not. The only reasonable time to call due a term paper is at the very end, you see, and so there is no opportunity to set a provisional assignment without creating conflicts. Reading through the term papers this week, I really did notice the lack of the annotated bibliography assignment I sometimes have at midterm.

Students in junior division lament the lack of freedom in choosing topics. I like, at that stage, for them to respond to specific questions. By fourth year, it is perfectly reasonable to allow them to find their own focus. But even good students can wander around quite a bit. In the seminar class, everyone chose an additional book, from a list of four, and used this text for a "comparison" with a core book. The pairings suggested some focus. I asked them in one case, for example, to look at Harold Loeb's The Way It Was with Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Loeb, in the late 1950s, was still stinging from Hemingway's fictionalized portrait of him in The Sun Also Rises. A Moveable Feast, published five years later, ignored Loeb entirely. But some of the papers just threw together examples for contrast, and did not draw conclusions about significance. What can be seen by comparing two very different, yet two equally nostalgic, sets of memories drawn out over thirty years?

The annotated bibliography assignment demands statements of thesis in advance. Sure, they are provisional, and students worry that they may change their focus over time. But the provisional thesis does demand focus.

And, of course, the assignment requires students to think ahead about research. These days, there are so many pdfs available through an online MLA search that interlibrary loan is less vital. However, describing the significance of what sources they have reveals possible gaps in time to fill them. How many of these papers had books about modernism but none about autobiography as form?

It is not that these papers were bad, per se, it is just that they did not serve as summaries of the term's learning. That's what the final examinations do?