AndiLit.com » 2007

March 30, 2007

Book by Book – A Method for Developing Your Summer Reading List

This week I finished Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life by Washington Post reviewer Michael Dirda, and I’ve never felt less well-read and more well-read in my life. I finished this commonplace books that’s full of quotes and reflections, and I thought – I get most of that; most of those ideas make great sense to me – and then I thought – I haven’t read 90% of the books he mentioned in there; I’m so behind. That paradox seems like a good thing for me, humility and confidence balled up in one. Now if I can only keep that balance.
Pick up this book and scan his lists of recommended readings on topics like love and death and education and childhood. You’ll be reminded of some of your favorites – Umberto Eco, E. Nesbit, C.S. Lewis, Yehuda Amicai – and you’ll learn about some folks you probably haven’t heard of, or then maybe you’re more well-read than I am. In any case, it’s a pleasurable read. Let me know what you think if you pick it up.

Book by Book by Michael Dirda – Henry Holt and Company Cover of Book by Book by Michael Dirda

Filed by Andi at 7:01 am under Book Recommendations
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March 27, 2007

Commodity Fetish in Freshmen Comp

Yesterday, I was teaching the introduction to Greg Tate’s Everything But the Burden to my English 101 class. The book is a complex discussion of, as the sub-title states, what white America has taken from Black culture. In his intro, Tate uses Marx and Engels concept of the “commodity-fetish” to discuss the ways that Americans develop fascinations with particular aspects of culture. For him, many things associated with black culture – music, clothing, art, etc – become larger than life and at the same time less than human when people start to commodify them and market them.

It took a while for the students to understand the concept, a complex one granted, but once they got it the conversation got lively. We ranged from Ipods to Air Jordans, Tiger Woods to Flavor Flav. They started to get really excited. We looked at images of Black Americana on Ebay and talked about the way we commodify anything we like. It was a good afternoon.

I walked away from that class proud of myself for not underestimating my students and especially proud of them for staying with me as I explained a difficult concept – and one that I still don’t fully grasp myself – and for embracing the idea and engaging with it in a meaningful way. Those are the teaching moments I treasure.

Filed by Andi at 8:17 am under Teaching Triumphs and Travails
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March 21, 2007

Spring Break – A Time Off?

Here I sit, the middle of the week during my spring break, and I’m trying to figure out when I can get to school to post mid-term grades, try to grade a few papers, and get some much-needed organizing done. And still here I sit.

I need a break, a real break. I feel a bit bad about that. Most people don’t get a full week off in the middle of the spring. Then again, most people don’t get a full summer off either.

And yet, I need this break. I put in, as most teachers do, about 60 hours of work a week. Some days I’m at the office (because I refuse to bring work home and so taint my home life with student grades) for fourteen hours a day. I constantly check email, even at home, and I spend many a waking hour, when I’m not even at school, planning out writing assignments, considering how I will structure a new course. I’m tired and need a break. Yet, I can’t fully take one. So even now, in the midst of spring break, I long for summer.

However, I know that come summer I will have two courses to teach, filing to complete, three new courses to write syllabi for. Even that time, won’t be a break. Alas . . .

All that whining aside, I’m a blessed girl. I get to do my work when I want it, less class time when it’s important that I actually show up at a given hour in a given place; I get to push myself to exhaustion on some days and sometimes (rarely but sometimes) take a weekday off; I get a few weeks of change, not necessarily vacation, at the holidays and in the spring, and I get summers of less every day work. I’m very fortunate.

But that said, I’m taking the rest of the day off from work – so that I can clean my house. Does it never end?

Filed by Andi at 7:29 am under Teaching Triumphs and Travails
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Rejections – What to do?

I once read that Stephen King hung his rejection letters like Medals of Honor around his office (at least I think that’s what I read – check that one for me – the book is available as an ebook). Another friend holds a ceremonial burning of each rejection she receives. Me, I usually note them in my submission system – which incidentally is the ever-so-technologically-advanced green recipe box that sits on my desk – and then throw them away. I’m not sure what the best thing to do with those sheets (sometimes now they’re little slips of paper the size of business cards). Should I keep them? Burn them? Display them? File them? Trash them? What is the value of these things anyway?

Some would argue that we should keep them as badges of honor, the Stephen King mentality, to show our wounds in the writing battle. We should bear them proudly, like the scars of war. But I’m not much one for battle metaphors.

Some argue that we should quietly squirrel them away into a file where, if by chance we get a huge success and start to get cocky, we can review the massive number of rejections and, thereby, deflate our overgrown heads. The possibility of excessive pride about my writing seems so distance that this idea doesn’t strike me either.

Some way we should keep them to be sure we don’t submit the same thing to the same place again, a fair suggestion if you don’t have a nifty tracking system such as mine. Others say we should set them up in a conflagration that would rival the best book burning, but that seems excessive and a bit overdone for my taste.

So in the end I’m left with my quandary still – keep, destroy, keep, destroy – And I decide, in this moment, to keep them. Better safe than sorry – I wouldn’t want to get overwhelmingly arrogant in the future and not have something to bring me down to earth. But then again, in this utopian future, maybe these slips will only serve to increase my arrogance in the “look what I’ve been through” sense, and then maybe I should destroy them. Who know?

Filed by Andi at 7:23 am under Written and Wrought
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Slater’s Sly Analysis of Science, Psych, and Sentiment

In Lauren Slater’s latest work of nonfiction Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, she delves into great studies of infamous folks like Stanley Milgram – the man who tricked subjects into supposedly shocking other volunteers at lethal levels as a way to test obedience, Harry Harlow – who studied how monkeys responded to an inanimate monkey that was soft as opposed to a monkey who fed them, and Elizabeth Loftus – who scandalized the country in the 90s with her theories of false memory in cases of sexual abuse.
The studies themselves are, of course, fascinating enough, but what makes this book worthwhile and more than what you can get in your normal Intro to Psych textbook is the way that Skinner lays bare these experiments refusing to reject them wholly or embrace them fully. Instead, she peels back the layers to reveal where we can find ourselves, our truth, and our minds in these pages.

Opening Skinner’s Box by W.W. Norton and Company Cover of Slater's Opening Skinner's Box