Another stop-gap entry.

Hmm. Busy time of year. We're just getting to the end of a week off, but I have to start an entirely new course tomorrow for which I just don't have enough material. Also I have a conference paper to give in a week and a half, but haven't done anything concrete on it yet. Still, it's in part about the way students read, so at least it is something I've been thinking a lot about.

To go back to the passage I posted last time - I did indeed get a couple of lovely answers from students, and one of those from a student who'd been struggling a bit earlier in the term and had come to talk to me about the advisability of dropping the course (this is one of the stranger things about the American university system for me - you can drop a course even when you're most of the way through it, so that it doesn't affect your grade point average). It's very satisfying when someone suddenly seems to see what you're trying to get them to do like that. At the other end of the scale, I had a student who wrote that the boy was crawling in next to the soldier to express his sympathy, and that he was the only one in the village who saw the soldier as human - not only an alarming misreading of the basic information given in the passage, but also a strange interpretation of the story itself, in which the boy continually refers to the captured soldier as a frightening wild animal or a gentle domestic beast. It's not the first time I've encountered the type of misreading of basic information at work in this student's interpretation of the passage, though this is one of the more extreme examples. And lest you think that it's a matter of being too rushed and not reading properly, I should say that in this case they had two hours to comment on three passages, from a choice of five.

For a change I got the grading out of the way fairly promptly, and then took a quick trip to Montana last weekend. I got a cheap United last-minute fare to Great Falls, then hired a car for the first time ever (a Subaru Outback, a much bigger and fancier car than my own, not only with a working radio, but also with such luxuries as seat warmers) and drove down to Bozeman via Helena. Since I've never driven any further or any more exciting a road than Boulder to Denver, suddenly finding myself on an almost empty highway winding through the mountains was quite exciting - though the long flat empty farmland bit at the end of the three-plus hours reminded me of why I'd opted to fly to Montana instead of driving through Wyoming (which is many many hours of featureless scrub with just the odd pronghorn throwing itself in front of your car to see if you're still awake). On the way back my friend directed me to a route going through Boulder (Boulder, Montana, that is - not very creative with names here) which took somewhat longer, but was a lot more fun. I got out of the car at a little white clapboard church in the middle of nowhere (Nowhere, Near Boulder) and appreciated the enormous wide-open space with no-one but me evident in it. It's what they always talk about as the inspiration in Western art, of which there is a large permanent exhibition in the Denver Art Museum. The art does nothing for me at all, but the experience of the space itself was exhilarating.

Visiting Bozeman itself for the first time since leaving almost three years ago was good. I saw friends and colleagues, ate breakfasts in the Stockyard Café and Main Street Over-Easy (America, or at least the American West, is at its culinary best at breakfast, I'd say), went cross-country skiing for the first time (thanks M!)... On the return journey I also visited Great Falls for the first time. I found a nice little health food restaurant that served me my first ever (vegetarian) sloppy joe (basically mince in a roll), but otherwise it turned out to be an ugly and deserted-feeling little town reminiscent of Saltcoats (but without the sea), or like Cheyenne, Wyoming. I've noticed that the towns with the most attractive names here often turn out to be the ones most devoid of charm - like Rock Springs, Wyoming. I drove out of Great Falls to the airport secure in the knowledge that it was a town I would never have to see again; and then I took an exit to pick up something at a mall, couldn't find the right ramp back to the highway, and ended up back in the middle of Great Falls again just a few minutes later.

Close reading

I gave the following passage to my students for a close reading exercise in the final exam:

Truly I was exhausted, and I felt wretched. The trip to the town, the black soldier’s supper – after the long days’ work my body was as heavy as a sponge soaked with fatigue. Taking off my shirt, which was covered with dried leaves and burrs, I bent over to wipe my dirty feet with a rag, a demonstration for my brother’s sake that I had no desire to accept further questions. My brother observed me worriedly, his lips pursed. I crawled in next to him and burrowed under our blanket with its smell of sweat and small animals. My brother sat there watching me, his knees together and pressing against my shoulder, not asking any more questions. It was just as he sat when I was sick with fever, and I too, just as when I was sick with fever, longed only to sleep.

It's from Ōe Kenzaburō, "Prize Stock" (1958) - in Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness.

What would you do with such a passage? I pick these out with such loving care and trepidation, and with some excitement about the fireworks my students might suddenly prove able to produce for me at this late stage. They often do surprise me at the last hurdle, to make me feel as if the whole thing has been worthwhile. This time, though, I feel rather crestfallen at the number of answers which do little more than tell me, in more or less roundabout ways, that the narrator is really very tired. So am I!

Silas Marner

I've been rereading Silas Marner, in a distracted sort of a way, over the last couple of weeks - and got somewhat abruptly to the end tonight. Old Penguin edition - the introduction, appendix and notes by Q.D. Leavis take up a surprising amount of the volume. Is this Q.D. Leavis person the brother of F.R., I wondered - and looked him up just now to discover to my surprise that she is wife of F.R. She seems just a little over-punctilious in her notes, which is what made me think she was male.

Silas Marner - strange novel. At times I thought it was fantastic, at times I just couldn't be bothered reading the conversations (but this is more to do with it having been the last two weeks of the quarter than to do with the writing, I think). It does end rather too abruptly. But what I did like in particular was the brief trip back to Marner's "country," and an indication of that sense of distance that we've lost with the advent of mass transit. When you're studying Japanese and find out about the older use of the word kuni for provinces - a word that now is used for "country" in the national sense - it seems very foreign and odd. It's nice to be made aware that the English word "country" has undergone the same kind of transformation.

Finals

On November 18th last year I complained of having to give a final at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Today I bettered that - not Sunday, but I had to start one at 7 a.m. I tried to persuade the students that they'd all prefer to start at 7:30, but too many wanted to have the full two hours.

But the quarter is almost over. And on Saturday I'm going to Montana...