A Weekend Spent Mostly Behind A Book

The view across rue Seguier from my front window

My entire weekend has been pretty intensely devoted to something I have spent precious little time doing for many years--Improving My Mind.  Studying again.  Reading and annotating (Stein).  Reading and not annotating (a couple of web articles about Stein; a huge and wonderful social history of Impressionism / Paris that I found in Raquel's apartment, missing some pages where plates have been razored out but still immensely fascinating); a history of the Nazi Occupation and its aftermath (When Paris Went Dark).  A Review of French Grammar I found in the apartment. Lots of stuff.

This is actually one of the things I fantasized about when I took this job, although last weekend, my previous opportunity, I ended up marking in-class journals, re-working Raquel’s draft schedule, and obsessing over trying to get sketches and drawings of the Tahoe cabin ready to pdf and send to an architect friend—that and taking some long slow Clydesdale (Percheron, I guess) runs while babying my prone-to-cramp calves.  Yes as I implied earlier I am giving myself a crash course catching up / getting ahead of the readings for A in P (thank goodness for the more leisurely schedule compared to the windsprints of the GT), which is actually a true pleasure: it sounds insane to say but I know how to read a Henry James novella and really get into it and be able to teach it.  This is a strange reminder of what after all was the metier that I thought I was going in for, back before the demographics of the late 1980s job market (lots too many white men chasing way too few jobs)  and my quixotic choice of emphasis ("Not another Shakespeare scholar.  Don't you know we're revising our curriculum to emphasize more relevant texts?") as well as my own self-sabotage ("Mr Stenzel spends too much time on his teaching and not enough on his publication efforts") led me to the career I had at UC Davis.  Eventually this career became a nonstop diet of writing courses leavened with the occasional Summer Abroad (dealing with some wonderful students as well as a bizarre mixture of travel-struck naifs, "fun"-bent Greekies and archly posing pseudo-sophisticates).  

This is half the hallway before my trap(ezoidal) door

I was talking with someone before I left about that twilight time before the writing program’s Amicable Divorce from the English Department, when the unanointed lecturers were occasionally allowed to toil in massa's vegetable garden (and teach literature courses for their sabbaticalizing betters) instead of toting dem bales of composition cotton while singing spirituals of solidarity.  Prepping a new lit course was a heady undertaking, extra work done in breaks and on the fly: crafting new writing assignments, re-reading old works and old notes, slamming up new reading lists and staying a week ahead of the undergrads (mea culpa).  Those were exciting times, kind of what I am feeling right now, the joy of flexing intellectual muscles and being satisfyingly tired from the workout.  The unspoken goal for all of us back then seemed to be to kick ass and be so much better than the more-published Academic Senate competition that the sagacious students would actually look for the non-professors on the at-first-generic yearly schedules, with STAFF instead of a professor’s name denoting someone who knew how to make a lecture interesting, or run a real discussion, or write comments neither snarky nor vague.  Of course when your competition was too often has-beens or never-weres preternaturally talented at putting undergrads to sleep despite the uncomfortable desks, with or without whispers of Inappropriate Behavior thrown in, it didn't take all that much to make a good impression.  The fact that we lecturers so seldom had the luxury of repeating a literature course lent the whole enterprise a desperate calm, I don't know how to describe it.  There was no way to justify the amount of work one put in, yet somehow we kept doing it.

Having the time to study, and to reflect on these and other matters, may be one of the best benefits of this month in France.  It’s hard to admit in some ways, but one outcome from the overwork on Project Palaces the past year is the realization that I really cannot keep up the extent and intensity of the physical work I was doing—some of you readers know about the lingering peripheral neuropathy (tingling-wake-you-up-hurting fingers and hands), general aches, and specific pains--and the creeping conviction that as I approach the Big Six-Oh I could and should ratchet that whole aspect back to a sustainable level, preferably a low level, and maybe pursue and develop some of the not-as-physically-demanding-or-damaging talents that I still apparently have.  It takes a 2 x 4 upside the head, but He Can Be Taught.  My fingers are returning to normal, mornings no longer agony the way they were a bit more often than I admitted at the time.  I'm stretching every day (using the pink yoga mat that I plucked as it rolled across the Quai des Grand Augustins the day after I got here--I looked around in disbelief, saw no claimants, and walked home with it under my arm.  Not even dirty.  Can I get an "Amen!"). 

Voila the pink mat AND the styrofoam table-shims

On the downside, all the sitting is taking its toll, and that stretching may have to be ratcheted up: this morning I started thinking about the ergonomics of this place and realized the table is simply too low.  My legs have been getting super tight, even as I attempt to stand up, walk around, and stretch every 15 minutes or so.  Yet I find myself sitting sitting sitting as I get stuck into a book, and I forget the physical side.  Oy.  This morning I found a hunk of styrofoam that was being tossed, took a knife to it, and carved four blocks about an inch and a half thick, and big enough to accept the four skinny wheel that this table rolls on.  So far it's a decent choice: the wheels sink into the blocks just enough, and the angle of my knees seems healthier.  We'll see.

Almost halfway through: putting the "ache" in "teacher"

Thought I’d cobble together a blog post out of some recent e-mails.  I’m halfway through the actual course meetings now, thanks to Raquel’s three-day-weekend-oriented schedule, and unlike many other evenings I do not have papers to mark: I asked for journal pages (photocopied) preferably today, but of course everyone took the opportunity to turn them in tomorrow even with no advantage.  As with other manifestations of student behavior I have to work pretty hard to avoid personalizing that kind of thing.  I’ll head back to the Foyer tomorrow and hope that there are at least some photocopies in the folder I left for them in the beautiful library-with-view-of-the-Eiffel-Tower where I spend quite a bit of time.

For awhile it looked as if I had spoken too soon about the peacefulness of this apartment, but the bad news is mingled with good: the other day Ion my way out I encountered Yuri in the chambre next to mine, did a bit of manly-man bonding about the dust and cleanup onus of demolition, and I took the risk of asking very politely whether he could do his fumer-ing in the room and not in the couloir, because I was sensitive to smoke.  He ruefully shook his head, took out a stick of gum and said, "C'est fini" at which I gave him a big handshake and bravo-chapeau affirmation of good a thing that was and how hard, but that he would succeed.  So.  We will see, but I call that a frickin' good omen.  The only time this place smells a bit like an ashtray is when I have windows open on both sides, and someone downstairs decides to smoke, which is less often than at other places I’ve been.

The course seems to be going fine, though as always one never can be sure. It’s all too easy to recall the debacle in Oxford 2011--though I don't seem to have as toxic a Tweeter as I had back then, nor do I have so many people born without the enzyme needed to metabolize irony.  I just today turned back marked Monday’s midterm-first-papers (with grades, which probably were be a shock to some) after a week of just doing informal journal-writing in blue books and making quick comments.  On Tuesday and Wednesday I had pushed hard on the Henry James close-reading, making sure that they actually got what was going on.  I had heard vague murmurs of discontent about the fact that I devoted an hour of lecture to some grammatical terminology review, confirming in the process that even some of the most voluble of discussion participants actually have no clue about the nitty gritty of narrative voice, person, tense etc, and that if (as I hope to do) we will look at the very different ways the different authors present Paris and their experiences using very different technical apparatus, these student should actually be able to be more precise than "It's like, you know, sort of 'you,' you know? Like, Hemingway goes, 'you are sitting in the cafe,' and, like, we are with him, like almost."  

As I’ve noted with other classes, the science-y folks are usually not the problem, it’s the self-appointed Literati that often have grotesquely exaggerated views of their own sophistication.  My Hermione Granger is no exception, but there are several others for whom glibness and lit-crit jargon have substituted for rigor and clarity their entire academic lives—they all passed out of having to take a writing class, god forbid—and they can be jaw-droppingly clueless about decoding complex prose or reading like a professional, much less expressing themselves coherently about how a text works.  Yesterday's discussion launched from some passage work on Henry James' Madame de Mauves (which I had not read before, scandalously)--it's always a good idea to ensure against the ghastly silence when one tries to discuss a work as a whole when only a few have read all of it--and then this morphed into an excellent session on cultural differences & expectations as regards expats / travellers / tourists, with melting-pot vs tossed-salad thrown in as I brought up Brexit / nationalism / Trumposities as well.  You can never predict it but sometimes magic happens.  I'm exhausted from conducting that little symphony, but hey.  I think they themselves were stunned at how the pronouncements of the characters about what it means to be American (to the French) and vice versa are still potent today.  

On the down side, I’m a little freaked that one of my interlocutors may have taken my Socratic / rhetorical persona too literally when I was pushing them about the limits of embracing diversity (honey, do you really think I am equating the headscarf with genital mutilation? or stoning? But I have to say, if you don't see a continuum you are not looking.  And let's leave religion out of this, there's plenty of behaviors / mores / "rights" that might be perfectly acceptable in a home country that one should probably be expected to curtail when one goes to another country to live semi permanently).  A couple of folks got on their soapboxes and started lecturing the class even as I was attempting to show the absurdity of these Diversity Brainwashings when you butt right up against “this-far-and-no-farther.” UC Davis pays several Vice Chancellors For Diversity a quarter million dollars a year to encourage everyone to sing Kum-Ba-Ya and wring our hands about grafitti—it’s great though, to see that the Kool-Aid has been drunk by a few of them.  I love being patronized by 20-year-olds who still don't know the difference between it's and its.

Then today, there were Awkward Moments as I tried to get them to focus on the last four or five pages of the novella.  To prime the pump for discussion I had them re-read (let’s be honest—for many, read-for-the-first-time) the passage, keeping in mind several key technical aspects: time-cues, point of view shifts, play-acting, characters’ reading others’ moods / non-verbal cues, and the theme of competition.  Two of them stared off into space for five minutes and then started looking through a guidebook and writing in another journal.  This after I had a week before made very clear, “If I give you fifteen minutes for something, there’s a reason.  If you finish early and stare into space, you are sending a signal to me that says, ‘I disrespect you and the task you set, I am so brilliant that I can extract and express everything that is possible, in half the time you think it needs, and I will share that sentiment of disrespect with the rest of the class by ostentatiously advertising my superiority and ennui.’”  Or words to that effect.

So pretty soon as I am pulling teeth to get the discussion rolling (thinking to myself, is this nasty fallout after yesterday’s discussion? Or is it just that another group of students took advantage of the pre-July 1 low online rates (35 euro instead of 90!) to spend too much time at EuroDisney and they are simply brain dead?) I get “Well, I don’t see competition at all, between the Baron and Longmore.”  I stop.  What do I do with this?  I ask for clarification.  Another one joins in, with the implication that my question about competition is I guess just some bizarre imposition of my interpretation.  In my head I hear my wife’s pleading tones as I enter a dinner-party fray: “use your teacher voice, sweetie” which is code for “I don’t want to duck and cover as you over-react to some imagined provocation.”  So I proceed calmly, reasonably, without too much of the I’ll-keep-one-wit-hand-tied-behind-my-back-to-keep-it-a-fair-battle tone to it, to read the very following passage aloud:

Longmore had dark blue eyes, of admirable lucidity,—truth-telling eyes which had in his childhood always made his harshest taskmasters smile at his nursery fibs.  An observer watching the two men, and knowing something of their relations, would certainly have said that what he saw in those eyes must not a little have puzzled and tormented M. de Mauves.  They judged him, they mocked him, they eluded him, they threatened him, they triumphed over him, they treated him as a pair of eyes had never treated him…

What do you think, dear reader?  Is the competition between these two characters all in my mind? There’s something about “triumphed over him” that gives me a clue.  Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Of course I am constantly stunned by folks' willingness to believe utter fantasies even as they maintain a pose of ironic superiority.  The day before, my students had sort of scoffed at Euphemia's romantic idealizations of aristocratic French matches, saying no one could be that naive, yet when I walked them through the Trump "logic" of "getting those manufacturing jobs back from China," they couldn't deny that such fallacies are just as ludicrous ("Attention WalMart shoppers, we're going to only sell Made In The USA merchandise now, so either you cough up triple the price, or you find a whole buttload of people to sign up to work for the five bucks a day and a bowl of rice, or whatever.")  Yes, we had brought up the Brexit vote, which most of them knew precious little about (a place for a couple of econ majors to outshine the Obliverati.

The whole episode today left me weary, weary, weary, and glad for some time off.  I didn’t even make them journal on the prompt, “At its heart, James’ novella presents an elaborate fantasy of American moral victory over French perfidy.”  We moved on to Gertrude Stein…

So that’s where I’m livin’ at the moment.  Time to make a little dinner and watch Poland play Portugal in the Euro Cup quarterfinals…