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…
