Joyce's Exiles

For Halloween, I thought it'd be fun to spend all October with just the "Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe."  But, my "Complete Poe" is a bit unwieldy to carry to work (curse you e-readers, you win this round!), so I'm also reading a series of slimmer volumes to read at lunch.  This seemed as good an excuse as any to finally check out James Joyce's sole play, "Exiles."

As more dates than I'm proud of have learned, I have sort of a man-crush on Joyce.  I'm a fan.  Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, even that lovable lunatic Finnegans Wake, they all make me happy.  It's not even a literary-snob thing, I genuinely love Joyce's books--it makes me honestly sad that the general public doesn't read him--I'm even sadder when fellow English majors merely respect him, as opposed to enjoying him, like he was meant to be, like I do!

And "Exiles" is standard Joyce--it features yet another Joyce stand-in with Richard, a prominent Irish writer returning to Dublin after 9 years abroad.  He finds his old friend Robert still has feelings for his wife Bertha...who may or may not reciprocate.  Robert is willing to risk him and Richard's friendship to find out...and Richard is willing to let him to find out to in the name of freedom...and Bertha is (understandably) pretty peeved with the behavior of both...I won't spoil the ending--though like all Joyce, the ending merely marks a termination of the text, not any sort of final resolution.

So how is it I've never gotten round to "Exiles?"  Probably cause what's enthralled me most about Joyce has been the music and precision of Joyce's prose, the stimulating complexity of his texts; Plays, by their very nature, cannot feature those elements. Hence, with so many other books to read, I'd never considered "Exiles" to be canon, required Joyce.

Yet though "Exiles" cannot portray Joyce's innovations, I'm grateful for the play, because by restricting itself only to dialogue, it throws into sharp relief another element of Joyce's fiction that often gets lost amidst all the erudition and theory--namely, the characters.  Joyce's characters, from Dubliners to Ulysses, all feel disconcertingly familiar, passionate, fleshed-out, real.  All the textual experimentation in the world wouldn't mean a thing, his books would all just be parlor tricks, forgetful high-wire acts, novelty for novelty's sake, flash-in-the-pan stunts, if it weren't for the desperate realism of his characters.

It's Joyce's characters that give his books their blood and guts, their strum und drang, their heart and soul.  They are too much like us you see, they are a highly-polished mirror held up to our own selves.  And it's in "Exiles" that one can no longer take refuge in over-literate-allusiveness and High-Modern-irony, oh no--what's left in "Exiles," stripped of all other pretentiousness, is the characters alone--people with hopes and dreams, depression and despondency, loves, passions, and genuine friendships that they wouldn't trade for the world, but maybe would for their own souls.

"Exiles" is a quick read, easy to miss between the much more demanding Portrait and Ulysses, but worth your attention, worth the cursory attention of an hour or two it asks for.  It is Joyce.

A Poem I Just Wrote *Ahem*

My greeny, fresh from the MTC, trained in the PMG
(yet also a bit of an SOB, quite frankly)
(And though he said he was of the GOP
on the DL was LGBT, as his DL told me)

Nevertheless became AP, and studied the GRE
to enter, as an RM, the ROTC, and eat MREs
Well, he went to the ER, and received 20 ccs
For during a PPI, he OD'd on PCP
In the ECI, we read to him from the D&C, and PoGP
While he received a blessing from his EQP
QED

You're welcome, America.

On the quieter impulse behind Seasonal excess...

When I was a child I spoke as a child, and parroted the childish complaints of some adults--the most seasonal of which was that the Holidays have stretched too long, have intruded too far, that Christmas encroaches upon Thanksgiving, and now threatens even Halloween, all while Halloween spreads out into September and even Labor Day.  Where is the restraint! the boundaries! where will the madness end! seems to be the hue and a cry.  Reasons for seasons are lost, stresses elevated, budgets strained, etc and etc.

But now that I'm a little older, a little more tolerant, a little more wounded, I...maybe don't excuse the increasingly-bloated holidays...but understand the impulse, a little more charitably.

Time flies fast you know; and the older you get, the faster it moves, and the swifter you approach the day when time won't move at all.  Holiday seasons that seemed to last a lifetime as a child, are suddenly over almost before they begin.  Even now, I'm aware that Halloween will be over in less than a month, and I haven't even started to do anything to enjoy this quirky little season that was once so saturated in childhood wonder. No, I now have papers to grade, lessons to plan, bills to pay, and a myriad other real responsibilities that ration off my attention away from the holidays that once meant so much to me. And if October passes this fast, then what of December?

So what can we do?  Maybe we're a little weak, maybe more sentimental than we'd care to be, but we let the season expand a bit, last a little longer, not protest as loudly when the store-front decorations go up a little earlier, perhaps proportionally let the season fill the same amount of our lives that it felt like it filled when we were kids, all in our inevitably-losing battle against the end of time, lest we turn our heads and find we've barely acknowledged yet another of our limited allotment of Christmases...

Jurassic Park Revisited

So, last week I rewatched Jurassic Park for perhaps the first time since the Clinton administration.  I'd been meaning to recently, ever since I read David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a novella-length essay which details the time in '95 when Wallace was paid by Harper's magazine to find out how an agoraphobic, neurotic hyper-intellectual reacts to a Caribbean cruise (unsurprisingly, not well).

Over the course of said essay, he mentions that JP (still a fairly recent release at the time) played on constant loop on one of the ship's on-board channels; he says he watched it 6 times that 1 week, and found the third act to be weak.  (Though he does say that, after losing a chess-match to a 9-year-old prodigy, he felt a sudden sympathy for the Raptors hunting the kids).  I wished to revisit the film and decide for myself.

So how does 1993's premier blockbuster hold up 2 decades later?  The first thing I noticed was just how 90s it looked--the haircuts, the clothing, the film-stock, the bulky macintoshes, the animation-quality of the Park's intro cartoon, Seinfeld's Newman as the villain, the hilariously-dated use of the word "hacker,"--the film just screams early-90s chick.

Now, to say that the film is dated (what film isn't?) is not say that the film hasn't aged well--on the contrary, whether enforced by then-technological-limitations or as a conscious artistic choice, Spielberg's decision to combine CGI with live-animatronics helps the film immensely.  (Just think original Star Wars trilogy with its models and sets vs the prequel trilogy with its...yeah).

What next struck me about this ol' childhood favorite is, well, just how much I remembered of the movie.  JP is now just in the air we breath, it has permeated our popular consciousness such that we don't even need to have seen, or even liked the film, to get the references.  (The fact that Natural History museums to this day still have videos explaining how you can't clone dinosaurs from amber-mosquito DNA proves the extensive reach of this film). To wit: the ripples in water-cup; "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear"; the lawyer on the toilet; "clever girl"; "nuh-uh-uh!  You didn't see the magic word!"; and so forth.

Now, none of this is to imply that JP is a perfect film, either, cause it's not: the big "reveal" that the dinosaurs have figured out how to reproduce in the wild has no follow-through; the "sick Triceratops" development gets introduced and promptly dropped; despite some token armchair-philosophizing about how "life always finds a way," the film's themes aren't particularly more profound than "folks almost get eaten by dinos, then aren't"; genetically, the film isn't far removed from the ol' monster films of the 60s; despite the actors' best efforts, the characters are never really more than bare stereotypes of themselves; the token black-guy predictably dies; and the merchandise commercials are shoe-horned into the screen-time rather obviously and clumsily.

But here now I'm being a curmudgeon--it really is a uber-fun film, isn't it?  The story is tight, the technical proficiency dazzling, and the dinosaurs delightful.  As much as I respect Wallace, I must heartily disagree with him that the third act is weak--perhaps he thought the T. Rex rescuing our heroes last second from the Raptors was a bit of a narrative cop-out?  On the contrary, I think the entire film was building up to that moment when the T. Rex throws the Raptor through the 70 million year-old skeleton, then roars in triumph as the banner reading "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!" flutters to the ground.  That's the money-shot, right there--when life breaks free of the carefully-controlled commercial restraints that had tried (and failed) to make kitch out of something transcendent.

The failure of commercialism to contain life is present from the opening scene, wherein Costa Rican workers sporting official "Jurassic Park" hard-hats wait with hard-stares for the raptor-container to be unloaded.  Those officially-trademarked hats give off a sense of professional control, of this Disney-fied de-clawing of danger, of this assurance that marketing professionals have carefully accounted for all quadrants and demographics, that powerful investors in board meetings have all processes streamlined and ISO2000 certified.  Of course, those kitchy logos rest on the sweating heads of hard-eyed men, and before the opening scene is over one of them will be dragged away and eaten by a raptor.  Man's folly in trying to control nature is a facile and broad theme; but, commercialism's attempt to Disney-fy and neutralize our chaotic world could've used some more attention.

I also found myself pondering if JP could be classified with such fear-of-technology films as The Terminator, Robocop, The Matrix, even Videodrome, films that express our deep-seated post-modern fear that technology is advancing too rapidly, that the machines by which we rush to master nature will rather master us, that even our best intentioned science may instead be our death (significant is the fact that the dinosaurs here are encountered not by time-travel or finding lost islands, but are actually cloned by human scientists with the latest tech).

Also fascinating is the femininity of the threat; remember that the scientists thought they could control the dinosaur population by breeding them all as female.  The implication of course is that femininity is something dangerous that must be repressed and controlled.  The appearance of the dino-eggs in the wild is threatening because women are reproducing without men, rendering men unnecessary.  The raptors are even first introduced as having claws that can "geld" the young boy in the audience; in Freudian terms, the dinosaurs represent man's unconscious castration complex at the hands of women.

But Freud's no fun! He would've gotten eaten by a raptor in the first five minutes, and the audience would've cheered when it happened.  Like I said, Jurassic Park is a genuinely fun film, one I was relieved to find out had lived up to my childhood memories.

And now, in conclusion, Weird Al's "Jurassic Park," a parody that, like most Weird Al songs, is now more recognizable than the original song!

Just Some General Observations Concerning Teaching College Freshmen:

• When it comes to choosing paper topics, it is my older students who are more likely to pick something light and fun; it's the younger students who pick dull, heavy topics like abortion, immigration, gay-marriage, etc.  There appears to be something about growing older that causes one to lighten up, take one's self less-seriously.
• The super-majority of the time, students who pick the "heavy" topics (e.g. abortion, etc) do so not because they are passionate about the topic, but because they are lazy and unimaginative.  This assumption is proved by their writing.
• Drug-users (both current and ex-) are usually among my strongest writers.  Conclude from that what you will.
• Students from truly turbulent countries--e.g. Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, former Soviet Republics, etc, rarely tell personal stories from their home countries.  I suppose there are just some stories that war-survivors won't even share with their closest loved ones, let alone their freshman composition instructor.  Understandably.
• A roommate suggested that maybe these international students don't share their war-stories because they perhaps consider their tales too common, too normal, to be worth attention?  Americans, by contrast, perhaps consider any personal tragedy to be a strange and great thing, for we don't ever expect tragedy to occur to us; hence, Americans will write long and dramatically about a car-crash where everyone survived, while a civil war survivor who saw his family butchered won't even think to bring it up.
• Or, perhaps these refugee-students simply don't have the words for their experiences--not in English, maybe not in any language.  I don't know which of all these explanations is more tragic.
• A native English speaker can absolutely jack-up one's own language--misspell, mis-punctuate, mis-capitalize, write both run-ons and fragments, etc--but they will still always use the indefinite article (a, an, the) correctly.  It's uncanny.
• Conversely, a non-native English speaker can master every other element of English grammar, but still mess-up the indefinite articles--Romance Language speakers over use them, Asiatic Language speakers leave them out.  A misplaced "the" gives them away immediately.  Articles appear to be first English grammar principle mastered by natives, yet the last mastered by new-comers.  It's uncanny.
• It is the A- students who are most likely to take me up on my offer to let them revise their papers for a higher grade; the B, C, and D students only take me up on the offer sporadically.
• Of the lower-graded students who do take me up on it, most only make the most superficial corrections to their papers, often ignoring the notes I've made detailing what they can do to improve their paper.  I no longer give these students higher grades for just turning in a token "revision."  At such times, I consider withdrawing my offer to let students revise their papers.
• But on the same token, I get just enough outliers who take my offer seriously and turn in superbly improved revisions, that I don't dare withdraw my offer.
• One of the saddest sights you'll see are the occasional students who clearly coasted through high school as class clowns, but who now find their antics no longer amuse their classmates nor get a rise from the teacher. The emperors have no clothes.  I almost pity them.
• But again, some of my most engaged and interesting students are high school flame-outs who are now determined to salvage their life.  I wish them good luck and godspeed.
• In a similar vein, it is also perversely gratifying to encounter the occasional former-honor-student who previously coasted by on sheer ability and teacher indulgence, who now suddenly realize that in college, one actually has to try.
• Whether because the blood is draining from students' brains to their bellies post-lunch or what, early-afternoon classes are usually my least-engaged, poorest attended, and hardest to teach.
• Night classes tend to be the funnest, presumably because they are populated by adults with day-time adult responsibilities, and, as earlier noted, it is grown adults who tend to lighten-up.
• Genuine tragedy seems to render people more charming, thoughtful, and interesting.  Bitterness, by contrast, is naive.  Again, draw your own conclusions as to why.

Real Problems

Words I thought I'd never type: I enjoyed the last stake high council speaker at church.  Normally when these speakers are announced, I crack open a book, play on my phone, try and flirt with the girl next to me, or even just drop all pretense of paying-attention, conk my forehead on the front-pew and take a nap.

I'm largely uninterested in yet another string of luke-warm platitudes constructed around such hard-knock life-stories as "I was a star center/quarterback/home-coming-king at East/West/Skyline/whatever who was AP on my mission then immediately married high-school-sweetheart/the beauty-queen/a model, attended the U/the Y/USU to became a lawyer/dentist/CFO, became rich and successful as a matter of course at everything I touched because monetary wealth is a clear sign of God's approbation and blessing," and "sired my race of Aryan superman through which I could vicariously fulfill my juvenile and sophomoric teenage fantasy to win the state basketball championship."  (I'm not even exaggerating about that last bit).

So it was genuinely refreshing to hear a story from someone who'd actually had real problems--we heard from someone who was divorced with kids and inactive in church when he remarried his girlfriend of 10 years (they didn't get sealed in the temple till a year later); someone who once had to work 4 jobs just to make ends meet; someone who was laid-off from his grounds-keeper job at 49, so went back to school for his Associates--not his BA, MBA, or Doctorate, but his Associates--which took him 6 years.

This was someone for whom tithing was once a sincere test of his faith, for whom there was never a clear, guaranteed light at the end of the tunnel, for whom the church was perhaps once a burden than a support, someone who's genuinely suffered emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually, yet somehow got through with his sense of humor intact--that is, for once, I heard from someone who actually had something to say!

These are the sorts of people I actually look up to--these are the sorts of folk that I suspect God can actually do something with--that in the eternities, I have the gut-feeling that it will be better for these passionate ones than all the MBAs, beauty-queens, and high-tithing-payers of the church together.

Song of Solomon

So, I was reading "Song of Solomon" a couple weeks ago.  Quick, which Toni Morrison novel is an episodic narrative concerning an ensemble of eccentric and pseudo-mystic African-Americans living in the colored ghetto part of a post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights Midwest town, and includes an open and frank discussion on bodily functions and gender relations?  The answer of course is "All of them."  After trudging through "Sula" and "Beloved," Morrison was precipitously close to being yet another one of those important-sounding-authors that I respect more than I actually like.  Nothing personal against her, maybe I'm just too white or too male, or even too 21st-century to totally get what she's doing.

Of course, I used to say that about Victorian novels, too--I read "Middlemarch" you see, and I found the whole affair to just be so dreadfully stuffy, petty, and foreign to my American sensibilities to feel accessible.  Who cares if understanding English class-structure might help me comprehend the book better, bollocks on the whole thing, good-riddance to England and viva la revolucion! 

But then, "Great Expectations" and "Jane Eyre" were both written in that era--indeed, neither of those novels could be written today, given how much has changed since then.  But there is still something hauntingly personal, something distractingly familiar, about these characters, that cause self-reflection and  an aching longing, so that even though they are thorough products of the Victorians, they've long outlasted them.

I had a similar experience once I breached the second-half of "Song of Solomon."  Now, doubtless there are simply certain facets of the novel I still haven't comprehended simply because I haven't experienced being Black--just as there are doubtless parts of "Great Expectations" I don't get because I'm not a Victorian Englishman.  Nevertheless, somehow the character of Milkman Dead, as he engaged on that most banal of plot-devices--the buried-treasure hunt--transcended the text in that second-half to become something far more real, a character who was alarmingly familiar, one who both condemned by association the worst in me while mapping out the best of our potential. 

He doesn't transcend his circumstances, oh no--he transcends because of his background, his family, his roots, the whole, strange, wild, eccentric, sordid, mad, lunatic pageantry that produced him.  The book made me consider how much more I should value my own strange family-ties, in a manner that no mere greeting-card salutations or maudlin-Hollywood-celluloid could ever do.  No, "Song of Solomon" has blood and guts to it, it feels, it strikes, it's as messy as life--it's head and shoulders above "Beloved."  And in the climactic, self-destructive finale, I'm tempted to thinnk that Milkman really does fly away.