Grades are in

If you want to know yours, shoot me an email and I'll break it down for you.
- posted by Mike @ 7:35 PM

 
Things That Make Me Feel Like a Failure

Every paper I have read so far contains the following errors

• "Affect" for "effect"
• "It's" for "its"
• "Their" used as the pronoun for various singular nouns (e.g. "child" or "person")

What do these three errors have in common? They are the only three errors I have pointed out twice or more in class.

Please don't keep making these mistakes. I don't want future graders to complain about how you learned nothing in English 100.
- posted by Mike @ 8:56 PM

 
Continuing in this vein of Things Authors Say, Kurt Vonnegut has an odd and brilliant essay in "In These Times" (a left-wing biweekly news magazine), "Cold Turkey." I should point out right away that Vonnegut is a radical left-winger himself, so please don't be alarmed if you are a friend of the president and, in reading the article, find him insulted. For what it's worth, Vonnegut's insults are always soft and fairly peaceful: he seems to find all humans equally inhumane, and he specifically derides the liberal/conservative dichotomy in his essay.
- posted by Mike @ 9:50 PM

 
Most author interviews tend to be banalities and the sorts of lies that sell books. "I was inspired by the courage of the soldiers of the Vietnam War in depicting my character blah blah blah," etc. There have been a couple of recent interviews--with children's book authors, none the less--that radically challenge this norm.

Most exciting to me is Madeleine L'Engle's hilarious and aggressive interview with (of all places) Newsweek. She's rightly famous for A Wrinkle in Time.

Not quite as snarky but even more impressive is Philip Pullman's televised conversation (here's a transcript) with the Archbishop of Canterbury. His recent trilogy, also for children, is called His Dark Materials, and it has been accused of being anti-Christian, much like Madeleine L'Engle's books and, for the matter, the Harry Potter series.
- posted by Mike @ 9:31 AM

 
Summer reading

I had offered to present of a list of possibly entertaining reads for those of you who actually practice this ancient pastime. Then Sarah H., who is clearly wonderful, immediately emailed me demanding some ideas. Rather than let her hog all my good advice, I've decided to share these suggestions with all my favorite students.

While the titles link to the appropriate Amazon entries, I hope you will save yourself a few dollars and support your local libraries instead.

• Blankets, by Craig Thompson. If you have developed a taste for graphic novels, Thompson's 600-page masterpiece has been heralded as the finest work of graphic fiction since Jimmy Corrigan. It is not, however, anything like Jimmy Corrigan--breezy, readable, and powerfully illustrated, it's a glorious symbolic autobiography. And if you don't trust me, read Kaylan's review.


• White Teeth, by Zadie Smith. A brilliant, hilarious novel of racial mixing, war, and religion in a time of genetic engineering, Smith's first novel (she was 23 when she wrote this; 23) seems likely to survive beyond the usual three or four years that a modern bestseller can last on bookstore shelves.


• Summerland, by Michael Chabon. In the last decade we have seen a second renaissance in children's literature. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy have convinced publishers that books marketed towards children can still find an audience among adults. Chabon is famous for Wonder Boys and the Pulitzer-winning comics-themed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. His Summerland is an epic fantasy about summertime and baseball; drawing on Native American and Norse mythologies, Chabon describes a cadre of young baseball players on a quest to save the multiple worlds of earth.


• In addition to Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, any number of recent Pulitzer-prize winners are glorious, readable paeons to the entertainment value of literature. My favorite Pulitzer winner is E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, one of those powerful stories about a broken man coming to remake himself; rendered in Proulx's haunting, crystalline prose, this ancient story gets new life. Last year's winner, Richard Russo's Empire Falls, is a lighter but equally rewarding read about a small, postindustrial Maine town.


• The summer after my freshman year I became obsessed with the works of Kurt Vonnegut. You have probably heard of Slaughterhouse V, for which he is best known. The story is certainly interesting, and quasi-autobiographical (Vonnegut was a prisoner of war stationed in Dresden at the time of its firebombing), but it's not really his most captivating work. My favorite work of his is Cat's Cradle, followed by his first set of short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House.


• Ian McEwan's fairly recent Atonement has won substantial critical praise in the last couple years. I read it last week for my modern lit seminar, and was as impressed with its erudition as with its plot. (I rarely devote the time to read 350-page novels in one day, but I really couldn't put Atonement down.) It's about a family torn apart by a young girl's crime in 1935, and the consequences of the crime as they play out through World War II and the end of the 20th century. But the book is also about books, and whether literature can ever atone for history.


• If you haven't read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, you really ought to, if you like the movies even a little bit. Okay, let's be honest: the books start slow. There are a couple dozen pages of geography and history, and then it seems to take Frodo forever to get on the move, and then there are some mishaps in Brandybuck Wood that didn't make it into the movies for a very good reason (two words: bor. ing.); the hobbits don't even make it to Bree until page 148 or so. Anyway, it picks up after that. The books are extremely well written, and the story is just glorious.


• On my reading list for this summer is Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, my sister's favorite book: it's the record of an American humorist's attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail. I've also heard excellent things about his A Short History of Nearly Everything, which tries to explain all of science. It's "accurate enough," claims my physicist friend.


• John Irving is author of some of last century's quirkiest stories. You have probably heard of The World According to Garp, which is a lovely read; A Prayer for Owen Meany is at least as good, and The Cider House Rules is wonderful (and only a little like the movie).


• Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves was a runaway bestseller in Britain before public demand forced the small London publisher to find an American distributor. This wouldn't be terribly unusual in the case of something like, say, the first Harry Potter book, or a legal thriller, or something. But Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a grammar book. And, seriously, it's on the New York Times bestseller list. It's Amazon.com sales rank is 2. 2. This is a book about grammar. More specifically: this is a book about punctuation, and it's hilarious. I picked it up last week and giggled all the way through it; Truss pulls out dozens of anecdotes about the use and abuse of grammar from the pettiest greengrocer's scrawlings to high and mighty debates about the comma in the editorial chambers of the New Yorker. This book is a wonderful read, and I'll probably be requiring it in my English 100 class when it comes out in paperback.
  
  If you're into grammar, you might check out another new release, Barbara Wallraff's Your Own Words. Her approach, while less entertaining, gives readers a better view of all the parts of English grammar that leave room for your own voice to come through. Her prose is a bit pedantic, but she's a good teacher.


• Political fiction is one of the more obscure subgenres, and it harbors a couple exciting and pertinent masterpieces. Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God--a two-part series--is a fictionalized reconstruction of the life and reign of the mostly forgotten Roman emperor Claudius, a hunchbacked, drooling "idiot" who ruled between Caligula and Nero. Graves's fantastic storytelling sheds light not only on the political practices of ancient Rome but, in a sense, the way all human politics work. Similarly, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men explores American presidential politics through the completely fictional story of the rise of a Southern governor from a questionable past to the presidency. This book was written in the 1940s, but attracted substantial attention during the 1992 election due to eerie similarity's between Warren's protagonist and then-Gov. Clinton.


• If you're interested in more avowedly literary texts--things that get studied in English classes, yet are interesting, I have a couple of recommendations. Last semester one of my colleagues claimed that my understanding of English literature could not be complete without my having read Lolita, and so I did. I had to admit--grudgingly--that he was correct. Lolita is one of the finest books of the Twentieth Century; it is written by a man (Vladimir Nabokov--link goes to 5/7 NYTimes article, free registration required) who loved the English language more than any author I know. By now we all know the story, and it is horrible, but it is the best prose of any written since the Second World War. I should add that if you enjoy the power of postmodern English, you might want to try Pynchon's splendid Crying of Lot 49, which is short and strange and brilliant.


• Willa Cather is something like a grown up Laura Ingills Wilder. Her My Antonia is one of the greatest American pioneer novels, and it's inspiring in the way that those books in the Inspirational section of the bookstore aren't.


• If you ask any English professor to list his or her favorite books (and I did this with all my professors in college), Middlemarch will invariably come up. Middlemarch is, depending on your edition, around 800 pages long. I read it last summer in about four days; even for a graduate student, that kind of sustained reading is extremely rare. Middlemarch is, without question, the finest British novel in the realist tradition. If you like Jane Austen (and if you haven't read any Austen, shame on you--start with Emma, although Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey are better) then Middlemarch is like all of Austen's wonderful canon rolled into one enormous book.


• Finally, I have to put in a plug for my favorite author: Virginia Woolf is the reason I'm in graduate school. I'm not going to guarantee that you will like Mrs Dalloway (her most accessible work), but there is a 50-50 chance that you will. Even if you don't, you might want to give Michael Cunningham's Woolvian The Hours a try. While I haven't read The Hours myself, I think we can take it on Jen's authority that it is a worthy read.

- posted by Mike @ 12:21 PM

 
Rewarding Bloggers

One of the carrots I dangled in front of you as a reward for submitting journals online was this nebulous potential for bonus points: to quote the original blogging handout, if, at the end of the semester, I feel you have kept a consistently active, interesting, intelligent blog, I reserve the right to add up to 5 bonus points to your grade. While I reserve the final say in who gets how many bonus points (the American education system is fundamentally dictatorial), I would really appreciate your input.

If you have a minute, shoot me an email praising one of your classmates' blogs. (This might be obvious, but you cannot vote for yourself.) Let me know what you most enjoyed about that blog, and what you learned by reading it. (Naturally, you can use this email as your final journal.)
- posted by Mike @ 11:11 AM

 
Ending the semester

As you think about your final two journals for this class, consider spending at least a little time looking over your work this semester. Compare your first paper to your third; your first journal to your most recent. What specific skills have improved for you as a result of this class? What do you still need to know before you will be comfortable writing your first paper next semester?
- posted by Mike @ 9:22 AM

 
Missing Journals

There are still depressingly many holes in my grade book, and I'm pretty sure that these particular holes aren't my fault. You should have received an email if I am missing one of your journals (from as early in the semester as February 13th). Here's a reminder of teh missing late/journal policy:

Any journal received even a minute after the start of class time automatically receives a check minus, although I have fudged this for journals that show up three or four minutes late on days when we don't have class. Any journal arriving more than a week late gets an automatic 0. That is bad, but it's not nearly as bad as what happens if I simply don't have a journal from you when I compile grades: you get a 0 and you also lose 1% of your final grade. It is really worth your time to make up missing journals before the end of the semester.

- posted by Mike @ 10:54 PM