UC Campus Perspective

. . .
Put on with speed your woodland dress,
And bring no book, for this one day
We’ll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living Calendar:
We from to-day, my friend, will date
The opening of the year.

Love, now an universal birth,
From heart to heart is stealing,
From earth to man, from man to earth,
–It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
the spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts may make,
Which they shall long obey;
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above;
We’ll fram the measure of our souls,
They shall be tuned to love.

Then come, . . .come, I pray,
With speed put on your woodland dress,
And bring no book; for this one day
We’ll give to idleness.

from “Lines Written at a Small Distance from My House”
                         William Wordsworth

I was talking to a new colleague yesterday afternoon, a blessed Friday, about plans for the weekend.  She had scrapped her Saturday plans, reluctantly anticipating a day of essay-grading instead.  Dr. Hall is admirably conscientious.  But I encouraged her to go home and enjoy the beautiful fall afternoon, to give herself up to idleness. And she reminded me of this lovely poem which she had used in her disseration on Wordsworth.  Well, it is quite perfect.  And it says exactly what I want to express on this perfect early fall morning.

Perhaps you think that college professors, and English teachers especially, spend their lives completely absorbed by books and papers.  Indeed, this is essential to our discipline, to our workaday lives, to our professional responsibilities.  And most of us dearly love to read for pleasure–and choose this pursuit on our own time.  So it may surprise you to know that I am a firm believer in “idleness,”  idleness in exactly the way Wordsworth so aptly describes it.  His poem, in typical Romantic fashion, celebrates the delights of nature.  But what I like best is the speaker’s insistence on freedom from “joyless forms,” be they shedules, tasks, or reason itself.  “It is the hour of feeling,” he writes. 

In my “hour of feeling” on this glorious weekend I want to talk about the way we spend our leisure time in twenty-first century American culture.  And I want to make a plea for idleness in Wordsworthian terms.  I also want to refer to a splendid essay by Witold Rybcynski called “Weekend” which describes the modern weekend as a time for structured activity and “busyness,” not idleness.  “Have we become enslaved by the weekend?”  asks the essayist.

I would argue that we have.  Where leisure once meant time to spend as one pleases, it has now become time best spent in making one more competitive and “well-rounded” in leisure time “activities.”  No longer does leisure allow for doing anything or, better yet, for doing nothing; leisure now requires a level of expertise–in which I am sadly deficient.  I know that young people are scheduled within an inch of their lives, and the time I used to spend “moping” around the house as a teenager, which I dearly loved, is now devoted to gymnastics and soccer and cheerleading and tennis and dance and art and filmmaking and volunteering. Summer vacations are filled with “camps,” not for friendship and loafing, but for “improving one’s skills” in sport x,y, and z.  The whole thing makes me tired.

But adults are not exempt.  If they push their children to perform every minute of every day, so they push themselves.  Harried professionals must also prove expertise in in their extracurricular lives.  I was awakened on Saturday mornings on the beach in beautiful Malibu to the competitive tennis games beneath my window of weekend warriors determined to prove their youthful vigor (never mind the truth of balding pates and obvious paunches) and superior strategizing.  It’s no longer possible to be an amateur at anything anymore.  A high level of proficiency is required before I could even enter a game.  We no longer “play” or allow our children to play.  We perform; we demonstrate proficiency; we make ourselves competitive in a world where “doing” always trumps “being.”

That is why I’d like to recommend the perspective held by British essayist and writer of detective fiction G.K.Chesterton, who said, “If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing badly.”  Allow me to quote from Rybczynski at some length in reference to Chesterton’s views: “Leisure was the opportunity for personal, even idiosyncratic pursuits, not for ordered recreation, for private reveries rather than for public spectacles.  If a sport was undertaken, it was for the love of playing, not of winning, not even of playing well.  Above all, free time was to remain that: free of the encumbrance of convention, free of the need for busyness, free for the ‘noble habit of doing nothing.’”  

So here’s to “the noble habit of doing nothing.”  I’m on my way to the porch with a cup of tea, no book, and a pillow for the swing.  Yes, I know you have assignments, athletics, outings, events, exercise, projects, preparations, plans, and provisions.  Your weekend is busier than your work week.  But still I encourage you, ”Come forth and feel the sun.”                                         

Country music legend Dolly Parton made a rare appearance on the Grand Ole Opry last Saturday night–and I was there.  Are you jealous?  You should be.  While the Opry is always an  “event,” Dolly’s persona and performance was an adult portion, “another heapin’ helpin’,” as Flatt and Scruggs sang it, of the Opry’s “hospitality.”  The thing is, how can someone so tiny be so ”big”? Don’t snicker.  You know what I mean.  Everything about Dolly is over the top, larger than life, much too much, from her big hair and spangled gowns to her business empire and crossover career.

I was a fan of Dolly when she was singing with Porter Wagoner and selling Duz detergent, when she was a small-town girl in the big city ”working 9 to 5,” writing songs, and hoping for fame.  And she made it.  Not even Elvis has his own amusement park. (By the way she has said that she’s just the girl next door, if the girl happens to live next door to an amusement park.)  Dolly is a shapely, savvy embodiment of the American Dream, a poor mountain girl in a “coat of many colors” who became a diamond-studded superstar. The perfect combination of singing and songwriting talent, stunning showmanship, lovable sex appeal, and sublime self-awareness, Dolly Parton is irresistible.

For me, the Grand Ole Opry is irrestible too.  There’s nothing like it.  It’s an old crowd, typically, who attend the Opry nowadays in its newly restored and rennovated Opry House.  And that’s a shame.  A new generation (who perhaps prefer FanFair instead) should experience this incomparable cultural phenomenon that takes us back to our rural roots, to Depression-era entertainment and escapism, to a uniquely American musical tradition that speaks to and for the lives of ordinary folks.  Of course, once the “pilgrims and poorboys” came to town and made good, in bedazzling Dollesque fashion they dressed gaudily, spent wildly, drove flashy cars, and built replicas of southern royalty’s white mansions.  Now Country Music Hall of Famers are Country Music and Nashville Royalty.  And the Opryland Hotel is the grandest and gaudiest monument to their kingdom. 

But country music itself, not that new-fangled stuff on the radio today, is ”bonafide.”  Raw and real, raucous and reverent, high-spirited and heartbreaking, country music is unabashedly adult music.  I grew up with rock and roll.  The first album I owned was “Meet the Beatles.”  I can “stick it to the man” and “twist and shout” with the best of em’.  But now that I’m older, have suffered and lost and been “so lonesome I could cry,” I know why the “man in black” and the “coal miner’s daughter,” the “honky-tonk angels” and truck-drivin’, hard-drinkin’, good-lovin’ cowboys have been venerated and celebrated in song.

I put another coin in the jukebox, tune in to WSM, watch CMT, google YouTube, download the latest “boot scootin’” hit to my IPod.  My jeans are tight, my hair is teased, and I’m woman enough to keep my man.

The social world is often tedious and torturous, but the natural world never disappoints. I awakened last week to an enveloping mist in our hollow, transforming the familiar into a realm of mystery and enchantment. I half expected Merlin or Puck or the cast of Into the Woods to appear and lead me on a dark and merry adventure. But as the fog lifted, I saw instead a flock of wild turkeys in the field by our house and a delicate doe and her fawn, her head lifted, listening. Goldfinches visited the feeder on the back porch, and an artful spider’s intricate web glistened in the dewey sunlight.

A cool, crisp night lured me outside where a full amber moon was rising just over the mountains, liquid and translucent in a pewter sky.
I winked at the man in the moon, and I believe he winked at me.

A heavy drizzle of rain and yellow leaves newly fallen, but there is woodsmoke in the air, haystacks in the fields, and a black cat prowling in our yard. Autumn has arrived–and with it the melancholy that makes me sad and makes me glad to see another autumn.

So far I’m having a great time in my new Integrated Studies course.  ENGL 403: Many Storytellers, Many Truths is part of a new grouping of courses under the updated general education requirements that asks students to particularly hone their critical thinking skills.  What I’m specifically doing is focusing on contemporary novels that have at least two narrators, such as Thomas Perry’s The Butcher’s Boy, with its alternating viewpoints from a hit man or a Justice Department bureaucrat, or Chris Cleave’s Little Bee, with its alternating viewpoints from a Nigerian refugee and a middle-class journalist.  Other novels have many more viewpoints: the currently popular The Help, Lee Smith’s Oral History, Ernest J. Gaines’ A Gathering of Old Men, and E. L. Doctorow’s Civil War retelling, The March.

What we have discovered, just as Dr. Gina Herring mentions in her recent post about Jane Austen and others, is that even a nobody becomes a somebody once that person uses a voice.  Our characters in ENGL 430 who speak get to control the story, if only for a few pages.  They may lie or be self-serving or only see things from a limited perspective, but they also have the potential to give the reader something that’s “truer than true,” as Granny Younger says in Oral History.

Yet part of the purpose of my course is not to simply validate the teller by reading or listening.  If narrators are flawed, it becomes the reader’s job to pick through the multiple voices and try to discern what is really the story.  This ability to not simply accept what one is told, even in a novel, is a central skill that I want my students to take away from ENGL 403.  We live in a world where we are bombarded by voices: politicians, journalists, commentators, advertisers, storytellers, yes, even UC bloggers are trying to get us to read, listen, and validate the speaker behind the words, to make sure that the speaker becomes a somebody.  If we ”like” something on Facebook or comment on a product that we bought from a favorite website like Amazon, aren’t we trying to enhance our own sense of somebody by asserting our own preferences?

But being somebody is a lot more than clicking on the like icon on Facebook.  Thinking, listening, reading, writing are the skills that turn a person into a somebody.  When UC students sort through the details, assemble them into a meaningful whole, and refuse to be swayed by just one voice, they are the real somebodies.  They are the ones who are able to think for themselves.

I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you–Nobody–too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! They’d banish us–you know!

How dreary–to be –Somebody!
Hos public–like a Frog–
to tell you name–the livelong June–
to an admiring bog!
Emily Dickinson

This may seem an odd introduction to a blogger who has agreed to share her thoughts and experiences with the public and who, as a college professor, might pretend to being “sombody.” But I’m hoping to establish connection and communion with fellow “Nobodies,” as the every astute Emily Dickinson envisions and defines them. Indeed, proud somebodies need not and will not care to see the humble musings of an over-worked English teacher on an ordinary day. No matter. Internal drama has its own charm, idiosyncracy its own power.

The school year begins again and with it the eternal possibility of starting over, of meeting life (and classes) boldly, of transforming oneself and the lives of students hungry to learn. The exhilaration, anticipation, and trepidation of returning to school has been with me since I was a child clutching a new bookbag and treasured school supplies and hoping for the perfect teacher and ideal classmates. The musty smell of “school,” a combination of disinfectant, chalk dust, cloakroom garments, and well-used books, a potent memory, no longer seems real in the sterile, high-tech setting of smart phones and laptops. But I still hope for an environment and experience that will sustain and inspire me. Inevitably, I’ll be diappointed and disheartened, as the realities of twenty-first century higher education assert themselves. I seem to have pleasant, capable students this semester, a mature group of freshmen (let’s hope so). But every year the number of students who value reading and writing shrinks. A major in English doesn’t promise practical delivery or immediate marketability, but a passion for “the best said and thought’ can never be irrelevant. “Literature is news that STAYS NEWS!” wrote poet Eza Pound, giving lie to the notion that current events and public opinon trump humane studies. John Henry Newman’s late nineteenth-century definition of the aims of a university education is still profound, and more meaningful than ever, in an era of specialization, job training, and mass produced college graduates.

I’m teaching a course in novelist Jane Austen this semester, another nineteenth-century author whose insights on human nature and social relations are timeless. What a joy to be in the presence of such wit, genius, fluency, and understanding! She’s another “Nobody,” the spinster daughter of a country parson who subtly and skillfully worte against the conventions of her world while offering smart, sensitive, worthy heroines the realistic fulfillment of earned happy endings. Her moral vision is unsurpassed. And if her milieu is limited and prvincial (the English village life she knew), her characters are not. Sh’s not a romance writer or a writer “just for girls.” If you are a reader and haven’t read Jane Austen, then you must.

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