I’ve been rereading Frankenstein the last couple of days because I’m going to teach it in my Imagining Science course next term. I’ve taught the book before, but never well, I suspect because I never managed to enter into its imaginative universe until now. The book is a bundle of narrative implausibilities & the science, as Shelley of course knew, is risible, but it is an imaginative whole, I now see. I think I’m going to present it to my students as a book about education & its risks & disappointments. Viktor’s education leads him to create a monster, who turns out to be an autodidact, for all the good it does him.
Monthly Archives: December 2007
Sandy Taylor Dies at 76
I only met Sandy Taylor a couple of times, but have great admiration for his work at Curbstone Press. He will be missed. He’d want me to tag this post as “politics” as well as “poetry.” As a memorial, here is the first stanza of Sam Hamill’s poem “Arguing with Milosz in Vilnius,” from Hamill’s book Measured by Stone, published by Curbstone.
You are recently dead, old man,
with your thunderous brows
and voice like a vast sea
hinting at a dangerous undertow–
you are gone, your generation
of testimony, or witness,
gone, gone among the ancient rites
of passage, gone,
taking with you the innumerable
names of the lost.
Xmas Break
I keep thinking I’ll have a day or two to just kick back & read, post a couple of things on the blog, cook a nice dinner, but so far that hasn’t really happened. Until today, at least, I haven’t needed to drive in to school. I got my grades turned in last Sunday, then Monday we had a foot of snow that needed shoveling, though all I had to do was make dinner since Amy came over & she & Carole cleared out the driveway & then Amy did the deck so the dogs could get to their run. Dinner was hot turkey sandwiches on homemade bread with mashed potatoes & buttermilk gravy. Tuesday I didn’t have to do much, so I read a paper sent to me to referee, which sent me back to the text the paper analyzed, which was absorbing enough, I guess, but not what you’d want to call “a break.” I’m not quite sure where Wednesday went & today I needed to go to campus for a meeting & a retirement celebration, one in the morning, the other in the afternoon. In between, I began pulling supplementary texts together for one of my courses & sent them off for duplicating. I also began making notes for changes I’ll make in next semester’s courses: I’ve taught them before, but I constitutionally incapable of leaving them alone. So all of that is lovely & even restful, but somehow I thought I was going to get a day to just loll in bed & catch up on the NYRB, The Nation, & The London Review before moving on to the “real reading” I was going to do (Peter Gay’s new Modernism, for one). Except that I can see now I’m going to be reading for classes from now until January 10th, when the semester starts. Am I complaining? No, not really. Time just buzzes by so quickly & I feel so often scattered. Tonight is very peaceful. Carole had a late meeting, so I came home & made turkey enchiladas (which she can warm up when she gets here) & now I’m sitting in front of the wood stove with all four dogs sacked out in front of me, each in their individual bed. Come to think of it, this feels very much like a break. It’s moments like this that make me realize how incredibly lucky my life has been. My work is reading & talking & writing. For a kid from the working class, that’s something. It still amazes me. Happy holidays, friends & readers everywhere!
Dec 16 2006 Snow
The birds have been enjoying coming to the feeder today in the bright sun. Just looking out occasionally, I’ve seen pair of hairy woodpeckers, several nuthatches, the usual flock of chickadees, jays, grosbeaks.
Snowstorm
Well, the storm that moved through the Northeast US seems to have played itself out. We got more than a foot of snow over the last twenty-four hours, which means I’ll be clearing the stuff of the deck (in shifts) for the rest of the day. When Carole gets home this afternoon, we’ll have to tackle the driveway. Good news is, the semester is over & I turned my grades in yesterday. (Hooray for electronic grade submission!) I’m going to take a couple of days away from thinking about classes, then start working on my courses for next semester.
Even at the height of the storm yesterday, a hairy woodpecker was hammering away at the suet & a few chickadees flitted around the feeder, along with a couple of bluejays picking up scraps of suet at the base of the pole by the woodpecker. This morning, lots more chickadees & a couple of nuthatches. Still only about 8° (F) so I’m going to have another cup of coffee before I start in on clearing the deck. Wish me luck.