"Song of Myself"

I am reading Walt Whitman for my post-Civil War American Literature class, the crux of which is the Whitman vs. Emily Dickinson approach to literature. Ever since I stole a beautiful copy of Leaves of Grass from my high school's library after graduation (a parting gift to myself, if you will), I have taken it up and devoured it, in pieces, from time to time.

Two years ago in New York I would stay up all night drinking wine and reading it aloud with my best friend.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the L-rd,

A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, Whose?

Last year in the mountains I fell in love with a man who also loved Whitman, and we would stay up late in my room taking turns reading our favorite lines.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?  

Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?

Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

So much flows from the memories of those nights that I cannot possibly consider them anything but vital to my education. But this time I am alone with Whitman, up late at night in a room that I have crafted intentionally to be full of things that I love to look at, and books that I love to read, and colors that I love to feel. And Walt reads a little differently tonight. He reads a little more like me.

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

To behold the day-break!

I am resigning myself to the lack of scholasticism in this post because of the running conversation in my other English class, Intro to English Studies, for which I am reading Plato (at dinner the other night I was irreversibly convinced of my own immortality over carrots and hummus) and Sir Philip Sidney and Archibauld MacLeish. Poetry is inseparable from the study of literature, from the study of anything, but I have to say that I agree with MacLeish when he writes,

A poem should not mean/
But be.



So I will let Whitman stand as is-- alone and full of himself (and all things).

Previewing the Postmodern

Uh ohhh.

I'm sitting here reading the introductory material for my Cultural Geography class (which of course was cancelled today because of the ice), and I am struck by the blatant postmodern themes running throughout it. While I am fascinated by postmodern ways of thinking and, admittedly, sometimes attracted to them, I'm Kingsian enough to read into these as red, subjective flags. Take a look. After talking for three pages about the impossibility of defining the term "culture," the author poses what he claims to be...

"...the fundamental problem of Western metaphysics: how do we grasp or comprehend the world? How can we be sure our representations of the world are accurate? How do we test the reliability of knowledge given the role that subjectivity, perception, and representation necessarily play in the formation of that knowledge? Philosophers from Aristotle to Descartes to Kant and Heidegger have of course wrestled famously with this problem. Restated in terms of culture, the problem asks how we can recognize the ways we perceive, experience, and represent the world, symbolically and with meaning, without losing some sense of the world's 'external and objective reality'. Given the fact that our understanding of how the world actually is depends upon how we know the world in the first place, knowledge can become frustratingly circular, reflecting as much the subjectivity of knowing as the objectivity of what is known. Debates over culture are essentially debates generated by this frustration."

Actually, upon closer reading, this passage may not be so damning as I first thought. The concept of "the subjectivity of knowing" and "the objectivity of what is known" makes a lot of sense, unless the subjectivity of knowing here precludes the actual ability to know. It's something to think about, and it will be interesting as I'm sure (or rather I hope) we spend some time in the class defining the term "culture."

"Wild Trees and Giving Things"

Greetings from Athens on day four of the Big Southern Freeze. Sunday night we had a huge snow storm come in that dropped six inches of snow in about half as many hours, and as a result the first four days of classes at the University of Georgia have been cancelled due to the icy conditions.


So with cabin fever fully in place, I decided to break up my and my roommates' routine of watching nonstop episodes of Say Yes to the Dress and intermittently eating junk food and complaining about our weight with a little bit of productive reading. My dear friend Danielle Perkins, with whom I lived for three weeks this past summer as we nannied together in New York, e-mailed me her (first) senior thesis to peruse. I say first because the wonderwoman that she is is actually taking on a second senior thesis during her last semester before graduation, which I await with great anticipation.


Danielle's thesis, Wild Trees and Giving Things: Rediscovering Awe in Children's Literature, was an absolute delight from start to finish. Not only am I already invested in the subject of children's literature because of my career goals in book publishing and previous jobs as a nanny (one of my favorite things to do with my kids was discover their favorite books and introduce them to some of mine), but Danielle brought such a fresh and sincere perspective to the transformation of this genre over time.


She postulates that "[t]his branch of literature has forfeited its sense of the 'Sacred'—its sense of a metanarrative." Trading sweeping tales of valor and heroism for small, menial narratives which do not encompass a child's sense of wonder, the stories that shape our children now are robbing them of a once rich tradition. Children (and all people, for that matter) have a deep need for a sense of the divine, a concept that is larger than themselves-- slightly out of reach and a bit out of focus, always being hinted at but perhaps never fully grasped. She traces the attribution of "the sacred" from the gods of Mount Olympus to the Almighty G-d, from Lockean notions of Reason into the physical world of exploration and nature, and finally, with scientific advances, to within the human mind.

"Whether it was talking caterpillars or Cheshire cats, a new host of guides invited children into impossible adventures and nonsensical journeys. And what wonders awaited them within the human mind. Seemingly, the only thing more convenient to explore than their backyard was the human spirit. It did not require any sort of travel, and thus the notion of the sacred was diminished one again, shifting from encompassing the world to the individual."

But with the advent of postmodern ways of thinking came an aimlessness in children's literature. Overarching metanarratives were exchanged for cyclical storylines, purpose traded in for tales with no room for the wonderful. Danielle examines the ways that three modern children's authors treat the sacred in their work: Roald Dahl, author of Matilda and The Witches, who uses magic and personal will power to provide a sense of the sacred; Shel Silverstein, author of The Missing Piece, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and The Giving Tree, who espouses an ideology that "circumstances are uncontrollable, people are unpredictable, and life is uncertain,"; and Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety, Pigglety, Pop!, or There Must Be Something More to Life, who seems to recognize the brokenness implicit in the world but points his characters and his readers to a hope beyond it.


One of my favorite passages from the paper is as follows and details the appropriate response to mystery:

"...[M]ystery helps create another side of the sacred by evoking reverence, or awe. When Corduroy Bear wandered from his shelve into the large department store, he marveled at the size of a world he never could have imagined. And when Lucy stepped through the wardrobe for the first time into Narnia, she could not help but gape at the snowy forest before her. When individuals are faced with the sacred, it is both frightening and alluring, and at times the only response offered is reverence. This is captured in the moments in literature when the narrator fails. Impotent before natural majesty, terrified before the unknown, overwhelmed by beauty or by fecund detail, everyone, at some point, fails. The lush verbiage of natural description or the blow-by-blow reportage of events invariably, at some moment, gives way to silence. (Lerer 184)"

Each of the three authors on which Danielle focuses "attempted to make beauty out of the chaos around them. And with each attempt, they learned that the human mind--while capable of many wonderful things--is not powerful enough to create a metanarrative able to satisfy the human heart."


And that, I am convinced, is a truth that applies far beyond the world of children's literature. 

Spring 2011 Classes

To start off I thought I would post my class schedule for the upcoming (tomorrow!) semester, along with the course descriptions provided by UGA. I'm taking nineteen hours, although six of them are online. Traditionally haven't been very successful with online courses, but maybe I can make a turnaround with these.

Introduction to English Studies (ENG4000)

"The skills and knowledge necessary for successful pursuit of a degree in English: close reading, critical writing, acquaintance with current theoretical issues, and familiarity with bibliographic and electronic resources. Required of all English majors."

American Literature from 1865-Present (ENG2340)

"Significant work by American writers between the end of the Civil War and the present. Writers may include Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, and Adrienne Rich."

Elementary French (FREN1001)

"The French language and French-speaking cultures. Open only to students who have fewer than two units of high school French. Emphasis is on conversational skills with attention to reading, writing, and listening comprehension."

Cultural Geography of the United States (GEOG1103)

"Geographic factors underlying multiculturalism and ethnic relationships in the United States. Spatial development and organization of culture; population growth, migration, and urbanization; and the spatial dimensions of political, economic, and social processes."

Children's Literature (CMLT3250) - Online

"Selected works written for children from antiquity to the nineteenth century. Special emphasis on historical, cultural, religious, social, and linguistic contexts."

Microeconomics (ECON2106) - Online

"Laws governing the use of scarce resources by producers and consumers in market economies, with emphasis on the role played by prices.The consequences of government involvement in the economy are studied, with examples taken from current policy issues."

It begins again...

In the last four years I have been to four different colleges in two different states, studied under twenty-two different professors and lived in five different houses or apartments. I've taken twenty-four classes and written hundreds of pages of papers. I pulled upwards of thirty all-nighters (admittedly not all for academic purposes) during the first semester of freshman year, and I stopped counting after that. I have spent countless hours in libraries grand and modest, paid thousands of dollars into institutions large and small, and read or skimmed more books and articles than I could ever recount. I have failed tests and aced exams, earned scholarships and lost them in kind, turned in badly written papers and left others wholly unwritten. I have consumed a thousand (or two) cups of coffee, smoked a hundred cigarettes, and ingested one Red Bull energy drink (never again).

All of this to say, I refuse to have it count for nothing. I find myself here in the deep middle throes of my education, with at least two years ahead of me before I can even hope to see a degree. And if I have gleaned any ideal, maintained any hope, or clung to any purpose throughout the tumultuous last few years, it is that I want-- beyond any major, beyond any degree, beyond any college-- to be educated. I want this in the purest and most liberal sense, and the purpose of this blog is to chronicle my attempts at achieving it, although of course this kind of pursuit is lifelong and will never culminate completely, much less reach an end with any turning of a tassel.

I am enrolled as a student at the University of Georgia-- a public research university established by the land-grant act of 1865, a piece of legislation which I have researched zealously and concluded dealt irreparable damage to the core understanding of the liberal arts within the realm of higher education. My artes liberales sensibilities are admittedly deigning legitimacy to that UGA status, though I hope to be pleasantly surprised by what I find here. (Perhaps one day I'll address the issue of the value of education on this blog. Can you put a price on true education? On classes such as Kreeft's Logic or Jackson's Research Writing?-- to which [to whom?] I owe entirely the composition of this paragraph and in great proportion my educational mindset. My college journey thus far would indicate that I have indeed put a price on it, or rather decided that its realization may not have to be so exclusive as I would like to believe if one only puts in the necessary legwork. A matter of discussion for another time.)

So, quite overwhelmed and with not a little self-impressed pride, I embark. I'll post here papers I write, assignments I find valuable, summaries of books and articles I read (and want to read), and likely a conglomerate mess of other musings. And poetry. There will of course be poetry on this blog, because, as Dr. J taught me via H.I. Marrou,

"There are things that a poet feels and makes you feel at once, and which no amount of science can ever fathom. The result is that an 'oratorical' kind of education, which in appearance is entirely a matter of aesthetics, whose one aim is to create 'wizards with words,' is in fact the most effective way of developing subtlety of thought."

An education. Here we go!