Mountains Made Low

The title is a joke; I actually don’t feel that way about them this year (so far). This is the case because, though I haven’t figured my taxes yet this year, it seems to me that I stand to make out pretty well. And here’s why:

1. I was taxed in the first five months of 2008 as though I would earn $56,000 in the year.
2. I was taxed in the last four months of 2008 as though I would earn $46,600 in the year.
3. I earned no income in the remaining three months.
4. I, therefore, actually earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 in 2008.
5. I was, therefore, overtaxed, before factoring in my deductions.

This makes me happy. I’ll update on how happy when I know for sure.

Movie #5 (2009)

Perhaps it’s confession time again: Since Liar, Liar, I like Jim Carrey. His earlier, insipid comedies didn’t really do anything for me, but I developed an appreciation of his brand of funny several films into his career. Then, with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I developed an even deeper appreciation for his work, the way he brings his comedic talent and timing to even a dramatic role. Carrey’s performance in The Number 23 was no different. Or perhaps I should say his performances.

This 2007 film from director Joel Schumacher features Carrey in two roles: animal control officer Walter Sparrow, who leads a fairly mundane life with his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) and their teenage son Robin (Logan Lerman), as well as Fingerling, the main character of the novel The Number 23 written, in the film by one Topsy Kretts (say it fast), which Walter is reading (and vicariously living) throughout the film; Madsen also portrays Fingerling’s love interest, Fabrizia, though she’s barely recognizeable through her blond/black hair changes.

Writer Fernley Phillips creates something very intriguing, and it makes me wonder if the script was crafted with Carrey, or at least his somewhat unusual gifts, in mind. Because, though the film is a drama, both Walter and Fingerling are drawn somewhat cartoonishly—Walter in his sheer mundanity and Fingerling in his over-the-top gritty 21st century noir. I’m thinking it takes an actor like Carrey—who is likely to be seen as somewhat cartoonish no matter what role he takes on—to make these almost-comic characters dramatic.

We follow Walter as he follows Fingerling, as both become more and more obsessed with the number 23, and through this first obsession, obsessed with the ideas of fidelity, conspiracy, and murder. And as obsession descends to the brink of insanity.

Of course, Chapter 23 of the novel Walter’s reading is where we learn the truth about Walter, Fingerling, and the novelist Topsy. It’s a truth that’s momentarily disturbing. But a truth that we have been led to all along.

And fortunately, it’s not the final word in the story. In the final scenes, Walter—apart from Fingerling and Topsy—has a few more things to say, things that are hopeful, if not quite happy.

With actors playing multiple roles and multiple levels of story and storytelling interwoven throughout the film, there’s quite a bit to keep track of as you watch this film, so it’s not the sort of movie to watch with that friend who’s always asking, “What’s going on?”

Because there’s one vital clue (or maybe two) missing from the narrative that keeps it all from coming together. And while I enjoyed the film, I did, in that sense, feel a little bit cheated, too: I like when the writer and director give me everything I need to figure it out, and still manage to surprise me in the end; but holding back just to complete the surprise…? Well, it feels a little like cheating to me.

Still worth watching though, especially if you—as I do—like the drop of comedy that Carrey brings to dramatic roles.

Even, or perhaps especially, given yesterday’s minor diatribe about not being able to work out the way I’d have liked to at the gym on Monday because of students behaving badly, I’m settling into my new semester’s daily routine, and I’m finding I’m pretty much liking it.

This is true despite the fact that it’s quite a bit different than I had planned. You see, there was a scheduling snafu. I had planned my schedule to have me on campus 9:30-5:00 Monday through Thursday (I know, rough life). I thought I would be teaching 2:00-3:20 and 3:30-4:50 Monday and Wesnesday, and 10:30-12:50 and 3:30-5:00 Tuesday and Thursday. But somewhere along the way, a mistake was made, and my section of SPE 2010 (“Effective Speaking”) was somehow entered in as the Tuesday/Thursday 2:00-3:20 section, not the Monday/Wenesday section at the same time.

It became clear that I arriving on campus at 9:30 in the morning when I don’t have class until 3:30 in the afternoon, while it can be useful for getting some things done, is really not productive scheduling. Especially when it also became clear that, with no gaps longer than an hour, on Tuesday and Thursday between 9:30 and 5:00, I wouldn’t be getting to the gym on those days until after 5. And I wasn’t particularly relishing the thought of trying to work out in the evening one day and in the morning the next. So I changed my office hours and “on campus” time around—since I work out at the on-campus gym, that counts as being there, you see.

So now I’m (scheduled) on campus until 7 every day. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I still go in at 9:30, so that I’ve got an hour or so to get my head together before facing the first-year composition horde at the gates at 10:30. But on Mondays and Wednesdays I go in at noon. Every day, once I’m done teaching at about 5, I don the gym clothes and the iPod, and go and work off the stresses of the day.

It’s not a bad arrangement, really. Not bad at all.

In the gym, though, yesterday, I took out my Monday-night workout frustration. On myself. In a way I feel kind of silly this morning as I write this, and in a way I hope I can sustain what I’ve started—keeping New Year’s Resolution #2, and all. For months, I’ve been in the gym about 75 minutes a day. Last night I was there 95, and I’m stiff (though not really sore) this morning. And for now, I’m happy with the solution to the “how” question surrounding the next level. In trying to tone the places from which I have lost weight, I know the answer is only “more time” spent with the relatively light weights I’m lifting (everything is in the 60-100 pound range), not adding more weight, since I’m only looking to tone the muscles I have, not add more bulk to anything. And that what I started last night. While I may also, in the near future, up the cardio time (I’ve been stuck on 45 minutes for months, as well), I’ve mostly decided that more reps on my weights circuit (until the muscles are screaming) is the way to go. And I spent 50 minutes doing just that last night.

And, because of my schedule, I’ve got two hours (give or take) each day where I’m committed to being on campus. Which solves the “do I have time” question of the resolution. It’s like a gift!

So, yeah, even though it’s not what I expected, I’m thinking my schedule is mostly all right. (Now if i could just find another block each day in which to write.)

I tried to let this go. I thought—several times—last night about posting this, then thought that I’d maybe get over it and think it was silly come the morning light.

Well, the morning light ain’t exactly here, yet, but I don’t think it’s silly. I’m still a little ticked, so here it is:

Note to the students who “work out” in the gym at school (the reason for the quotation marks will be apparent soon, I think):

The weight machines are exercise equipment. They are put there for those who want to use them to work out. Some of us actually do exercise not because it’s fun (though it is), or because it’s cool (maybe, maybe not), but because we want to commit that time to being and staying in (some kind of) shape—other than round.

I know some of you might think it’s funny when you see me working out. But—believe me—you don’t know from “fat guy.”

So a gentle reminder that some people realize that the machines are for exercise—they’re not just really expensive sex toys, and there’s certainly no way that four of you can use the same one at the same time. So I guess I’m saying, “Flirt on your own time, huh?” and don’t wreck my workout in the process, please.

Thanks!

In the summer of 2005, the summer after I finished my PhD, I was presented with an opportunity: For the first time in years (at least seven), I didn’t have anything I should be reading. I was no longer receiving reading assignments, I was no longer looking far and wide for those last sources that would add to my dissertation, and—for the moment, at least—I was not (re)reading along with my students.

I was free.

So I took full advantage. I read more than 30 books that summer—whatever I wanted. And I enjoyed it. Immensely.

But then, I’ve always been a reader. In fact, in high school, I would both forgo homework and stay up way too late reading what I wanted to read. I always had a stack of library books, I usually bought from the wire racks of best-sellers in the grocery store, and I’d jump at any chance or excuse to go to the mall, so I could hang out at the bookstore (a proclivity that later morphed into always knowing where the Barnes and Noble or the Borders was).

If you read here, you know that, though I may have slowed from my 30 books per season pace (I am currently on pace for 30 books in a year in 2009), I still, four years after I rediscovered that freedom, read at a fairly good clip, and read pretty much what I want to read. And the more I read, and the more I revel in my personal love of reading, the more I’m annoyed by a great number of people who share—or who hope one day to share—the broadest statement of my profession: English Professors.

But to be clear: I am not a literature Professor. In the twelve years I have been teaching English at the college level, I have taught exactly one literature course. One. (And this discussion will likely come back to that.)

And it’s mostly literature professors, and their aspirants, that annoy me. No, check that; they piss me off. They piss me off in great measure by insisting that the canon of literature is something that must be protected. To them, it’s sacred, and a canonized book is, to them, no less venerable than a canonized saint is to the most devout Roman Catholic.

I first ran afoul of this belief when I was working on my master’s degree. It had little to do with my own studies, of course, as by that time I had already made my transition into studying writing, rhetoric, and composition full-time. So it wasn’t like I wanted to read non-canonical works and was bucking the system of the program. Instead, I was slated, in the fall of my second year, to be a TA (in the most traditional, non-English sense of working with a professor in his class) in Dr. Jim Egan’s “Fantasy Literature” class—a class which I had enjoyed immensely as an undergrad. But, as registration began, Jim was informed by the Assistant Chair of the department that there were too many course offerings in non-canonical literature, and would he please agree to teach “17th Century Poetry” instead? Of course, the polite request for a voluntary change was only a front, and the message was clear—he would be teaching the poetry course whether he wanted to or not. So I ended up TAing in the poetry course (of course, as a senior I had completed an independent study with Jim on Renaissance literature—particularly the literature of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in England—so I wasn’t at a total loss).

But that was the first time I encountered this notion of “too much” non-canonical literature. And an in-depth course on the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, and others can be fun, in an über-dorky kind of way. But I had my heart set on the range of speculative fiction Jim covered in the Fantasy course, so I was pissed (as was Jim, actually).

That was the first time, but it certainly wasn’t the last. Most places where I’ve worked as a professor, there’s been at least one of my colleagues hell-bent on “preserving the canon.” But, seriously, what does it mean to “preserve the canon”? To answer this question, I think we need to look at the reasons why we read, when we do.

Because It’s Good. Let’s be really, really honest for a moment. Most of us who read when we don’t have to (when it’s not assigned to us), read for pleasure. Because the story, the characters, and the writing itself give us pleasure (or, in the case of nonfiction, because the subject matter and the writing do). Because we enjoy what we’re reading. I read Stephen King and Dean Koontz for this reason; I also read William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Dickens for this reason. I read Shakespeare for this reason, too. Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Friedman, and Lawrence Lessig, too. I enjoy reading these writers’ writing. Period.

Because It’s Important. The books of many writers may not be great in the sense of “fun to read,” but they’re important in terms of the flow of ideas down through the centuries, and in terms of the development of language and literary forms. The nice part here, though, is that very few writers ever single-handedly revolutionized language or literary form, and the play of ideas goes on over long spans of time within and among any number of cultures. We can, then, read follow those developments and find what we think is good among them. Why, there are even those who (gasp!) prefer Marlowe to Shakespeare.

Because It’s There. This works a couple of ways. I know that, for myself, I’m prone to trying a writer or a book, simply because it’s available to me. Give the new kid a chance, and all that. But it also works in terms of a writer or that writer’s work having stood the test of time (which ties into both good and important, too, in interesting ways). Of course, sometimes this latter is just the luck of the draw, too.

These three reasons, I think, cover most of the reading we do. Hopefully, they cover it in some combination. But when it comes to the canon, we’re often asked (forced?) to substitute someone else’s judgment for our own. We’re required to take someone’s word for the goodness, the importance, or putting the two together the “greatness” of the work that is there.

I find this funny—when I don’t find it infuriating.

It’s funny because we all (I think even the staunchest, sternest, most old-school defender of the canon among literature professors) snigger at the scene in the film Dead Poets’ Society where the students are encouraged by their literature textbook to draw a graph, charting a poem’s greatness. (Damn, I need to watch that movie again!) We cannot, most seem to believe, mathematically compute or numerically represent the greatness of a work of literature.

But, to many of these stalwart defenders, even though greatness cannot be computed, it can be known and taught. And when it comes to what’s great and what’s not, there are right and wrong answers. There is literature, there is fiction, and—worst of all—there is popular fiction (which, to many of these folks is the rightful heir and successor to the “penny dreadfuls” of the 19th century and the pulp-novels of the early 20th.

I think it’s this snobbishness that most angers me, at least in part because it ignores that many of today’s canonical writers (that simultaneous highlight and bugbear of the canon, Shakespeare, foremost among them) were incredibly popular in their day—and not just—or perhaps not even—among the erudite intelligentsia. In the days of the original Globe, The Bard’s players played to packed houses—houses where the lower classes came to stand in the mud and hear/see the stories.

And when an installment of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop was arriving in Baltimore, so many fans gathered on the dock where the ship from England was approaching that several were knocked off the dock into the water and drowned.

Yet no one faults Shakespeare or Dickens for having been popular. And no one faults them for having written about ghosts, either (before someone raises a subject matter argument). Ghosts, after all, a the central conceit of both Hamlet and A Christmas Carol, and Shakespeare also wrote about fairies and magic (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, respectively).

In short, and with apologies to the alarmists who would have us believe otherwise, there are no literary barbarians at the gates. The best of our contemporary popular novelists are, in fact, writers on par with the best writers of yesteryear as represented in the canon. A writer today needs not suffer poor (literary) circulation to be good enough or smart enough to warrant consideration. Success is not a mark of illegitimacy, and it’s simply boorish to claim otherwise.

Many of the canon’s writers were successful in their own way and in their own day. Reading (and even—gasp!—teaching) what’s good and what’s important from any and every era is what the study of the written word should be about. Writing need not be centuries old, or obscure, or incomprehensible to be good, to convey deeper meaning, to explore human truth, to be worth reading, exploring, understanding, and loving.

If we follow that line of thinking, the canon will take care of itself, don’t you think?

Movie #4 (2009)

In case you were wondering if I would ever watch and write about a movie that I didn’t like, this is the post for you.

Cloverfield (2008), directed by Matt Reeves, was not a total waste of my time, but it’s the closest I’ve come in watching a movie in a while (the last total waste was Knocked Up, which I didn’t even bother writing about—it may, in fact, have been before I started writing about movies on a regular basis).

Cloverfield is a monster movie, that revolves almost wholly around a D+ (at best) monster that seems to have a serious rage on for Manhattan. It leaves the boroughs and suburbs completely alone, of course, and after beheading the Statue of Liberty and lobbing the head into downtown, it ignores the financial district and moves on to destroying the downtown and midtown residential sections of Manhattan and wreaking havoc on the populations there.

As an audience, we follow the exploits of a group of young Manhattanites as they deal with the monster’s impact on their lives: Brothers Rob and Jason Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David and Mike Vogel), their friend Hud (T. J. Miller), Jason’s girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas), and Lily’s friend Marlena (Lizzie Kaplan).

The film is shot entirely with handheld camera, as though Hud (for most of the movie) is recording the events with Rob’s camcorder.

The bulk of the story chronicles these friends’ attempt first to flee Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge, and then to reach Beth McIntyre (Odette Yustman), who lives in Midtown, and who has been in love with and loved by Rob Hawkins, though neither of them has admitted it.

As they make their way uptown to complete a daring rescue of Beth from a collapsing building, the group is pared down until eventually Beth and Rob are—in various ways—separated from all the others, and out of time. Only as they face impending death and bid their farewell messages to the camera are they able to admit their feelings for each other.

And that’s probably what I liked the least about this film. The cinéma véreté approach to shooting it didn’t put me off; the actors gave passable performances (Kaplan’s performance as the affectless Marlena was flat, but I think intentionally so); and I can even give the less-than-creative monster at least a partial pass. But the fact that screenwriter Drew Goddard used this largely nonsensical story as a vehicle for his heavy-handed message about admitting our feelings for those we care about was just too much for me to overlook.

Just. Too. Much.

The message might have been okay if the monster was better. Or if I cared more about the people (who, honestly, seemed more to me the Manhattanites of American Psycho than Sex and the City). But the monster wasn’t better and I didn’t really care.

And I still want to know what became of Lily, too.

For some reason, I left the house this morning with REM’s song “The One I Love” stuck in my head. I can’t put my finger on that reason, because I hadn’t heard that song in forever (though I did dial it up on the iPod on the way to work). Maybe I heard it in a dream last night.

But I seriously had it stuck there, and I thought that maybe listening to it would shake it. So far, so good. Nonetheless, I heard the music and Michael Stipe’s haunting vocal. But mostly, I was turning the lyric over in my mind, and I realized something about it. The primary (and repetitive) lyric of that song is essentially a limerick, rhythmically, at least.

And I’m about to something equally nasty to you—think of any limerick you know (and everyone knows at least one, I’m sure), and try to make it fit to the tune of the REM song.

I know that’s almost as mean as telling you that the words to “Amazing Grace” fit to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme-song.

So that’s two mean things I’ve done to you today (or maybe three if the title of this post led you to believe it’d be about something else entirely). Sorry.