Busy-ness

I know, I know, I haven't posted here in awhile! My mother is pestering me daily about it. But my bloggerly absence must be forgiven for the following reasons:

1. I'm teaching Othello this week and giving my students their Midterm and reading up on literary criticism so that I can teach my students all about literary theory next week. It's the ickiest time of the semester, both for my students and myself.
2. I just started a new part-time job at a bakery/cafe in Lawrence. I like it a lot, but I'm pretty well whupped after every single shift. I'm not used to being on my feet that long, or carrying large coffee urns and dish tubs, or talking to that many people in a single day. I know that I'll get used to it in a few weeks, once my brain and body have adjusted, but right now, I'm doing a lot of passing out at 10:30. On the upside, I've learned how to use an industrial oven, how to make espresso, the difference between lattes and cappuccinos, and how to make some killer smoothies over the last few days. And that is awesome.
3. I'm finishing up my application for a full-time teaching job here in Kansas City. The job would be a great fit for me, but the application is a pain: it requires a full electronic application, a cover letter, a CV (a resume for academics), a teaching philosophy, and an essay about what a student should expect from me as a teacher. If I get it, the job will be more than worth the hassle of applying, but the process is sucking up all my writing juices right now! And so the blog suffers.
   

So there are my excuses, like them or not. I'll probably be slow about posting until early February, but I assure you that I haven't abandoned you, gentle readers! I'll be back, after many, many hours of sleep . . .

"Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)"

I've been reading a lot recently. Or maybe I should say that I've been reading a lot of different things recently, all at the same time.

As a little kid, I was addicted to books. I couldn't wait to start a new one, even if I hadn't finished the one that came right before it! This meant that I ended up reading four, five, or even six books at a time. I once took a backpack full of eleven books to stay overnight at my cousin's house--I was a fiend!

I liked to jump back and forth between each book, tasting a few chapters of Black Beauty before shuffling over to The Black Stallion (I had a thing for horses, what can I say!) before switching over to one of the Goosebumps books or to a Dr. Seuss book that my mom read to me when I was small, like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

I'm sure that this ecclectic style of reading was caused mostly by a short attention span and too much enthusiasm for the next new thing. Yet, somehow, I managed to finish almost all of those books, even if I read them in ten page increments!

The last few weeks, I've been going back to my old habits and reading several books at once. I'm still working on Rebecca, but I'm also working my way through another Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel (I'm on number seven now: Burnt Offerings). I've been listening to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead on my drives to and from Lawrence. I've also been sampling a few books of poetry, including William Carlos Williams's Sour Grapes and Louise Gluck's Ararat.

On top of those, I've also been furiously reading The New Yorker. Charlie bought me a subscription for my birthday, and I've loved every issue so far! The only problem is that there are too many interesting articles in each issue; I usually only have enough time to read two or three before the next issue arrives!

I love my new/old arrangement of reading so many things at once, sampling here and there, feeling edified by my New Yorker articles, excited by the wonderfully extravagant plots of Laruell K. Hamilton, and calmed by the wise old narrator of Gilead. Each thing I read seems to satisfy one part of me that the others cannot. And, week by week, my head is filled with such wildly different stories and thoughts and experiences that I feel enlivened by the variety of it all.

Last night, my class and I read a poem that reminded me of this experience. "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the first poems I read during high school, and it has always amazed me. I love the beauty of its language, the vibrant roughness of its sounds (read it aloud, I beg you!), its joyful message, and the sense of peace that always descends on me when I come to the last lines.

Every time I read this poem, I agree with Hopkins once again: it is the strangeness of this world, its overwhelming variety and frantic richness, that makes living such a wonderful thing.

---------------
Pied Beauty
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
           

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
                                                Práise hím.

True Story:

On Monday, I was feeling very active and responsible and go-getter-y. I decided to go to the library to check out the rack of work-out DVDs that used to line the back side of the Large Print Mystery section. Then, I was going to go to the grocery store to pick up a few ingredients for a low-fat chocolate-mocha cream pie recipe from my new The Complete Cooking Light cookbook.

Unfortunately, the work-out DVD section has been moved to a different library. So I came home with this:

And this:

There is no excuse for me.Work-out fail, sweet tooth win!

Rebecca

This week, I've been rereading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I first read it my senior year of high school when it was assigned by my fabulous AP English teacher Mrs. Greiner. I loved it enough that I read it again the following year during my freshman year at KU. Both times, I was mesmerized.

First published in 1938, Rebecca is about a young woman who marries a rich widower with a shady past. Maxim de Winter sweeps the young narrator off her feet and carries her away to Manderly, his ancestral estate. Manderly is beautiful, but it's also haunted by the memory of Rebecca de Winter, Maxim's first wife who died only a year before. The shy, nameless narrator is cowed by the sumptuous setting of Manderly, but she's even more cowed by the household's continuing love for the dead Rebecca who, by all accounts, was beautiful, charming, and an elegant hostess. The novel transforms from a romance to a mystery as the speaker begins to suspect that there's something fishy about Rebecca's death.

Rereading this book for a third time hasn't been as rewarding as I thought it would be. The novel, which once seemed rich, multivalent, and romantic, now feels long-winded and heavy-handed. The narrator especially keeps getting on my nerves. I think that I used to identify with her shyness, but now she just tires me. I keep thinking, Just tell the damn servant to bugger off! You're the mistress of the house, and they can't tell you where to put that vase! or, Just ask Maxim what the hell happened to Rebecca! She was only a woman, for heaven sakes! 

Some novels grow with you and offer more riches with each rereading. Rebecca, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be one of them.

What books do you love that stand up to multiple rereadings? What books have grown with you, and what books have failed to stand the test of time?

Avatar: A Review

So here's the thing: earlier this week, I wrote a really long review of Avatar that had links and references and smart words in it and everything. Unfortunately, the more I wrote, the more I hated it.

This has happened to me before: I've written a few long posts that, once I stop typing, strike me as just awful--long-winded, pretentious, and dull. I never post them, and I won't subject you to this one, either.

Instead, here's my review of Avatar in brief Q&A form:

Was Avatar . . .

• Long? Yeeeessssssssss.
• Preachy? Uh huh.
  
• Racist? For sure.
• Moving? Yes.
• Beautiful? Definitely.
• Exciting? Sometimes.
  
• Good? Ummmmm, well, sorta . . .
• Bitchin'? Yes! (Fight scenes + dragons + helicopters = automatic bitchin' rating.)
  
• Worth your $10: Yes. Seeing the world that James Cameron creates is worth the price of admission. Go for the pretty blue people communing with trees in a gorgeous CGI forest, just don't expect too much from the script.