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Published On: Jun 19, 2006 08:16 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jun 19, 2006 08:16 PM
Well, blech
Or, I'd really better get my act in
gear...
...if I'm going to teach a class using blogs as
medium and topic. Jesus. I guess, as Rebecca commented, my New Yorker like entry
tired me or something. Ah, but I have been busy. But not that busy.
Bad.
Let's concentrate on one small thing and perhaps I can knock this puppy out.
So, I am coordinating Ursinus's Summer Fellows program as I believe I have previously mentioned. Well, I am also mentoring a Fellow, which means I meet with him frequently (thus far about every other day) and help him through his research. He (a certain Jon Gagas) chose me or rather I was chosen for him because he wanted to work on D.H. Lawrence and no one in the English department had any particular knowledge or predilection.
Now, some of you know my relationship with DH. First, he was born the day after me, so there's that Virgo connection. It's interesting, but I can't quite remember how my connection with DH began, but somehow in the Fall of 1992, I found myself in Oxford, reading a novel a week and writing a paper a week about said novel, and reading that paper to my tutor.
It was the best educational experience of my life, to that point.
I came back to Pomona and wrote a voluminous senior thesis some 140 pages long explaining how DH and Virginia Woolf were diametrically opposed in how they dealt with homosexuality in their lives and in their fiction (DHL: closed in life, open in fiction; VW: vice versa). I don't remember what I said about why that mattered or what it meant. I must have said something though...there were 140 pages for Christ's sake.
Anyway, I went to Delaware and promptly left DH behind.
And now, years later, I find myself back with DH.
What I realized today is that with Jon I am engaged in the same kind of exploration of DH that I had years ago, which is sort of strange really.
Wednesday, Jon and I spent probably 90 minutes talking through ideas we had about DH's troublesome book, The Plumed Serpent. 90 minutes. I probably haven't had that level of sustained intellectual discussion with one person since Oxford (OK, I'm sure I did in grad school, but not week after week...and not before going to Peppers for lunch).
Is it DH that does it? Probably not. However, DH is certainly a good person to do it with, because he is so confounding and frustrating and wild and brilliant. Yes, he is sexist and racist and really quite mad, but sometimes his prose is just breathtaking. When I taught the British Lit survey two years ago, I found once more that DH has a maddening allure: all of my students loved him. And it wasn't the sex, because you don't really find the sex with DH unless you're looking for it. It was the passion. He believed he knew what was wrong with the world and how to change it. He was angry. He was on fire.
And he searched and searched for happiness or contentment. And I think that is why he is so attractive: we find someone who is hellbent on finding The Truth and who can communicate that search so beautifully that we want to go with him.
And I'm excited to be back with him and with another person to see where he will lead me this time.
PS: DH in Apocalypse, wherein he uses the Bible as a springboard to tell his contemporaries how screwed up they are: "When the will of the people becomes the sum of the weakness of a multitude of weak men, it is time to make a break. So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bringing the evil into being. This is the Christian Community today, in its perpetual mean thou-shalt-not. This is how Christian doctrine has worked out in practice."
Um, yeah....
Let's concentrate on one small thing and perhaps I can knock this puppy out.
So, I am coordinating Ursinus's Summer Fellows program as I believe I have previously mentioned. Well, I am also mentoring a Fellow, which means I meet with him frequently (thus far about every other day) and help him through his research. He (a certain Jon Gagas) chose me or rather I was chosen for him because he wanted to work on D.H. Lawrence and no one in the English department had any particular knowledge or predilection.
Now, some of you know my relationship with DH. First, he was born the day after me, so there's that Virgo connection. It's interesting, but I can't quite remember how my connection with DH began, but somehow in the Fall of 1992, I found myself in Oxford, reading a novel a week and writing a paper a week about said novel, and reading that paper to my tutor.
It was the best educational experience of my life, to that point.
I came back to Pomona and wrote a voluminous senior thesis some 140 pages long explaining how DH and Virginia Woolf were diametrically opposed in how they dealt with homosexuality in their lives and in their fiction (DHL: closed in life, open in fiction; VW: vice versa). I don't remember what I said about why that mattered or what it meant. I must have said something though...there were 140 pages for Christ's sake.
Anyway, I went to Delaware and promptly left DH behind.
And now, years later, I find myself back with DH.
What I realized today is that with Jon I am engaged in the same kind of exploration of DH that I had years ago, which is sort of strange really.
Wednesday, Jon and I spent probably 90 minutes talking through ideas we had about DH's troublesome book, The Plumed Serpent. 90 minutes. I probably haven't had that level of sustained intellectual discussion with one person since Oxford (OK, I'm sure I did in grad school, but not week after week...and not before going to Peppers for lunch).
Is it DH that does it? Probably not. However, DH is certainly a good person to do it with, because he is so confounding and frustrating and wild and brilliant. Yes, he is sexist and racist and really quite mad, but sometimes his prose is just breathtaking. When I taught the British Lit survey two years ago, I found once more that DH has a maddening allure: all of my students loved him. And it wasn't the sex, because you don't really find the sex with DH unless you're looking for it. It was the passion. He believed he knew what was wrong with the world and how to change it. He was angry. He was on fire.
And he searched and searched for happiness or contentment. And I think that is why he is so attractive: we find someone who is hellbent on finding The Truth and who can communicate that search so beautifully that we want to go with him.
And I'm excited to be back with him and with another person to see where he will lead me this time.
PS: DH in Apocalypse, wherein he uses the Bible as a springboard to tell his contemporaries how screwed up they are: "When the will of the people becomes the sum of the weakness of a multitude of weak men, it is time to make a break. So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bringing the evil into being. This is the Christian Community today, in its perpetual mean thou-shalt-not. This is how Christian doctrine has worked out in practice."
Um, yeah....
Posted: Mon - June 19, 2006 at 08:16 PM |