…or at least, that is the net effect of what aging, children, pets, mortgage payments have me sometimes believing.

When I was a child I thought myself bright. Many of us at one time probably thought the same of ourselves. It was the euphoria of youth, the deeply felt conviction that with a little application, one’s quick-to-understand-anything mental prowess could master any subject placed before it.

So when did the realization arrive that being some sort of prodigy was not my destiny? Indeed, when one reads about prodigies, would such a destiny even have been desirable?

Oh, but the power! That sense of infinite capacity powered by youth and hormones. It is something I sorely miss.

Like many who write for or read this site, I was a reader, too, and a precocious one at that. (But weren’t we all?) The transition for me from the Mighty Thor to the Mighty Shakespeare was sudden, taking my father as much by surprise as me. He was kind enough to make the switch from bringing home issues of Iron Man to leaving Signet editions of Dickens on my rolltop desk. He was a good father, and he unwittingly encouraged me in my adolescent hubris.

I read voraciously (didn’t we all?) and performed reasonably well in school—except for those classes that I had consciously decided not to succeed in. The world seemed my oyster, easily pried with the knife of my intellect.  In short, I felt really, really smart. I was sharper, I was funnier, I was livelier, I was wittier.

Or was I? Sometimes I think I was these things because now there are so many days as a mid-40s, mid-career, midlife so-and-so that I just feel plain exhausted. Tired. Weak. Pooped. I should exercise, but it bores me. I should eat well, but I get hungry. I should read more and watch less television, but my eyes hurt and besides, my attention wanders: I think I hear my children calling…or is that my wife? And don’t let me forget that I need to: bring the car in for a repair, pay the Visa bill, renew my license, send a Bar Mitzvah card (with check, of course)…

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet, when Dr. John Watson first meets the great Sherlock Holmes, he utterly flabbergasted to learn:
 

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

Ignorant of Copernican theory?  This is detective fiction as farce. But even more interesting is the explanation:

“You see,” Holmes explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

Yeah, the italics are mine.  Honestly, I have no idea if Doyle is toying with readers or metaphorizing late Victorian views of memory and forgetfulness. It doesn’t really matter. Holmes purposely unloads any accumulation of “useless facts.” For me, the act of disposal is thrust upon me, willy-nilly. The space I once reserved for the minutiae that made me a living room whiz during Jeopardy or reasonably competitive in a game of Trivial Pursuit is now taken up with doctors’ appointments and trips to the supermarket, worries about my 401k (or what’s left of it) and making sure the gas tank is full.

I used to be smarter, or so I would like to think. And yet, I know this is not entirely true. Separate from the reams of data that literally wrinkle my face like pen strokes gone awry, signs of knowledge dearly bought by experience, I do know more about some things than I once did, I am more capable at some mental tasks than I once was.

For example, I know more about the history of literature than I ever did upon my graduation from college. I’m also far better at crossword puzzles. I suspect I may even be a better chess player, which isn’t saying much since I always sucked at the game. (Remember, youth had inspired me with the belief that with enough application I could be great at chess, not that I was.) I definitely know more about politics and how it works—daily blog reading has trained me well in that regard. I am definitely a better writer.

But has my writing all this made me feel any better? Not necessarily. In some ways, it has suggested how wrong-headed the sentiment is. I used to be smarter doesn’t seem like much nowadays when the smartest guys in the room so successfully melted down the economy of the United States. Suddenly I’m not so inclined to take stock in this type of nostalgia. Already it has begun to pale. Maybe I used to be smarter. But I think I was also more callow, more selfish, more spoiled, and hard knocks have made me smarter in the ways that count.

Or so I’d like to think.

Lisa Dickler Awano is a scholar of Alice Munro and an alumna of the University of Chicago, which I attended as well. She is also a subscriber to New Haven Review and a forthcoming contributor.

When we saw each other at the most recent New Haven Review gala, we talked briefly, as we have before, of the ol’ “U of C.” She had recently visited the campus, where Amy Kass was being honored. Our conversation turned, as per usual, to the topic of faculty we had known.

For me, Amy Kass, and her equally eminent husband and fellow faculty member, Leon, were not among those with whom I had the honor of taking a class (notwithstanding their conservative credentials). But Lisa and I were able to share fond remembrances of David Bevington, the U of C’s premiere Shakespeare scholar. (Bevington’s edition of the Shakespeare’s complete works remarks for me a touchstone of quality in editing and exposition of the Bard’s work.)

Our conversation then took a curious turn. She knew that the greatest influence on my early development as a reader and critic had been literary scholar William Veeder. But that influence, as I’ve written elsewhere, affected less the shape or quality of my criticism than the confidence—sometimes reckless—that underwrites it. In brief, Veeder trained me in the attitude a literary critic must take to the object of his attention rather than in the actual tools of analysis that should be brought to bear. For a critic to do his work well, one simply cannot tread a path of undue reverence to authors or their work.

And while this was a necessary first step to the art of reading well, the tools he offered at the time did not, as I suspected then but know now, deliver much substance in the way of interpretation or criticism. This is seemingly harsh, but it is without doubt the case that Veeder’s passion then for psychoanalytic criticism offered readings that, in my humble view, were seemingly complex but terribly hollow. While the article on him in Wikipedia conveys the strengths of his basic positions as a literary pragmatist (that meaning is engendered by the intersection of text and reader in a given context), his in-class instruction often dwelled to absurd lengths on intricate variants to the Oedipus complex and other Freudian and post-Freudian phenomena.

Veeder supplied the starting blocks. But my “literary regret,” small and speculative though it may be, was the opportunity I missed to have a baton passed to me by U of C’s best-known literary critic then: Wayne Booth.

Part of the reason for the missed opportunity was simple timing. Somehow I managed to graduate from U of C in three years (an achievement not to be mistaken for any act of genius or even above average intelligence on my part: I sweated seven years on a doctorate that wasn’t all that great when I finished.) My junior year was thus also my senior year, which gave me the privilege of shouldering my way into any class I wished but did not bestow the magical property of compelling professors to return to the classroom early from sabbaticals. The academic year after, I bridled with jealousy when a peer and friend regaled me with tales of Booth’s erudition and kindness during classes he took the year after my graduation.

At the time, there was no doubt in my mind that the star who shined brightest in U of C’s English department then was Booth. True, by the mid-1980s, my undergraduate years, his star had begun to fade under the glare of deconstruction and a cadre of poststructural reworkings of feminist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist literary theory. Booth’s theories seem quaint by comparison, but with the receding of the Continental tide of theory, the artfulness and articulateness of his struggle with issues subsequently advanced by narratology and reader response criticism seem to have worn well, or at least, better than some other theories.

This, of course, is just one reader’s opinion, and Booth was not necessarily my favorite or even the most convincing critical theorist. But I do think he was, at the time, the best U of C had to offer. But I’ll never really know. It is always possible that he as an instructor and I as a student would have been less than compatible. But such is the nature of regrets, even literary ones, which exist in some other universe with its own history.

I have been watching a lot of BBC Television lately. This surge of anglophilia was occasioned by my wife’s return from Walmart with two collections of “BBC Video Classics” tucked into a plastic shopping bag. The first, “The Charles Dickens Collection,” contained dramatizations of Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Bleak House, Mrtin Chuzzelwit, and Oliver Twist; the second, “The Jane Austen Collection,” featured—naturally enough—adaptations of her six complete novels.

Working my way through the latter, while folding laundry or stuffing envelopes, proved both illuminating and disappointing. The first thing you need to know is that both collections comprise BBC’s first round of Masterpiece Theatre-like forays into high literature. All of the productions appeared in the 1970s and 1980s and were shot, to their detriment, as video.

Now let me be clear: I’m an unapologetically avid admirer of Austen. But no amount of avidity can forgive the woodenness of these productions. The stilted deliveries, passive blocking and not infrequent lack of dramatic subtext are fittingly complemented by the flaccid camera work, wan indoor lighting, and general absence of sound engineering. (Everybody speaks with a faint hallway echo).

While hardly distraught, I was, well, dismayed. Did Austen translate that badly? BBC productions clearly have the luxury of length, the lack of which in Hollywood productions was a continual source of frustration for me. In Emma Thompson’s rendering of Sense and Senibility (1995), there is no midnight visit by the faithless but regretful John Willoughby, seeking forgiveness for his caddish behavior; in Keira Knightly’s Pride and Prejudice (2005), scenes in Rosings Park and Pemberley are painfully abridged, while several characters were altogether eliminated.

Perhaps the faults I perceived lay in the dramatizations (the British term then for adaptation). I had started with Pride and Prejudice, a personal favorite. This BBC version had the distinct honor of being adapted for video by British writer Fay Weldon. Yet despite the seeming coup in selection of dramaturg, the execution was pale at best. It certainly did not compare favorably to BBC’s 6-part reworking in 1995 with Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. And yet somehow, I did receive some modicum of pleasure, so I turned to my next favorite novel, which I had recently read: Persuasion.

Ack! It was unwatchable. The blind were surely leading the blind when someone cast 38-year-old Ann Firbank as the 27-year-old Anne Elliot. Even worse, that someone then set her against the much younger looking Valerie Gearon (who was 34 but looked 25!), who played Anne’s elder sister, Elizabeth Elliot. The overall effect was creepy, with the younger sister, the romantic object of the novel, looking like the older sister’s mother!

The real test ultimately proved to be Sense and Sensibility because here I could compare BBC and Hollywood productions and directly. (I owned the 1995 movie version.) Now I could assess more intelligently what worked and what did not. The differences were palpable. Despite the inevitable contractions that movies impose on their novelistic sources, both adaptations shared a number of identical lines, demonstrating by contrast what real talent can deliver. Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, and Kate Winslet earn their reputations for subtlety and expressiveness when compared to the weirdly vapid and at times uninspired verbiage of the BBC production, which no doubt explains Masterpiece Theatre’s reputation among some Americans in the ’70s and ’80s as a waste of cathode rays.

And yet…and yet, I can’t seem to give up my commitment to Austen, even when done badly. To be blunt, as dramatizations of literary classics go, these BBC “video classics” suck—but not so much as not to be worth the watching. So is this what makes a “classic” a classic? Somehow the stories still compel even as the productions repel. There is a mystery here that I can’t explain.

But forgive me. I see I have a load of laundry on the bed and Mansfield Park is in the DVD drive, so I best get back to work…

“Art” by Yasmina Reza first appeared in Paris in 1995.  Shortly afterwards it was translated into English for the British stage and turned up at the Royale Theatre (now the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre) on Broadway on March 1, 1998.  The cast was stellar for this three-person play, performed without intermission.  The six-month Broadway run included Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina, all well known film and theatre performers.

 The recent weekend performances of the play at the Kehler-Liddell Gallery in Westville this April were perhaps a little less glamorous but were easily just as powerful as its Broadway version—in some ways even more so. Where the Royale Theatre seats 1,100, Kehler-Liddell’s impromptu bleachers and 60 some chairs transformed what on Broadway can only have been an all-too-impersonal experience into an intimate tete-a-tete between audience and performers. Placing the play within a gallery reflected, if anything, the mutual trust exhibited by gallery staff and the Elm Shakespeare Company, which was responsible for this production.

This element of trust is no small matter in a play as powerful as Reza’s. The setting is simple enough: the living rooms of the three characters—Marc (James Andreassi), Serge (Tom Zingarelli), and Yvan (Raphael Massie)—which remains unchanged throughout the hour and twenty minute performance. The key conflict is unsettling, one that should worry any gallery owner in the business of selling art. In brief, Serge, a dermatologist and divorcee, has purchased for 200,000 francs a five-by-four-foot painting of white lines on a white background. This decision immediately upsets Marc, an engineer who condemns the work as trash, to the dismay and disdain of Serge. Their seeming arbiter is the hapless and “chaotic,” soon-to-be-married Yvan.

 While hardly a tale of war or woe, Reza’s play disturbs the universe of art and, as becomes shortly evident, human relations. The opening gambit in Reza’s backhanded criticism of postmodern art—and possibly of poststructuralism, a distinctly French phenomenon that Reza undoubtedly had to live through—is the all-white painting that is the object of Serge’s veneration, Marc’s rage, and Yvan’s confusion. But “Art” goes beyond the obvious conundrums formerly presented by Marcel Duchamp’s institutionalized snow shovels and urinals. (Does something become ‘art’ by virtue of hanging in a museum? What if you pay 200,000 francs for it?) It goes after the relationships among the characters, since it’s on the blank whiteness of the canvas that their relationships are ultimately inscribed, evoking a range of emotion that drives them through the convolutions of feeling that by play’s end leaves the audience near breathless with the verbal pyrotechnics of it all.

This is where mastery of the material makes all the difference, and the ensemble put together for this production really does have firm control of that material. The snugness of the venue and the simplicity of the set demand a conciseness of body language that is belied by the explosiveness of the characters’ pent-up feeling. The contrast of so much energy to be conveyed in so contained a setting ultimately creates a bond between players and spectators that only a great performance in the right environment can convey.

This simpatico between audience and ensemble seems exactly the intended goal of this experiment by Elm Shakespeare Company and Kehler Liddell Gallery to bring high art of high quality to New Haven’s neighborhoods. “Westville is something of an arts district already strong in the visual arts with its many galleries,” noted Elm Shakespeare founder and director James Andreassi. “Elm Shakespeare’s goal was not only to find an indoor space for performing smaller plays but also to take advantage of the artistic energy in Westville and deepen it by bringing the theatrical arts to the neighborhood.” In that regard, Elm Shakespeare both follows in the wake and leads along with works that have been aired by New Haven Theater Company, Broken Umbrella Theatre, and Theatre 4.

This article is cross-posted at the New Haven Independent.

Earlier, I posted on the fruitlessness of teaching students how to write literary criticism. The argument was part tongue in cheek, part all business. In brief, I’m ambivalent about the value of this activity. This ambivalence lies in the fact that not teaching students how to write literary criticism is not the same as refusing to teach them how to do literary criticism. Perhaps this is a distinction without a difference. I don’t think so.

When it comes to the art of unraveling a literary work — or as students of literature pejoratively put it, of “dissecting” The Scarlet Letter or Death in Venice — we should instruct students in this activity. I’m just not convinced this is the most effective way of teaching students how to write better, and too often beginning literature courses are treated as an extension of one’s training in academic writing. But, in my view, the experience of writing literary criticism comes too early in the trajectory of the typical student’s college career. Unless the inability to write has burdened him with remedial composition courses — something of a norm on American college campuses — writing literary criticism within the first two years of study is just too soon to engage in the art of analyzing one of our most complex human artifacts.

A small digression: I’ve always been amused by the distinction in our culture between the “hard” and “soft” sciences. In academia, hard sciences, like physics and chemistry, are not uncommonly seen as more difficult, more challenging than the “soft” sciences of psychology and sociology. Hell, just look at the adjectives! But this bias is built on a strange notion. The soft sciences are soft not because they’re easier but because they’re the more complex of the two. And why? Because they have humanity as the object of their analysis, and human beings by nature deceive — if not the scientists who observe them then themselves. Our capacity for deception and delusion inevitably muddies the stream of reproducible results and controlled variables upon which “good” science depends. Pity the poor psychologist rather than the physicist. Grasping human behavior is enough to give even the keenest of minds a migraine. And narrative is, if anything, a demonstration of this seeming incomprehensibility, a neverending case study in the instability and unknowability of intention and response, human cause and effect. If human beings instantiate in every living moment the Heisenberg principle, stories are little more than exemplars of the principle at work. And yet we’re sending in students to write coherently about them?

Perhaps I make mountains of molehills here, but I wonder if compelling nineteen-year-olds to intelligently and (one hopes) intelligibly interrogate a literary text is an episode in the kind of all-too-human irrationality we ask them to expound on. It is difficult enough to figure out, say, a character’s ostensible motivation; to ask students to peer further beneath the literary veil and comment on the unstable source of that representation, which may range from the author’s unconscious predilections to the ultimately unknowable historical milieu of the work, seems sheer madness. Here we blithely walk students into literature’s hall of mirrors and ask them to look from reflection to reflection — the cascade of narrative ambiguities, which is generally agreed to be a good thing in a literary work done well — and then expect them to walk out loving the work and the craft of writing literary criticism.

Instructors of the art are inevitably disappointed by their charges, who leave the hall frustrated with results that are more pedestrian than not. At best, we hope for diamonds of insight in the rough. Some students who stick it out may even come to enjoy the ride — despite the results. In these are our first English majors born. But was the ride worth it for them?

In the end, frustrations aside, I have come to believe it was. Uncertainty and ambiguity in a work of literature is a good thing. I’m with the New Critics on that point. But try getting your typical first-year college student to accept that. Not so easy.

That is because eventually they will have to accept the fact that life as lived is rife with uncertainty, and making it through depends on learning how to navigate its shoals. Literature of any real quality demands suspending the Hollywood-driven Manichaeanism that childhood depends upon. Engaging students in the act (and if they’re further interested, the art) of literary criticism is among their first steps in exploring and accommodating the not-so-black-and-whiteness of reality. Literary criticism is essentially a safe space to pick apart life through the vehicle of narrative. The more robust and thoughtful the picking apart, the better the training the student receives for handling the blows life will inevitably deal. Better to explore earlier in a textual work why a crime was committed than later in a courtroom as a witness, plaintiff or defendant. Literary criticism for this reason, among others, is a species — maybe a subspecies — of ethical training. It is the unexamined life being examined, through the lens of narrative.

But, mind you, this describes only the act of engaging in literary criticism. It is not the same as the act of writing it. For when you write literary criticism — not a bad thing in itself — you have now more heavy-handedly codified the flux of possibilities that circulated prior to committing ideas and arguments to paper. Granted, codification will sometimes have the ameliorative effect of pushing you to think through and state more clearly your views of the work at hand. For while uncertainty may characterize the nature of reality, so, too, does stability, if only for a while. Uncertainty, after all, is not the same as chaos. And the writing of literary criticism, while difficult in the extreme at times, is not a mission impossible. Indeed with time, maturity and the ability to walk the high wire of our quotidian existence, it is even something we may want to teach. But only when it really is worth the teaching and not before. A softening up that concentrates more on discussion and more imaginative forms of engagement would do far more till then.

Some time ago, I joined friends in New Haven for a Friday night meal. Their daughter was in town, back from college, and over the course of dinner conversation, I asked if she had any professors who were stood out from the others. She immediately described two of her instructors, who were notable for the passion of their presentations and their commitment to quality literary criticism. An English major now, just as I had been when I attended the University of Chicago twenty years earlier, she asked after a half hour into her own passionate description why I inquired. I admitted that I wanted compare her experience with my own and find the link between what these special folks had done for her and what mine had done for me.

Actually, I had one particular individual in mind, one whose own presentations were responsible for my liberation as a reader. That person was William Veeder, who, I have since learned, apparently produced enough of a pedagogical impact to earn himself a Wikipedia article. The article, which outlines his literary theories, is largely a tribute. I’m especially tickled by the classroom quotes, or “Veederisms,” as they’re aptly described.

While some of what appears in the article is familiar from my classes with him, what I recall most is what fails to show up. The article rightly records Veeder’s emphasis on the how derive meaning from a literary work through the intersection of words submitted by an author for your consideration and your response to that concatenation of words. This intersubjective take is hardly uncommon, and, if anything, is an eminently practical approach to how writers, texts, and readers engage within the reading experience. But what the article’s author(s?) fail to capture is the degree to which Veeder’s application of that idea, and application of it within the classroom, empowered readers: no small thing for the first- or second-year college student seriously considering a major in English. In short, intersubjectivity was his way of reducing the authority of authors.

Now this is not to say that Veeder took great stock (or, let’s just say, all of his stock) in some variant of Roland Barthes’ “death of the author.” Veeder did believe in authors and their authority, but it was an authority much limited. To make this point he would tell a wonderful story that, even if apocryphal, rings true in the only way these things matter.

At some point in his education, Veeder had taken a course in which the class found itself reading a D.H. Lawrence novel. The classroom conversation had become lively and insightful. The classroom instructor then distributed a short essay on the work by a contemporary of Lawrence’s and asked for the students’ feedback. They all agreed that the critic had clearly misconstrued what the novel was about. The instructor then revealed that the critic was…Lawrence himself. Most interesting of all? Not a single mind was changed: the class responded — rightly in Veeder’s view — that Lawrence had simply failed to understand what he had achieved. As slippery as this slope seems, Veeder held firmly to the view that literature is always first and foremost a literary experience, and that experience takes at least two to tango — a reader and a text — sometimes three if the author insists on butting in and the reader lets him or her.

It was the follow-up question in my class, and Veeder’s answer, that sealed the deal for me. A classmate asked if an author’s assertion about what a text is “about” should have any standing in our interpretations of a text. Veeder’s response was artful: authors do not have the kind of authority that we (and sometimes authors) imagine. Once the text is born, it is, like a child, sent out into the world to fend for itself; the author may have brought the work to term but her relationship to it thereafter changes forever as she becomes just another reader.

OK, well maybe not just any other reader. Veeder’s term of choice was a “privileged” reader, but a reader nonetheless. Privileged, in Veeder’s construction, meant that the author had a special, not definitive, relationship to the text— in the D.H. Lawrence case, as the abovediscussed novel’s progenitor. But need I add that if the author’s work were about, say, his mother, such as Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors, wouldn’t the author’s mother also be something of a privileged reader, one with her own special relationship to the text?

But even this “privileged” relationship is problematized by the fact that we all have unique relationships to texts, not only because we are unique in relation to one another but because we are unique even to ourselves over time. In my mid-forties, I’m just not the same person reading Heart of Darkness that I was when I struggled with it at 18.

The net effect of Veeder’s insight was to empower me as a reader by depriving authors of the kind of mystical authority that they simply do not have. True, authors are bound to be frustrated by perceived misreadings of their work — think Salman Rushdie, certain Muslim readers, and his Satanic Verses — but there is no getting around the reality of the situation. Readers will make what they will of what they read, which is why, though it be a classic, I still find The Scarlet Letter a dreadful bore while my neighbors consider it a thrilling and tragic romance.

Let me add that this does not make all readings equal in value or cogency. But that is an entirely different issue. The first step in reading well that Veeder taught was not about being right but about being bold. And in order to be bold, a painfully obsequious deference to the author is the first thing to go out the window. It’s a mantra by which I still read.

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series rolls into its 3rd week with readings at Bru Cafe, 141 Orange, Street, this Tuesday, March 23, at 7� p.m.

Our theme?
“Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”

Our stories?
Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Shiloh” and Bernard Malamud’s “The Jewbird”

Why these?

Two great writers, masters, in particular, of the short story: what could go wrong?

For those who don’t know Bobbie Ann Mason…shame on you!  One of America’s best short story writers, she offers in “Shiloh” a quietly moving meditation on what breaking up is really like: that onerous sense that not all is right in the world, often sneaking up on us before we know it.  Two lovers look at one another and, lo and behold, they’re strangers.  And then there’s the story title.  Wikipedia describes the Civil War battle at Shiloh as follows: “The Confederates achieved considerable success on the first day but were ultimately defeated on the second day.”  If that’s not a good description of breaking up, then I don’t know what is.

Malamud’s “The Jewbird” was one of my favorite stories as a kid and remains so to this day.  It’s Malamud at his magic realist best, taking the “Jewish problem” and realizing its substance in a way that few works of “straight” fiction do. In many ways, it reminds one of the trickster tales of Native American legend, of coyote who knows things all too well, and yet all of this with a distinctly Jewish twist, featuring equal parts cynicism leavened by wisdom and  hope threatened byour failure to understand, really understand.

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks
Ethan Gilsdorf
Lyons Press, 2009
 $24.95

If we’ve learned anything from Sigmund Freud and J.K. Rowling, it’s that we members of the species homo sapiens sapiens exhibit a strong fantasy life.  From the family romance to  wingardium leviosa—frame it however you like—our predilection to imagine ourselves as something other than what we are is as old as the first storyteller regaling listeners around a campfire of a thrilling hunt or noble deed done with great sacrifice, indeed, of anything that takes us out of ourselves and places us elsewhere.

Ethan Gilsdorf’s Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is a culturally specific meditation on this all-too-human fact of life.  [Full disclosure: the acquiring editor for Lyons Press, Keith Wallman, is a subscriber to New Haven Review.] Gilsdorf’s starting point is personal and, at times, painfully confessional, prompting a firsthand tour of the Anglo-American obsession with medieval fantasy and faerie.  That obsession ranges from beer-bellied and bearded role play gamers who gather in Geneva, Wisconsin, to relive the pre-corporate glory days of Dungeons & Dragons to middle-aged housewives whacking orcs and ogres in the virtual realms of World of Warcraft; from middle-class couples who don wings and tunics on weekends to swing Styrofoam swords and fling confetti-filled fireballs at one another to “Tolkien tourists” who have descended en masse on Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson’s New Zealand to walk the grassy plains of Rohan and sniff the cindery ash of Mordor.

Gilsdorf survey, however, is more than an act of journalism.  It’s an inner odyssey that receives its first push with the devastating stroke that transforms his mother from a bright, ebullient woman, for whom the world was her middle-class oyster, into the “Monster”: a shambling, chain-smoking, emotionally explosive terror whose son finds solace in a regularly scheduled Dungeons & Dragons game with high school friends.  This, at least, is the personal motivations behind Gilsdorf’s re-entry into geekdom.  Like so many others—myself included—when Gilsdorf left for college, he had put away childish things, supplanting the joys of casting sleep spells and slaying giants for more mundane adult pursuits: grades, sex, money, work, family.  In Fantasy Freaks, Gilsdorf uses the opportunity supplied by authorship and a book contract to revisit this phase of his life and indulge himself. But this indulgence is hardly a shameless one since Gilsdorf is clearly unsettled by this ostensibly voluntary return to his teenage roots.

Mostly it’s a question of image. Anxieties about how he appears to others resonate throughout. This no doubt explains his not infrequent mentions of the normality of his respective guides through the subcultures of Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, live action role playing, and DragonCon.  This is complemented by his own boldly stated yearning for the adult things he still does not have at the time of writing—a long-term relationship, marriage, children.  The underlying story of cultural anxiety combines elements of projection (“What’s so weird about pretending I’m a half-elf warrior? The guy who plays the dwarf wizard is an assistant VP of finance at the local bank!”) with reaffirmations of normal urges (“OK, so I’m dressed in a funny costume at this DragonCon, but everyone’s doing it and maybe I’ll meet a girl and have real rather than role play sex”).  With respect to the first, Gilsdorf is no different from every other guy or gal who live, in one way or another, their own Clark Kent-Superman double lives; as for the second, fantasy play can serve as a conduit to culturally normative goals, such as networking for love or money.  And, to be honest, who can argue with either of these?  Four guys huddling over funny-shaped dice and elaborate rulebooks, which may end in a shared beer or job lead, is no stranger than watching four guys huddling in a green field over a dimpled white ball that rests on a little piece of wood, which they will spend some three to five hours swatting with one of ten differently shaped, club-footed poles. 

Gilsdorf does make several pop psychology efforts to explain the penchant of a certain class of Americans (and Englishmen and Australians and Frenchmen, etc.) for these types of recreations.  Much of this pop psy 101 stuff comes from his own intuition. Nor do I think him that far off the mark.  These various forms of role play, whether table-top, digital, or “live action,” do reflect our collective need to escape the dullness of our daily reality, supply ourselves with the illusion of control over the chaos of modern life, feed that never absent desire for child-like, consequence-free play, and give release to our pent-up stores of aggression. It is all of these, and more. Indeed, if I had but one criticism to make, it would have been a fond wish for Gilsdorf to have shed some of the habits of personal journalism and donned more academic vestments.  (He certainly is capable, as a former Harvard graduate.)   In brief, I and, I suspect, any of his readers would have liked to have seen more of the academic literature—assuming there is any—on these various behaviors.  Otherwise, Fantasy Freaks is an eye-opening romp through what continues to strike me as a culturally specific juncture in our collective psychology.

The Listen Here! Short Story Reading Series gets off the ground this week with its first readings at Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea at 194 York Street, at 7 p.m.

Our theme?
“What Did She See in Him?”

Our stories?
Raymond Carver’s “Fat” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Jelly-Bean”

Why these?
“Why not” would be too glib an answer. First and foremost, they’re really good.

Second, did I mention that they’re good?

“Fat” is one of Raymond Carver’s finest tales. In the tradition of Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Cafe, it takes what would otherwise be a classic sideshow freak and turns one customer’s gastronomic compulsion into a story of salvation for the waitress who must serve that compulsion. It’s a tale marked by the quiet bittersweetness and powerful subtextual currents that typify all of Carver’s stories.

Fitzgerald’s “The Jelly-Bean” was published in the October 1920 issue of Metropolitan Magazine and was later collected in Six Tales of the Jazz Age. This classic short story wonderful captures a generation’s embrace of the imminent freedoms promised by the Roaring Twenties, but not without pain and wasted possibility. Sympathy and pathos mix liberally in a story about a time when both were so deeply needed after the terribleness of the Great War.

OK, call me lazy, but I’m reposting something I had written once upon a time for my personal blog and still find to be the case, not that currency always justifies repetition.  But, in this instance, I’m making an exception.

Once, while I sat schmoozing in the home of  New Haven Review editor Mark Oppenheimer, we started speaking of our respective experiences as college instructors. He noted how much he preferred teaching nonfiction writing to literature because he neither wrote nor knew all that much about literary criticism—a gross understatement on his part, really. I chimed in, stupidly perhaps, “I don’t really understand why we teach students how to write literary criticism at all.”

But is such a sentiment all that stupid?  In spirit of making a go of this bit of devilish advocacy, I thus ask: why do we teach students how to write literary criticism? Make no mistake, it is a type of writing that can approach the status of art in the right hands. But even for experts it is a far more difficult form of nonfiction to produce—in my humble view—than those ol’ classroom chesnuts: narration, description, and argumentation.

Now, technically, literary criticism is a subdivision of the last, but it remains one of the hardest to do well. I attribute this difficulty not only to the inability of students to read and write well but to the inherent complications of trying to formulate an argument about something as slippery as a well-wrought story or poem.

In my experience, the slipperiness of the literary artifact comes directly from the story-like nature of this species of discourse. When I taught the art of litcrit—and probably not all that well, to be honest—my students continuously wrestled with the Herculean (or more likely Sisyphean) task of unwinding authors from characters, storytellers from their stories, the telling from the showing. Even I still have difficulty with the boxes-within-boxes or wall-of-mirrors (pick your metaphor) nature of this discursive mode. And, mind you, I have a doctorate in literature.

I’m currently convinced that high school teachers and college professors teach students how to write literary criticism not because it instructs them in how to “think critically” or “formulate an argument” better. These can be done just as easily—actually more easily—focusing on more seemingly concrete topics, like reproductive rights or drunk-driving laws. Instead, I believe many teachers, in their heart of hearts, would rather not teach students how to write literary criticism at all. What they’d prefer is reading works of literary quality and talking about them intelligently—like a book club but with the teacher’s authority intact for guiding novitiates. That certainly was my experience as a college instructor.

I loved selecting, teaching, and discussing (or more appropriately discoursing on) the work at hand. What I despised to no end was marking my students’ papers, which were poorly written, generally incoherent, and pretty pedestrian in their interpretations. And most literary instructors I speak with tend to echo this sentiment—although I’m happy to be flamed to the contrary.

Marking papers probably explains why I became an editor: I grew tired of commenting on people’s dry runs. If someone is going to write poorly, and I’m going to have to redline it into readable prose, I might as well make sure the fruits of my labor see light of day in published form.

In some ways, I miss those halcyon days of teaching literature. I even sometimes miss the stress and strain of writing literary criticism—no easy task, even for me. But the idea of teaching students to write literary criticism, as if that constituted training for a profession other than, well, writing literary criticism (which is not even a solid basis for the art of book reviewing), is a misbegotten notion that serves no one else other than the instructors who recognize this chore as the price they must pay for the pleasures of reading and discussing literature worth talking about.