Jose Saramago: The Double

It seems the higher one goes on the scale of Literature, the more irrelevant the customary means of analysis become.  We are trained to look for things like meaning, intention, message and the like, both in book and in other forms of media.  At a certain level, however, writers move beyond these things, just as painters and composers do.  One expects the answer to the question "What is it about?" to be answered in terms of meaning rather than plot.  I am hard pressed to answer for this book in other other way than, "It is about two men who look exactly alike, and take that scenario to its logical conclusion."

Given that setup, one would assume that it would be "about" concepts of identity and self, fate, determinism, and the like.Perhaps there is a possible existentialist reading of this book, but it seems at times that Saramago is going out of his way to event it.  He, in the voice of the narrator, often interjects and waxes philosophical, but pointedly avoids those ideas.  Instead, his digressions are about things that seem more universal: the nature of language, communication, and thought itself.  Where one would expect a book on this topic to be Cartesian, it is Chomskian.

The book is not "about" these things, however.  It simply reflects on them , almost wistfully, and then continues as a mere description of a singular occurrence, which is all it purports to be.  The singular occurrence in question, however, is not the eponymous doubling.  It is rather the observation of this doubling, and of the interior lives of those doubles, by a slyly witty narrator.  The narrator is no mere pronoun distributor, either.  They have a personality, and a certain reflective way of looking at things, pointedly disregarding conventions of punctuation and dialogue, as if to say, "Isn't this all interesting?"

Saramago's greatest trick, however, is that the narrator is not merely observing and describing.  They are actively discussing with the reader, apostrophising and rhetoricising with us, even going so far as to refer to themself as "we", which in context includes the reader her or himself.  The effect is one of a salon, a gathering of witty, reflective individuals, into which the reader is conscripted, at which one has proposed a little thought experiment.  "What if," one of us has mused, "It was possible that . . ." and the rest of us have chimed in with our own thoughts on the subject, ending in the wry comment over aperitifs, "Human minds certainly are capable of some interesting things."

Will Hobbs: Bearstone

 It is difficult to write at length about so short a book, and especially so insofar as young adult novellas seem to take care not to offer too many gaps for analysis to seep into.  This one in particular seems designed as a needlepoint sampler of freshman English concepts: imagery, symbolism, character development, etc., and will serve reliably in that capacity.  All of this is to say that it was a nice book, but not literature.

One way, however in which I can picture this book standing out to students is the author's level of comfort with discomfort.  It would be to much to ask that such a novella blow itself apart in a blaze of deconstructionist  glory--it must satisfy, after all--but it comes very close several times.  It goes deeper and more unforgivingly into the rage of a young man, and offers a theme that is both uncommon and useful: redemption.

Christopher Emdin: For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood

 I dislike teaching movies in general, and especially those of the "inspiring teacher reaches ghetto students" variety.  For one thing, they universally fail to represent teaching even close to accurately.  I wonder if nurses and police feel the same way about the many shows and movies that attempt to reflect their realities.  What is more egregious, however, is how frequently and unabashedly they play into the White Savior trope.  For one thing, the assumption that poor students who happen to have some melanin need saved is insulting and arrogant.  More to the point, it has been my experience that teachers in general, and white teachers in particular, wouldn't have the tools to do so even if it were needed. 

Which is probably why I approached this book with a great deal of skepticism, leaving it in my "To Read" stack for at least a year before I grew tired of looking at its accusatory title. It certainly didn't help that it was given to me, unprompted, by my brother, who has a sizable white savior complex himself.  As it turns out, however, I was looking at this book wrongly.  It was not analogous to a "feel-good-unless-you're-an-actual-teacher" movie.  It was more like attending a teaching conference, in which not everything was useful or relevant, but enough was that I came away with a bit of juice for the coming year.

My favorite thing about this book was how it successfully distilled something I feel very strongly into words: "The ideology of the Carlisle School [an infamous school founded 'to tame the wild Indian'] is alive and well in contemporary urban school policies" (6).  As he goes on to iterate the characteristics of the administration, teachers, and students of that indigenous reeducation program, he scarcely needs to mention that the exact same descriptions apply to modern urban public schools.  I was reminded of an announcement that our students are subjected to every morning: "No hoods, hats, do-rags, or bonnets."  Could it be more of a racially coded dog-whistle?  This policy and others like it are designed with a specific vision of black student success: to join the middle class and become "respectable".  This paradigm, which originates with white perspectives, but is reinforced by administrators with melanin, devalues and denigrates the students' lived experience in their communities, assuming that a more "civilized" life is preferable.  Emdin's coinage of the term "neoindigenous" to highlight these parallels irks me semantically, but cannot be faulted.

Which is not to say that all of his suggestions are practical or possible in my classroom.  Such is always the case at teaching seminars; one takes away what one can reasonably apply, and endures the rest for the complimentary breakfast.  The ratio of useful--inspiring even--to forgettable in Emdin's "seminar", however, is far better than what could be hoped for and I, for one, came away from it determined not only to share it with my coworkers, but to live in the knowledge that ultimately the paradigm a teacher adopts "boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the students" (206).

David Lehman and Paisely Rekdal (eds.): The Best American Poetry 2020

 I'm not sure what I hoped to gain by reading this, other than moving it out of my "to read" stack, or indeed why I should be concerned with gain when it comes to the activity of reading.  I read so rarely for pleasure, and it is not my first time to mention that I should probably do more of it.  Nonetheless, I did gain some things, and I am grateful that it found its way into my stack.

 Among my gains were the awareness of some astonishingly good works by modern authors, which is always a blessing to an English teacher.  In teaching poetry to high school students, there is no particular need to adhere to a canon, especially insofar as I myself don't enjoy much of it.  It is rather more important to find works of import that make clear what poetry is, and why one writes or reads it.  The reason, as I spend an entire semester reiterating every year, is that there are things poetry can do that prose cannot, just as the obverse is true.  Prose writing is meat, and poetry is dessert--a parfait to be precise: a richly layered treat, where each little element is present in every individual bite.  Among the works that I will consider including in the curriculum this coming year: "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn" by John Murillo, "When I feel a Whoop Comin' On" by Steven Leyva, and "Good Mother" by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.  Among those that were marvelous, but either inaccessible to or inappropriate for my students and I keep for myself: "Big Gay Ass Poem" by BC Griffith and "The Seeds" by Cecily Parks.

But in addition to these jewels, I gained something else in the reading.  I became aware of a trend that, not being a huge consumer of contemporary poetry, perhaps predates my notice, but was, at least, alive and well in 2020.  In keeping with the way I teach poetry, which is naturally the way I think about poetry, I always look for the layers.  Each element of a parfait must contribute to, and align with, the other parts, combining in a way that is one lovely thing, and in which each bite is a microcosm of the whole.  That is the entire point of poetry, and the extent to which something does that is the extent to which it may be called "poetic".  The form, texture, imagery, language, and meaning of a good poem all have a reason for being the way they are, and in the best poems it is the same reason for each of them.  

I am reminded of a lesson given by Professor Susan Taylor in my undergraduate literary criticism class.  In it, she challenged us to find a piece of prose writing and transform it into poetry by simply altering the form. I took the assignment with a grain of absurdity, as remains my wont,  and chose an article from the Weekly World News entitled "Fish With Human Head Discovered".  I don't think she was amused, but she made her point: form itself does not make poetry.  It is this point that seems to have been en vogue to ignore during 2020.  More of the selections in this volume than I care to remember, perhaps even the majority, would have been quite lovely as essays, but were instead chopped into symmetrical bits for no reason whatsoever. Was it enough, in 2020 to be set in stanzas to be considered poetry?  In most of them, even in some by truly iconic poets whom I am ashamed to name here, the form has no purpose whatsoever, let alone any connection to a greater meaning.  Whether this represents a contemporary poetic trend, the biases of the editor, or a blind spot on my own part, I cannot say.  But I did not enjoy it in the least, and will do my best to teach against it.