Books Do Furnish Rooms

                My summer break is finally here.  I look forward to two events during the summer:  writing more and reading more.  I’ve already moved into the pages of three books although my break from teaching is hardly two weeks old. 

For the past fifteen years or so, I’ve been making my way through Patrick O’Brien’s twenty-novel set of his Aubrey/Maturin seafaring works about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic era.  I have only 100 pages left of the 19th novel, The Hundred Days, plus volume 20 (Blue at the Mizzen) to finish.  A must read for summer 2011.

                I also have been reading a recent biography, Beatrix Potter, A Life in Nature, by Linda Lear.  Potter was more than a writer of colorful and fascinating children’s books.  She was a naturalist who was not accepted during her time (in part because she was a woman) and a conservationist well before such a thing existed.  (I’ll have more to say about Potter as the summer progresses; she’s still a teen at the moment.)

                As we drove to and from Arizona right after graduation (my excuse for no blog last week), Marianne read First Family:  Abigail and John Adams by Joseph J. Ellis aloud as we tooled along.  Abigail and John were feisty, independent thinkers; we would do well to label them both as “Founding Fathers” of our democracy.  Marianne and I were enthralled by the coalescing of so many currents in their lives:  politics (obviously), but also home and often tragic family life, plus a passionate love for each other.  They are a good model for contemporary committed couples given the carnage of marriage we see all too often in the American political landscape these days.

                Lastly, I also opened a book I bought at Ypres last May while there with SMSU students, Dunkirk:  Retreat to Victory by Julian Thompson.  The author, a major general in the Royal Marines and a professor at King’s College, London, starts with the British Expeditionary Forces actions against the German Blitzkrieg while in Flanders in May 1940.  He does so to stress the heroism and tenacity of the BEF before it was overwhelmed by the Panzer onslaught and left huddled on the Dunkirk beaches awaiting evacuation by the Royal Navy—the final part of the story we all know.  Thompson shares an absorbing tale of French military blindness and Belgium wishful thinking, that their neutrality would save them this time, in 1940, although it hadn’t in 1914.

                I guess it’s no secret that I am a book lover.  Whenever I am in someone’s house which has a bookcase, I am not much of a conversationalist, I’m a library browser.  I love seeing works I have heard about but not read, and also seeing my favorite works proudly on display.  I especially love seeing works I teach on a shelf somewhere.  It makes me feel that teaching novels isn’t so esoteric and irrelevant.

                I recently spied dog-eared copies of Matilda and James and the Giant Peach which reveals that the adults of the house read to their children.  Roald Dahl teaches kids about more than just chocolate.  Houses with older kids (many now at college) usually have a tattered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.  It’s not surprising that this work has remained timeless.  Its exposure of racism is as pertinent today as in the early Civil Rights Era. 

                I’m always excited to see Cry, The Beloved Country on a shelf, especially when its binding tells me it has been read.  This novel has one of my favorite characters, Msimangu, a young, dedicated priest fighting racial injustice with Gandhi-like fortitude and determination.  The work is an eye-opener for sheltered students who have no idea of what lurked under the oppressive stones of empire building.  Move the Imperial stones aside, and they see that in the ooze underneath, the history of colonialism (European or not) is an ugly history.

                It’s the same with All Quiet on the Western Front.  Here is a story of youth and honor and gullibility.  And then of disillusionment and horror.  I am convinced that some wars need to be fought; World War One was not.  Europe blundered into the slaughter and could never justify the carnage.

For a war that couldn’t be avoided, witness our Civil War, a war which should be viewed in its rawest contrasts and not glossed over with some fervor that celebrates “the honor-bound Confederacy” as actually having a real cause, now lost.  It was a war over the ownership of humans.  Black slaves as chattel, nothing more or less.  I don’t often see it on a bookshelf, but pick up a copy of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara to witness the awful truth of that slaughter made worse by Southern “gentility.”

                On the lighter side, when I see that children and adults have devoured Harry Potter, I am especially pleased.  In Marshall when the intense frenzy of the final Potter books hit, I was among the first to get my hands on Book VI and Book VII.  Locally, I got the 10th copy of The Half-Blood Prince in the summer of ’05; in ’07 I had slipped to 23rd when buying The Deathly Hallows.  Either way, I was there at the stroke of midnight in our community bookstore, now unfortunately closed, to gather with witches, warlocks, nerds, geeks, book-freaks, and cyberpunks willing to try a different genre, plus all those enlightened parents who wanted to foster their youngsters’ passion for the right kind of magic, reading.  I feel at home among these devotees of Rowling.

                It’s a rare house that does not contain any of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works.  The Lord of the Rings is almost as ubiquitous as the Bible.  If Tolkien is there, I am almost certain of finding C. S. Lewis as well, Narnia and Screwtape and perhaps a personal work about his tragically lost wife, Joy.    

                While scouring my friends’ bookshelves, I am pleased to see a variety of cookbooks.  Before Abigail and John Adams caught our attention, Marianne and I read aloud My Life in France, the well-crafted autobiography of Julia and Paul Child during their European sojourn that eventually lead to her writing The Art of French Cooking.  (“And the rest is history,” as they say. . .)  I enjoy seeing other cook books as well from vegetarian to Indian to “eat fresh and local” newbie works.  It’s also encouraging to see a host of works about food production in America:  Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

                Books do furnish rooms.  Travel.  History.  Science for the non-scientific.  Art.  Photography.  Fiction, including sci-fi.  An occasional slim volume of poetry.  I love a crowded bookcase with cock-eyed books stuffed in them.  The montage shows that these volumes are for reading, not decorating.  It’s a positive sign.  As summer comes to warm us, don’t forget time for reading.  Devour a novel or two (or a dozen) this summer.  It’s good for your soul.  Read to a bored kid.  Buy them books.  Ask them what they are reading and share how much you enjoyed reading about Tom Sawyer or Elizabeth Bennet.  Live it up!

                Two novels you can’t see on a bookshelf yet are my first two Marsco Saga works, The Marsco Dissident and Marsco Triumphant.  They are speculative fiction which brings in many elements of today’s political chaos into a story set 90 years from now.  I plan to have them available for Kindle download in June or July this summer.  Meanwhile, I have loaded two chapters of the first novel on this website if you wish to take a look.  (Follow the Marsco link on this webpage.)

    

Graduation

“What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.”

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

                Graduation for me is the happiest of days.  I think it is for any teacher since it ends the year yet begins a new career for many students.  They seem to start so young and then graduate so wise.  Here at Southwest Minnesota State University, the weather is always iffy in spring, so we hold our Commencement Exercises inside our basketball arena.  Sitting on metal chairs and bleachers extended out from the wall, we wait patiently and politely for more than two hours as every graduate crosses the stage as her or his name is read aloud.  For a moment the graduate shines as each shakes the hand of the appropriate Dean, then the President, then the Alumni Director, then Department Chair.

                As Chair of English, I am the last to congratulate our majors.

Our Creative Writing majors make up the largest portion of our students.  Creative Writers are a plucky group.  It takes sure faith and determination to make a career with this major.  Many will attend graduate school in the hopes of eventually teaching college while waiting for their blockbuster to hit number one.  Others move into journalism as a career; a few return to a family business or back to the farm.  Many are simply off to experience the wide world with different eyes and stronger voices to capture their travels in print. 

We’ve had our Creative Writing majors end up in the most unusual places.  One moved up to the highest tier of management at an international business based in Brussels.  Another writes successfully here in Minnesota, winning prizes in every genre:  poetry, fiction, non-fiction.  One went South to earn his secondary license while teaching in New Orleans through a post-Katrina program designed to lure fresh talent to that devastated city.

Graduate school or not, our Literature majors have to invent their own way.  I teach with one who finished as my student early in my career here; she’s now a colleague on campus.  Other LIT grads are faculty at college campuses coast to coast.  One’s the president of a university out West.  Another earned her Library Science degree; she became our Head Librarian until her untimely death.  More besides have earned their Library Science degree and now staff community or university libraries.  Some have taken up business or journalism.  Others are lawyers.  Whatever their career, they are articulate writers and speakers, careful readers, original thinkers, and generally wickedly funny.  They’re the ones who pick up the nuanced jokes and allusions to Shakespeare in movies.

                The Literature/Education grads know the classroom awaits.  Mostly, they stay local.  One young teacher from several years ago is now living in my neighborhood.  Others are off in Chicago, California, or New York teaching.  

                Any student with a liberal arts degree has to be inventive to make a career.  One young woman returned to campus recently and spoke to my Brit LIT class.  She graduated with a LIT degree then quickly became a journalist and eventually a staff writer and HR administrator for a computer application company.  She can’t write their software, but she can write all their website materials.  None of her company’s writing is seen by the public unless she approves it.  I wish more companies were as conscientious about their use of language. 

                Yet another of our grads in LIT cracked the Big Ten.  She’s off at Indiana U earning her Library Science degree.  Her first year here, I taught a night class so ate once a week at the student snack bar.  As a student worker, she cooked me hamburgers on a regular basis.  (I eat much better now!)  Her second year, she moved to being a student staffer at the campus Library and fell in love with that world.

                One of our grads who will walk the stage this week has had a long road to graduation.  He came to SMSU through a program to help students who are not as prepared for college as they should be.  But, he knuckled under, read widely, stuck with his studies.  I remember talking to him early in his career when I had just become Chair.  He said he loved reading British Literature particularly and drinking English tea especially.  As a British LIT specialist, this was music to my ears.  I got him to test the waters of actually traveling to England with our last Global Cluster which took our students to England, Belgium, and France.

                After landing at Heathrow, we went to Brighton where I bought him his first real English afternoon tea.  Later, through the generosity of a colleague, this student spent a semester teaching English in Mongolia.  This week, he graduates.  Next August, he leaves for a teaching position in South Korea.  The world has changed for this young man, changed in ways he never imagined when he started reading his first Dickens novel and T. S. Eliot poem.

                To me, this is education at its finest; students should be launched from here out to the world.  I say that even though I am fond of saying about SMSU, that “we educate Main Street.”  And there’s nothing wrong with Main Street.  Around Marshall, our grads are teachers, bankers, principals, lawyers, nurses and physician’s assistants at the medical clinic.  They own businesses or farm locally.  They sit on boards or are elected to local and state offices.   

I believe in a kind of magic.  I say that sloppy term (“kind of magic”) on purpose because I don’t mean magic spells or wands or potions.  But out here on the prairie, SMSU has worked a “kind of magic” which has become so common folks don’t realize what magic it brings.  By this I mean the opportunity locals and their children have to hear poetry, or experience a play, or see an art exhibit.  Hear a nationally prominent speaker whether they agree with the topic or not.  Hear music that sets the soul free, performed by local musicians and visiting virtuosos.

Eric Sevareid wrote about the northern prairie during the Great Depression and how bleak it was, how grinding for its lack of opportunity.  Too much being alone without art to raise the soul can turn humans back towards being beasts; drive them away from their best instincts.  Poets and writers have known this for years.  Art and education nurture our soul, our whole physical being.  And now, the latest science is proving this time and again; Johnny-come-lately researchers documenting these beliefs that have been so obvious to artists for centuries.

Having a university in the midst of this town helps it in ways that are “kind of magic.”  Remove that magic, and I’d hate to see the dryness that would creep in, a patina of dullness that would gray-out the brightness of nuance and distinctiveness. 

Next Saturday, when our graduates cross the stage, many will be off, away from this corner of Minnesota.  But many others will remain.  And the intrinsic richness of those who cross and stay will enrich the whole area.  Our grads will cross Saturday’s stage with new eyes.  And whether in Marshall or another small town, many will return home.  But after their time here, they may, as T. S. Eliot suggests, “know the place for the first time” because they know themselves so much more deeply.

I hope we all believe in that kind of magic.

 *** You may not see a blog next week.  I'll be on the road and may not have time to write, edit, and load a blog on May 12.  I'm going to my ne Look for me on Facebook (James A. Zarzana) or possibly my Miscelany page of this website.  Ciao!