Solace of You

2010.11.12
Days Remaining: 198

1. No particular theme today, just a bunch of random stuff I've been thinking about over the past week. I figure for a Friday post, why not a grab-bag? If my story is disconnected and unorganized right now, at least we'll be able to see what I've been fragmentarily narrating.

2. The past few days I've had Yuletide on my mind; I've several times found myself almost playing Christmas carols on my iTunes, or humming them as I walk around. Christmas is my favorite holiday, and the past several years I sort of yearned for it earlier and earlier, probably as a comfort-seeking thing in the midst of my marriage. When my youngest sister, Silvia, had a stroke in December two years ago, and had surgery in NYC the week before Christmas, I spent an evening with her in the hospital, walking to her building across Central Park (Octavian used to live almost directly across the park from her hospital, and he and I had had dinner and hung out beforehand). After I left her hospital I walked to the subway station the long way (rather than taking a branch line and doing an exchange); it was the Winter Solstice that night, and I felt more serene in the cold, lamp-lit dark, walking through snow and over empty sidewalks, then, than I had for a long time before or since. I am not a huge fan of NYC (nice to visit, not interested in living there), but a snowy Central Park on the longest night of the year was something to behold. Today, while taking a break from grading (so much grading...) I poked around on Amazon.com and found a bunch of interesting Christmas albums that look interesting, most of them are by the Boston-based Christmas Revels but a few are by other groups, including two that are period-style Colonial American Christmas music, which I thought was neat. This is an exercise in what if, basically, frustration due to lack of funds, but I am balancing is and ought right now, to give myself something to aim for.

3. We had snow on the ground this past Sunday, though it burned off by mid-morning. I can't imagine living someplace where it never snows (or, rather, I can, but don't want to). Place is, in general, very important to me, but I am sometimes struck by how much my sense of "place" includes weather. Living in New England, excepting the obvious personal difficulties, has been very enjoyable, weather-wise. I like snow on a regular basis in winter.

4. Yesterday I had an uncomfortable incident in one my Philosophy of Religion class. (Due diligence: Belisarius heard about this in an email yesterday, so if you're reading, you can skip to topic 5, Catchpenny). As I've mentioned before, I open my classes with what I call "10 Minutes of Freedom" where the students can ask questions, or raise issues, about anything at all. Today I let that go far beyond 10 minutes because the majority of students (roughly 15 out of 22) were actively engaged with me and each other on the topics, and those particular topics were ones I found very interesting, namely the state of education in our society and, growing out of that, questions of how to effectively address problems on a campus (or in our society). I kept an eye on the class as this proceeded, because we were definitely cutting majorly into allotted class time for the actual topic (philosophical accounts of life after death - sounds interesting, really isn't). Then, when I said, "We really need to get to the readings now" I had a student stand up and make some sort of dissatisfied noise as she headed for the door (n.b. she left her belongings, so she wasn't ditching class suddenly). She then said, "I'm just really frustrated because we're not talking about the readings and we've got papers coming up and I'm just really frustrated" (I'm paraphrasing). I said, basically, "Well then, sit down, as we're going to go over the readings now." But she had to go to the bathroom. The moment she walked out, the rest of the students (who all looked very embarrassed) started back on the preceding topic, so I let them add final comments until the frustrated one came back in, at which point we went to work on the readings for today. So, I'm torn, basically, because I chose to let the off-topic conversation go on, and I spoke with several students after class who said that they actually found it really valuable. But on the other hand, it was a departure from my normal procedure and the class topic. On the third hand, the frustrated student had the option, at any point, of raising her hand and asking about the readings. I'm more annoyed that she said nothing until she made a very public scene, given that the whole enterprise was being driven by students asking questions and responding to them. But I'm also defensive about it, since this felt like an implicit ad hominem criticism of me, couched in terms of not preparing my students for papers they have to write (btw, they have two weeks to write the essays, during which time I take drafts and respond with lots of comments, so they're not simply cut adrift). Meh. I'll be chewing on this for a while.

5. Something else class-related (though very tangentially). I got an email from my Philosophy Dept. Chair forwarding a call for undergraduate essays for a special issue of a journal focused on love. My initial thought was that this would be great, but then as I read through the call I saw that they were looking for essays responding to a particular book, and when they gave suggested topics, it had nothing to do with my Love, Death & Desire class. I was, however, intrigued by the book they were organizing around, and so I did some poking (via the wonders of Google Books and Amazon.com), and found some very interesting stuff. I often, when I've taught a class for the first time, come to the conclusion 2/3 of the way through that I would do it completely differently if I taught it again. This is, so I'm told, fairly normal for professors (though I am something of an inveterate tinkerer - my classes are never completely identical from one offering to another). In this class's case, I took it over from a professor who is on medical leave; she's been teaching it for quite a long while, and it's an established part of the Philosophy Department's course offerings. Given that, I opted not to radically redesign it for this one semester, as I wanted the students to be able to engage with those who came before and after this semester on shared ground. I stand by that decision, but as often happens to me, I start to think of courses I teach as "mine," and with the stuff I found when motivated by that call for papers, I have been tinkering in my head with radically redesigning the course. Since this is my last year at Baskerville College, this is an entirely theoretical exercise, but I really enjoy course-building as a mental practice, so forward I go.

6. One of the most interesting things I discovered was that the very famous (and justly so) cultural and literary theorist bell hooks (deliberately uncapitalized as per her wishes) has been working on the idea of love in our society for some time (I knew her primarily for earlier work on deconstruction and postmodernism). From what I gather (there are several different books dealing with different aspects of this project of hers), she is suggesting that our society has been suffering from an over-focus on love as desire (and therefore selfish). Basically, we need to remember the other-focused type of love, love as acceptance and nurturing. She says this is a different type of love than desire, and one that we're sorely lacking. This struck a chord with me, because I've sometimes had moments when I'm overwhelmed by a feeling of how much I love the people in my life, and sometimes how much I love everything, how much beauty and value there is in the world and the people in it. I am, however, not following through on that in hooks' terms, because I don't use those moments as spurs to greater social activity. But I can feel, at least a bit, what she's talking about. There is so much hate and antagonism thrown around, and sometimes, she says, the best response is to love back.

7. And that's it.