Living · Teaching

Memory, the Mother of the Arts

Alison BakerLeave a comment

The Greek goddess Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory. She is the mother of the Muses. So memory gives us the arts.

The Muses are the goddesses of inspiration who bless mortals with the gifts of song, dance, and contemplation. There are muses of epic poetry (Calliope), of lyric poetry (Euterpe), of love songs (Erato), of songs to the gods (Polyhymnia), of history (Clio), of chorus and dance (Terpsichore), of tragedy and comedy (Melpomene and Thalia), and of astronomy (Urania).
All of these arts rely on memory. Creating and performing these works means holding lines of verse, tunes, and motions in your head, keeping them in order, delivering them with the grace of a goddess. If we don’t have good memories, we can’t be good artists.
For all its miracles, Google is not helping us in the memory department. Don’t get me wrong; Google is amazing and powerful. I once employed its virtuosic search engine to identify a particularly nasty bug in my bathroom. I typed “big-ass bug with too many legs” in the glowing bar, and it delivered image after image of exactly the thing: a house centipede. So I know its phenomenal capabilities.
What I worry about is how much people are coming to rely on it. Sometimes I feel like my students have very little impetus (beyond the fear of failing quizzes) to remember anything; they’ll just Google it. My partner teaches chemistry. He has seen students who know the molecular weights of elements Google the weight of a compound instead of simply adding the weights together.
This seems small, I suppose, but I think it’s probably… not small.
When we stop calculating, we slowly lose the ability to check Google’s responses. When we stop memorizing things, we forget how to. When we don’t have stories and details and random facts that we find cool stored in our heads, we have nothing from which to create new worlds and solve the problems of this one. Memory is the mother of creativity.
It behooves us, then, to increase our memory. We need to go to the mental gym, not just the muscle gym. Those things that help us remember things? They’re called mnemonics, from Mnemosyne. Here are a few that always work.
 
Tell a story. If you want to remember a fact or a lesson, give it a narrative. We love stories (as evidenced by the fact that squarely seven and a half of those muses work in words). If you want to teach children to stay away from strangers, you tell them “Little Red Riding Hood.” If you want to teach them multiplication tables, it works there too. (There’s a video called Times Tales that animates numbers with narratives and helps kids memorize even math facts with stories).
 
Make a list. When we group things together that are similar, we visualize them together and see how they connect to each other. We have a tremendous ability to remember lists, whether we make up jingles for them or see them in our mind’s eye. Thinking of things’ similarities helps us remember them.
 
Visit your Mind Palace. Long before the BBC Sherlock visualized his Mind Palace to recall things, medieval folks imagined mental cathedrals, slotting facts or story blocks or shopping lists in to the stained glass windows of a cathedral and imagining themselves walking through it, seeing the items in order.
There are many more. When I have my students create journals for my Myth as Literature class, I give them complete freedom to use whatever tricks they can to help them remember the stories. Some make elaborate family trees. Some draw comics of their favorite scenes. Some write Tinder biographies of all the gods. Some theme their whole journal around what drink a god or hero would order at Starbucks and why it’s appropriate.
We need to do more of this, not less. We need to figure out what method works for us individually and what has a good track record on the whole, and we need to start employing these tricks. I’m heartened by the resurgence in Commonplace Books and Art and Bullet Journaling;  there does seem to be a trend currently to write things down that we want to remember.
Whatever we do, we need to combat the tendency to offload all our knowledge in to data files and websites. Otherwise we risk not only losing our ability to be creative, but also our own stories, our own lives, in the waters of Lethe, the River of Oblivion.
Living · Teaching

The Case for Joy, or the Other Side of Job

Alison BakerLeave a comment

There is a significant thread in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales considering the issue of the biblical “Book of Job.” “The Clerk’s Tale” tells the story of Patient Griselda, a folk heroine often likened to Job. The Wife of Bath, in her Prologue, casts herself as Job’s wife, telling her husband to curse God and die. Other tales make reference more obliquely, but it is clear that it is a running trope, and that Chaucer keeps bringing it up from different angles invites us to ruminate on the lessons it teaches.

A painfully short summary of Job, so we’re all on the same page, is: Job is a wealthy man with a large family, and Satan tells God it’s only because of his many blessings that he is so devout; if God took away his gifts, Job would curse Him. God tests Job by having his crops fail, his children die, his body afflicted with sores—the works. His wife tells him to curse God. He does not. He does, however, question God, reporting that everyone around him thinks he must be pretty awful for God to be punishing him so. God even responds, and when He does, he explains that humans have too narrow a vision of suffering. It is not a result of sinning; it is character-building. God wins his bet, and Job gets everything back—even new kids.
Tonight it’s the narrow understanding of suffering that catches my attention. Do we need suffering to become our best selves? It certainly builds sympathy, but I like to think empathy can be developed through our imagination, not just experience. For tonight’s blog, my friends, you need to know that I am an incontrovertible happy-ass. (“Optimist” works too, but you lose the “happy,”and I’m not ok with that.)
I think we can imagine other people’s suffering and learn from it. Not as viscerally, certainly, but I don’t think we need to suffer everything to realize some things are terrible. I’ve never lost a limb, but I can imagine how that might change my life. I have had heart problems, but I don’t think I feel any more deeply for others with heart problems than for those who’ve lost limbs.
You can feel free to argue with me on this point, but if you wait, I’ll give you another one to argue. I want to consider the opposite conjecture tonight. We may have too narrow an understanding of suffering, but if so, we also suffer from an inadequate appreciation of joy.
If suffering builds character, joy defines it. The things that give us joy are the things that make us unique. You can’t choose what gives you joy any more than you can choose whom you love or whether or not you like brussels sprouts (I do—they make me feel like a giant Mopsy Rabbit raiding Mr McGregor’s garden), so we kind of identify and understand ourselves by those affinities.
When we feel joy, when we’re super giddy and delighted, we seem to sport a sort of shield against the world’s woes. When I’m on my way to class to teach a text I particularly love, I bounce a little and dance a little and smile really broadly. Mostly it’s infectious, but sometimes it’s disconcerting for folks. But that just entertains me more because I’m already in joy-mode, so my shield is up and other people’s lack of understanding doesn’t dim me at all. You know the geeks who get all goofy when they talk about what they love; that’s what I’m talking about.
There is power there.
The smaller moments of joy matter too—what the Danish call “hygge,” or cozy delight. They mean the warm, fuzzy feeling you get wearing warm, fuzzy slippers in front of a fire while drinking something warm and (not fuzzy) delicious. The point is clear. We use the metaphors because the physical feelings are so deep. That is joy too, if calm and simmering rather than bouncy and electric.
Another thing joy does for us, in addition to helping us understand how we are unique, is it allows us to make connections with other people. When we meet someone who likes the same things we do, we immediately feel a bond. English majors, for instance, how many of you form an instantaneous  attachment when you see someone in the wide world reading a book you love? I know best friends who have been besties for decades because they bonded over a particular book. If it speaks to both of you, you must be in some way the same.
We are, all of us–in lots of ways–the same.
When we find something that gives us joy and we meet someone else who also loves it, that’s enough to forge a connection. When we meet folks who love something we don’t really get, we can still react to the feeling, still sponge a little vicarious joy, and (ideally) encourage them to keep on loving it.
Joy produces joy. It also makes us healthier. There’s lots of research on this, some of which is summarized very briefly in the UC Berkeley Greater Good article linked at the bottom of this piece. But the evidence is piling up. If we don’t give enough thought to how suffering helps us, we also don’t recognize the profound impacts of joy. Maybe that’s ok. Maybe the point is just to feel it, not to analyze it to death. But if we understood it a little more, maybe we would make choices that put us in joy’s path more often. That seems like a good project.
Find what you love. Get it; do it; be it–boldly. Help others do the same. I’m off to read a book in my fuzzy slippers.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_ways_happiness_is_good_for_your_health
Also the cocoa picture is mine, but the picture of the young ladies, Mopsy, Flopsy, and Cottontail is, of course, from Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit.”
Reading

The Desert Island Book List, or what can you not bear to live without?

Alison BakerLeave a comment

I mentioned the Kalevala was one of my Desert Island books last week. It is. The Desert Island list is what it sounds like—if you were stranded on a remote island somewhere away from the honking of traffic, the onslaught of internet information, and could only carry ten books, what would they be?

It’s worth thinking about, and, I think, revisiting at various points in your life. It’s a good way to check in and see what’s changed in terms of values and passions, and to see if you’ve discovered some new treasure since you last thought about it.

So if I were stranded on an island in 2018, the books whose words I would feel lost if I could not read again are as follows, and you should know ahead of time that I intend to cheat:

A Collected Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. (See what I did there?) I don’t think I could live too long without access to the Canterbury Tales, but he has other lovely works, like the Legend of Good Women and the House of Fame that I would want those too, if we’re talking about forever.

Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler is also a frame narrative, or a story full of stories, and it’s the kind of book I’d reread once a year even if I didn’t teach it. It’s all about reading and writing and reading like a writer and writing like a reader, and I love it. There is a character who talks about translating like flow—moving in and out of languages like a fish swimming—and it has never left me.

Franz Xaver von Schonberg’s Collected Folk Tales. I used to say the Grimms,’ and I still love them, but if we’re only granted a limited number of books and they might be used to build a new civilization, I’d want the ones with more neutral gender roles, so we don’t have to relive all that damsel in distress nonsense.

The Arabian Nights. I get lots of stories here too, and since I know less about this area and language, I’d defer to the translation by Husain Hadawy, my first year composition instructor from the University of Nevada, so many moons ago.

The Mabinogion, a collection of medieval Welsh folklore and legends with some marvelous characters and scenes, like Caumniated Wives and Wizards who use transfiguration as a punishment.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoesvsky because we probably should have a traditional sort of novel, and Grushenka’s onion was instrumental in my forming healthy adult relationships.

Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson because we probably should have an American, and Dickinson’s poems craft images as if out of clouds.

A World Mythology collection because it’s good to know where we came from and how much we have in common.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and I favor Allen Mandelbaum’s translation. But let’s face it, if I were on an island, I’d have lots of time to work up my Latin, so I should have a dual-language edition. I love so many of these stories so deeply, but the stories of Proserpina and Orpheus alone would merit its inclusion—Proserpina/Persephone so we remember that death and life are inseparable, and Orpheus so that we remember that while art can do almost everything, it cannot bring back the dead—nor do we mortals need it to.

And last, but not least, The Kalevala, because of all the reasons I mentioned last week and because it’s good to remember that words are magic and can change your world.

This is where I am now. If I were honest, I’d say I need ten picture books, ten children’s novels, ten poets, ten novels, ten essayists, and ten non-fiction, but this is where my mind lives most often at this stage in my career and life, and it is a happy place. A folkloric, mythic, medieval wonderland with only occasional forays in to the modern world, and usually by those who value the past.

Of all the personality inventories and internet quizzes that crank out a conclusion about us based on what we like, I think which stories we could not live without is probably the most accurate, at least for me. I need magic. I think in archetypes. I revel in beautiful words and compelling images. And I view story as the most valuable thread back to our collective past and in to our individual selves.

Reading

Loving the World: The Literature Approach

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I had a cousin who was always fascinated with Japanese culture. He spent a lot of time and travel learning everything he could about it, and he worked it in to his life in lots of ways. With a Welsh last name, he didn’t know he had any genetic tie to Japan until he did a spit-in-a-tube DNA kit, which confirmed for him what he had always felt and even hoped: 5-10% East Asian ancestry.
But what about when you love something you have no claim to—just love?
My relationship with the Finnish Kalevala is long and convoluted. And there is, so far as I can tell, not a cell of Finnish in my body. I don’t care.
When I was nine, my aunt gave me a book about eggs for Christmas. It was a weird little book—not really for kids, I don’t think. I have seen it since (and books like it) in gift shops and bookstores over the years. It’s a little, hardbound, dust-jacketed gift book, with lots of folklore, vintage postcards, customs, and legends about eggs from all over the world. If it were bigger, it would be a coffee table book.
I read the whole book, but a few pages I must have read a hundred times over the years. Some had images that worked on my imagination, sticking there, rolling around, popping up when tangentially related topics or stories crossed my path. I grew up wanting to know how to make Ukrainian pysanky (I learned in grad school, as one does). I knew a Slavonian tale about a witch who turned an egg shell in to a boat. And I learned the weird, spell-like word Kalevala.
One two-page spread had an excerpt from the Kalevala, titled CREATION OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, which, in retrospect, seems momentous enough to catch a kid’s attention. The text describes the water mother Ilmatar, who lifts herself out of the sea, becomes a perch for a bird’s nest, and uses the eggs that fall when she twitches her knee as raw material to shape the cosmos: the shell for the dome of heaven and the earth below, the yolk for the sun, the white for the moon, the mottled parts for stars, the black bits for clouds.
There was a picture. I was done. It stayed with me forever.
All it said at the bottom of the page was Kalevala. Neither of my parents had ever heard of it, and there was no Google in 1980. That was all I knew of it for years and years.
One day in grad school, a friend and I were talking about what it meant to be well-read; we listed all the medieval epics we knew and felt we should know. He mentioned the Kalevala.
A bell chimed in my head, and that image of Ilmatar was right there, as if it had been fifteen minutes, not fifteen years, since I’d thought of it. Clearly I had to follow up.
A professor of Old English recommended the translation I love and teach now, by Eino Friberg, and the Kalevalabecame one of my “Desert Island” books. (Do people still do that—think of which ten books you’d need on a desert island?)
When I had the opportunity to design a course around epics, I included the Kalevala. It rounds any epic discussion nicely, being so lately “gathered,” like the Grimms gathered folktales, with similar nationalistic fervor in the 19th century. Students come in to the class expecting the Odyssey, which they get, but not many think of epics as still being a genre so late as 1870. It feels like a relic, with its shamanism and magic, but the culture it depicts feels fairly modern. It puzzles students and enchants them.
Two years in to my teaching of epics, I stood in line at Subway in Kalamazoo, Michigan at the conference on medieval studies I attend every spring. While chatting up the gal behind me (we all sported the spiffy lanyards with our names and institutions), I learned she was a Finn studying in the states, and she had never met any American who taught the Kalevala. Did I know, she asked, “The Canine Kalevala”?
Of course we’re still friends. The picture book she referred to was hard to find in the United States, but it was available in English. She sent me a copy from Helsinki filled with museum postcards because the illustrator had used famous art depicting scenes from the text, and she wanted me to see the originals.
I shared these “scholarly materials” with my students, and I read that children’s book to my kids any number of times. When my daughter was in second grade and the principal suggested–in light of the “wonderful problem” she presented as too advanced a reader–that I teach her a second language. My daughter chose Finnish. (She lost—I know several other languages well enough to teach a seven-year old, but still not Finnish).  And the Kalevala circle kind of closed.

We have no Finnish ancestry—just a deep love for the characters, the magic, and the world of the Kalevala. That’s enough.

Living · Reading

We Read to Remember

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I said this on a podcast (in a podcast? This is a very new world for me) recently, and when I said it, it rang with more truth than I could articulate at the time. I hope to parse it out more productively here.
Reading has always served a cultural purpose, preserving our past and providing a way for us not to repeat mistakes. We read to remember how wars began, in hopes that we can avoid more. We read to remember our cultural history when we read fairy tales or myths, but also biography and history. Biography tells us one woman’s story; folklore tells us Everyman’s.
When I teach literature and folklore, students are delighted (or aghast) to find themselves in these stories. I taught the medieval German epic The Nibelungenlied a few years ago, and we talked not only about the obvious influences on works like The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, but also the repetition of political dramas relevant to the upheaval in the Ukraine at the time (2014). We read to feel connected and understood when the world seems chaotic beyond measure. Because more than likely, we’ve been here before.
Those are big, sweeping reasons to read to remember. There are more personal ones, of course. We read to remember people we knew and loved. There are lots of books that remind me of my parents—mom loved biographies and romances; dad loved historical fiction, especially set in World War II, and he idolized Frank Lloyd Wright. Every time I pick up a biography I think of my mom because I argued with her for years about their usefulness. I loved to read stories, but true lives held no interest. The older I get, the more interesting people are to me, though, and I know she’d be tickled by that. I still don’t find myself tripping through World War II novels, but every time I read about some new building or, let’s face it—any time there’s any significant structure in a book I’m reading, I read it like an architect’s daughter, and I remember his lessons and esthetics.
That seems pretty personal, but I think the most important reason we read to remember is even more intimate. We read to remember who we were. When we read a book we’ve read before, part of our experience is remembering what we thought the first time—where we were; if someone had made us read it and whether that colored our encounter; and we even find parts of our identity that may have changed radically since then—nearly forgotten past selves—until we dig them up like archaeologists of the soul.
This happens to everyone every time we read books that take us back. But since I had fifteen years of reading to my kids, and since I sometimes teach Children’s Literature, it means the most to me when I reread a children’s book I’ve loved. It’s one thing to read 100 Years of Solitude at 20 and then 30, but it’s quite a different experience to read “The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes” and be able to pinpoint the moment it first occurred to you that women could be something other than mothers. I was little. That was huge. Reading it to my Children’s Lit class was both a return to my youth and a call to arms for the next generation. Reading it to my daughter was a homecoming. I watched her face. I looked for sparks. And I rolled around in the images and ideas, bouncing back and forth between child-me and mommy-me, feeling all the goodness and love important ideas and charming stories fill us with.
Because that’s what it’s about. Feelings. We read to feel, so we can read to remember how we felt. This could be a book that reminds us of a particular person or a time in our lives, or it could be the book just makes us feel great, and we read to capture that feeling again and again.
We read to remember how we feel, how we felt, where we came from, whom we love, who we were. We read to become ourselves.
(The podcast I refer to was a conversation with the brilliant and gracious Steve Zelt, and can be found, if you’re a listening type of person, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmIDJH2E54)
Reading · Teaching

The Wife of Bath’s Experience

Alison BakerLeave a comment

Last week, as Americans and others watched testimonies before the Senate Judiciary Committee pertaining to a Supreme Court nomination, millions of people relived their own moments of traumatic assault and discussed why women fear they won’t be believed. And I taught “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In fact, we were discussing how survivors are treated (and were in the middle ages) at the same moment Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was under oath.

The Wife of Bath is, sadly in some ways, still screamingly relevant.
Her name is Alisoun and she is from Bath. Let’s start there. She is the only pilgrim among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims whose prologue is longer than her tale, because in a very real sense her prologue is her tale.
She begins by establishing the basis for her authority, and it is not the standard. In the medieval period writers based their stories on previously attested, authoritative works.
People who wrote (and read) were overwhelmingly male, educated by studying languages and literature and theology–what Chaucer affectionately refers to as “olde books.”
Alisoun, traveling in a group of mostly men, of clergy and members of the lesser nobility, as well as tradesmen and middle class managers, asserts her voice and her authority and their basis in experience.
Her subject is marriage, or more precisely the relationship between married men and women. Really she’s interested in who has what she calls “maisterie” or “mastery” in the relationship. She has been married five times and is ready for a sixth; she describes herself as being of “five husbands’ schooling.” And she has a lot to say on the subject.
There are several remarkable things happening here. First, Alisoun is claiming authority for herself in an environment where it is both challenged (by the Friar, who tells her to leave off “preaching” and tell a nice story) and sought out (the Pardoner asks for tips, for her to teach him her “practice”—the same word you might use to describe work in law or medicine).
Second, her tale really is biography and a kind of testimony, where she explains how her marriages worked and gives voice to her experiences, some of which we would characterize today as abuse. She enters the masculine, patristic arena as she challenges St. Paul’s doctrine of chastity and the story of Jesus and the Samaritan, where Jesus tells the Samaritan her current husband is not her “real” husband.
Surely God gave us sexual organs, she argues, not just to purge urine, but also to make begetting children pleasurable. How many of the Samaritan’s husbands “counted,” she wonders aloud, and why would Jesus fix a number on marriages? She advocates for gentler rules—for acknowledging that the highest goal is virginity, but that people who do not maintain such austerity can be virtuous too. In a century of plague and a society with an outrageous mortality rate, she advocates for remarriage as a necessity, but also as humane.
When she’s done arguing, she recounts an overview of her first three marriages, but it’s structured as a laundry list of all the anti-feminist ideas circulating among scholars at the time. She knows these stereotypes and biases, and she manages to turn them back on her husbands, gaining mastery—of her husbands and their finances. These are all the accusations she’s had levied at her since she first married at the age of twelve.
The last part of her story recounts her fourth and fifth husbands, one of whom kept a mistress, and the other of whom beat her regularly, but these two were the ones she loved. That was the problem, she deduces.
Chaucer has done something here. He has let a woman speak, validated her experience, and given her a full, flawed, beautiful character. She explains herself on her own terms and enters a discussion that has not been designed for her presence.
We literally haven’t gotten yet to the Tale she tells about a rapist knight whose life is forfeit to the queen and who is rehabilitated when he discovers that all women want authority over their own lives. Today we don’t need to.
What we need to do is hear Dame Alisoun’s story. We need to believe her. We need to learn from her not exactly what she says, but what she shows—that these problems are centuries old, and it’s past time to fix them.
Picture Books

More Board Books for Babies and Wee Folk

Alison BakerLeave a comment

About a year ago, I wrote a blog about what books are my go-to gifts for baby showers. Today I became a great aunt. It’s time to talk baby books again.

Last time I was talking about the ones I couldn’t imagine a wee one growing in to toddlerhood without. little less color/number introduction and lullaby.
So in the interest of expanding libraries and celebrating baby Jackson, here goes:

 I am a Bunny by Ole Rissom and Richard Scarry. This is a slow-paced, low-action sort of introduction to a cute little rabbit and, by extension, the natural world. He’s wearing overalls and is completely adorable. A quiet-time, sweet moment, snuggling book.

Snuggle Puppy by Sandra Boynton. Speaking of snuggling. But it’s Boynton, so it’s bouncier, and you probably have to sing. My kids are teenagers, but they still remember the Snuggle Puppy song.

Sheep in a Shop by Margot Apple. She’s done a number of “Sheep” books, and they’re pretty uniformly delightful. This one is about a birthday party, so a good first glimpse of these sheepies. Lots of rhyming, bouncy, alliterative verse and silly humor.

 Big Red Barnby Margaret Wise Brown. A classic Tour of the Farm book, it introduces lots of animals and the noises they make. You need other books by her (Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, but this one is charming too.

 Peek-a-boo by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. A window book featuring a sweet, British family with a delightfully messy house. And when your house is a wreck because you can’t do laundry fast enough to keep up with a new baby, it’s somehow cathartic to see someone else’s messy house.

George Shrinks by William Joyce. Joyce is brilliant, not least in his adapting stories from one medium to another, but this little fantasy about George and his baby brother’s day being complicated by George’s sudden diminutive size is hilarious as well as witty.

Strega Nona by Tomie de Paola. This is a well-known folktale about a magic pot that works with a controlling spell, and doesn’t work if you don’t know the magic words. It’s a common enough trope, and this is a good first version for little ones.

Time for Bed by Mem Fox. We need one lullaby book, and we definitely need one from Mem Fox. She’s a champion for literacy and for reading aloud, and the books she writes are great for hunkering down on the couch and sinking in to a story. This one is an animal book and a lullaby and a lovesong to language.

Happy reading, my friends, and happy snuggling, and if you are fortunate enough to have a baby on your lap and a book in your hand, may you make the most of that magical encounter.
Reading · Uncategorized

The Meta Blog, or How Reading About Reading Is Making Me a Better Reader

Alison BakerLeave a comment

So this is a “Reading About Reading” sort of musing. I’ve recently read Maryanne Wolf’s marvelous new book, Reader, Come Home, which is part Neuroscientist Explaining For Lay Persons How Reading on the Internet is Changing Our Brains, and part Clever Plan to Evolve Purposefully in the Face of a New Shift in Text and Literacy.

I’ll say a bit about this book, a bit about where I’m going from here, and then offer a reading list I’ve given myself and would love to talk about with similarly interested humans.
 
Reader, Come Homeis a written as a set of letters, a real, old-fashioned epistolary book, evocative of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium. It is also a series of love letters to the genre of the novel, which she worries may be in danger. But mostly in this book, the author explains the science of reading.
In a brilliant metaphor of the circus, Wolf illustrates the multiple centers of the brain involved in reading, and shows how they represent an adaptation of using multiple centers in quick succession and simultaneously. Reading involves the “circus rings” of the Vision, Language, and Cognition centers in the brain, but also Motor Functions and the Affective center. Suddenly those memes about your brain on television (barely any activity) vs. your brain on books (huge chunks of your brain lighting up) become clear. It takes a lot of work to read, especially to read deeply.
This is enough, frankly, to set my mind whirring for days, but thankfully she’s got a trajectory that kept me moving forward. She’s discovered that our reading patterns have shifted in response to all those hours skimming news on the Internet, zipping from article to vine to clickbait, and that while we are capable of reading much more, we are losing our ability to read deeply.
Reading deeply (she shows a serious predilection for novels that this medievalist finds limited, but forgivable) has been linked to increased empathy, to stress reduction, to critical thinking, and even to happiness, but our ability to sustain deep reading is waning. Even people who have been excellent deep readers are becoming less so in the onslaught of internet reading.
But she offers some hope, too. She advocates training up the next generation as “bi-literate” by which she means able to switch modes given the medium. Little children should be read to from print picture books, and in school they should learn how to use and manage electronic texts, while continuing to develop a relationship with print. (There are lots of reasons to love print, but I think that’s for a different blog.) In this way we can grow readers who navigate the internet without losing their ability to read deeply, for there are simply too many benefits to being able to read deeply.
You can imagine, for a person who writes a blog on reading, that this book has been a bit of a head cannon. I am puzzled by the idea that we’re not able to read deeply, given the publishing world’s continued success, and my English majors’ habits, but maybe we’re reading “lighter” fare? (Maybe not. I need to be convinced of this. Someone quick—do a study for me.) I am comforted, too, by her findings on children reading print books, as someone whose very favorite moments of child-rearing involved storytime. And I find comfort as a literature professor who aims every year to get more young people intoxicated by the stories of the Middle Ages.
Science now says we need to read. And we need to give it our full attention.
So, naturally, I’ve started another list of books to read in my copious spare time:The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
Why Read? By Mark Edmundson
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs.
Apparently I’m not alone in my interest here. But before I get to these, I have a mystery novel I’ve been putting off for too long. Happy reading, y’all.
Living

So Much Mothering

Alison BakerLeave a comment

I have been mothered by so many wonderful people. Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday. She would have been 82. And I have recently worked on a podcast where the first installment was about fathering. And I’ve been thinking of my academic mothers, one of whom I actually refer to as Doktor-Mutter. All these things have gotten me thinking about mothering.

Is mothering different from fathering, for instance? Does one need both? I think we tend to associate mothering with more nurturing and protecting, and fathering more with providing and preparing, but in my house parenting is pretty gender-neutral, and I certainly wouldn’t say one gender has the market cornered on any of these actions

Yet, there are certain people whom I think of when I think of being mothered. My mom associated mothering with warm bread and secret treats when I was feeling bad. Her job was to make me happy, and she did it well. When I had to leave school because I was sick, the car always veered toward the donut shop on the way home. When I was overwhelmed with school, she brought me a glass of milk and sat with me while I worked, helping where she could and offering moral support if she couldn’t. When I was sad, she made it her goal to cheer me up. She didn’t always get me, but she always loved me, and she made lots of things easier on me.

But in truth lots of women mothered me. My aunt, who recognized the moderately predictable drama of a “smartie” who wasn’t challenged enough in school, had a huge impact on me. Because of her, I parent both of my kids better than I would have. I had a tenth grade English teacher, who, when I was confused and anxious, helped me understand that mental health was just as important as physical health. It was a lot easier to learn that language at 15 than later, I can tell you.
I had professors whom I think of in very motherly terms. One, a Germanicist who taught me Old Saxon, Gothic, and Latin, also taught me how to teach people and how to be a woman in academia, especially a married woman with children. One was a nun–my Doktor-Mutter—who praised my creation of a child as much as my creation of a dissertation, who calmed my tears when I thought I had nothing to say, who bought me oil paints and told me to be creative if I wanted to find my scholarly voice again. She prayed for me even though I didn’t pray for myself, and she called herself a mother of my heart.
And these are just the biggies. I have also been mothered by men—by my husband, certainly, when no one else could have, and by a professor whom I didn’t even take classes with, but who, out of sheer generosity of spirit, coached me to interview for jobs and built me up when I was most insecure. I have been mothered by faculty mentors at my job and by friends who made my well-being a priority, and I even think I have been mothered, if briefly, by strangers who have only shared a few minutes in a shopping line or at the PTA or in a hospital room.
It seems to me, then, that it is incumbent upon me to do my part–to mother my children, my loved ones, my students, my colleagues, the world. Mothering is serious business. I have to pay that stuff forward and backward and sideways and diagonally. I must not seem ungrateful. I think of Angela Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood, who “has been too much loved ever to feel scared.” That’s some powerful mothering. We’ve got work to do.

(These images are of my mother, Marlene Turner Baker, Molly Weasley as played by Julie Walters, and a fox mama and adoring kit that I found on the internet a while back and now can’t find an attribution for. And Angela Carter’s amazing retelling of Little Red Riding Hood is called “In the Company of Wolves” and collected in her volume, The Bloody Chamber. The wonderful podcast I was referring to above is Steve Zelt’s introductory offering on fathering at A Small, Good Thing, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Og6QvKASQc .)

Living · Reading · Teaching · Uncategorized

Ode on a Shortened Summer

Alison Baker2 Comments

The most glorious myth of academic life is the summer vacation. People who don’t teach sometimes assume the summers are one long, three-month margarita party. That’s never the case, of course, although some may start out that way.

Alas.
Instead, those who work at state universities, at least in my experience, spend a significant chunk of summer doing the research or creative work they don’t have time to do during the school year. Then there’s the planning of next year’s courses. This year that was dramatic and demanding, as my school converted from a quarter system to a semester system, so even people who have been teaching the same things for some time had to reconceive their syllabus, reading lists, and teaching strategies.
There’s also a very real need to rest one’s head and do something different for a bit, so you can come back strong. I try to reserve time to read things I will never have occasion to teach. I wrote a beautiful list and made a stack of books at the beginning of summer. In addition to three more novels in my lovely, pulpy, mystery series, I intended to read twelve books, mostly fiction, one a re-read of a book I haven’t read since college (Kamouraska by Anne Hebert).
This year’s haul from Solvang. The Book Loft always has the best new fairy tales.
Looking at my list now, I only read four, started four more, and don’t know exactly what happened with the others. I never even pulled the mysteries off the shelf. I did, however, read a tall stack of new fairy tales I bought on a trip with my daughter, write a handful of blogs and a pitch for a children’s novel, and now I am plowing through three non-fiction books I just HAD to read before school starts.
I guess what I’m realizing that what’s valuable about summer for me is the ability to plan and then pitch the plan entirely.
From September to June everything has to be very carefully orchestrated. I keep list after list and plan and organize, so that all goes well in my classes and professional life. Summer is a welcome rest for my brain not just because I’m not prepping, teaching, or grading, but because I can afford to go unscripted for a while. It’s very liberating.
This summer, because we are shifting from quarters that ended in June to semesters that start in August, our summer is about seven weeks instead of eleven. And scripted or not, it has been jam-packed. We’ll be ready, because we must be, but we might all be starting out a little tired, which we usually don’t, I think.
I resisted this conversion for a long time. I voted against it. I grumbled when our vote was ignored, and we were simply told to convert. But now, staring down the barrel of my first week, I’m not worried. I’m glad I’ll have sixteen weeks instead of ten to get to know my students better. I’m glad to have more time to go deeper in the texts I teach and to assign more writing and more revision. I’m part of an academic family, so I’ll be glad to have more holidays match up and have some more time off in the winter. Mostly, though, I’m just always glad to go back. That’s the real perk of this job—not the summer break, but the fall return.