Jessica Rosevear

In teaching, not every day is a scene from Dangerous Minds or Freedom Writers.  A lot of teaching involves the organized, timely completion of mundane tasks:  disciplinary paperwork, grading, planning, classroom management, endless copies, meetings.  There’s a lot that can make a teacher just throw herself under a bus at 3 PM.  But I’ve found that sometimes, little miracles sprout throughout the day, when you least expect it–miracles that make everything worth it.

Yesterday, a student compared The Taming of the Shrew to 1984.  “They’re using the same method of torture,” she said, referring to Petruchio’s “kill-her-with-kindness” method of taming his new wife Katherine and O’Brien’s torture tactics with prisoners of Oceania.  The creativity and relevance of the connection knocked me out.  I saw another stroke of brilliance later while grading papers on my prep period.   In an essay tying Transcendentalist literature to the film Dead Poets Society, a student compared the characters from Dead Poets Society to coloring books–their oppressive parents created the lines of confinement, leaving their children to only fill in the pre-fabricated shapes.  Brilliant!

There’s drudgery in everything–escaping paperwork is impossible in any job.  But I feel lucky to be part of a profession in which I get to witness kids’ creativity and brilliance, like diamonds in the rough, slowly emerging from the humdrum tasks of the daily grind.

I know, I know.  You want me to talk more about Virginia Woolf.  Well, it’s a tough task, but I aim to please.

Many Woolf fans were outraged by the 2002 film The Hours, based on the Michael Cunningham book based on Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.  They thought it didn’t do justice to Woolf as a writer or as a person.  In my research, I’ve poked around and found this five-minute interview with the actors in the film:  Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore.

After watching the interview, I couldn’t wait to see the film.  I predict that I’ll enjoy the film, but we’ll see.  I was worried that hearing Woolf’s voice (see previous post) would taint the way I read her work, in the way that once I see a music video, I can never listen to the song in the same way, and that fear proved unfounded.  And so I will plunge ahead with watching The Hours in the hopes that it will enhance this study I’ve undertaken.  Review forthcoming!

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.” — Virginia Woolf

“That’s what all of these people are doing.  They’re facing the hours of the day, every day in and out.” — Ed Harris, actor, The Hours

“What’s so great about it?”

The question, asked during a recent class, came as a response to my declaration that I think Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” is one of the best short stories ever written. 

“Look what she does with language,” I said.  “Look how much she does in a span of two pages.  Look at what we can see about one person’s life!  That’s what makes it so great!”  I waved my hands around for emphasis, an ineffective teacherly habit of mine.

“But look how she talks.  I can’t even read one of these sentences without stumbling over the words.  It’s all wordy and awkward.”

I found myself, in response, bumbling in an effort to expound on the power of language, how its purpose can be much larger than the instant gratification of the orchestrated amusement park ride that literature can be.  Unfortuntely, the bell cut me off one minute into my impassioned case for Chopin.

Merely hours later, I found this audioclip from a BBC interview with Virginia Woolf, who, in the kindred way she meets my writerly needs, articulated the purpose for language much more succinctly than I did that afternoon (she also has some amazing philosophy on why teaching and learning how to write can be so challenging–I highly recommend giving it a listen!).  She talks about a writer’s purpose for using words in this clip:  ”How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they create truth?  That is the question.”

Survival, beauty, truth. 

That’s what’s so great about it, my lovely students.

There’s nothing quite like an awesome conversation–an exchange of ideas, wishes, dreams, desires, humor, commentary.  A great conversation goes above mere gossip and small talk–although discourse on a simple subject can be as gratifying as a heated discussion of a hot topic.

While there’s little place in a set curriculum for meandering conversation with a rolling gait–in the classroom it’s considered a “tangent” or going “off topic”–I think getting lost in conversation is sometimes what leads to great realizations, discovery, the birth of great ideas, the connection and weaving of floating lily pads, inspiration for a new project or reinvigoration in a current project.

That’s just one of the reasons why I’m fascinated by the idea of the Bloomsbury Set–a group of the literary elite bouncing ideas off of each other and discussing all kinds of art in early 20th century London.  The group, which included Virginia Woolf (natch) and E.M. Forster, was quite controversial, being considered elitists among other things.  While I hate the idea of elitism, especially in terms of art, which is so subjective, if I could go back in time, attending a Bloomsbury gathering definitely tops my list of things to do.

In the meantime, I hope one day to visit the Bloomsbury section of London and, in the way I love losing myself in meandering conversation,  meander through the streets these literary greats once walked themselves.  And maybe, in the way that great conversation leads to learning, such walk would lead to discovery in the style of Bloomsbury.

“By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”
— Virginia Woolf

Thanks to Amy Bishop, the professor that recently shot several university administrators after being denied tenure at the University of Alabama, the term “going professor” might soon replace “going postal.”  It’s definitely a serious crime that Bishop committed, but the whole story, as detailed in “Short Cuts,” by Adam Shatz (London Review of Books), is so farcically insane that it becomes comical.  I highly recommend the article–for as much as this is a tragedy, “Short Cuts” had me all but rolling on the floor laughing.  Can there be a greater, more ridiculous shame than being arrested at an IHOP for punching a woman who wouldn’t hand over a booster seat for your kid?  If you thought John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius J. Reilly was too absurd to be anything but an allegorical figure, clearly you have not yet heard the story of Amy Bishop.

The short answer is:  I am.

The longer answer is:  everyone.

I’ve made Mrs. Dalloway, my nemesis just a year and a half ago, and the current object of my obsession, the focus of my master’s critical paper.  In my research, I’ve come across an article of the same title as this post that came out in 2003 in none other than my favorite newspaper, The Record (a sign?  perhaps).

A pithy excerpt from the beginning of the article:

The obsession can begin at any time.

In high school, for example.

“I first read Virginia Woolf when I was 15,” says author Michael Cunningham, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Hours,” features Woolf’s work and the author herself.

“This older girl, whom I had a crush on, threw me a copy of ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ and said, ‘Why don’t you read this and try to be less stupid.’ I had never seen anything like her writing. I remember thinking, ‘She’s doing with language what Jimi Hendrix does with guitar.’-”

The obsession can begin in the middle of a successful career.

“I hadn’t read her as a kid. .-.-. She had sort of a presence, but I didn’t know any details,” says actor Nicole Kidman, who read Woolf in preparation for her role as the author in the recent film version of Cunningham’s book.

Woolf’s life and her work are of equal intrigue to me.  But it’s more than just an interest.  I’m starting to think that the further I delve into Woolf, her writing and her life, the further I’m delving into my own career, my own beliefs about writing.  Even this is parallel to her style.  She didn’t tell the story of a character.  The reader is forced into the mind of the character, and so I am into her work. 

I’ve spent the past two years trying to crack this thing called writing, called literature, searching for my place and purpose.  I’ve spent countless hours trying to figure out what is literary, what is commercial, what’s the difference between the two, if there is a difference between the two, and how are each achieved. 

Something is clicking right now, something exciting, and I can’t explain it, but Virginia Woolf is somehow part of it.  Coherency can come later.

One of my favorite TV shows is Rumpole of the Bailey–a British series from the seventies and eighties about a barrister who lives and breathes Magna Carta, the presumption of innocence, and steak and kidney pud’–all while making his living affectionately defending the petty thieves and criminals of London’s streets.  Aside from being a fantastic show, Rumpole  is especially interesting to me because the show’s only writer, the renowned British playwright, novelist, and screenwriter John Mortimer, worked as a barrister (a British sort of lawyer) and writer throughout his entire professional life.  He had this to say in an interview about juggling the two jobs:

“When I was fourteen, I suddenly realized that I wanted to be a writer.  I knew that writers always had other jobs, like being a school teacher.  And I certainly didn’t want to be a school teacher, so I thought, well I’ll be a barrister and that will be my second job as I make my fortune as a writer.  Like girls who want to be film stars do a bit of waitressing, being a barrister was my waitressing job.  And I was always a writer who did a bit of barristering; I was never a barrister who did a bit of writing.”

It’s a great way to look at your passion and your life.  He had that balance of practicality and passion, yet he saw himself as a writer first, barrister second.  It’s inspiring to think:  what defines you?  What do you put first on your list of priorities?  What is secondary?  Is your life balanced or cluttered?

Another inspiring quote from Mortimer’s interview:  “Of course the prime business of the Rumpole series, like any writing, is to entertain the audience, to give the audience a good time.  To be funny, but to be truthful as well.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.  Cheers, mate!

1)  Read in the bathtub and risk electrocution.

2)  Forgot to charge your battery?  On a six hour flight?  Hope that your neighbor is interesting.

3)  Goodbye, coffeehouse/bookstore culture that you love so much.

4)  How would you write on the pages, underline words you don’t know, scribble ideas and realizations in the margins?

5)  The terms page turner and dog-eared would become obsolete.  Orwell had a term for this… it’s called newspeak.

6)  Just what this country needs.  Another zillion employees out of work.

7)  My bedroom would be a jail cell without my beautiful bookshelf.  You know yours would be too.

8)  What would your favorite authors autograph when you go to their readings?  Hmmm?

9)  Kindles might save some trees, but don’t forget that it takes a ton of energy to charge electronics. 

10)  A book is an artifact of history; it’s much more than just the words the author wrote.  Each book is a memory of the time you read it.  Which of your books are falling apart?  Which of your books have your name written on the front cover in childish scrawl?  Which have spines that have never been cracked?  Do you, too, get joy from seeing the works of a favorite author aligned in a single row?  If so, join me in my chant:  Down with the Kindle!