- I hate second-year courses. No, not because of the students or anything like that; but I loathe the air of representativeness that seem to entail, and the extremely broad nature of their surveyances remind me all too well of limitations rather than expansions. Such courses set too many of one's pedagogical concerns in conflict with one another, and they niggle at each other like impulses in a Danish prince. In second year courses, one normally has to pay lip-service to the idea of history, to which I am not hostile at all but which reminds me all too well how much one's omissions, if only for the sake of getting things done manageably, ends up doing history a disservice. My current bane is the idea of a second-year course on Modern literature, and given the fecundity of that age one's choices become challenging: how do you leave out Henry James, but how do you keep him in, given that 19 year-olds aren't going to sit through The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl, and Portait of a Lady while it may be done will require a huge chunk of time? Any course is heavy enough with Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Woolf, Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and the others. But what about Ralph Ellison or Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene or Bill Faulkner or E.M. Forster or even that salacious mucky-muck D.H. Lawrence? And that's just a rough sampling of the prose writers. The poets could be -- should be-- entire courses on their own, as should the prose writers and the dramatists. But take the poets? Who gets screwed? Yeats? Hardy? Frost? Surely not Ezra or Tom or the War Poets (Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon), but teaching modern poetry without Yeats is like teaching contemporary music and having to start with Bob Dylan; it can be done, but the disservice is great. Fuck. First, third and fourth-year courses are much different, or at least can be. One's sense of historical responsibility is ripped asunder by one's sense of responsibility to providing a roughly tenable history. In fact, it's always a bridge across the River Kwai built with chopsticks and playing cards.
- Considering the daunting task of "describing my teaching philosophy," I'm torn between two realizations, both connected to my two favourite modern poets. One is to Tom: what I do put down always feels inadequate, like a charcoal sketch, more rough design than detail, and prone to anticipating, "but that is not what I meant at all." The more precise one, though, connects to Wallace. I actually do have a philosophy, a theory, but it's best perceived in actions not immediately addressing it, or in adagia that express fragments of it coherently but not academically. Without praising, or knocking, myself, I think it's true that what I do is best seen in process, and very often isn't realized until much later. After a while, so much becomes intrinsic and instinctive rather than theoretical, even if there is always a theoretical scaffolding beneath it all. Scaffolding, however, is preliminary, like all theory and philosophy; it is never the reality. It helps one build; eventually it has to fall away. Or so I say now. As much as there are central dimensions to the things I do, there is always room for mutability. There has to be. Or, if not mutability, then at least flexibility. I don't know. It buggers all description. In the end, I think I'd say that I fall somewhere between Matthew Arnold and Wallace Stevens, but if I said that even readers of Matt and Wally would ask what the Arf I meant by that. Don't break down my adage, I'm sure I'd want to say.
SO-- for those of you that have seen me doing what I do: if you have any ideas on what you think my philosophy is, I'll be glad to hear it. I promise, I won't Well yes, but..., even if that's might be in fact needed. Oddity is, there was a time when my ideas of what things were crucial to a university education didn't need such laboured explanation; they would have, at least in many corners, have been understood as implied, inferred or simply basic. Not so now.
But before any of you start to think me being too hard on myself I'd like to say this: reading Viv's comment the other day that she could see how Johnny Carson had in a way influenced the way I do things, I was heartened a bit. I was glad she could see that. There are so many others, some obvious, some not, from clowns to writers to even great characters, the Not-So-Good Doctor being a bit-- from among so many others-- of Groucho Marx, Tom Eliot, John Donne, King Lear, Colin Mochrie and Dave Barry, the stew perhaps now too Irish to discern potatoes from meat.
I don't know anymore.
I'm reminded of one of my old mentors, the great Dick Ewen, who once said that there was no confusing anything I'd done with anything anyone else had done. (In a statement that would have ired the high formalists.) "Jeremy," he said, in that inimitable brogue, the emphasis on the R more than the J, and from here I think I'm quoting but I may in fact be paraphrasing, given my brain's capacity for slippage: "what you do is You. Your fingerprints are everywhere." (I remember mid-cigarette hacking here; this could be wrong.) "No one could confuse you with anybody else." (There was laughter here, as I recall.) "I just know to get out of the way." Or something like that. And we both chortled, and buried the subject. I'm pretty sure I was too green to say much to that. I think we just sat in his office and smoked for another minute before we changed subjects.
Those were better days. And more real ones, too. I should probably explain that, but Jenny has informed me that in writing this I've kept her abed too long, she strangely and in ways so atypical of a cat unwilling to rest until I do. I wonder in retrospect if I should have named her "Shadow" instead. But, after all the silly excoriations one does to oneself for one reason or another, perhaps it takes an animal to remind one of what really matters. What you do is You. Out of the mews of babes.
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