Pushing Back against the Purity Police

By Robin Bates | Published: February 21, 2022
Nicholas Nickleby punishing the brutal Wackford Squeers

Tuesday

While I don’t think, for a moment, that today’s leftwing purists are as bad as rightwing fascists when it comes to censorship, they can inflict their own kind of harm. My friend Rebecca Adams, who has been editing my book, alerted me to a dispiriting account by Kate Clanchy, a Scots woman and author of the Orwell Prize-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, about such sensitivity police. Since I read the piece right after having encountered the stories about teachers in a Washington state school attacking To Kill a Mockingbird (see my blog post on that here), and after having read a historic piece about Black activists calling poet Robert Hayden an “Uncle Tom” in the 1960s, I wondered whether liberal and leftwing cancel culture wasn’t a bigger deal than I had previously thought. Today’s post is my attempt to sort some of these issues out.

I don’t want to be guilty of a false equivalence here. Liberals are not taking books out of libraries or throwing them into bonfires or even (to cite the Washington state school system policies) forbidding teachers from teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. My quarrel with the Washington state teachers is that they reduced the book to a narrow political point rather than (as they should have done) made the case that there are authors of color who have written far better works dealing with racism than Harper Lee.  If, as a teacher, you must pick and choose, why choose Mockingbird instead of Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or Song of Solomon, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, or (to choose a more recent work) Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-prize winning The Nickel Boys?

With regard to Mockingbird, it certainly has problems, including its vision of a white savior (who, for the record, doesn’t actually save). It’s noteworthy, however, that the white savior has joined a racist organization in Harper Lee’s sequel, and it’s not that there aren’t danger signs even in the earlier book. Furthermore, the story of Atticus Finch is not the entire book. When I read Mockingbird as a child, my focus was entirely on Scout and her horror at injustice. By seeing literature as propaganda making a single point, leftwing purists, like their rightwing counterparts, overlook everything else going on in the work.

This is what Scottish author Clanchy discovered from the reader reports of her memoir. Here’s a sampling of the feedback she received:

I am enjoined not to quote from My Ántonia by Willa Cather, as it is “an old novel”; nor to state that homosexuality has historically been taboo in Nepal, as homophobia comes from colonialism; nor to mention that the Taliban were terrorists. Extending the principle of sunny improvement into the present, Wordsearch List [one of her readers] breaks out of their list to make the helpful suggestion that I should remove references to terrorism from across the book, as it “over-sensationalizes such a heavy topic, especially with minors involved.”

Nor should I say that more middle-class than working-class children go to university; nor that Foetal Alcohol Syndrome leaves children unable to progress; nor that a long tight dress restricts movement. All of these things are, for my Readers, “hurtful” notions of mine, not unfortunate facts. Writing, they imply, should represent the world as it ought to be, not as it is.

Clanchy ignored the responses and published the work, which sounds wise. As I read her words, I think of W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, both of whom complained about virtue police in the Black community. Here’s Hughes defending Jean Toomer’s masterpiece Cane:

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. “Oh, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,” say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial.

And here’s W.E.B. Du Bois discussing how Black authors are pressured by the Black community to avoid certain inconvenient truths. While the observation comes in an article (“Art Is Propaganda”) that excoriates White authors for engaging in certain racist tropes, Du Bois is so interested in truth that he complains about Black audiences pressuring Black authors. He therefore urges Black authors to stay true to their art:

We [Black readers] are bound by all sorts of customs that have come down as second-hand soul clothes of white patrons. We are ashamed of sex and we lower our eyes when people will talk of it. Our religion holds us in superstition. Our worst side has been so shamelessly emphasized that we are denying we have or ever had a worst side. In all sorts of ways we are hemmed in and our new young artists have got to fight their way to freedom.

A different kind of pressure was applied to Black artists in the late 1960s, including to Robert Hayden, whose “Those Sunday Mornings” I wrote about recently (here).  In an article for The Dispatch, Timothy Sandefur notes that Hayden refused to embrace the Negritude movement, which “supposedly meant emphasizing African traditions, but which in practice meant subordinating artistic concerns to the demands of Marxist revolution.” Sandefur observes that Hayden “had worked too hard perfecting his skill to elevate protest over craftsmanship.”

It’s central to this blog that literature can have a tremendous impact upon readers. Literature, however, operates differently than prose meant to exhort people to action. The latter is necessarily reductive since it must choose one plan amongst multiple possibilities and advocate for it. Literature, on the other hand, is multifaceted. Those politicos who don’t understand this will, upon reading a work, link a theme to something they don’t like, at which point they dismiss the work altogether. Literature that is politically correct propaganda, however, is not literature.

I remember, even as a child, sensing when a work was operating out of an agenda. Such stories often appeared in our school textbooks. In fact, I recall arriving at the conclusion—this as a third grader—that there were two kinds of reading: real reading and the reading one did in school. The latter bored me silly.

Later, when married to Julia, I also remember getting a book from her evangelical brother entitled A Christian Mother Goose, which rewrote the Mother Goose rhymes as Christian parables. I felt ill in the face of what felt like a profanation or a bad joke. Never have I understood Lewis Carroll’s parodies of didactic poetry as well as I did when reading this book. If children at Christian school are being force fed such “literature,” then they risk becoming similarly one-dimensional and will be ill-prepared to negotiate our complex world.

But back to leftwing purists. I imagine, when some of them condemn a novel, they pat themselves on the back for being able to read between the lines and pick up themes. But instead of surveying a forest, all they are seeing is one of the trees. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Alexander Pope famously wrote, and a little knowledge too often shapes their response.

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Poems for Keeping the Home Fires Burning

By Robin Bates | Published: February 20, 2022
Pissarro, The Wood Cutter

Monday

Christmas has come early to the Bates household: we have just purchased a wood splitter, which feels like getting a giant new toy. As I watch the blade cut effortlessly through giant logs, literary references to woodcutting come to mind.

First of all, some background. My mother owns 18 heavily wooded acres surrounding her house by Lake Eva in the Southern Cumberlands. We are surrounded by tall oaks but, because of the shallow soil, the red and black oaks sooner or later hit rock, at which point they begin rotting from within. (The root systems of white oaks are able to work around the rock so they don’t have the same problem.) Then, come winter, the water that has entered the rot freezes, expanding and cracking the foundation. After that, it just takes a strong wind to topple the tree. As a result, just within 50 feet, three red oaks, one hickory and one maple that have all gone down. In addition, a tree service had to take down two trees that threatened to fall on the house.

With all this free wood around, the question has been how to take advantage of it. Finally, I found someone who would cut the trees into chunks, and he in turn persuaded us to buy a log splitter (rather than rent one at $250 a shot). I rev up the machine whenever I want a break from writing.

A Robert Frost poem confirmed me in my decision not to add a chainsaw to the log splitter. You may know “Out, Out,” maybe his most horrifying poem. In it, a boy is sawing logs when the unimaginable happens:

His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.


Better to pay a skilled professional, I figured, than take that risk.

Another Frost poem has me wondering, however, if the wood I split and stack—being so plentiful—will end up like the abandoned woodpile, in the poet’s poem by that name. Frost comes across it quite by accident and figures it is at least three years old.

It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

So if I turn four fallen oaks into firewood with this wondrous log splitter, that could be enough wood to fuel our woodstove for ten years. But would it stay good for that long? Please write me if you know.

One other literary image comes to mind as I add logs to our fire. I gave Julia a bellows for her birthday and suddenly we feel as though, without it, we’ve been making fires with one hand tied behind our backs. It also makes me think of Flute, who reluctantly plays the female lead in Pyramus and Thisbe in Midsummer Night’s Dream and who is a bellows mender. I’ve never thought of bellows needing mending—much less that there was a special profession dedicated to doing so—but now that we own one, I realize that they can wear out.

Anyway, here’s a fun poem about bellows, by one John Steele, which appeared in The Amethyst Review:

The Bellows

The bellows breath ignites a fire.
Flames purge your nostrils, gut, and brain,
rouse the serpent from its slumber,
coiled up in your sacral cave.

Cross-legged, your head bowed
to face your heart, breathe in
to lift your chest up toward your chin.
Exhale, inhale through your nose,

pump your gut to blast air out—
in-out, in-out, in-out…
Then with a sharp in-breath,
suck your belly in and hold…

Work the bellows till the embers glow.
Breath by breath, surrender to the flow.

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Maybe Death Is as Soft as Feathers

By Robin Bates | Published: February 19, 2022
Snowy owl in the hunt

Spiritual Sunday

For my wife’s birthday this past week, my mother gave her a copy of Mary Oliver’s Devotions, a collection of poems compiled by the author that capture her vision of the world as sacred space. Oliver often sees owls as symbols of death, and in “White Owl Flies into and Out of the Field” death is seen as “scalding, aortal light.”

When death strikes, the poet tells us, we should greet it with amazement and “let ourselves be carried,/ as through the translucence of mica,/ to the river.” Drawing on imagery of being cleansed in the River Jordan, Oliver says that, with death, we are “washed and washed/ out of our bones.”

What crossing that river means, Oliver says in another poem (“In Blackwater Woods”), “none of us will ever know.” But as in “Blackwater Woods,” in “White Owl” she hints at salvation.

White Owl Flies into and Out of the Field
By Mary Oliver

Coming down
out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel,
or a buddha with wings,
it was beautiful,
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings —
five feet apart —and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys
of the snow —

and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes,
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows —
so I thought:
maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —

as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,
not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow—
that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

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Humpty Dumpty Cited in Trump Case

By Robin Bates | Published: February 17, 2022
John Tenniel, illus. from Alice through the Looking Glass

Friday

I’m here to report a literature sighting! A judge has just cited Alice through the Looking Glass and 1984 in his ruling that the Trump family must sit for depositions in a case involving its real estate practices.

Yesterday the Associated Press reported,

Former President Donald Trump, as well as his children Ivanka and Donald Jr., must sit for depositions in the New York attorney general’s civil investigation of their business practices, a New York judge ruled Thursday.

New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron also rejected an attempt to freeze the work of Attorney General Letitia James, who is investigating whether Trump misled lenders, insurers or others in his family business’ financial statements. On several occasions throughout a two-hour hearing Thursday morning and in his ruling, the judge expressed skepticism toward the Trumps’ arguments that sitting for testimony in the civil investigation would undermine their constitutional rights.

The judge was particularly of skeptical of the looking-glass logic used by the Trump lawyers when it came to the Trumps’ accounting firm. Earlier this week, MazarsUSA declared that the information it has been receiving from the Trump Organization over the past ten years is so unreliable that it can no longer vouch for them. Most people have taken this to mean that the Trumps have been lying to the accounting firm about the value of their real estate assets. The Trump lawyer, however, argued that the Mazars declaration instead exonerates the Trump Organization and means that people should not go rooting around into the Organization’s past practices.

If that makes absolutely no sense to you, then you’ll understand why the judge declared the argument to be “as audacious as it is preposterous.” And why he turned to literature to express his shock and amazement:

“The idea that an accounting firm’s announcement that no one should rely on a decade’s worth of financial statements it issued based on the numbers submitted by an entity somehow exonerates that entity and renders an investigation into its past practices as moot is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll (‘When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said … it means just what I chose it to mean — neither more nor less’); George Orwell (‘War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength’): and ‘alternative facts,'” Engoron wrote.

“Alternative facts” was the phrase used by Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway to defend Trump’s (false) assertion that his presidential inauguration attracted more people than Obama’s. I probably don’t need to gloss the passage from 1984, but here’s the passage from Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty has just used the word “glory” in a way that confuses Alice:

“There’s glory for you!”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

“Would you tell me, please,” said Alice “what that means?”

“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”

“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

“Oh!” said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.

“Ah, you should see “em come round me of a Saturday night,” Humpty Dumpty went on, wagging his head gravely from side to side: “for to get their wages, you know.”

(Alice didn’t venture to ask what he paid them with; and so you see I can’t tell you.)

Trump has not been held legally accountable for his use of words in the past, which I suppose has given him Humpty-Dumpty type mastery over them. One hopes that Trump’s words aren’t waiting for him to pay them, however. After all, he’s notorious for stiffing those who work for him.

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Crusoe and the American Work Ethic

By Robin Bates | Published: February 16, 2022

Thursday

I recently received an eye-opening essay from a Pakistani student in my English 101: Composition and Literature class that sent my mind to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. I’ll be taking a somewhat circuitous route to making the literary connection so sit down and prepare to enjoy the ride. I think you’ll find it as enlightening as I did.

Hamza Zia (who is allowing me to use his name and share his essay) is from a small town in Pakistan. He was raised in a small village with a substandard educational system so his ambitious father worked hard to purchase an internet connection. When Hamza found himself learning more from the internet than from school, he dropped out, which at first led to quarrels with his father. But his internet education proved so fruitful that he scored extremely high on the national O level examinations, at which point his father acknowledged that Hamza must know what he was doing and let him continue. His high scores earned Hamza further educational support and ultimately a scholarship to Sewanee.

His essay was about his culture shock upon arriving here. I share a slightly edited excerpt from his essay:

When we reached McClurg [Sewanee’s dining hall] I was surprised to see so much food and realized that I could eat as much as I wanted. It was like a buffet that was available every day. The variety was so much that it reminded me of a big grocery store…We [Hamza and his Vietnamese roommate] were very happy and excited about being university students and how good the university and dining hall were.

While I was eating, however, I looked around and saw that everyone else who was eating was using their phone or laptop. Everyone was talking to each other and the food itself was not important. It appeared to be invisible to everyone….It was like watching someone put petrol in their car.

Hamza reports feeling equally amazed—in fact, shocked—at how much food was thrown away. He notes that, when he was a child playing cricket near the garbage dumps, the kids would interrupt their game when the garbage trucks arrived to unload. The children usually didn’t find much but would “get very happy even about the small stuff.”

To further explain his shock, Hamza contrasted American eating practices with Pakistani:

When I was a kid, I was always taught that food and water are the most important thing in the world, and because they are so important we have to give them respect. If we do not, we will mess up our fortune and not get a lot of food in the future. When my family assembled for a meal, we would put aside distractions and sit on the ground and eat. Eating was like praying. It did not matter if it was my favorite food or food I did not enjoy eating. All food, even food we would put outside for birds, was respected. In Pakistan, if we ever drop food, we pick it up and kiss it and ask for forgiveness.

Hamza further noted that Pakistan differs from America in other ways as well:

In Pakistan we also do things slowly. Everything is relaxed and people do not worry about technical problems. People spend full days with their families and friends. Everyone does their work and then spends time doing whatever they like. I remember when I was growing up, my father and I would go outside two hours before the sunset, lying down on the grass and watching the eagles. We would do this almost every day. I would also go on walks with my uncle for three hours. We would go all over our town and then climb the hills nearby. There was no reason why we would watch eagles or go on long walks other than that we wanted to. Sometimes my father and I would go traveling to other towns on three day trips without any reason as well. We would just walk around, look at stuff, and talk to people. Life in Pakistan is very slow. It is like calm water.

These reminiscences led Hamza to a breakthrough understanding:

 The reason why people don’t respect food over here is because there is another resource that is far more valuable than anything else to Americans. That resource is time. America is a rich country. That they can make tons of food is not be a big deal to them at all. But no matter how rich and advanced America is, it cannot make more time. So what matters the most to everyone is the amount of time they have. Because of this, everyone over here is in a hurry and trying to do as many things as possible in the smallest time possible. That’s why they work during their meals. Watching everyone in America go about their life is to me like watching a movie on 2x speed. If life in Pakistan is like calm water, life in America is like a very fast river with waterfalls.

His realization is helping Hamza “adjust to my new American life”:

 The moral problem that I was facing [over wasted food] was solved because I understood the reasons why things are different over here. Because the economy and societal structure is so different in America, the morality I learned in Pakistan cannot be applied here…. You cannot judge and compare two things which have very different circumstances and say one is good and other is bad. This has also allowed me to keep my mind open and increased my wanting to learn new things. Every time I experience something different, I am excited because I try to understand the reasoning behind it and what made it be the way it is….This is how I have learned to live in American time.

Most of us will recognize what Hamza is talking about. In fact, there are those amongst us who actually boast that they eat their meals at their desks and that they work insane hours. Looking back, Americans can find signs of their current lifestyles in Defoe’s best-known novel. For Robinson Crusoe, working nonstop is a sacred duty. If you are idle, you are sinning against God.

Defoe was raised Puritan and his outlook has been traced to fundamentalist Protestantism in such groundbreaking works as sociologist Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and historian R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922). The argument goes something like this: early Protestants, especially the Calvinists, believed in predestination—which is to say that God, who knows everything, foresees who is going to be saved (the elect) and who is going to be damned. In other words, there is nothing one can do to change one’s fortune.

While we might think that this would give people the freedom to do whatever they want to do—after all, mere human effort makes no difference—the effect was instead the opposite. Because people were so anxious about their fate (hell, after all, was presented to them in the most graphic terms imaginable), they looked closely at their lives for reassuring signs that they were amongst the elect. Even the tiniest details were seized upon as evidence.

In pursuit of this reassurance, Puritans often kept meticulous journals. In his brilliant work The Rise of the Novel (1957), scholar Ian Watt argues that this focus is at the foundation of the English novel, which specialized in realism. In Defoe’s novel, we see Crusoe keeping a journal and noting things that characters in previous centuries would not consider worth mentioning. After all, we don’t know what Hamlet eats or how he dresses or any other of his daily habits. These things are not of interest to Shakespeare or his audience. That’s not the case with Crusoe.

So how is this related to Hamza and American time? After all, if it is decided ahead of time whether one is going to hell or to heaven, why not just lie on the ground and watch eagles soaring? Why not go on three-day trips seeing new sights and making new acquaintances?

People being people, however, the Puritans didn’t just observe. They also tried to ensure that the results of their lives proved they were amongst the elect. In other words, they worked hard to make sure that they got good results, that their journals were able to record successes. This may not make logical sense but it makes psychological sense. If they were making the most of the opportunities God had given them, they figured, then they were headed for the good place.

As a result, one finds in Puritan journals people chastising themselves for having slept for more than six hours and for wasting time. In Defoe’s novel Dickory Cronke, Ian Watt points out, the protagonist says at one point,

When you find yourself sleepy in a morning, rouse yourself, and consider that you are born to business, and that in doing good in your generation, you answer your character and act like a man.

Cronke even believes that to pursue economic utility is to imitate Christ:

Usefulness being the great pleasure, and justly deem’d by all good men the truest and noblest end of life, in which men come nearest to the character of our B. Saviour, who went about doing good.

Crusoe, meanwhile, insists on never being idle. Unlike Hamza and his father, we never see him enjoying a sunset. Instead, we get such passages as this:

Thus, and in this disposition of mind, I began my third year; and though I have not given the reader the trouble of so particular an account of my works this year as the first, yet in general it may be observed that I was very seldom idle, but having regularly divided my time according to the several daily employments that were before me, such as: first, my duty to God, and the reading the Scriptures, which I constantly set apart some time for thrice every day; secondly, the going abroad with my gun for food, which generally took me up three hours in every morning, when it did not rain; thirdly, the ordering, cutting, preserving, and cooking what I had killed or caught for my supply; these took up great part of the day.

When Friday shows up in Crusoe’s life, Watt points out that the mariner doesn’t slow down. Instead, he sees it as an opportunity for accomplishing even more.

Calvinism first arrived in America through the Plymouth Rock Pilgrims, and the Protestant work ethic came to be known as the American work ethic. While it has dropped some of its religious trappings so that even non-religious Americans regard working hard as virtuous behavior, we see some of its religious origins in prosperity theology and in Norman Vincent Peale’s “the power of positive thinking.” In Peale’s church, economic success was a sign of God’s grace while failure was a sign that you were—if not damned—then at least unworthy. If you were poor, it was because you lacked faith and weren’t positive enough. In other words, being poor if your own fault, which is where some Americans oppose social safety net programs. Peale’s church, incidentally, was the one that the Trump family attended in the 1950s.

So to sum up: the “American time” that Hamza is witnessing has historical and religious origins. Defoe helped spread the vision in Robinson Crusoe, which for two hundred years was the most popular novel in Europe and America. Since then, the outlook has become so entrenched that Americans don’t even notice it anymore. It takes a student from a very different culture to make us aware of it.

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Comic Literary Twitter (Continued)

By Robin Bates | Published: February 15, 2022

Wednesday

As I’m currently knee-deep in book revisions, I turn over today’s blog post to my Victorianist son Tobias Wilson-Bates, who teaches English at Georgia Gwinnett College. I’m transcribing rather than photographing Toby’s tweets because, despite reader Dana Cole’s instructions, I haven’t yet mastered the process. If you want the full effect, complete with gifs and emojis, check it out for yourself at https://twitter.com/PhDhurtBrain. But here are the literary ones (and a few teaching ones) that had me laughing over the past week or two.

For instance, there’s this one featuring a Gogol short story for a punchline:

French Literature: your nose is a sexual pun
English Literature: your missing nose signals sexual disease
Russian Literature: your nose is impersonating an officer and womanizing around town. The police catch it fleeing the city, and may soon ruin your plans for marriage.

Toby loves imagined dialogues, often involving an author or a character:

Editor: hey, wow, really interesting rough draft of Notes from the Underground
Dostoevsky: “rough” draft?

Here’s one about the prolific Victorian author Anthony Trollope:

Me: let’s just keep this between us; it’s kind of embarrassing
Anthony Trollope: *writes an entire novel about the awkward social faux pas I just made
“Suuuuure”??

Toby followed this up with the observation,

Being friends with some writers must’ve been the absolute WORST

Toby is an Elizabeth Gaskell fan:

I like to imagine that if Gaskell had actually finished Wives & Daughters, it would have ended with Molly Gibson turning towards the camera and shouting, “MARRIAGE IS A BRUTISH FORM OF EXCLUSIVE PRIVATE PROPERTY THAT TURNS WOMEN INTO OBJECTS!”

And a special one for Valentine’s Day:

Me: hey, can you help me out with a love sonnet for Valentine’s?
Shakespeare: sure, this one is about how my poem turns my love into an object
Me: hmm
Shakespeare: this one is about how all love is a lie that lovers tell one another
Me: so, uh, maybe next year, but thnks

With the follow-up comment:

It really is one of the best jokes that Shakespeare’s sonnets get referenced on Love when they’re all deeply suspicious/skeptical or evenly openly cynical on the topic. Like, “I love you so much that this long list of insults about your looks doesn’t even get in the way.”

I had to look up MILF for the following tweet. It means “Mom I’d like to F***”

Tiresias: now, ah-hem, have you heard of the concept of the “MILF”?
Oedipus: ick, disgusting, why do you ask?
Tiresias: no, umm, no reason at all, goodness look at the time

And another on Oedipus:

Oedipus: woah, that’s a crazy story, babe! I can’t believe your ex left your baby to die of exposure on Cithaeron. Same thing totally happened to me!
Jocinda: ?

One of my favorites involves a member of the Frankfurt School:

Me: I just feel such malaise
Therapist: modernity
Me: existential dread
Therapist: modernity
Me: everything feels like a copy
Therapist: mod-
Me: wait a second! You’re not my therapist, you’re Walter Benjamin!
Walter Benjamin: SMOKE BOMB!

This one is accompanied by a great gif of two adolescent girls but it’s good even without it. Tobias’s favorite Bronte, it must be said, is Anne, partly because she’s not obsessed with the supernatural. Here he imagines them all discovering what it’s like to be dead:

Ghost Charlotte Brontë: this is AMAZING!
Ghost Emily: Right?! OMG lol
Ghost Anne: whatever, you two.
Charlotte & Emily: SAY IT SAY IT SAY IT
Anne: *sigh, this is soooo Gothic

Ghosts (as you will see) are a regular theme in Toby’s tweets. Here’s a dead Charlotte communicating with her biographer:

*Elizabeth Gaskell, sitting down to write the biography of Charlotte Brontë
Gaskell: The Leeds and Skipton railway runs along a deep valley of the Aire; a slow and sluggish stream, compared to-
Ghost of Charlotte Brontë: GUESS WHO WAS RIGHT ABOUT GHOSTS EXISTING?!
Gaskell: ??‍♀️ [palm face plant]

And:

Gaskell: so the child dies-
Brontë: AND COMES BACK AS A GHOST!
Gaskell: no. just typhus, then his mother becomes ill and-
Brontë: COME ON DOWN TO GHOST TOWN!
Gaskell: No! It was her opioid addiction! But there is one ghost.
Brontë: !!!
Gaskell: the Holy Spirit.
Brontë: …

Toby has a follow-up to this one:

I’m trying to manifest the Gaskell-Brontë buddy period drama we all deserve. I really want it to be like X-Files with Brontë being the Mulder character always seeing Gothic shit happen, while Gaskell is reading like Workers’ Rights pamphlets.

Dickens gets regular shoutouts on Toby’s timeline:

Editor: So, I started proofing your manuscript, and I just don’t think it can be the “best” and “worst” of times simultaneously, right? If there’s some “best” in the times, it’s probably moving more towards middling
Charles Dickens: *quietly covering up the rest of the paragraph

Another tweeter, one Doug Hering, got two Toby responses after posting this Samuel Beckett episode:

In 1938 Samuel Beckett was stabbed on the street by a pimp and would have died if not for his thick overcoat. Later he found himself sat next to his assailant at court and asked why he did it. The pimp shrugged, which Beckett found hilarious. This is the Beckettest anecdote ever

Toby responded:

Beckett was quietly the best comedian of the 20th century.

Like, he spent his whole career writing one joke (meaninglessness) and then was delighted that he got to live his joke.

And then there’s this reference to Shelley’s famous elegy of Keats:

Shelley: what do you think?
Ghost of Keats: well…
Shelley: please, don’t be afraid to be honest
Ghost: it’s just, you know
Shelley: it’s the name, isn’t it.
Ghost: ya, I get it, I do, it’s very nice and all, but my name is not “Adonais”

This one isn’t funny but, for those of you who know George Eliot’s novel, it’s right on target:

Daniel Deronda is the cruelest book I’ve ever read. Just 784 pages of dramatizing what happens to a woman who tries “to get everything she wants and nothing she doesn’t”

And here’s one about NFTs (non fungible tokens), which I was born too early to understand. Author, painter, furniture maker and wallpaper designer William Morris, however, would have been appalled:

*William Morris dream travels to 2022
Morris: and is there a vibrant market for artisans now?!
Me: well, you can purchase a digital receipt of monkey drawings
Morris:…
Me: it also destroys the environment

And a follow-up:

I can imagine no specific thing that William Morris would’ve loathed more than NFT’s. Almost an entirely perfect anti-Morris concept.

Here’s one on Ursula LeGuin’s best-known short story:

The high point of Western Civilization was Ursula LeGuin’s tangent on orgies in Omelas.

Here’s the LeGuin passage Toby has in mind:

I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas–at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the gory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.

Here’s one that is more thoughtful than comic:

It remains funny/not funny that the resolution of Pride & Prejudice involves “saving” someone by forcing them into an ill-conceived and loveless marriage because the alternative is worse.

And here’s one for English teachers:

I like to imagine the classroom is like a heist film. My students are a ragtag band of misfits, and I’m some ancient loon who nonetheless knows the plans to cracking the vault with the McGanty fortune.

“Ye’ll never crack that ther bibliography with Chicago! Yer gonna need MLA for this job!”

Can you identify the following fairy tales?

School board: whew, I think we’ve censored everythi–
Here’s a story about a wolf eating a child.
SB: well-
In this story two children cook an old woman
SB: now that’s-
A man’s eyes gouged out
SB: these things-
Just a deluge of women being kissed without consent
SB:…

Toby has a novel allegorical reading of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”:

The Emperor’s New Clothes is the most revolutionary children’s tale. An incredibly persuasive theory of power, the intentional stupidity it demands of inner cabals, and just how fast it can dissipate in the face of even the simplest communal awareness.

And some good comments on Aesop’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”:

On the one hand, the boy acted irresponsibly, but, on the other hand, after the first event the town should really have implemented a better early warning wolf detection system.

Your Apex Predator Child-o-Matic Sensor System has provided two data points, both false positives, the one thing you can be sure of now is that any data from the system will miss an actual confirmation.

I conclude with a final ghost tweet:

*New version of Hamlet told from the perspective of Yorick’s ghost*
Ghost: I mean honestly the whole family kind of sucks. Just look at this guy moping about the graveyar– hey, wait, that’s my–what the?! Motherf$*^%er!

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A Love Poem Flavored with Salt

By Robin Bates | Published: February 14, 2022
Jacob Lawrence, The Lovers

Tuesday –Valentine’s Day + 1

The Super Bowl edged out yesterday’s Valentine’s Day post so here it is a day late. I’ve always liked Lucille Clifton’s “salt” because it gives us insight into her marriage to Fred Clifton, who tragically died of lung cancer before his time (he didn’t smoke).

Lucille joined us at St. Mary’s College of Maryland not long after Fred had died but, because she was a private person, I never learned too much about him. As I read the poem, she all but says that Fred was an acquired taste—but that it was her taste (“precious and valuable only to her tribe”). In the history of the word, salt has been used as currency in certain cultures and Clifton plays on that fact here.

And then there’s how she comes across to Fred. While she acknowledges that she can rub Fred raw in quarrels that end in tears (or at any rate, that leave “a tearful taste”), she is also what he needs. Maybe he is drawn to her because she rubs him raw. From what I can tell, he was no less a forceful personality than she was.

Clifton doesn’t use the Valentine’s Day cliché that their love is as deep as the ocean. Instead, she says that her husband will strain the entire ocean for a taste of her. Which is romantic in a visceral type of way.

Here’s the poem:

he is salt
to her,
a strange sweet
a peculiar money
precious and valuable
only to her tribe,
and she is salt
to him,
something that rubs raw
that leaves a tearful taste
but what he will
strain the ocean for and
what he needs

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Chaucer’s Miller & the Los Angeles Rams

By Robin Bates | Published: February 13, 2022
Charles Cowden-Clarke, Chaucer’s Miller winning “the ram”

Monday

Congratulations to the Rams for winning their first Super Bowl for Los Angeles (they won one when they moved to St. Louis before returning to Los Angeles). When, in the third quarter, I thought the Bengals would win, I started concocting a blog post featuring William Blake’s “The Tyger.” In the poem, Blake contrasts this fearsome predator with a member of the sheep family. Not a ram, to be sure—but then, at that point in the game, the Bengals had reduced the Ram to lambs, especially when it came to the run game.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
In the forests of the night; 
What immortal hand or eye, 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. 
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain, 
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp, 
Dare its deadly terrors clasp! 

When the stars threw down their spears 
And water’d heaven with their tears: 
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright, 
In the forests of the night: 
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Cincinnati was proving very much to be a hammer, and the Los Angeles backs were experiencing their “dread grasp” on virtually every running play. In the poem, Blake is amazed that a supposedly benign god—the god who creates sweet little lambs—could also hammer out such a creature on a celestial anvil. I imagine him watching an American football game and wondering what kind of a divinity would create 250-pound linebackers that run like deer and hit with the force of sledgehammers.

But then Los Angeles rose to the occasion, finally behaving more like their moniker as they charged into the Cincinnati offensive line. They got to the Bengals’ talented quarterback multiple times, including on the play that effectively ended the game. As distraught as the Bengals are, maybe they’ll take consolation from the fact that I compare their opponent to one of Chaucer’s most disagreeable characters.

The miller is noted for his wrestling skills, for which he will often win—wait for it—“the ram.” (I’m not sure why a ram would have been the prize for which they were fighting.) But that’s not his only association with the animal. The miller is also famous for running into doors with his head, thereupon either breaking them or heaving them off their hinges. His physical build, as described by Chaucer, would make him an ideal football player:

The MILLERE was a stout carl for the nones;
Ful byg he was of brawn, and eek of bones.

 He’s also a drunkard and a loud-mouthed braggart who tells dirty stories. He plays the bagpipes (in other words, he’s full of hot air) and insists on always taking the lead. I haven’t followed the Rams team close enough to know whether there are any members who fit that description.

In any event, here are the relevant lines from Chaucer’s Prologue, with every other line the modern translation.

The MILLERE was a stout carl for the nones;
The MILLER was a stout fellow indeed;
Ful byg he was of brawn, and eek of bones.
He was very strong of muscle, and also of bones.
That proved wel, for over al ther he cam,
That was well proven, for wherever he came,
At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram.
At wrestling he would always take the the prize.
He was short-sholdred, brood, a thikke knarre;
He was stoutly built, broad, a large-framed fellow;
Ther was no dore that he nolde heve of harre,
There was no door that he would not heave off its hinges,
Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed.
Or break it by running at it with his head.

And, oh yes, the miller is often a cheat, stealing from the farmers who bring him their grain. But for ramming things, he’s your man.

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When Spiritual Longings Are Thwarted

By Robin Bates | Published: February 13, 2022
Sewell as Will Ladislaw and Aubrey as Dorothea in Middlemarch (1993)

Spiritual Sunday

My good friend and editor extraordinaire Rebecca Adams just alerted me to a fine blog post on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In the view of Lindsey Brigham Knott of the Circe Institution, Eliot’s magnificent novel grapples with the question, “What happens when a person of fervent ideals is born into a place and age that cannot support them?”

Knott points out that Middlemarch compares protagonist Dorothea Brooke with Teresa of Avila. As Eliot states in her preface, certain people, “with dim lights and tangled circumstance [try] to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement.” Unfortunately, to all the rest of the world,” their struggles seem

mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Teresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.”

Knott observes that the challenge arises in figuring out what path to choose. Since that path must be “greater and beyond” self, the ardently willing soul “longs to be directed, subsumed into an end other, greater, and more self-evidently transcendent than its own whims and fancies.” For St. Teresa, this transcendence involves working to reform the Carmelite Orders within the context of a divine mission. For Dorothea, lacking this religious context, it takes the form of marrying a stodgy professor who seems to be working on a great work, a key to all mythologies. Dorothea will (as she sees it) become his amanuensis, supporting him as Milton’s daughters supported their father to produce Paradise Lost. Unfortunately for Dorothea, Casaubon is no Milton. Knott points out,

She creates plans for cottages that would improve the lives of neighboring estates’ tenant farmers; she embarks on regimens of personal discipline and denial; in what should be her culminating glory, she marries a man in order to aid him in finishing his life’s work of scholarship before his looming death. But these attempts, though they promised great reservoirs to fill, prove too shallow for the flood of her zeal. Her plans for reform are dismissed as frivolous and expensive; her efforts at denial earn her only a reputation of oddness; and, rather than a great work, her husband’s scholarship turns out to be little more than the crabbed scrawls of a weary mind. So she pours her passion out, only to watch it overspill and soak, heedlessly, into barren ground. 

Dorothea is not the only character who experiences such frustration. Lydgate is a visionary doctor who wants to bring new medical and sanitation practices to the area and also build a much needed hospital. Unfortunately, his vision is stymied by local politics and he is essentially broken by his failure, leaving in disgrace and spending the rest of life servicing wealthy invalids in a resort town. His shallow and materialistic wife is happy but he himself, having been denied a higher purpose, dies an existential death, which in turn is followed by his actual death.

Thus, Dorothea and Lydgate are in the same boat. Knott writes,

For what Eliot critiques through her novel is not the protagonist, whose impetuous errors are described with gentle pity, but rather her setting—Middlemarch, as the title indicates, an English neighborhood that represents the social order of the whole nineteenth century, and that our own twenty-first century perpetuates. Dorothea’s ideals do not fail because of her poor choices, but because of the poor circumstances her world offers her. 

At this point in her essay, Knott cites Middlemarch’s finale:

[A]midst the conditions of an imperfect social state . . . great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Teresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. 

Applying the message to our own times, Knott writes that,

in the world of the modern West’s secularized syncretism, the medium of ardent deeds is forever gone. Here, neither Teresa nor Antigone would have known how to act significantly, because there is no consensus on what constitutes significant action. The actions that were clearly transcendent in the medium of their own times could only be met with this response today: “Well . . . it was an extreme choice . . . but if it was personally meaningful . . . then it must have been fulfilling to them”—and no ardently willing soul would want to pour its fervor out for something merely personally meaningful. 

The answer, as Knott sees it, is “a classical Christian education [that offers] not offer a worldview, but a world”: 

This could, perhaps, form a fresh metaphor for understanding the task of classical Christian education. It is not only to train students in wisdom and virtue, but to summon them into a medium beyond their present circumstances in which wise and virtuous acts can take shape. It is to make the legends of Homer’s Troy, Dante’s Paradise, Milton’s Eden feel like students’ own history, and then to make their history feel like a grand legend, and their present but a small chapter in that tale. It is to reveal their religion, not as a school’s statement of faith or Sunday church attendance, but as the interpretive key to all time and space. It is to cultivate, within the walls of the classical school and classical home, a communion of people who share this sense of the drama in which they are supporting cast.

I’m not entirely sure of the relationship between “classical” and “Christian” in Knott’s articulation. Homer, after all, is not a Christian author and Dante and Milton have different Christian visions. But I fully subscribe to Knott’s view that many people, those in their teens and twenties especially, long for a meaningful quest and sometimes thrash around trying to find it—and that literature is a powerful guide to help them find their way. The quest, in other words, has a spiritual dimension, even though I would disagree with Knott that it can find articulation only through a religious education.

And in that light, I believe that the political path that Dorothea is planning with her second husband at the end of the book addresses some of the meaning that Knott finds missing. The social reform to which the couple dedicate their lives is as worthy–as spiritual–as convent reform.

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