near wild heaven

This is now, this is here, this is me, this is what I wanted you to see.

I have been reading The Odyssey for the past couple hours. I am reading it because I decided to teach it in my literature class, this 460-page poem. Nevermind that none of my undergraduate professors required me to read this, or any other Homeric epic, even though they are fundamental texts in Western literature. It's like being a Christian but never having read the Bible, that you have only heard it referred to in such a way that you are allowed to nod your head as if you understand the sly allusion that has just passed into your ears.

What better way to learn about this book, what a better excuse to spend hours reading it, than to assign it to my own undergraduates? I should provide a caveat here--I did read most of the book last summer, before I lost interest or became engrossed by other things. I liked it, but more than that, it's something I need to read. I want to understand something of the Western history of storytelling. Of course, I will project my own shortcoming onto my students, who may complain about the heft of the text. And I will tell them it's something you should read in a literature class. By doing this, I will seal my fate: learn this book, or look bad in front of a classroom. The latter is, of course, inconceivable.

I do this for other reasons, too. One of the blessings of my new teaching job is the opportunity to teach a literature course. My new chair assures me that I gave him every confidence in my interview that I am up to the task. I believe that I am. But I'm also looking ahead, to the day when I will be in a position to apply for tenure-track jobs in academia. And the truth is, I will be much better off being able to say that I have taught college-level composition, creative writing and literature classes. It makes me appear versatile--which I am, ladies, let there be no doubt. The appearance will be reality, is what I'm thinking. Along those lines, I'm challenging myself now to teach several books: not only am I teaching The Odyssey, but Castaways, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Slaughterhouse-Five and my old favorite, The Things They Carried. And a bunch of stories and poems from an anthology, which I haven't decided yet.

Sounds like fun to me.

posted by: zithereen at August 17, 2004 20:08 | link | comments (5) |

After I don't teach for awhile, I become secretly convinced that I have no idea how to do it. In the recent past this worry may have had some merit. I am, after all, only entering my fifth year as a teacher, and the Zithereen who first stepped into a classroom four Augusts ago, shaking in his boots, is different than the one who last left a classroom two months ago, uncertain when he might have his next teaching job. As it turns out, my teaching career resumes September 3, and I'm thankful for it, for the lit class I'll get to teach alongside my three composition classes, for the respectable salary, and above all for the opportunity to remain sharp in front of a classroom, a place where I have started to feel at home.

My most notable memory from my first day of teaching in Ames, Iowa in August 2000 is when I told my students that poor attendance on their part would "piss me off." I remember this because I sort of growled it (in a teacherly way), and that these bright-eyed freshmen, who were (thankfully) even more bright-eyed than me, gasped. Not in an audible way, really, but something about them was taken by surprise. They were not accustomed to teachers swearing in class. This was my Big Weapon. I could cuss, damn it. And I would not get into trouble.

My latest teaching memory, in Irvine, California in June 2004, is of sitting outside my fourth-floor office, in a sun-baked outddor hallway, discussing the finer points of James Joyce with one of the brightest students I've had in these four years. He had arrived to submit the final revision of his short story, which was largely a knockoff of Joyce's Ulysses as seen through a lovesick college sophomore, but which still revealed a respect for language and storytelling. The story showed substantial promise--I could nearly locate where he was with his writing, which is far beyond where I was as a college sophomore. I soaked up our discussion as I soaked up those frank southern California rays, knowing all the while that this could be my final act as a teacher for some good time, perhaps even forever. I was reviewing my modest teaching career even as it continued, thankful that I had fashioned myself into a decent teacher, comfortable in front of a classroom, competent, the beneficiary of good teachers who have also taught me how to teach.

I think I have come a long way. In this way, this post is not unlike my last post. I have learned, but more than that, I have applied. This is no premature pat on the back: I know what I am and what I am not, where I have been and where I have not gone yet. I am better at things, more agile in some ways. I write this because it's heartening to observe, and worth observing every so often. It makes me eager for the future more than nostalgic for the past, though those two feelings are often on competing ends of a fulcrum in my mind, and I'm trying to keep them balanced: using what's gone to throw myself into what I must create. I have come a long way and I think there is still a ways to go.

posted by: zithereen at August 17, 2004 00:04 | link | comments (2) |

For the past hour I have been reading through some old writing of mine, dating back as far as ten years, my first semester of college, papers I wrote for Ethnic Literature and Art History, poems written during a particularly miserable time during that first fall. I remember feeling lonely for something, not the place I was from, but for a future that was not yet a part of my past. I really felt it, people. And I wrote some horrible, awful, immature, badly-conceived poems, papers and stories as an encoded way to say so.

My goodness, what must have my professors thought, this scrawny eighteen year-old with his feathers puffed out on the page, trying to look bigger than he really was? These intelligent, highly-educated teachers, writers of dissertations? I can only imagine. Part of me cringes when I look at my scattershot work--am I old enough to call it early?--the flawed arguments, the stilted diction, not quite fitting my syntax, my ambitions larger than my abilities. What I hope is that my professors then saw what I see now, twenty-eight years old, much further along the line to respectability. I see a young man teaching himself to write. It's very cute to me, kind of endearing, and hopeful. My brazenness! Best that I didn't know my professors' amusement at this young man trying too hard to impress, to show he could be trusted with words, that he actually had something to say, that he wanted to be good at this, wanted it badly. That's what I see in that early work, a desire to impress, a kind of sophomoric posturing, but a real, living attempt to engage with words, to give them weight and make them matter. Is it arrogant to say I find it touching, these attempts to pony up and take myself seriously? I suppose this would all have to be contextualized within some larger timespan, going back even longer, to when I saw myself as a writer even as a child, even when I floundered in school before college, biding my time, distracted by the petty particulars of whatever life I had in New Carlisle, Ohio, where I grew up and lived until age eighteen, and intermittently for a few years afterwards. It's just so strange to encounter these words now, by surprise, as I looked through old disks I have carted all over the country, to find free space to save my recent work, the stuff I think might be actually okay, then to zap backwards ten years, a healthy chunk of any life, to a younger version of myself I am thankful to recognize still.

posted by: zithereen at August 12, 2004 20:29 | link | comments (2) |