Report from the Lowlands, first 2 weeks

i had comfortable, uneventful flight with 80 strangers who would soon be familiar, and who were kind and helpful when i needed assistance with my carryon.  i became a hero briefly at schiphool airport when students were getting stopped after customs; apparently no one had been told to expect a group of 80 students, and the authorities insisted on getting confirmation from a 'leader.'  our 'leaders' were waiting for us outside the gate, and the students were getting concerned, til the RA remembered i was at the back of the line. 'wait,' he told the guy in the glass box, 'we have a professor!' and ran back to get me.  i had only a vague idea of what the problem was, but i guess i managed to look authoritative when i went to the head of the line and said, 'hello, i'm traveling with these students; how may i help you?' that seemed sufficient to the flustered offiicer, and all worked well.  i slept off and on through the weekend, while the kids went through the orientation drill, which should have been refreshing for me but wasn't; anyway i was able to prepare the first lit class, rereading for the 100th time the first 1/2 of the odyssey.  so far classes go well, and all the students seem like nice people, excited about their [mostly] first time in europe, and the thought of living in a castle.  and it's great to see my colleagues again.

last weekend the castle was closed down for the students' required trip to amsterdam, meaning i had to stay elsewhere, so i chose, very wisely, the B&B run by the lovely couple who do the castle's food service.  they were horrified that i'd never been to what the students call the Blue Lake [officially the Reindersmeer], and they promptly arranged to take me there saturday afternoon.  it was a lovely outing, and the lake really is blue--not the aqua of the Mediterranean or the Adriatic, but a kind of slate grey-blue, quite unusual and very pretty. we ate in the combined visitor's bureau/ restaurant overlooking the lake, and they had mustard soup with no bacon. this was a double treat; few enough restaurants have mustard soup, one of my favorite dutch foods, and those that do tend to have it with bacon bits.  on top of that, they had a lovely pannekoek [dutch pancakes; closer to crepes than to american pancakes, but heartier and larger] with brie and syrup.  hardly low-cal, but wonderful.

the only problem was that my insomnia kicked up badly both nights i was there and my first night back, making me so dizzy and weak i missed monday's class--only the 2nd class i've ever missed here. weak all week but got through. realized that the one thing that helps prevent a totally sleepless night is getting up and eating.  perfect for weight loss!  ah well, whatever gets me sleeping...

i love having only 2 classes; it will offset some of the sleep problems and keep me off the hectic schedule i've had in recent years.  yet one more thing to make me feel my age.  and the energy of these  kids does that too, in spades. they're like the bunny in the old battery commercial; they keep going and going....and they do that in class too. they seem anxious to learn, very cooperative--and some of them thank me when the class is done!

so, a decent start, if my body will only cooperate.  will start tarot readings next week...

RIP Pete Seeger

there doesn't seem to be much more to say. he lived to 94, one of the few greats of our time, joyful while acknowledging and fighting pretty much all the evils in america. and honestly humble through it all.  no one can match him; no one can even try. who can fail to be heart-heavy at his loss, and grateful for all he shared with us?

For Those Who Hate Beowulf...

...and i am one of them. for several years after i began teaching "Literary Foundations," i  forced that dreary creature down my own throat and those of my students. what was interesting to me about the poem was  not the poem itself, but its nearly unique position in english lit.  but i ignored the nearly, and just dropped the beowulf, which worked quite well in one way: we left antiquity with the aenead and picked up the middle ages with the aenead-influenced inferno, with no nasty early medieval centuries in between to distract us.  then curiosity drove me to attend a lecture on the rest of the beowulf collection: some fragments and a possible non-fragment, a complete retelling of the story of the ancient biblical heroine judith.  i was entranced, and went home to bask in wikepedia and its links. the same great anglo-saxon rhythms and alliteration, probably written down by the same sort of monk who wrote down the epic beowulf. only here was a hero worth reading about!  no prissy good girl, our judith, but also no show-off warrior like beowulf. a job has to be done, and no one else is gonna do it, so it's up to her and her faithful handmaid.  she inserts herself into hateful holerfones' tent on the pretense of wanting the jews to surrender before they're all killed, because holerfones is such a great warrior.  the beastly boss is impressed with this show of intelligence, and invites her to come back and hang around together.  presuming  a sexual encounter,  he chases all his soldiers away. the virtuous virgin gets him drunk in anticipation of their night of lust, and when he's well soused, she chops his head off.  the joy of the monk writer blasts out of every syllable.  off go the ladies, freely through the camp of the enemy, carrying the basket in which they had brought goodies for the evening's enjoyment; it now carries past the soldiers the head of their dead leader.  now here's a tale.  it has its limits, of course. wholly judeo-christian, it has none of the blend of pagan and christian found in beowulf,  which makes the epic at least intellectually interesting. but 'judith' compensates with its constant motion, its emotional tone, and its competitively gory ambiance.  i still have to lecture about beowulf in the context of explaining the Judith manuscript, but i find beowulf  more interesting to talk about than to read.

judith is only one of the ways i have managed to get some female representation in the Great Works.  thought written by a man, it's a great picture of a woman, who is totally front and center.  the aenead too, in what is arguably is greatest section, offers an amazing female hero.  dido owns the first section of that amazing poem, and one of the most compelling things about her is that she never becomes only the woman who kills herself over her lover's abandonment.  she is that, no question.  but so much else! she is the only woman who could make a compatible mate for aeneas, and his sadness at his need to leave her is real, his argument sound. what forces him from her is just that. he cannot stay and help her build her city indefinitely; he must leave and found his own. neither can she leave with him; as she tells herself, that would destroy her carthage and leave it to its surrounding enemies.  her decision to commit suicide is one of the most amazing scenes in literature.  caught up in the fury and pain of his betrayal, she yet rationally considers all her possiblities.  goddess-driven, she has made a choice whose consequences leave no other way out.  had he stayed and been [as she sees it] her husband, they could rule carthage together, with both their armies.  his leaving loses her all credibility; she becomes,  simply, the alien's discarded whore.  she must die and leave her city to be ruled by other Carthaginians.  i can never read that scene without feeling her heartache and ecstasy.

later in the term, i again get to teach some cool women--and this time, as writers.  to understand the canterbury tales, you need to know a little at least of the decameron.  but the decameron has other followers, and to progress from the decameron through chaucer to the heptameron by maurguerite de neuvarre is sheer fun.  attempting to create 'the french decameron' 200 years after the original, she uses becaccio's  structure to invent a wholly different work, whose tale tellers are socially and personally deeply intertwined, and who stories relfect that.  and then there is the medieval woman who broke into the nasty 'querelle de femmes' to utter a fully female, almost proto-feminist retort in the  form of an imaginary city built  at the instruction of three women sent by the blessed virgin mary to the self-fictionalized christine de pizan.  the influence of the far superior writer dante is clear, as is that of baccaccio, but the result is a dazzling peice of propoganda, re-use of old myths, and wholly original work that became one of the first pieces of writing to be paid for in western history.

ah, mine is a tough  job......

Haiku

gray Christmas
white boxing day...
sigh

Santa's Alter Egos

One of the charms of any feast day that lasts over the centuries is its intermingling with other mythologies.  When you feel too sorry for Santa Klaus and all his work on christmas eve, you can rest easy.  he has dozens of comrades, some well known, some less so.  time and space allow me to touch only on a few here, but they are a few i'm very fond of.

One, though his identity has been appropriated by Santa claus over the years, is the German Kris Kringle.   but chris was originally  a far worthier saint than our jolly red giant, or even than the good Dutch bishop sinter klaas who comes by ship from spain to the netherlands.  Kris kringle translates to Christ Child; the boy we worship is himself the giver of gifts to the rest of us.  which makes sense, when you remember that in christian mythology the reason the boy was  born was to give us the greatest gift of all--his life, in redemption for our sins.

the gift givers have never been an all-boys' club.  in the cold Scandinavian countries, it is Saint Lucia who brings light to us, quite literally--she wears a crown of lit candles as she makes her rounds.  two interesting, obviously interconnected female givers , are the russian babushka and the northern italian bafana, though bafana seems to be the older of the two.  in each case, she was approached by the three kings taking a shelter break from their star-following, and offered them hospitality.  in turn, they suggested shes come with them to meet the new child- king of the world.  but she was too busy with her housework, and decided to wait. by the time she was ready, they were long gone and the star had disappeared.  so every year, she travels the world with gifts for the christ-child, and, failing to find him, gives the gifts to other children.

i like the idea of the woman punished for taking housework too seriously and who gets a marvelous fling around the world once a year.  but more, i like the idea that different peoples from different countries and backgrounds have Incorporated the idea that children deserve gifts and special treatment once a year at least.  and that these ideas began long before consumerism took them over, out of a notion of pure love for a pure, poor child.  if the world survives its frantic rush to self destruction, i hope these gift givers survive with it.  we will need all the comfort and joy possible.

SEASON'S GREETINGS & A FLASH FICTION STORY

my holiday card to you all....

The Necessary Sadness in Christmas

Christmas, as we  know, is infamous for escalating the level of depression among americans.  it heightens loneliness, despair, and fear with its insistence that we all be jolly and love our neighbors and chuckle like a 1940s film santa.  it excludes non-christians, throwing them a hanukkah bone and ignoring that hanukkah is a minor jewish holiday, not the year's biggest one.  it tortures parents without the wherewithal to buy their kids the goodies advertised since october, all, as is the nature of advertising, promising a degree of fulfillment once imaged only in tales of the heavenly afterlife.  it even promises snow on christmas day, a rarely met promise but a pretty one.

these are the negative christmas sadnesses.  the further we can get from them, the better off we who are christmas lovers will be. but there is another side to christmas sadness that we need to embrace, without which our happiness is, at best, a little shallow.  the feeling, and the rejection of it, are strikingly present in a popular song from 1944, which first appeared in a pleasantly fluffy film called Meet Me in Saint Louis.  Judy Garland plays a turn-of-the-20th-century teenager in love with the boy next store.  all is well  until her father gets a better job, far away, and the family must move from its beloved home and friends, and from garland's beau.  and it's almost christmas.   so she sings, with all the garland wistfulness, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."  In this version, she gamely tells us that 'next year all our troubles will be out of sight," and that 'someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow,' and that 'until then we'll have to muddle through somehow."  Unfortunately, singers like frank sinatra and later barbra streisand got hold of the song and merried it up.  in these later versions, from now on our troubles will be out of sight, through the years we all will be together, and there will be no more muddling through, just hanging stars on the highest boughs.  anything negative just gets pushed aside like  broken glass ornament.

but we need the sadness of christmas, as well as its joy; indeed, the absence of the former taints the latter.  some other popular songs admit this: 'i'll have a blue christmas without you' [which my mother played frequently in the early 1970s when my brother was in vietnam]; 'i'll be home for christmas,' which sounds very happy until the last line, 'if only in my dreams.'  then there is the 20th century folk hymn, 'i wonder as i wander...why jesus the savior was born for to die.'  and that cracks it.  the exalted central myth of christmas is the story of death mingled with life.  that gorgeous babe in the manger exists solely for the purpose of dying, horribly, 33 years later.  and we, celebrating that birth, are equally mortal. we are surrounded by the void of our beloved dead, our absent loved ones, our unmet dreams, and our own ultimate mortality.  

dickens knew this.  those who read a christmas carol and see only a treacly happy story miss the point. the happiness is there, all right. but so is the loss--all of it. marley makes that clear when he shows scrooge the suffering poor and the ghosts trying, too late, to help them.  we cannot but know that tiny tim's survival comes out only through one man's personal conversion combined with a conveniently curable illness.  scrooge had destroyed many lives along the way to his conversion, not least of all his own.  [watch the quick-changing expressions on the face of alistair sim in the greatest film version of the book, and see decades of loss mingle with current joy.]

the secret to a full christmas lies in embracing the whole of the season, of the day.  as  dickens says in one of his essays, we must invite our beloved dead to join us, in the hope if not the faith that we will one day be reunited with them. we must sigh for our losses. and we must do the grand work of creating happiness, enough to carry us through the cold winter to come:  the winter we will likely survive but possibly die from; the happiness we hold through chill fingers as it tries to escape us; the joy of that noble mother who dared to rejoice in her child's birth and death.