Cloud Tectonics, Jose Rivera

Title: Cloud Tectonics
Playwright: Jose Rivera
Pub Info: Broadway Play Publishing, Inc., 1997.

 

"I wonder if love sometimes does that to you. It alters the physics around you in some way: 

changing the speed of light and the shape of space and how you experience time." (44)

Is Cloud Tectonics a love story? Maybe. I suppose. They tell me it is, on the back cover and in performance reviews and, even, in the long monologues throughout. The "love of a lifetime," the leading characters say, the idea that such a love makes you so different from how you were before that even something as elemental and innate as your concept of time is altered. I get that. But is this really a love story, or is it a warning?

"What's life? A fucking blink." (35)

I like going to the theater, but the special thing about reading plays instead of watching them is that I get to be the director, the actors, the stage hands, and the audience. The only authority that gets to affect how I interpret it is the playwright himself. In the case of Cloud Tectonics, that playwright is Jose Rivera the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Motorcycle Diaries, and, thankfully, he provides enough detailed, demanding stage directions that I could watch this whole production play out in my head. His words drip with poetry and purpose, grit and reality, drawn-out metaphors and very heavy-handed symbolism. If he ever took a class on how to make his audience cringe, scoff, sigh, smile all at the same time, he passed it with flying colors.

Staging of Cloud Tectonics; click for photo source.

His leading characters are Celestina del Sol and Anibal de le Luna -- I don't speak Spanish, but geez, I get that much -- and their setting is simple: a small house in LA, in "the present," during the storm of the century. Anibal finds Celestina, a beautiful young woman who is "very pregnant" and offers her a ride. Realizing she and her child have no where to go, he hesitantly but nobly offers her a warm place to sleep in his house for the night.

It's not long before he's pretty sure she's absolutely insane.

Celestina tells him that, by all accounts, she's been pregnant with her baby for two whole years, and though she could pass for early twenties, she's at least fifty-four. When she walks into his house, the clocks stop, the TV goes out, and they're cut off from the screaming sirens and raging storm outside. Isolated, adrift, disconnected from the world around them and, it turns out, from the passage of time.

"Papi wanted me to count numbers, count numbers, over and over; he said it would teach me 

about the nature of 'time,' and I tried and tried, I really did, but I didn't learn anything." (18)

For Celestina, there is no such thing as minutes, hours, days, years as we know them. To her, a lifetime could pass in a moment, and a moment feels like days. That, from the outset, makes this play worthwhile for me, because it is so frustratingly fascinating to contemplate a life where time plays no part. Like Anibal's brother Nelson, an enlisted serviceman who appears briefly on stage, we are all of us trapped in the when of life--when we will arrive, when we will leave, when we will do, be, act, go, change. To consider no schedules, no aging or growing up, no distinction between then and now, is interesting and, by the end of the play, a little exhausting, too.

Nelson de la Luna alone breaks the isolation of Celestina and Anibal during the play, and only one who's still trapped in a world dictated by time; he's got only two hours to visit his brothers after years apart. He comes in with a flurry of sirens and thuderclaps from outside, and his reunion with his brother plays out the way most reunions do: how long has it been?; going so soon?; when will you be back? Nelson, blatantly, represents the "normal" progression, time as we know it outside of Celestina's world.

The main action of the play spans, perhaps, an hour of Anibal's day. He and Celestina talk, eat, almost-but-not-really have sex, and then there's Nelson again, knocking on the door and bringing the sound of sirens with him. "It's only been a few minutes," Anibal tells him, but in that short time he spent alone with Celestina, two years have actually passed.

 "Trying to understand such a life, and why love matters to it, why a god would need to be loved too, 

was like trying to understand the anatomy of the wind or the architecture of silence or cloud tectonics. 

(He laughs) Yeah. What better way to respond to a miracle than to fall in love with it?" (70)

So where, exactly, does the love-and-romance part start? I honestly don't know. One minute we're ruminating on time, discussing Anibal's life story on two coasts, trying to figure out Celestina's sad, sentimental, and creepily child-like sexual fantasies, and the next, we're all of a sudden thrust into a grand metaphor of what love does to you. I like the grand metaphor, really. I get it, totally. But where does it come from? Why are we all of a sudden supposed to believe we just witnessed the "love of a lifetime?" By all accounts, they just cuddled on a bed suspended over the stage and woke up two years later. 

But in order to make this play work, we've got to accept that they fall in love, even though Anibal's got a girl named Debbie that he loved from afar for five years and finally won over, even though Celestina is crazy (in real life he'd have had her committed, not kissed her feet), even though Celestina is "very pregnant" and currently on a mission to find the baby's father, who may or may not have raped her two years ago, when the baby was conceived. But, alright, sure, they're in love. And love stops time and makes you forget yourself and paints the whole world as one long, glittering, beautiful moment that will stretch on forever and ever if only you'd let it. Fade to black.

In my opinion, though, that's not the message that makes this play powerful.

"It was so long ago and so much has happened since then, so much life, so much dying, so 

many changes, it just gets buried under all the time between now and then, you know?" (67)

The most touching part, to me, was the way the play toys with a concept of memory, both as a product of time-that-has-passed and as a reflection of what makes us whole. Anibal is constantly forgetting; he forgets how to speak Spanish, the names of people he used to know and when exactly he knew them, how certain circumstances of his life came to be the way they are. It speaks of how easily life--the important things, the little things that shape us, the moments that were so valuable--gets swept up and diluted as time marches forward, as if that passage of time blurs everything but the lingering essence of feelings we used to know.

I see in this play a distinct warning, or at least, an urging to ask yourself the question, With what do we chose to fill our "time?" And what kind of life would it be if the things we chose today are all we'll ever have? Do we love, even if it means two years of our lives could slip by without our knowing, if other relationships and obligations are neglected or forgotten for the sake of it, if we'd be haunted by it forever, even after it's gone? Maybe Rivera's telling us that that's what love is, the relinquishing of our whole lives for that one feeling, and even though the world is turning outside and time is passing, you're always going to trapped in that love, alive in love like you aren't alive anywhere else. Are you prepared for that?

I'm not sure why I decided to read this play last night. I was looking for an old yearbook on my bookshelf and it was wedged into a stack of old student literary magazines, slender and small with its corners all crinkled. I was just flipping through it, reminding myself what it was about, when I kept getting stuck on certain words and phrases so often I finally gave in and read the whole thing. Overall, I would say, those words and phrases are the sum of it's worth; the play itself is fueled by poetics but little story, and sadly, the characters are structured to be symbols and that's all they ever really amount to: pretty symbols for sad notions, bluntly staged and fleeting.

Hunter S Thompson, daily

The first time I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I was a brown-nosing little eighth grade student who favored epic battle re-enactments with action figures over all other forms of social interaction. Simply checking that book out of the library made me feel a little bit bad-ass. Now I know Thompson a little better, and I have since found other ways to entertain myself (sometimes still involving action figures because, well, people don't change that much), and I find something more than feeble claims at street-cred within the pages of his work. This, though, is awesome, a short-but-telling summary of a day-in-the-life of Hunter S Thompson:

I found it on THIS blog.

Let's Talk About Shakespeare

I love to talk about Shakespeare, don't you? I focused a lot of my studies on his work in college, and still sometimes dream about being a professor of Shakespeare's tragedies at some point in my life (tweed smoking jacket with elbow pads, perhaps?). Here I've compiled a list of the questions people most commonly ask me whenever I somehow manage to turn regular conversations at dive bars into discussions of Shakespeare (which is more challenging than you'd think, actually). 

Favorite Shakespeare ________?

Comedy: As You Like It.

Tragedy: Antony and Cleopatra.

Character: Horatio, from Hamlet.  

Sonnet:#137 (he's so mean!)

Have you read them all?

Hah. No. At last count, I had read 11/14 comedies; 7/11 histories; and 10/12 tragedies.

Biggest Shakespearean pet peeve?

All the misquoting and poor attribution aside, I can't help but ask -- Why, oh why, is Hamlet always holding Yorick's skull in drawings/renderings of the "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy? He holds up the skull during "Alas poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio," which comes way after he gives his famous emo-kid speech.

 Have you seen so-and-so do this-or-that?

Probably not. I'm not a huge fan of the "re-imaginings" of any writer's work (leave Jane Austen alone!), and I prefer to read the plays so I can take my time and enjoy the craftsmanship and wordplay. That said, I do love Kiss Me Kate (Taming of the Shrew), which I discovered during my young Fosse-obsessed phase, and I once went on a class trip to see Midsummer Night's Dream that made my best friend laugh so hard she had an asthma attack in the audience. Also, Gerard Butler and Voldemort (ahem, I mean Ralph Fiennes) in the recent film version of Coriolanus were pretty spectacular. 
  

Do you use the "third" genre of classification for his plays?

Sadly, my nerishness has led to several debates over cocktails on whether we can break down Shakespeare's plays into just Comedies and Tragedies, or if we should also denote certain titles as Histories. Short answer: I do like the distinction, but I rarely use it. To explain: in a way, most of Shakespeare's work is based in history and/or folklore, right? There are all those names and faces ripped straight out of Plutarch's Lives, and you could spend years studying all his sources. So, do we say some are more historical than others and therefore those are the histories? Or just the ones with a real-life dude's name in the title? Sometimes I think it's just an arbitrary distinction, but then, aren't most genre titles and categories?

 

Least favorite Shakespeare play?

Totally, definitely, without-a-doubt All's Well That Ends Well, because seriously, ALL IS NOT WELL at the end (nor is it well at the beginning and middle). Helena, the young daughter of a late doctor is madly in love with Count Bertram, a class-A douche who pretty much equates Helena with the Elizabethan muck on the bottom of his noble boots. When Bertram's father gets sick, Helena attends to him with the stipulation that, should he be cured, she gets her pick of any man in court for a husband. Lo! she chooses Bertram, who still doesn't like her even a little bit so why does she want this guy anyway? A whole host of awful, cruel, deceitful, low-down, dirty escapades ensue (bed tricks included!), painting neither Helena nor Bertram in a very pretty light. Everyone sucks and nobody is happy. The end.

My honorable mention for least favorite is Troilus and Cressida, because Cressida is just so whiny.

Why is Shakespeare so hard to understand?

Probably because your high school English teacher did not do a good enough job teaching you how to read it! Seriously. Shakespeare needs to be read intently, but without over-thinking it. You've got to allow for plays-on-words, double entendres, and the notion that, even while playwrighting, he was a poet at heart. Mostly I find that people are so sure they won't get it that they're too nervous/close-minded/et al to try, and the words get all tangled up in their heads. Chances are, you already know what's going to happen because the stories are so ingrained in us already, so just let go of the intimidation and read the words in front of you. 
   

And, honestly, it always helps to get a good copy of the play, one with well-developed footnotes or annotations. There are going to be archaic words in there that even the best use of context clues won't decipher, or words that had a different meaning to Shakespeare than they do to us. Look them up, or you may miss out on some pretty hysterical jokes.

I haven't read Shakespeare since high school; which one should I pick now?

That depends on what you want from it. 

Something simple to ease into? Hamlet. You can probably recite half of it already, and it's cut, dried, and wonderful.

Something fun? Midsummer Night's Dream, or As You Like It. Both make me laugh.

Something to impress your friends with obscure Shakespearean references? Coriolanus. It's a great one, and in my experience, no one knows it well enough to notice when you misquote it.

Something after which I will never want to read anything ever again? Henry IV, parts one or two.

  

Which play is [insert quote from Pinterest] from?

Most likely NONE of them! There are so very many quotes attributed to Shakespeare that are not actually his words. Some of them don't even sound like something he would say. Most notably, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," is by William Congreve; "How do I love thee; let me count the ways," is by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and "When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew," is actually Arrigo Boito. Check before you get things tattooed on yourself...and probably take a look at the quote's context, too.

Nobody asks (but I wish they would):  

What's the deal with the bed trick?

I HATE the use of the bed trick! It is so...icky. It's an oft-used device in which someone tricks someone else into sleeping with him/her, usually using thin disguises that are as bafflingly successful at hiding his/her identity as Clark Kent's glasses. The resulting tryst is usually the means to the play's dramatic end, and for some strange reason leads to romance and weddings. Oh, and the bed trick almost always results in pregnancy. 

And the most common question I've ever been asked about Shakespeare--

Will you write this 7-10 page MLA-formatted paper on Shakespeare for me? 

Yes, but it'll cost ya. 

[ This post was inspired by The Classics Club's January Shakespeare Event, which you can find HERE. ]

Happy Birthday, Lewis Carroll

 

 

 

 

"There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you may get un-birthday presents, and only one for birthday presents, you know." 

 

 

In honor of what would have been Lewis Carroll's 181st birthday, let's all strive to be much more muchier, and remember that diving into nonsense is sometimes the best way to spend your day.

And maybe read one of my favorite bits of childhood nonsense, "The Hunting of the Snark" (1876), which can be found HERE.

Sandburg, They All Want to Play Hamlet

Sometimes poems get stuck in my head, like songs or show tunes or jingles from radio commercials. Does that ever happen to you? Today I woke up with a few lines of this one, by Carl Sandburg, rattling around in there, so I thought I'd share it.

II. People Who Must

6. They All Want to Play Hamlet

They all want to play Hamlet.

They have not exactly seen their fathers killed

Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,

Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,

Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,

Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers--O flowers,

       flowers slung by a dancing girl--in the saddest play the inkfish,

       Shakespeare, ever wrote;

Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad

      and to stand by an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and then

      to say over slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words masking

      a heart that's breaking, breaking,

This is something that calls and calls to their blood.

They are  acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be

      particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.

--Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel (1922)            

 I  don't really think of this poem as an insult to actors, but if that was its sole intention, it would make sense--even though the play's the thing, Shakespeare himself was not a fan of actors and did not paint them well in his works, particularly in Hamlet. 

Instead I like this poem more as a general caution, an urging to understand the role you want to play before you attempt to play it. Actors, per Sandburg, are so swift to use their own personal heartbreak as fodder for some grand, well-crafted performance, THE performance that is all the sound and the fury an actor could want, without stopping to wonder what that performance would really, truly demand of them.

If we, as readers, look at the actors metaphorically, then we could reason the poem speaks to a sort of universal empathy, or a block that limits the capacity for empathy among all individuals. We don't know what it's like to suffer as Hamlet suffered (or how our friends/neighbors/relatives have suffered), so can we ever really connect with them completely? Even sad people, as all actors are sad people, cannot know the extent of the sadness of others, and yet we desperately want to because that is the proverbial role of a lifetime, the grand, well-crafted performance we know as friendship, community, and love.

Two Birds, Fifty-One Stones

It's a little late for New Years Resolutions (2014 calendars have already been price-slashed at Walmart), but I've been struggling to think of a self-inflicted, book-related challenge for myself for this year that would both expand my book knowledge and whittle down my To Be Read List. In researching this lovely cyber realm of book bloggers--of which I have been a part for exactly three days, huzzah!--I found The Classics Club. It's awesome, and perfect, and throws down a great bookish gauntlet I'd love to be a part of.

 

The idea is to set yourself a "living list" of literary classics, and read them within a five year time frame. It sounds simple, but a few notes in particular on their official site made me do a I Truly Appreciate You dance in my computer chair:

"There have been questions about what constitutes a 'classic'. As long as you feel it meets the guidelines for your list, include it! ... The Classics Club is not intended as a statement on what counts as a classic."

As someone who has taken part in many a "but can you ever really define literature?" debate, I love this idea-- I have my own personal parameters for what I think makes a classic, but I resent teachers/scholars/journalists/snooty kids sitting next to me in the lecture hall/my dad telling me that I am wrong or misinformed. The important thing is talking about books, not crafting arbitrary limitations.

 

My general focus for my Classics Club list is to finally get to all the books that have fallen between the cracks and slipped my attention all these years. I have often read classics for fun, and continue to re-read them often, mostly because I enjoy archaic wordplay and period-specific social commentary. There are so many that I've been meaning to read, ones that sit just next to the "big ones" on the library shelf, ones that I keep forgetting about until somebody says, "So, have you read --- " and I'm forced to say, "No, not yet."

 

I've got fifty-one planned novels, hopefully to be finished in just under three years. My original list was much longer, but I tried to stick to just the "Oh, I've always wanted to read that!" titles that have been haunting me for a while. There are so many by authors I've loved but haven't explored their work as much as I would like, and several I've started a whole bunch of times but never finished (ahem Satanic Verses ahem). Here's a link to my full list: 

 

There is something about stumbling around through lists of literary cannons and recommendations that makes me feel like I haven't really read all that much at all! Gee willickers, Batman, what have I been doing with my life if I haven't even read Anne of Green Gables yet?? On the plus side, it's given me an overwhelming determination to do right by my list, and get started as soon as I can check out the first one from the library....which, I think, will be Dickens's Hard Times, because I've been going through a Dickens withdrawal lately, complete with cold sweats and frequent outbursts of "tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

Link & Source: The Classics Club.

College Reads

I used to brag to all my friends that I had the best major in the whole world, because I got to spend all my time reading really freakin' awesome books, and who doesn't love that? All the bragging backfired, of course, when I had to tell them I couldn't go out on a Wednesday because I had an epic paper due the next day (that I totally hadn't even started yet), and they'd just look at me like "don't you just read really awesome books all the time? where's the work in that?" It was challenging work sometimes, but the payout was, sadly, not a lucrative claim to the job market, but exposure to some pretty incredible works of literature. I'm fairly certain it was fair...right? 

1. The American, by Henry James (1877)

Christopher Newman is "committed to nothing in particular," and, feeling something is genuinely wrong with him and his place in the harsh realm of American business, takes himself off to Paris to learn how to live life passionately. Soon he finds himself enamored with a lovely woman named Claire, obsessed with the juxtaposition of new money versus old, and floundering in the world of art. It's a heartbreaker, mostly because I'm still not sure Mr. Newman has a heart at all. Social commentary, some humor, failed romance.

2. Le Morte D'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory (~1470)

The quintessential tale of King Arthur and his knights. The story of Camelot (the one without any Kennedys) and the round table and Guinevere's betrayal. If you're an Arthurian legend junkie like myself, you've got to read it; this is considered the massive forerunner of all the musicals and cable shows and reimaginings of the tale that have come since. If you're looking for the romances (and Lancelot's public shaming), try Chretian de Troyes's Arthurian Romances.

3. My Ántonia, by Willa Cather (1918)

"Prairie books" have never been a particular favorite of mine, so the thought of reading and enjoying Cather's tale of the lovely, free-spirited Tony and friends in Black Hawk, Nebraska, never occurred to me. Enter my American Lit teacher junior year, who called me crazy and told me I'd be graded on it. Worked like a charm. My Antonia (pronounced Ann-toh-nee-ah, not An-tone-eeya) is one of Cather's Prairie trilogy in which the narrator Jim actually makes farm life interesting. Go figure.

4. Paradise, by Toni Morrison (1997)

The story of a town, Ruby, Oklahoma, a convent, and a group of women whose personal memories and experiences tell about a great struggle. It starts with one of Morrison's most famous lines - "They shoot the white girl first" - and opens with a massacre scene that sets the soul-crunching, heart-wrenching, emotionally-soggy novel rolling. I loved Beloved when I read it in high school, and after Paradise I went on to read all of Morrison's books because nobody since James Joyce could handle anti-punctuation stream-of-consciousness quite like she can. I re-read it whenever I feel like I need another hole ripped open in my heart.

5. American Splendor, by Harvey Pekar (1976-2008)
Gosh I love Harvey Pekar, that lovably sullen comix jerk! An anthology of his comic strips (for lack of a better word) was presented to me in a class on memoirs; they tell the story of an average man living an average life in Ohio, complete with his quirky girlfriend and his mid-life crises. Each installment is written by Pekar, about Pekar, but is illustrated by a different artist in order to capture the theme/emotion/point. I don't think there are too man comics I could write a twenty-nine page thesis on, but Pekar gives enough that I was able to do it for him.

6. Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett (~1953)

The play in which nothing happens...twice. The height of absurdism. Interpret from it what you wish.

 7. Prufrock and Other Observations, by T.S. Eliot (1920)
Never have I loved a poet with such fervor as I love T.S. Eliot. I'm not a big poetry person, usually because my take on the works have never been my professors' takes on them, resulting in poor grades or the insistence that I explain myself better. The best thing about Eliot, in my opinion, is that there is no need for explanations; it's all dark and dreary and romantic, like London under fog. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is my favorite (though "Hollow Men" is a close, close second) and it gives us such oft-quoted lines as "...have known evenings, mornings, afternoons, / I have measured my life out in coffee spoons," and "Do I dare disturb the universe?" Read the title poem from this collection here.

Oh, Hello | An Introduction

When I was a freshman in college, I once took a class taught by one Dr. Franks, a British literature professor who thought himself, in no uncertain terms, to be the Absolute Greatest Living Being In the History Of All Creation And Then Some. Generally speaking, I like this sort of person, their lofty self-images notwithstanding. They are so enveloped by the world of academia, so often literally and figuratively raised on platforms above the minds they are to shape, that I cannot help but find some vein of reverent respect for them, and search desperately in their seemingly indisputable assertions for some small hint of how they managed to so far remove themselves from the average thinker. I, still very new to higher education at the time, simply assumed that a healthy dose of condescension naturally came with the doctoral territory, and if Dr. Franks had as much intellectual prowess in his head as he claimed, I was more than willing to give him the chance to share it with a lowly undergrad like myself. 

This professor in particular would stand in front of our small, cramped classroom every Monday and Wednesday at nine, thundering and flailing and stomping his feet to the tune of his lectures, drawing from some of my favorite works of literature bombastic conclusions that, he reminded us, certainly could not be discovered by ourselves alone. He was eccentric, unapologetic, and sometimes alarmingly cruel. For a few weeks, I sat in the back corner of the room - my usual seat, all through school - mesmerized by Dr. Franks, his apparent devotion to the literature with which he worked, and his all-consuming, indisputable, never-to-be-questioned status as the smartest man in the room. It was, at the time, very easy to believe him.

Sometime before mid-semester, Dr. Franks gave us an assignment based on To the Lighthouse, a novel I had read and loved years earlier which still held great literary and emotional value to me. I was excited to hear what the self-possessed Absolute Greatest Living Being In the History Of All Time And Then Some had to say about the book. The night before he was set to begin his lecture on it, I stayed up all night re-reading the pages I knew well (because even for subjects I love, I am a terrible procrastinator and do everything last minute), highlighting and underlining and making notes in the margins. After a while, the thoughts of what Dr. Franks would say about it in our upcoming class slipped away, and it was as it should be: just me and the story and Virginia Woolfe's beautiful words and the dark, clear, quiet night through which no one disturbed me. I genuinely laughed, honestly cried, and felt the weight of worlds and hearts beyond my own suspended on the simple, elegantly rendered novel that seemed to mean more to me with each passing page.

As far as reading experiences go, I still remember it as one of my best.

By the time our nine a.m. class came around, I was bleary-eyed but deliriously content, ready to spring up from my seat in the back corner of the room with the same sort of overwhelming feeling and driving love for the book that had captivated me the night before. I knew enough to keep the personal parts out of it -- neither Dr. Franks nor my equally bleary-eyed classmates would care that To the Lighthouse had been a book that my aunt bought for me once before she died, one that I had spent a summer with her and my family reading it in the sun -- but I found that the more I considered what I would say in the class discussion, the more I realized it was nearly impossible to refrain from injecting my analysis and discussion with my very personal response to the text. Such is human nature, I think, and such is the value of literature.

When Dr. Franks at last posed a question to the class that I, still lingering in my post-book glow, felt I could sufficiently answer, I leapt at the chance to do so. Now, years later, I don't remember exactly what I said, or what the question demanded, but I do know that it pertained to the part in the novel in which the young Lily Briscoe, an aspiring painter, despairingly considers her latest work a failure: 

"She could have done it differently of course; 

the color could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised,

...but then, she did not see it like that.

She saw the color burning on a framework of steel; 

the light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral." 

 
I admit I hadn't realized how much of my notes, reflections, and considerations of the work began more often with "I feel..." and "I believe..." than with the far more scholarly, "The text suggests..." or "As supported by chapter X, line xx...". I knew then, as I know now, that from an academic standpoint, nothing matters so much as what the text says, and what is expressly printed on the page. Had Dr. Franks accepted my answer with just that caution, or redirected my feelings toward facts with even the most pedantic, condescending hand, I would certainly have forgiven him. Maybe I would have even appreciated him, for showing me the difference.

But that is not what happened. Instead, Dr. Franks, a teacher I had already known to be cruel at times and always leaning toward elitism, turned to the other students in the class, pointed his finger at my back corner, and said, "That, friends, is exactly the wrong way to read a book." 

I remember I wasn't embarrassed until later, though I think now it had been his main intention to embarrass me in that moment, not teach me. He curled his lip at me, smirked at my silliness, and spent the remainder of the class snidely referring to my answer in tones of great amusement. It was laughable to him that I had felt something instead of inferring it; it made him happy to tear apart my response and drag it through the proverbial mud of his far superior academic prowess. I know that because he told me so, four years later, just before I graduated with honors from the lit program, and still in my head I heard loudest his words from that day, clear and haughty, when he told our class that he was afraid people like me would "always give stupid answers like that."

It was the last time I answered a question in Dr. Franks class. In fact, it was the last time I said a single word in front of him, in front of his most prized students, in front of his colleagues for a long time. I would linger in my back corner seat, thinking how maybe this wasn't for me, maybe I didn't know how to read critically or analyze literature, maybe the parts that really mattered to me weren't really all that important after all.

In truth, it took far longer than it should have for me to recover from that odd experience with Dr. Franks, but I am not afraid to say that while it was a teacher who tore me down, it was a host of other teachers who built me back up again. Slowly but triumphantly, I figured out that there really is no difference between reading like a Book Lover and reading like a Student, as long as you love it enough to learn, and you have learned enough to love it.

from the incomparable The Phantom Tollbooth

Looking back, I do owe Dr. Franks for one thing -- he forced me to develop a philosophy, a standard by which I read all books now, and by which I enjoy them. While I take pride in my academic foundations, I, like Lily Briscoe, do not want to boil down my perceptions of art so far that I miss the burning color and vibrant light that it holds. What good is knowing the analytical cues and scholarly assertions of a text if the words and characters and stories hold no personal meaning? What good is any work of literature to me if it does not, in some way, make me feel? Reading critically does not mean reading heartlessly; if it did, I would not read at all.

Now, as I start this blog, I am far enough removed from my days as a quiet undergrad in the back of the classroom to know that my silence following Dr. Franks's To the Lighthouse lecture served only to limit my own participation in the wide realm of literary discourse, and my own development as a reader. I have come to celebrate anyone who finds themselves so moved and so touched that the regulations of people who consider themselves The Absolute Greatest Living Being In The History Of Creation And Then Some play no part. When there are no grades on the line, the only thing that matters is what you personally draw from the words in front of you. The moment you sit back from it and think on how it touched you is analysis enough.