no place like...

After reading Wallace Stegner's Wolf Willow and Ivan Doig's This House of Sky, both memoirs of rural life, I am struck by how central the agonies of leaving are to each book, and to others like them. The aching desire to be done with a place, the habits, memories, and compulsions that draw one back. Rural America is many things to contemporary culture--nostalgic heartland, political touchstone, cultural wasteland--but one thing it isn't is heavily populated. Leaving so dominates the narrative of small-town life that it's easy to forget such places were once the stuff of sod-busting, nation-building dreams.

It isn't so much the lack of consumer niceties, like espresso or malls, but that rural life is hard, physically and often socially. The lonely work of making a living off the land, often in harsh or isolated environments, knits communities together in ways that are both boon and burden to their members.

Or perhaps it's just a function of genre, that truth that, with time, we're all haunted by the past, by the things that shaped us before we could comprehend them. Geography only reinforces temporal distance, and so we return, asking memory and place to yield time's answers.

new year's resolutions

Last summer's move--and combining libraries with Kendall--occasioned a wholesale re-evaluation of my book collection. I winced in self-recognition, then, when I read this article in which readers reflect on which books to keep and which to send along. Although Kendall and I did cull our respective collections, we somehow still ended up in Washington with multiple editions of things like Doña Bárbara and Amadís de Gaula. We made every effort to keep only Really Useful Books or Really Good Books, but the biggest stumbling block came when it was time for the books to leave the house. Like dog lovers earnestly finding new families for a litter of puppies, we shepharded our discarded books to local bookstores and listed them for sale on the internet. A few trickle out from time to time, but because the market for medieval Spanish literature and literary criticism in Portuguese isn't strong, many of the boxes of books still lurk forlornly around the house, unwanted, neglected, cursed because they're in the way. But I have faith that they could be useful to someone, somewhere, and so they sit, mocking me every time I push the "add to shopping cart" button on Amazon.

um, señora….?

I like my students, I honestly do. What I do not like, however, is the feeling that comes over me when I am slogging through about 70 student essays. I begin with good intentions, reading each one carefully, thinking about the syntax and paragraph structure and language use, but each essay completed feels like the tiniest drop in the biggest bucket. I'm soon peevish, agitated; my back hurts, I can't find a comfortable position for my feet. I leaf through the remaining essays, counting and re-counting those left to grade. Students' errors begin to feel like a personal affront. Are they confusing the preterit and the imperfect on purpose? Are they not proofreading because they want me to suffer? With each carelessly translated phrase or misuse of ser and estar, I'm less and less certain that I'm teaching them anything at all.

It comes down to too much togetherness, I think. Even more than the usual intimacy of reading, correcting student essays draws the reader into the mind of the writer. As language instructors, we make sense of direct translations of idiomatic phrases and decipher errors common to language learners. Did the student truncate that sentence for stylistic reasons, or was it a grammar error? What to make of the paragraph that breaks off mid-sentence? And why do some students not grasp the concept of audience, failing to edit certain highly personal details? All of this means that students very much inhabit the mind of the grader, and grading essays can seem all-consuming. Despite the fact that student writing involves an exchange of ideas not unlike conversations that would be productive under other circumstances, such as in class or during office hours, grading that writing comes to feel like an imposition when it takes over the non-business hours of evenings and weekends.

Now that my grading is wrapped up for the term, however, I'm very happy to be back to liking my students again. From a respectful distance.