Richard Jeffrey Newman's Miscellany

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #138

I drafted a pitch letter today for a book of translations from a language I don’t read or speak. The experienced translator (but not in poetry) I’ve been working with thinks I should give myself equal billing as a translator, not a co-translator. I am torn.

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #137

Sometimes it’s better if what is meant to be hidden from sight stays there.

Given the size of my classes and how much writing I have to ask them to do, I always think when I grade of a phrase from the old TV show M*A*S*H: meatball surgery. Most of the time that’s what grading under these conditions feels like: meatball teaching.

I’m teaching a full load for the first time in a very long time and I’m reminded how inhumane it is, for students and teachers, to pack college writing classes well beyond an instructor’s ability to learn each student’s name and give their work the attention it really deserves.

I did not sleep well and I have a very long day today.

That unsettled feeling you carry around when the poem you’re working, or the essay or the story, has taken you into emotionally difficult territory and not only is the language not right: you know something about it rings false, but you can’t name that yet either.

This quote from Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings made me laugh: “The pleasures of Paradise are withheld from the poor in spirit and all ascetics, because they would not understand them.”

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #136

• A student who wants to teach ESL;
• A student who informed the class she is homeless;
• A student who told me they use they/them pronouns and wanted me to know they are outspoken because they are tired of keeping it all in like they had to do in high school;
• A student who wants to write a memoir about the abusive Muslim boarding school for girls–more like a finishing school–she was forced to attend and who is trying to figure out how not to disavow the term feminist;
• A student who was honest enough with himself to figure out that he was asking me how seriously I take grammar when I grade because he was really trying to talk me out of taking it seriously when I grade his papers;
• A student who spent 20 minutes talking me through the story he wants to write about a member of a new Dungeons & Dragons race called the Reborn;
• A student who wants to write “realistic fiction,” but seems more interested in fantasy and romance;
• A student who shook my hand and thanked me for the emphasis I put on professionalism as the base line expectation for how I want my students to handle the requirements of the syllabus;
• A student who wants to be a professional rapper, who shyly asked how to spell the names of musicians he hadn’t heard of when I asked the class what kind of music they listened to. These are the ones I remember: Jim Croce; Simon & Garfunkel; Yes; Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Off to my second day of teaching. The first time I’m teaching a full load (plus one additional class) in six years at least. Should be interesting. It’ll be nice to be just a teacher and not also in a leadership role.

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #135

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #134

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #133

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #132

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #131

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #130

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #129

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Bookshelf Juxtapositions #128

Sometimes, watching mindless TV to keep from thinking just doesn’t work.

Trying to figure out how to be, in my friend Elizabeth’s words, the loyal opposition when I don’t feel particularly loyal to the people I need to oppose.

“Oppressive language does more than represent violence, it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge, it limits knowledge.”

—Toni Morrison, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature”

Bookshelf Juxtapositions #127