Yesterday, I attended a Seminar for Excellence in Teaching on technology and learning, particularly the use of smart phones. The presenter concluded with the following quotation, which I thought was especially suitable for the topic:

I am indeed a king, because I know how to rule myself. -Pietro Aretino

Last week, when I read The Canterbury Tales with my students, I told them to look for other poems or stories that begin in April. This week, when I reviewed Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, I realized that the idealists who embark on an adventure at Blithedale Farm do so during an April blizzard.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…

From The Blithedale Romance:

[O]n an April afternoon, but with the fitful gusts of a wintry snow-storm roaring in the chimney […] Around such chill mockery of a fire, some few of us might sit on the withered leaves, spreading out each a palm towards the imaginary warmth, and talk over our exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew.

I’ve started reading Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and I’m drawn to these passages about the task of interpreting the past and telling a story.

And if there’s anything worse than self-questioning coming too early in life, it’s self-questioning coming too late. (68)

The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that’s why you feel awful later–you’ve relieved yourself, and if it is truly tragic and awful, it’s not better, it’s worse–the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse. (82)

But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy–that is every man’s tragedy. (86)

Since I like to keep up with what influential women are saying, I enjoyed reading Amy Poehler’s Yes Please over Christmas break. I’ve included a few passages that I found interesting or funny.

A word about apologizing: It’s hard to do it without digging yourself in deeper. (71)

People don’t want to hear about the fifteen years of waiting tables and doing small shows with your friends until one of them gets a little more famous and they convince people to hire you and then you get paid and you work hard and spend time getting better and making more connections and friends. (219)

I find that, in general, the amount of sharing men do with each other in one year is about the same as what I share with my female friends while we wait for our cars at the valet. (233-34)

Today, as I get ready for the semester to begin on Monday, I’m thinking about two quotations I include in my syllabus.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!–When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library. -Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

‘Tis the good reader that make the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today I read Momaday’s folklore about the Kiowas in preparation to teach it in an honors colloquium in January. Below are a few passages I appreciate for their understatement.

War was their sacred business, and they were among the finest horsemen the world has ever seen.

A word has power in and of itself.

Long ago there were bad times.

I just finished reading Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), which interested me because I focus my American literature survey course on defintions of freedom. I’ve included two passages about this topic, one from a mother of teenagers and the other from one of the teenagers himself.

By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free. (192)

Almost everybody in his dorm communicated with their parents daily, if not hourly, and although this did make him feel unexpectedly grateful to his own parents, who had been far cooler and more respectful of his wishes than he’d been able to appreciate as long as he lived next door to them, it also touched off something like a panic. He’d asked for his freedom, they’d granted it, and he couldn’t go back now. (257)

This semester, I enjoyed using Mallory Ortberg’s Texts from Jane Eyre in my British Literature course. Below is my favorite exchange between Jane and Mr. Rochester.

Rochester:

I KNEW IT

DID YOU LEAVE BECAUSE OF MY ATTIC WIFE

IS THAT WHAT THIS IS ABOUT

Jane:

yes

Absolutely

I’ve include a couple entries from my students’ commonplace books this semester that made me laugh.

I heard Jay Parini lecture earlier this semester, which got me interested in his work. I like his gloss on Thoreau in his Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America (2008):

Viewed in a certain light, Thoreau can seem like a spoiled child, someone given every opportunity in life who still complains about his situation. But in the larger sense he was right: One can be “enslaved” by values and social circumstances. (111)