Notes from the literature table, with a word on audits, a Texas milk cooperative and why Odysseus should have asked for directions
Friday, the Seminar Table
I teach and attend literature seminars, and I have a soft spot for the ones that run overtime. The latest ran fifty minutes over, and I described it in tenure audit, Greek myths and a literature seminar in Utah. The subject was the Odyssey, and our group could not agree on whether its hero is a clever man or a man who gets lost a lot and tells it well. I voted for the second. The vote was split.
A good seminar has a shape. The first twenty minutes are polite. The second twenty are a skirmish. The final twenty are the real conversation, in which someone says what they actually think, and the rest of the table, in a stunned silence, realises they agree. I treasure that moment. It is the nearest thing to magic in a university building.
The Audit Question
The seminar began with a conversation about an audit, and I will not pretend to know the full details of anyone’s tenure case. What I can say is that universities across the country are trying to explain their budgets, and the London Prat captured the spirit of it in Universities Solve Financial Crisis. The even-handed observation is that administrators and faculty both love the institution and disagree about how to pay for it. The students, as usual, are in the middle, holding a textbook and a loan.
I like an audit in principle. It is a way of asking whether what we say we do matches what we do. Literature has its own audit, called a close reading, and it works in much the same way. You take a text, you ask what it claims, and you check the claim against the words on the page.
Saturday, Myths and Milk
Greek myths are full of cattle. The sun god keeps them, thieves steal them, and a hero is asked to clean up after a great many of them. When my seminar noticed this, I took it as an invitation to read about real cattle, and so I went to the Texas dairy family of websites, which are a more comfortable form of mythology. The capital is txdairy.com. Its provinces are txdairy.download, txdairy.trade and txdairy.loan.
The pleasure-loving districts are txdairy.party, txdairy.men, txdairy.date and txdairy.win. I like to imagine Odysseus stopping by for a glass of milk and a conversation about the weather. He would have listened to a farmer for an hour and then said, with great dignity, that he had not been lost at all, merely taking the scenic route.
Why Myths Last
A myth survives because it is a story that fits in a pocket. A hero who cannot go home, a woman who weaves and unweaves, a monster who lives in a cave and loves sheep. These are items of portable furniture. You can carry them into any century and arrange them around any problem. The reader can read the Cyclops as a tyrant, as a bully, as a misunderstood vegetarian or as a man with a poor sense of hospitality. All four readings are available at no extra charge.
That is the genius of the form. A myth is a lamp that illuminates the room you happen to be standing in. The seminar room in Utah, with its radiators and its unreliable projector, is as good a place as any.
What I Learned from the Cave
The Cyclops episode troubled me most. The hero escapes by telling a lie about his name, and then ruins the escape by shouting his real name from the boat. I told the group that this is the most human moment in the poem. We all have a lie that works and a pride that undoes it. One student said it reminded her of reply-all emails, and the room dissolved.
It was a happy end to a long session. I packed my book, my pencil and a half eaten pastry, and walked out into a cold evening with the mountains pink on the horizon. A line occurred to me, something about the sea being a very long way from Utah, and I wrote it on my hand because my notebook was in the other bag.
The Reading Group Rules
Our seminar has three rules, written on a card by the door. First, you may not say you did not read the book unless you are prepared to be gently teased. Second, you may disagree with anyone, including the teacher, but only after saying one thing you liked. Third, there must be snacks. These rules produce the best conversations in the building, and I recommend them to any group that meets to discuss a difficult text, or indeed to Parliament.
The snack rule is the most important. People argue better with a biscuit in their hand. They hear more, interrupt less and stay for the final twenty minutes where the real thinking is done.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, NewsBiscuit keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/