A few stray thoughts upon Spring's sudden appearing

Unbelievably, April is almost upon us. I find myself with mixed feelings at this time of the year. On the one hand just stepping out of my apartment most mornings is delightful; the air is warm the trees are blooming, bulbs are sprouting and I feel I could skip all the way to the bus stop. It is the time to wear dresses and skirts again and to begin eyeing sandals and flip-flops collecting dust at the back of the closet.  However, this is also the time of year that paper deadlines begin to loom and the lethargic winter attitude begins to catch up with you as the mound of work between you and summer vacation seems at times insurmountable.

How should this dilemma be handled? Denial and procrastination of course! Flowers only bloom once every spring, after all, and those papers will always be there waiting for you to write them ;-)

I'm currently working on mixing responsibility and recreation into a magical elixir that once perfected I will copyright and mass produce, making a fortune that will significantly diminish my own need to be responsible. To that end I've taken several opportunities to smell the spring flowering flora: Jake and I have visited Brookside Gardens in Silver Spring and the Cherry Blossom (pre) festival in DC. Additionally Heather and I spent a lovely afternoon at the US Botanic Gardens enjoying their impressive Orchid collection. Here's a smattering of pictures:

A beautiful day to be downtown enjoying the cherry blossoms!

At Brookside gardens the vibrancy of the early spring flowers was noteworthy.

This past weekend when the weather was not as cooperative, Jake and I made a trip to the air and space Smithsonian museum where I learned how Jet engines work and how planes land on air craft carriers among other mentally stimulating tidbits.

Eventually I will have to drag my eyes away from the windows and my mind out of the flower beds to finish off my second semester of grad school. I'm doing some work with a couple John Donne poems for my Linguistics and Literary Criticism classes. I'm having a more difficult time picking a project for my Restoration Drama class, but I'm making that a priority for this week.

I'd like to end this post with a book recommendation. The Year of the Hare, by Arto Paasilinna is a profound yet lighthearted novel about a journalist living a fast paced, 20th century life who hits a hare with his car, is overcome with concern for the hare, patches him up and takes off on a series of adventures across Finland while trying to figure out what is really important in life. I picked this book up over Christmas vacation upon a recommendation from Jennifer at Literary Life Bookstore in Grand Rapids, and found it to be extremely enjoyable. Although I read it in winter, I think it has a spring-like air and has come to mind several times since the weather turned. So if you're looking for a delightful read that is a bit off the beaten path, I highly recommend this book.

Visitors and Poets

This morning, blinking sleep from my eyes at 6:30am, I said goodbye to my mom and sister who had come for a long weekend visit. Now all that remains of their time here is an air mattress waiting to be deflated and a handful of extra groceries (including four jars of peanut butter). I enjoyed having them to visit; it gave me an excuse to do some sightseeing. I find that despite my proximity to our nation's capitol, I don't take advantage of its many cultural and intellectual offerings as often as I should. With them I visited the Holocaust museum--a sobering, but excellent exhibit-- and revisited the Natural History museum.

Here's some pictures from their visit:

Mom and Loren got a chance to meet Jake

Riding the Metro

Mom likes it that there is a Calder statue in DC like there is in Grand Rapids, although she says this one looks like Shelob

Duemler girls together

Now the apartment is once again quiet; after three weekends of visitors in a row, the silence is almost unsettling. Realizing I hadn't updated my blog in a while, I spent some time looking over my journal entries since my last post and over some of my reflections on the beginning of a new year. As we are making our way into March, I'm realizing how much has happened in a year. A year ago at this time I was hearing back from grad schools and trying to decide where to spend the next few years of my life. A lot has happened since then and I've gone through some large changes; most of which I'm very happy with. I can say with confidence that God has been very very good to me.

One extra curricular book I've read this year is  Red Bird, a collection of poems by Mary Oliver. I found it very delightful, but also haunting. Oliver deftly interweaves an awareness of death and the joy of life  through the lens of the natural world which remains for me a powerful system of images. It reminds me of the walks I would take when younger through the woods behind my parents' house: pleased as I was just to be alive for a moment in that rapidly eroding and suburbanly tamed, small, sliver of nature, it was here that the peaceful melancholy that marks my memories of childhood most clearly overtook me. It was a place for both solitude and communion with God and his world. Through Oliver's poems I recapture as an adult most completely that bit of who I am:

Red Bird Explains Himself

"Yes, I was the brilliance floating over the snow
and I was the song in the sumer leaves, but this was
only the first trick
I had hold of among my other mythologies,
for I also knew obedience: bringing sticks to the nest,
food to the young, kisses to my bride

But don't stop there, stay with me: listen

If I was the song that entered your heart
then I was the music of your heart, that you wanted and needed,
and thus wilderness bloomed there, with all its
followers: gardeners, lovers, people who weep
for the death of rivers.

And this was my true task, to be the
music of the body. Do you understand? for truly the body needs
a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work,
the soul has need of a body,
and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable
beauty of heaven
where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes,
and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart."

Stray Thoughts

I should be writing a response for my class tomorrow right now. I should be interacting with readings on how the University has forced students to appropriate an unfamiliar language and discussed their failure to do so in quantitatively diagnostic terms. Instead I'm listening to the Eagles and Ingrid Michaelson and thinking about how a lady's umbrella yesterday flicked up neatly and gracefully, like an extension of her arm as she stepped off the bus and into the torrential downpour.

Creative Break

Pictures!

Marie and I at dinner Friday night.

The Studio Theatre

Marie's favorite place in DC so far: Frozen Yo, where you can find almost any possible flavor of frozen soft serve yogurt.

Fall is coming! (or it might already be here)

The building in which I work, O'Boyle Hall

Marist Hall, the building that is supposed to be my home base since it houses the English department and graduate student offices, but alas, it is currently undergoing structural repairs due to earthquake damage.

Not a bad looking campus :-)

Of learning and living

Freshman student: "So, I really need help with grammar. Can we work on that during this session?"
Me: "Sure" (thinking to myself "I can teach grammar, parts of speech and sentence type; no problem") "what do you have questions about?"
Freshman: "I really just don't get the predicate stuff; direct and indirect objects, subject complements, and transitive verbs."
Me: "ok...let's see" (thinking to myself, "dang, how much have I forgotten since eighth grade? I don't even remember what those are.") "Let's see what your grammar text book has to say about those things! It can be tricky, but I bet if we work through the book it will all become clear." (thinking to myself "I hope")

Another day in the life of a writing center consultant. I'm currently on a mission to make the writing center a more welcoming environment. The people in the center are very nice, but the wall hangings currently are large barnes & noble-esque framed posters of Virginia Woolf and Nathaniel Hawthorne (not the two most cheery literary figures between a biography that ends in suicide and a novel about adultery and hypocrisy). So, every week I put a new inspiring quote about writing on our otherwise unused chalkboard and I've started bringing in cookies. I really want some lighthearted decorations to sprinkle around the room, but that might come later when (and if) I have money to spend on such things.

Classes are going very well, and I feel like I've finally hit my learning groove in most of the classes. The heavy theological reading is pretty much over for my class on Religion and Literature in Early Modern England (there is only so much Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Moore, William Tyndale, Philip Melancthon, Erasamus, Martin Luther, and John Calvin a girl can handle) and we're headed towards poetry. I'm also reading a book for that class of my choosing for which I have to write a book review by next Tuesday called The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama, and it discusses the ways in which theatre by using religious props on stage both confirmed and undermined the Protestant desire to move away from a material faith towards an inward immaterial faith. It combines my interest in Drama, props and religion and I'm enjoying it a lot.

My pedagogy class continues to be eye opening, mostly because half of my classmates are currently teaching English 101, and I feel like I'm learning a lot from their shared experiences, frustrations and successes. My intro to the profession of letters class is also interesting. Last week we went on a field trip to the University of Maryland to visit their archives where I got to look at and touch the marriage certificate of T.S. Eliot to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Christmas card he wrote to a friend, an early type-written with revision notes of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and a prescription William Carlos Williams had written. Most of us were in book nerd heaven. I also have an assignment for that class that will take me down to the Library of Congress in the upcoming weeks to look at 19th century British periodicals. I got my reading card for the library and have had a tour of their reading room, and it brought back lovely memories of doing work in the Radcliffe Camera at Oxford.

In other news, my roommate's sister who lives in Baltimore just had a baby boy, and Hannah is very happy. A week before she went into labor, Abby had Hannah and I over to make applesauce which was very much fun. Other non-school related activities have included a Friday night spent with Marie, reducing my bank account at H&M--my small wardrobe has grown disturbingly since moving to DC...have I become a clothing accumulator? I hope not!

Additionally, the weather in DC has taken a turn for the pleasant with cool sunny days after a mad string of humid rainy ones.

I think I'll wrap it up for now. Photo post to come!

Narrative

Story. Yesterday a student came into the writing center with an assignment. Hemingway claimed that the phrase "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" could be read as his autobiography. This student's teacher wanted him to identify what made that phrase a story and what could that story mean. I asked him what he thought made that phrase a story. He looked at me, smiled apologetically and said, "I'm sorry, Ma'am, I don't actually think its a story, I'm just writing that it is for the assignment." I hope the student left yesterday with a changed mind as well as a changed paper.

Hemingway's story, the terse collection of words and punctuation, imposes on the reader the lens through which he's asking us to look at him. Most of us go through life making stories out of experience; we interpret interactions, actions, and inaction narratively. Chronology, connections, and climax slip into our thoughts and spill out of our mouths often without us consciously aware of the verbal construction at work. As I find myself looking back and trying to craft my experiences into a mildly entertaining narrative, I'm more aware than usual of the potential for artificiality.

Story. I ventured inside the library on Monday. My religion and literature in Early Modern England had me comparing two different early english translations of the Bible. Our instructor stood in front of class and said, "now, I want you to realize what is at stake in the work of translation; you're literary scholars, this is what you do best. Get to the library and actually look at the Bibles we have there. Find a passage that is different between translations. Try to use some of the early ones, the Douay-Rheims, Geneva or Tyndale translations would be best. I guess if you have to use the Authorized King James Version, that's fine."

So there I was, in the library as ordered; I'd dutifully looked up the Douay-Rheims Bible, and I had the call number. I knew I was on the right floor because I was knee deep in biblical commentaries and concordances, but I could not find this book. So after walking up and down the three flights of stairs to double check that I had the right number, checking and double checking the library map and guide, I did what any young bewildered student might do; I asked a librarian for help. What did I get? A very nice albeit condescending tour of the third floor of the library, complete with a lesson on how to read call numbers (that stung my pride a bit...after all, I did know how to read call-numbers) and a lecture on the purpose of the reference section--something I was also aware of. All of which was spoken in a thick eastern european accent. What did I learn? The library stacks are half floors. So I needed to go up a half flight of stairs to 3a in order to find my book. All I can say is, that definitely wasn't on the map.

Story. The Douay-Rheims Bible is the Catholic translation of the Vulgate into English. It has undergone several revisions since the sixteenth century, but my understanding is that it remains heavily dependent on the Latin. The Tyndale and Geneva Bibles were early protestant translations that attempted to return to the Greek and Hebrew roots of scripture to translate. An early disagreement between Tyndale and Thomas Moore was Tyndale's choice to translate "ecclesia" as "congregation" rather than "church". Tyndale argued that people needed to know ecclesia included the laity as well as the leaders, and that it referred to a body of believers rather than an institution. However, later protestant translations returned to "church" as the translation of ecclesia. Our instructor used this example to illustrate the difficulty of translation when dealing with divinely inspired literature. He argued the reformers insisted optimistically that the ultimate meaning of the text could be understood and agreed upon by all true believers. However, if the meaning of language is created by the communities that use it, then differences in communities will ultimately create difference in interpretation. Interesting stuff, eh?

Story. Due tomorrow: writing assignment, unwritten.

Goodnight!