"Memory pulls us forward"

Today, feeling warm and sticky, and wishing I hadn't worn sweater tights I walked the long pilgrimage up to O'Boyle hall to fulfill my last writing center obligation of this school year. I had turned in all my final term papers yesterday and had felt giddy and lighthearted upon their completion.

Handing in final papers always feels like it should be a momentous moment; crowds should line the hallways and stairwells as I walk solemnly towards my professors' offices, twenty pages worth of intellectual toil, frustration, spatters of brilliance and blood grasped lightly so as not to wrinkle the title page with a sweaty palm. Come, now, admire this clever title, the artful intro, the dancing prose, the thought-provoking conclusion, and the meticulously assembled bibliography. At the very least a professor should be waiting with an admiring nod that acknowledges my timely completion of the task; perhaps a pat on the back; a quick thoughtful glance at the thesis; an exclamation of eagerness. Such are the fantasies of an English grad student.

Reality is hearing my sleep-deprived stumbling gait echo in an empty hall while I find what appears to be my professor's office locked and I spend a moment or two debating whether wedging it under the door or putting it in a clear plastic box attached to the door is the more likely successful method for delivering the paper into the professor's hand--a paper whose merits are questionable given its hasty and anxiety driven composition. Such are the end-of-semester glorious triumphs of an English grad student.

Although I felt that odd mixture of relief and letdown once the papers were in, it didn't really strike me that I was finished with my first year of grad school until today as I collected the bits of me that had become scattered around the writing center.  Thanks largely to Heather's efforts, the writing center had been appropriately seasonally decorated all semester. As one final gesture I gave our giant picture of Nathaniel Hawthorne a pair paper cut-out sunglasses, and scattered paper cut-out flowers in Virginia Woolf's hair. Earlier this week Heather had put up word balloons for them: Nathaniel: "Virginia, I've rented a house with seven gables for the summer. Would you like to join me?" Virginia: "Thanks, Nate, but I'm headed to the lighthouse for my break." Such little self-indulgent smiles along tea and cookies and paper cut-outs have successfully made the writing center more pleasant in my opinion--even if only for the consultants.

After I finished my shift and made my way back towards the metro--again wishing away the scratchy tights--I was struck by how silently the time has slipped by; the year passed neither quickly nor slowly, but stealthily.

I met two fellow grad students in Silver Spring for a book discussion after my shift was over. It was as Susanna remarked, "the first official act of summer." The three of us had read Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson; Susanna for a class, Heather upon Susanna's suggestion, and me because the book had been a gift from my mother. Although we all found the plot troubling to various degrees and spent time sifting through the implications of some of its darker themes, we each agreed that the writing itself was exquisite--the narrative voice so concrete in its attention to the details of the world of the narrator, so deft in maneuvering from reflection to action, so subtle in developing consciousnesses, and so timely in revealing plot elements that we each found ourselves ending our discussion in admiration. I highly recommend this book, although, be warned it is not a pick-me-up.

As I was thinking about it after our discussion I found it a fitting book to be reading at the end of a semester. The book returns to and dwells upon transience; something that seems to confront me often in my paper cut-out life. Torn now between the sense of place I remember as home and the sense of place I'm creating as home, I'm left feeling "turned out of house" as Ruthie remarks in Housekeeping. 

I'm going to end this post with a passage from the book I found especially beautiful and poignant:

"Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Life would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water--peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries." (Robinson, Housekeeping, Chapter 8, p. 152, 153)

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!