Week of Lists Day 2: Why I hated elementary school

I remember really hating elementary school. I disliked pre-maternelle, they were always trying to tell me what to do -- for instance one time I tried to paint a rooster and they told me the assignment was to paint a christmas tree and that I had to do the assignment, with the result that somewhere in my parents' basement there is a green roster with a trunk instead of feet. I thought they were idiots - who cares if I draw a christmas tree or a rooster? I disliked maternelle, too, which was at the same school as my elementary, Ecole Nouvelle Querbes. But I hated grades one through five.
1) The other kids scared me. They were intimidating and it seemed like you could always say the wrong things.
2) Though I really liked Yves, my grade one teacher, he went on burnout leave and never came back, so for grades two and three we had a series of medium-term subs, none of whose names I remember. Is that weird, that I don't remember their names? They were there for months, and there were probably only three of them in total. I characterized them as temporary, though, and didn't think much of them. This is a guess.
3) I had no friends. I was conscious of this and as a fact about myself I think it bugged me. I don't think I thought enough about the reality of these things to consider what having a friend in class would have meant, so I can't say that the lack of friendship was in itself actively upsetting, but the fact of it disturbed me. I did have one friend from when I was four, Edith, who was at Querbes, and she was tough and got along well with the other kids, bu she was in another group and I didn't see her much. In grade 5 I became somewhat friendly with a girl called Sarah Pépin, but she couldn't invite me to her birthday party because her best friend Miriame said she wouldn't go if I did (I had caught Miriame cheating at a board game a year earlier, perhaps these were related?) As consolation, Sarah invited me to her grandparents' cottage for the weekend.
4) In everyone else's defence, I definitely was a weird kid. I didn't brush my hair for a year because it hurt too much to brush it once a week. I wore jogging pants to school (not always). In grade 5 there was a girl called Daphné who announced one lunchtime she would be organizing a fun project for a group of kids, which turned out to buy a shopping trip to get me some more acceptable clothing. Daphné asked how much money I could get from my parents and I offered a guess of $20.00, at which point she said forget it and went back to ignoring me. I was bothered by all this. For one thing I had this feeling maybe the whole thing was a ruse to steal from me. From what I can remember, which isn't much, I didn't care enough about clothes to even feel insulted on that account.
5) I didn't understand anything very well. I understood books, though, but somehow couldn't really translate their narratives into what real life was about. The world was a source of frustration all the time. The 4-5-6 teacher -- a fairly unpleasant person named Ruth -- was a mystery, my own feelings were a mystery, communication with other kids, clearly, a mystery. What they did when they left school, what their lives were like, was quite a preoccupying and befuddling mystery.
6) I believe I craved some kind of order or purpose. The alternative-school model works well for some kids, maybe it's better for happier children? Or ... I don't know. I am not a very conventional person, and I wasn't conventional then, and maybe would have hated rows of desks facing a preachy adult just as much or more. I remember feeling quite stupid, and perhaps discovering that I was smart would have made me happier? I used to think having grades or report cards in elementary school might have led me to seeing that at least in some ways I was smart.  I was a very unhappy kid. But I loved reading and there were other things I also loved -- I loved the ocean, when we went to it one summer for a few days.

A week of lists

While on the theme of memory (see last post), I thought I would do an exercise and post a list of remembered items every day for a week (this is also the week of my birthday so maybe a remembering theme is particularly fitting?)
List # 1: Books I loved as a kid (between roughly 6 and 8)
1) Beware the Fish by Gordon Korman (and pretty much all other Gordon Korman books)
2) From the Mixed-Up Files of mrs Basil E. Frankweiler
3) Richard Scarry books (I guess a little earlier than 6?)
4) James and the Giant Peach
5) The B.F.G.
6) Sweet Valley High books
7) Babysitters' Club books
8) Pride and Prejudice
9) Anne of Green Gables
10) Emily of New Moon
11) The Story Girl
12) A book from the Outremont library kids' section called Angela and Luke (I think)
13) Marsupulami comic books
14) I remember really liking Courte echelle books by Christine Brouillet, but I don't remember their names. I liked some other Courte echelle books too, but the only title that comes to me is from one I didn't particularly like, called Le Nombril du monde.
15) Harlequin romances
16) Stalky and Co.
17) Archie comics
This is just the things that came to the front of my mind in five minutes. It feels terribly incomplete. Maybe I'll add more in comments as I think of them. I liked Judy Blume books a lot too -- Superfudge, Tales of a Fifth-Grade Nothing, Sheila the Great. Oh, and Lois Lowry, I liked her books a lot too -- none of the names come to me right now.

Memorization

Just came upon this article today, in my usual waiting-for-my-brain-to-wake-up rounds of sites likely to provide short articles that I will find moderately interesting: http://www.salon.com/2012/06/13/make_kids_memorize_poetry/
It starts off by reporting the negative reaction of progressives to a new proposal by Michael Gove, Britain's Education Secretary, to have schoolkids memorize poetry. I can sort of understand why people would be against it -- if one believes it's a step in turning all education into rote memorization, then it might seem really dangerous and creativity-killing. The article goes on to mention memory-building benefits to memorizing poetry. It also interviews a progressive who is home-schooling her kids with poetry memorization as part of the program, who says her kids seem to enjoy it. I can certainly believe that. Hanging out with my two young nephews (currently 4 and 5) is that the more they hear something the better they like it. Up to a point, of course, eventually the thing becomes to simple for them and they move on. But that comes waaay later than the memorization point. At two and a half, my nephew could sit at the dinner table and recite all of Where the Wild Things Are (with maybe a little help from my brother -- my brother now knows at least forty different kids' books entirely by heart, and can do scene-by-scene recounting of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, including many of the lines). All of this is to say, I would expect that with the right poems and the right playful attitude, a great many kids (though not all) would enjoy memorizing poetry.
Last summer I started memorizing The Waste Land. I haven't looked at it much recently. I have about 240 lines down, which is a bit more than halfway. I keep meaning to get back to it but doing a PhD and living in two countries and all that other not-fun everyday stuff has gotten in the way a bit, but also I guess just that I'm nt good at being consistent at anything, even if I enjoy doing it. Other than watching television -- I've been incredibly consistent at devoting time to that, which I am currently trying (again) to change. The thing I felt about memorizing, though, was that it brought so much more to the language. I've recently started to think that poetry reading is harder for people whose thinking style tends towards quickness -- it takes an effort for me to slow my mind down enough to appreciate the words individually, which is where poetry comes to life. I can do it, and then it's amazing, but I have to consciously remind myself to. I have a sense that for other people that comes more naturally (I would like to know if this is true; maybe they simply have better training? Maybe it's some other difference entirely? I am also of an analytical bent, which can get in the way of some activities).  But memorizing illuminates the words in a way that no slowness or concentration of reading could. I feel the connections between lines that are far from each other, and not just the obvious ones where the line is being repeated with a twist, but subtler things. Not that it's taking me to any great intellectual level, but it's incredibly enjoyable to see and feel the poem in that way. I can also imagine never getting tired of those words, which is great. It gives me something to do on walks on when standing in line. I guess the trouble is, when a huge institution brings it into its curriculum, it's likely to fuck it up and make it seem like an awful irrelevant chore. The experience of one intellectual and free-thinking mum with her two kids is likely to be quite different than that of a bunch of harassed, underpaid and possibly not entirely poetry-loving teachers with their sea of students.

Today: coffee, Ashmolean museum, unpalatable lunch in Hall, exhibit at the Bodleian Library, Vanessa Redgrave, Wit

My mother is here visiting me for a day and a half so we made the most of our day today. We had coffee out then walked through the covered market. From then to the Ashmolean Museum, where we saw Mughal paintings and drawings, which were small and very detailed and quite interesting, accompanied by descriptions that found the right balance between explaining and being short enough. From there we went and got some rolls to make sandwiches for our train trip tomorrow morning. At 12:30 we went to lunch in Balliol's Hall. Stupidly I took the fish option, since I don't eat meat and the vegetarian option -- a baked potato stuffed with lentil curry -- didn't look very nice. Anyhow, I ate the carrots and the dessert of chocolate cake. The room itself is very lovely, which is why I took my mum. She enjoyed it, and also didn't mind the food as much as I did. On our way back from Hall we detoured through the Bodleian Museum where they had an exhibit on about romance and knights and the effects of those stories on later art & literature. The narrative they were trying to string together didn't interest me as much as the beautiful books themselves: on display were a first folio Shakespeare, several handwritten illuminated manuscripts, the first book printed in the English language, and several other weighty tomes. I guess these are all part of the Bodleian's own collection (the two items that were lent from the V&A were listed as such, so I assume everything else was from home, though I didn't look closely at every single tag). It pleased me to wonder what these books do when they aren't part of a special exhibit. And presumably dozens if not hundreds more of equally unique artefacts. Are they on some dusty stacks in the back? Surely not, but what? Individual steel boxes in a humidity- and acidity-controlled room? Do rooms have acidity levels? Then, lawyer that I am, I was thinking about the insurance implications of having all these books about.

Back to my room for a fifteen-minute rest and then across the street to the law faculty, where Vanessa Redgrave was speaking about human rights and Shakespeare. She spoke almost without ceasing for three hours (including a half-hour question and answer period). She spoke about her family a lot, about King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, about Virginia Woolf, about various plays and movies she'd been in. She's played Cleopatra of A&C five times, and directed the play three times. It gives you a certain perspective, and she had a lot of interesting insights, I thought, about the play. One of her takes was that Antony is not as lovestruck as he's often played, that in fact he's highly political and strategic, even though he is truly in love with C, at least at the end, but that part of what he's going through is an intense fear of Octavius, because Octavius is 20 years younger than him, and because his soothsayer has told him Octavius will win (and Redgrave cautioned against thinking of the soothsayer as someone who should be "rubbished off" as a quack). So when he turns his boat around it might be his own fears guiding him, not his beloved queen. She said, think of him when he's the Antony in Julius Caesar, driven and savage. He's the same guy. Anyhow, she talked a lot also about politics and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and so on. My mother asked a good question about how, given that Redgrave had just said that one shouldn't overly demonstrate the bad qualities or good qualities of a character one is playing but let the audience think for themselves a bit, had she played the very bad Volumnia in the film version of Coriolanus that has just come out? She gave a really interesting answer. Originally she told Ralph Fiennes that she couldn't do it, because she couldn't connect to the character. He said he knew she could. She thought back to when she was six years old, during the Second World War, and how she'd wished she could be a grown-up and go and fight, and defeat Hitler. She then thought about the military people she had met during her several trips to Sarajevo and Kosovo during the war, and how they had been good people, and finally she found the inner understanding of this woman who believes in war and honour above all else.

I had not in any way expected that the talk would last from 3 to 6, and we had reservations for a play that started at 7:30 so we ran off to eat some pasta before finding the theatre. The play was Wit, put on by students from Trinity College. It's about a very severe and unsociable poetry professor who is diagnosed with end-stage metastasizing ovarian cancer. She identifies so much with the researchers, since research has been her whole life, that she lets them do all these horrible and painful things toher in the name of progress, pretty much understanding that it won't help her at all, though they of course try and elide that part when getting her consent. They were pretty good. I thought they were better at the intellectual parts than the emotional parts. The one who played the old woman who is the poetry professor's own poetry professor was my favourite, and that brought me back to thinking about Redgrave, who told us that her first job out of drama school was a job that paid seven pounds a week to put on a different play each week (and you had to provide your own costumes!) and that they'd hired her because they'd seen, from the class's graduating performance, that she could convincingly play old people. So I wondered if the one who played the old professor might be the most talented of the lot. The main character was also good, she did a very believable job retching and writhing, but there was a kind of emotional depth that I felt was lacking. Also, a play called Wit should elicit some laughter, and there were some funny parts but they didn't resonate enough. The old woman got the most laughs, in what was also a fairly sad scene right at the end - and her performance actually made me cry, as well. Part of that maybe is the problem with a small audience, fewer chances of someone taking the step of being the first person to start laughing, and when no-one else has laughed it seems like sometimes the crowd finds it harder overall to discern the comedy bits. They were there. The play itself was interesting, though not amazing, and the players were likewise very competent.

Got home at 9:30 quite exhausted.

Ulysses

I haven't been keeping very good track of the books I've been reading, but thought it worth recording (for the sake of my own bad memory) that I finished Ulysses about a month ago. I had tried it once before, as required reading, got about 150 pages into it, and thought that since I could understand absolutely nothing, there was no difference between reading it and not reading it. So I gave up. This time, I kept feeling some kind of dismay at my former reading self who couldn't understand: it gets hazy, but never so much that you actually lose the general flow of what's happening, if you're paying attention. Perhaps I didn't really know how to pay attention before -- or, which seems more likely, couldn't differentiate between when I was paying attention and when I wasn't. In a sense, it's like poetry that way -- which is fitting because, although Ulysses is not written in verse, its source book, The Odyssey, is a poem. If you don't focus on the individual words, it turns into a blur around you. As an aside, this is why I've become such a convert of memorizing poetry -- when I start memorizing, I feel like I'm only then beginning to properly read.
I won't bother with any exposition on Ulysses for now, it's been done enough by people who actually know what they're talking about. I will say: somewhere in the middle I felt like I was kind of reading just to get to the end, but around the second to last chapter I started to get a feeling from it, like there was a general wavy, whelming ambiance that I was finally getting. It had to build up sufficiently before I started to feel it, but then I felt it backwards through the book, redeeming the middle parts. Then it feels big and real, and worthwhile.

To her let us garlands bring

Tonight was music night in Balliol's Middle Common Room, which is Oxford's way of saying graduate students' lounge (though the Room can also be metaphorical, at which point it's the student union, sorta). Oxford only likes to say things in ways that are confusing to anyone unindoctrinated. 
I arrived a few minutes late and could hear a loud tenor voice from outside the door. So as not to do that thing where you make a lot of noise and walk right into the stage (there are two doors to the MCR and I wasn't sure where they'd set up), I waited till the end of the song, and snuck in on the clapping. All the seats were taken. As I took up a post standing near the side wall, a guy (who I know but not well) stood up and started reciting, "Who is Silvia, what is she?". It was slightly disorienting. Several people turned to look at me, knowing exactly where I was since I had just walked in late. Anyhow, I suppose it was good timing, would have been sad to miss the poem about me. Then the singing struck up again, a German song to the translated words of the Shakespeare poem.

Proust's letters

Despite a cold and general lousy feeling, I went out into the dark, dark 5:15 last Wednesday to walk a half hour to Wolfson College in order to hear Michael Wood speak on Proust's letters to his mother. It was the inaugural lecture of the Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson. I was pretty neutral on the introduction until after it had passed when I figured out that it must have been Hermione Lee giving it. Then I was really excited -- I've read her wonderful biography of Virginia Woolf and a book on doing biography that I wrote about somewhere in this blog. The talk itself was about ways of reading, looking at letters in general and Proust's letters more specifically. There wasn't too much on Proust, at least there wasn't much I didn't know already, though some of it was funny: Proust's mum used to send him a questionnaire to fill in about how many hours he'd slept, what time he'd gotten up, whether he'd had headaches the day before, etc. Wood's thesis was that there are three modes of reading: just reading (little interpretation, straight absorption of face-value textual meaning), letting the reading sink in (the kind of interpretation that we do when for instance we have an unreliable narrator) and overreading -- where only a considerable stretch beyond our ordinary idiom will allow us to feel we're getting what is written. Psychoanalysis does a lot of this. Maybe (this isn't what Wood said, I'm interpreting) it's that in this overreading what we're doing is bringing separate knowledge of our own (beyond the very general) to interpret what is going on -- that's what psychoanalysis does, it uses its own theories to bring extra meaning to a dream or a story, fleshing it out beyond what a reader could extrapolate from the text itself.
Wood says that Barthes has a similar theory, of three levels of seeing -- communication (straight face-value understanding of the image), signification (bringing in understanding of whatever symbolism is at hand), and the third he calls signifying, though only out of alack of a better term. It's when you feel that there's some meaning beyond the first two, and it's sort of intangible. Maybe my eye is just wandering or maybe there really is something there. I am put in mind of Rembrandt, whose portraits always look curious and alive, and apparently it's because the eyes are always pointing in slightly different directions, giving our brains an impression of movement (I guess there's cognitive dissonance in which the brain assumes movement rather than dealing with the unlikeliness of eyes looking two places at once [speaking of which, it would be cool if someone could train themselves to use their eyes separately -- but I guess there's reasons why that's not possible, but the fact that some people can cross their eyes makes me feel like there's some willful control over eye coordination]).
After the talk there was a reception. I was alone, which made it more awkward to stay, but I went in and had a glass of champagne and ate a few hors d'oeuvres before taking off. After the man next to me and I both waived off a waiter carrying a tray of smoked salmon on circles of brown bread, the man said to me, "It helps when you like the canapes." Unfortunately, I didn't engage him in conversation. Instead I walked home.
But the next day, my friend Jane told me that she's just been elected (if that's the word) to be a fellow at Wolfson, and she invited me to a guest-night dinner there next week. So maybe I'll meet Hermione Lee (turns out she's the president of the college). But I would probably be too shy to go up and talk to her even if she was at the dinner.

A Thursday: Mary Warnock; jurisprudence discussion group; turf tavern

On Thursday, Balliol's weekly lunch seminar, called Doug's lunches for Dean Doug Dupree who nominally hosts, though two second-year undergrads organize it, brought in Baroness Mary Warnock, philosopher and member of the House of Lords (the Baroness is non-hereditary, it's for achievements). I first heard of her two weeks ago when I went to a panel discussion on moral issues surrounding human embryos in research. Her name was used a lot because of a committee she chaired in the early 1980s which set government policy on embryo use for in-vitro fertilization.

I fairly regularly go to these talks as part of my generalized quest for free sandwiches. Usually they are held in Doug's fairly tiny sitting room, which is quite hilarious: it consists of a couch, a chaise longue, three sofa chairs and one or two straight-backed chairs brought in from the other room, a coffee table and a side table with sandwiches. In the first week, they brought in Julian Barbour, a physicist who's just written a book called The End of Time, in which he argues that time does not exist, based on some trying to make sense of the numbers, as physicists do. The room was packed, with people fitting into tiny little corners on the floor right up to the tips of the man's shoes. I had arrived five minutes early and so had one of the comfy sofa chairs. Usually, the talks attract undergrads; even Barbour had maybe one or two other graduate students.

But Mary Warnock's talk was held in the Old Common Room. About 55 students showed up, a little less than half of them grad students. The OCR also doesn't have a lot of tables, so people again sat on the floor, but at least 20 people would have had to leave if it had been held in Doug's rooms.

She's 87 years old and very small with a cap of wispy white hair, and totally charming. She spoke to us about existentialism and its cultural role in 1960s France, and about reading Sartre on a windy beach after having been asked to include him in a book on moral philosophy she was commissioned to write. She then explained that she completely disagrees with the existentialist position that all that matters is authenticity, and stated her view that without morality, society would disintegrate. Her interest is in disentangling morality from religion (which aren't entangled in the first place as far as I'm concerned but I guess for a great many people they are, and people get stressed out about the impossibility of maintaining moral fabric if religion is left behind), and she argued that rather than coming from religion, morality in fact comes first, and informs later religious tenets. The students gave her a pretty hard time, some of them apparently being quite up on Sartre, and others seemingly religious. I was a little worried, which is silly, that they were giving her an old time, because she is fantastically elderly and couldn't really hear some of the questions, and didn't have that quickness that I'm sure she had twenty years ago. Anyhow, she didn't necessarily fully answer all the questions as vociferously as someone else might have, but she didn't duck them either, responding instead with, yes, that's a difficult question right at the centre of the problem, and then speaking around it a little bit.

In the afternoon, the jurisprudence discussion group met to discuss a paper by a youngish member of faculty named Noam G (I'm using the initial to avoid him finding this post if he googles his name; Warnock would have to wade through a lot of sites before she ever found this blog). His paper was on whether legal rules are content-independent reasons, which sounds complicated and technical, and involved diagrams and lots of abstraction, but which sort of boils down to whether people obey rules just because they are the law, rather than because it's a good idea based on the content of the rule (that's in the case of them being content-independent reasons for action). I go to the JDG most weeks because I like the general idea of it, but this paper didn't interest me much. He got a lot of very hard questions afterwards, the hardest of which came from Leslie Green (who grew up five blocks from where I grew up, on Fairmount). Noam mostly had no answers for the hard questions, and said thanks for that, I'll have to think about it, which I thought was good on the level of composure but maybe not great on the level of having command of the subject, though it is a hard subject and one which probably admits many views.

Between these two summaries it's starting to look like I should be writing an analysis of question-answering in special seminars. After the talk, a bunch of the JDG-goers went out for drinks to the Turf Tavern, which is a bar that's only accessible through a winding alley and has coal fires out on its patio, where we talked of many things including the blindness of members of majoritarian cultural groups, corporate moral agency and Wittgenstein (these were not all part of one conversation). Tom, another law dphil and a convenor of the JDG, recommended that I ask the professor of the seminar on Wittgenstein to sit in on his classes, which Tom has done himself. I somehow decided this was a good idea and the next morning, perfectly sober, actually went through with it. I got back a friendly reply and a syllabus. Now I am contemplating the massive reading list they have for each week, and wondering at the wisdom of my choices. I'm also reading Machiavelli for a seminar this week on classics of political thought (which meets once or twice a term). Still, I'm excited about getting back into Wittgenstein, even though it (and all these endless interesting talks) cut into the time I spend working out sentencing principles for corporations.