Sunday Salon: Mt. Grademore on the Grand Tour

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Papers on Parade

A week ago Friday I gave a final exam to my Intro to Drama students (my last on-site teacherly duty of the term) at 7 p.m.  (Worst. Exam. Time. Ever.)  At 10 p.m. I headed back to my house for some quick reorganization.  And at 3 a.m. I was out the door for the airport.  I've taken Mt. Grademore on a field-trip, you see.  To the beaches of Oahu.

The glass-half-full perspective is that I am grading in PARADISE.  The glass-half-empty attitude, however, primly reminds me that I am in Paradise and all I do is GRADE.

To be honest, the only idyllic sunning Mt. Grademore and I have done in Paradise to date was on last Sunday (hence the lack of a post then, fellow Saloners).  Since then I have been locked up in the apartment, enjoying the heat but barely registering the sunshine while I slog through the endless trails and crags of papers and exams while D is at work.

My only consolation is in the (sometimes unintentional) wit that blazes a comic streak through these assignments.  "Agamemnon," one of my exam essays reflected yesterday, "is more stapled to religion, while Oedipus is hung on it."  Oh, Mt. Grademore, I thought.  Will your delights never cease?

Then I turned the page on an exam booklet to find an essay titled, "How to Sacrifice a Goat."

Me [aloud, alone in the apartment]:   "I don't know whether I can face this tonight."

After hearing the epic saga of the Journey up Mt. Grademore, my friends start sending me comforting links that pose grading as an old-school epic computer game:

Hell

You are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike. The path ahead of you is littered with sentence fragments, left broken and twitching at your feet as their pathetic spaniel eyes implore you to put them out of their misery. Dangling modifiers loop happily through the branches overhead. In the distance, that sound of undergraduate feet has turned into a heavy, erratic thwump - swoop - THWUMP you recognise immediately - it's a badly-indented long quotation, and it's coming closer.

>run

You wish.

A flock of commas scampers past, squeaking in a high-pitched, giggly way. 

[...]

>get commas

Tricksy little things, commas. These ones have embedded themselves in the comforting thicket of a nearby sentence.

>search for commas

Where do you want to search for the commas?

>search for commas around subordinate clauses

Surely you jest.

>search for commas prefacing speech

You spy a clutch of young semi-colons here, looking slightly confused.

>get semi-colons

You have the clutch of young semi-colons.

>throw semi-colons in direction of my own writing

I don't think you need any more of those, young lady.

>but I'm a Victorianist!

That's no excuse.

Seriously, though: I could do with a good long vacation in the rolling plains of Good Grammar and Sound Argument.  Or the beaches of Total Frivolity. If I could just get over this last craggy range....

Have I accidentally wandered into the academic version of Pilgrim's Progress?  How grim. I'll be over here by the Slough of Despond.

Grading.

From the slopes of Mt. Grademore to the Groves of Academe

Continuing tales from Mt. Grademore:

November 22, 2010

Best student slip from today's Mt. Grademore?

Agamemnon was blind to his fat, and was only truly able to see his flaws in death.

Best response from a friend to my exclamations over the brilliant Freudianism of this slip?

Well, I don't think they had very good mirrors back then.

December 1, 2010

My Metatheatre class ended with an extra credit viewing of the brilliant Slings and Arrows (if you haven't seen it, go get your hands on it RIGHT NOW).  My students' response?

Students:     That was better than it had any right to be.

I:     What do you mean?

Students:     Well, I mean: it's Canadian.  And old.

Let's be clear: we're talking about a 2003 show here.  I can feel myself getting desiccated and crotchety even as I listen to them.

I:     Come on.  It's not that old.

Students:     Please.  Did you see those cell phones?  They weren't Will Smith Fresh Prince big, but they were pretty big.

I: [defensively]      OK, well: it's not that old.  But it is Canadian.  Does anything strike you as quintessentially Canadian about the theatricalism here?  Anything that reflects the particular status of theatre in Canada?

     [The air between us fills with the awkward awareness of our generational and national differences.]

Students:      Um, I don't think people our age really think there is a difference between Canadian and American theatre.

And with that cheering assertion of ahistorical universalism, the term drew to a close.

December 3, 2010

Today's gem mined from Mt. Grademore (from a quiz on Racine's Phèdre):

I am not always in agreeance when people say something is phallic, but, ooh boy, is this phallic.  There is quite obviously a sexual subtext, but I think she'd find being stabbed a lot less satisfying than her rather breathy words make it seem.

Let's hear what Phaedra has to say for herself, shall we?

Here is my heart.  Your blade must pierce me there.
In haste to expiate its wicked lust
My heart already leaps to meet your thrust.

(When my students performed this scene on extra credit performance day, Hippolytus couldn't stop blushing and grinning.  And Phaedra couldn't help but put a, well, textually rich emphasis on the lines, "If you'll not stain your hand with my abhorred / and tainted blood, lend me at least your sword," accompanying the final words with an ambiguous hand gesture.)

The student was rightfully struck by this scene.  A week later, on his exam, he said this while defining the neoclassical concept of "decorum" (a type of propriety that governs the behavior - amorous and otherwise - of characters based on their class, gender, age, and profession):

Phaedra never actually does anything to Hippolytus sexually, but she eyes his sword more than the average passerby.

December 7, 2010

One of my students just sent me an email that ended with an order:

Marry Christmas!

Wow, I thought, I think I'll decline.  Based on about four different political principles.

And Come the Revolution: Royal Anxieties and Republican Rage

November 18, 2010

I think it might now be time to come to terms with the fact that I will never be the Queen of England.

In younger days, this possibility inspired me with romantic unease.  Today it just fills me with republican rage.

Here in Anglophile, Loyalist Halifax, the newsstands are filled with tabloids reveling in the princely engagement and "Tales of the Royal Women." There is something strangely delightful, I have to say, about the fact that these gossip mags intersperse official portraits of Queen Elizabeth the First among youthful glamor shots of the current queen, her sister, the young princess-to-be, and Princess Di.  Nothing says glamor like Queen Bess, all done up in a Juno gown (covered in peacock feathers to show that she always - ALWAYS - has her eye on you) and standing on a map of subjugated Europe.

Notice that I said "might now be time."  I'm not discounting the possibility that, come the revolution, I could be elected (or chosen by virtue of my merits) to live in a palace and wave in a dignified fashion.