The Witch

20 October 2016: I first saw The Witch when it opened back in March--and enjoyed it very much (though perhaps "enjoy" is the wrong word for such a dark film). I couldn't stop thinking about what a perfect depiction it was of Puritanism taken to its most dramatic extreme and how much it reminded me of two of my favorite American poets: Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor.

So when some students and a professor in the History department asked me if we (my students and I) wanted to be a part of an event they had planned for tonight, a screening of the film followed by a discussion, I happily agreed to do my part, offering all of my students extra credit for attending and preparing some remarks beforehand on Puritan literature and the connections I saw in the film. To be honest though, as this day started, I wasn't exactly looking forward to it--it's been a long and busy week. But man, I am glad we planned this darn thing. It went so very well--great audience, great discussion.

"Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain..."

20 January 2016: I got to teach some Anne Bradstreet poems in my beloved ENGL 204 classes today. I haven't taught that class in a year and I forgot how much flippin' fun it is to teach her. The post's title comes from one of my favorite lines from her poetry, the first line of "The Author to Her Book." Bradstreet is just so awesome: a woman balancing so many competing identities with skill, humility, humor, and a deep and abiding faith. For me, she puts a very human face on the Puritans. And Lord help my students because on Friday (assuming we have class...stay away, Blizzard of 2016!) we get to my favorite Puritan poet, Edward Taylor. The forecast calls for major geeking out.

How to grade 70 midterms and 50 papers with 2 demanding cats...

Some of you know that I often make myself stay up in my office working until pretty late in the day. There are plenty of good reasons for this: I am less easily distracted here by TV or the phone, I feel better about myself if I get home later in the day having accomplished a whole lot, I keep a lot of my reference materials in my office at school. There is, of course, another reason that I am often much more productive at school versus at home: Bing and Wes. Whenever I have my work laid out at home, they are never far from it, reminding me of how I should be spending my time with them.

The photographic evidence:



Here's my oh-so-important, if-I-lost-it-my-life-would-be-derailed schoolbag. (Seriously, I keep everything from my wallet to my ipod to my flash drive to my datebook to stacks of important papers.) So, when I am working from home, I am always taking things in and out of it. It's no coincidence, then, that the boys often chose to cuddle up right next to it.



This shot (and the one following it) are from last weekend when I was switching back and forth between grading English 101 papers and making a study guide for my English 204 classes. I was sitting on the couch, with my legs stretched out in front of me on the coffee table. (Don't judge: it's my house and I can put my feet on my own darn coffee table.) I had my lap desk on my lap (duh) with the 204 anthology and some papers on it and my computer on the table. Next to me were stacks of 101 essays. Not exactly the kind of space that says, "You know what we've got room for here? A cat!" But that didn't stop Wes, who climbed right on that stack of papers and made himself comfortable. (Fortunately, I had my camera on the sidetable next to me, so I could capture these incriminating shots.) His face cracks me up here--I guess he doesn't like what he's reading: the Puritan poet Edward Taylor. That's too bad, although my students feel the same way.



Later that same evening, Bing also made himself comfortable on my work. Don't let his pose fool you here. He might look like he's being helpful and offering some proofreading advice, but just a few seconds later, he stretched out even more, displacing my neat stack of papers. He couldn't have been more pleased with himself.

Anyway, last night I was bound and determined to get some serious grading done from the comfort of my own living room while watching Thursday night TV. (By the way, anyone watch "Ugly Betty" last night? How awesome was it? That show just cracks me up--what a nice way to spend an hour after a long day.) I could tell, though, by the way the boys were circling, that I might be in for a repeat of last weekend's pleas for attention. My solution? Drug them up!

I whipped out the Cosmic Catnip. This stuff is amazing. At the very sound of the tub opening, the cats come charging over, like heroin addicts at a methadone clinic (or so I've heard). I gave each of them a little bowl of the sweet sweet nip, and let them go to town.



Now this is a pre-"ultimate drugged out craziness" shot (after all, my purpose in giving them the nip was to get work done, so hanging around and doing a photo shoot would have been counter-productive), but even still, you can see the effects starting. I love how Wes has his arms around the bowl. Bing is already doing that slightly-high "dude, what's that over there?" thing. (He's really staring at nothing.)

So off to work I went. And about 30 minutes later, I was still happily working while the fellas had worn themselves out.



Bing in a "cat loaf" position.



Wes all tuckered out. (I think he might be the cutest sleeping cat I've ever seen--seriously, he sleeps "cute"--all the time.)

So does this make me a bad cat-mom? Vogel said it's like giving a baby cough syrup to make it stop crying. Oh well. Mama's gotta make the money to buy the catnip, so I am sure Bing and Wes understand...

Escargot and thoughts on poetry...

This morning I was rushing out the door--rushing for no reason in particular. I wasn't running late and there was nowhere I had to be immediately. Rushing off to get something done, feeling like I am not getting enough done--these are common feelings for me lots of the time. Now I am not complaining--I like my life that way. It helps me feel motivated and productive and (eventually) accomplished. But as I walked out the door today, a little creature was slowing creeping across my door mat.



It stopped me in my tracks for a bit, so much so that I even snapped the picture above. A snail really is an amazing creature, carrying around something as marvelous as a pretty shell. He or she was a pretty brave snail, too, not really hiding in the shell as I leaned over him/her to take a picture.

Can you see where I am going with this? (I hope it's not too cutesy or Chicken Soup for the Soul). Something as tiny as a snail made me stop, take a look, and consider the wonder of creation. It made me slow down, just for a moment, at a moment when I certainly benefited from slowing down.

The rest of the morning, as I thought about the snail, I thought about all the great poems written about little creatures who lead human beings to greater insights about themselves. Here's a partial list:

• John Donne's "The Flea". Donne ingeniously uses the logic in this poem, arguing that since the same flea on a woman he desires might have also fed on him, and since their bloods, therefore, were probably already mixed, they ought to just sleep together.
• Robert Burn's "To a Mouse." Burns is said to have written this poem after turning up a mouse nest on his farm. It contain the famous line "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley." For those unfamiliar with Burns' dialect, it's usually translated into "The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry.'" He also has a poem called "To a Louse," slightly less scandalous than Donne's poem on vermin.
  
• Edward Taylor's "Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold." Taylor's speaker observes a wasp that seems to come back to life and constructs an elaborate conceit in which a sinner is imagined as the wasp and God as the sun that brings him back to life. I'm partial to Taylor these days, as I taught some of his poems to get my job here at Shepherd. He really is an amazing person--a Puritan clergymen who wrote these elaborate and beautiful poems to get himself ready to preach. And most of the poems were forgotten until they were discovered in 1937, over 200 years after he died.
• Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider." This poem kills me--in a good way. The image of the spider/soul throwing out "filament, filament, filament" hoping for a connection is so beautiful and touching. But Whitman has a way of doing that with nature poems. Don't even get me started on "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."
  

I could go on, I suppose (haven't even touched Emily Dickinson yet, or that wonderful bug that Thoreau talks about crawling out of the table in the end of Walden, although I suppose I'd be switching genres then), but you get my point--a point the metaphysical poets, the British Romantics and the American Transcendentalists (and poets, painters, and writers long before and after them) made so well: creation is a constant source of wonder and inspiration for us, a way to understand both ourselves and the world around us. Okay--enough English professor preaching!