Slighcarp and Grimshaw

Teaching has done strange things to my intellect. Every once in awhile, I’m feeling my intellectual oats. I’m either dishing poetry with Jeff or Joel, or a student asks a question that I can knock out of the park. Just this past week, while teaching poetry (I don’t even want to talk about the disservice I may have done poetry, the thing I value most in all of academia, which is the house I live in), a student asked a question about the nature of line breaks and received the full height of my passion and knowledge in return. But day in and day out, I am chained to a high school curriculum. I don’t mean in anyway to degrade my job or my students. I love my job, I love my kids, I have a good time on a regular basis. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking, regularly, that our students have no idea the extent of the talent and intelligence that all their teachers possess. I think the moral here is that it’s hard to have teenagers be the bread and butter interactions of your day.

As a refuge, I’ve been trying to read things that are very, very smart. Novels and poems that involve language so very far above any high schooler’s head that I cannot possibly mistake what I am reading for something “high school.” Over a year ago, I read this review of an Edna O’Brien novel at Slate. At the time, I was knee-deep in poetry, workshops and a two-poetry-book-a-week diet. I was also spending a good hour a week browsing the Oxford English Dictionary online. (Sidebar: I spent this morning at the Sarah Lawrence library so as to use the OED online to put Calvino’s “The Enchanted Garden” through an N+7. Squeal!) As it goes with books and me, I promptly wrote O’Brien’s name down in my little black book that lives in my purse. Six months later, I bought Night at Half Price Books. Then, a full year later, I read the book. And I read it rather quickly, which is saying something because my exhaustion these days knows no bounds.

The Slate reviewer claims that “O’Brien has her own language.” I concur. But she finishes her thought on O’Brien’s unique language by saying that her language is “stilted, and cumbrous when you first encounter it.” I say fie. I will not deny that Night’s language is intimidating. Check this out:

Birdshit on the window. Happened without my notice. Bloody negligence. I was looking down at myself, surveying the zones that are going to rack and ruin. The poor old corpus, the corpus collosum and ciliare and dentatum and spongiosum and urethrace and the devil knows what. The bones are supposed to give revelations, but I haven’t had any yet. Soon I will be eligible only to play gooseberry, to wait under lampposts or at crossroads, while some wench is experiencing the ends of fingers.

If you happen to be saying to yourself, “that thing about ‘experiencing the ends of fingers’ sounds kind of dirty,” I will tell you that it is. This book is dirty. Maybe dirty is too strong a word, but I don’t think saucy is strong enough.

I would kind of hate to pick up Night, because I knew it was going to make me think. But after a paragraph, I was hooked in again. Perhaps the sauciness was part of it. But equally important was that, unlike other language-obsessed Irish authors–I’m thinking Joyce and Beckett–O’Brien’s engine is story. I say story and not plot because Night is anecdotal, for lack of a better word, and does not press inexorably towards a climax in the way of plot. But I’m telling you, read one paragraph and you have to read the next three pages at least.

The only thing that stopped me from reading the book faster was a pressing need to close my eyes. If I were the kind of person who read books more than once (like Jeff), this would go on the re-read list. As it is, the reason it is currently sitting on the bookshelf next to Jeff’s bed (see above picture) is that I’m pressing the book on him. Jeff rereads good books; I push them onto loved ones.