QUOTES: The past few days have been spent, happily enough, reading (This Side of Paradise and The Sea, The Sea, along with a crack at Ezra Pound), and I anticipate more of the same (The Brothers Karamazov again, and the Charterhouse of Parma), as I begin my annual preparations to write extensively in the forthcoming semester. Blogging will be accordingly light. Two thoughts, though, from Paris Review interviews, first with William Faulkner:

Interviewer: And Freud?

Faulkner: Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't.

Dorothy Parker:

Interviewer: That's not showing much respect for your fellow women, at least not the writers.

Parker: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: I enjoy getting outside confirmation of my writing habits, so I was pleased to find the following in an interview T.S. Eliot gave to the Paris Review:

Interviewer: There's a good deal of interest now in the process of writing. I wonder if you could talk more about your actual habits in writing verse. I've heard you composed on the typewriter.

Eliot: Partly on the typewriter. A great deal of my new play, The Elder Statesman, was produced in pencil and paper, very roughly. Then I typed it myself first before my wife got to work on it. In typing myself I make alterations, very considerable ones. But whether I write or type, composition of any length, a play for example, means for me regular hours, say ten to one. I found that three hours a day is about all I can do of actual composing. I could do polishing perhaps later. I sometimes found at first that I wanted to go on longer, but when I looked at the stuff the next day, what I'd done after the three hours were up was never satisfactory. It's much better to stop and think about something quite different.

UGH: (on VH1's '7 Ages of Rock') David Fricke (Rolling Stone guru) just declared "Sympathy for the Devil" to be 'a blues' that's 'about the devil.' I mean, I suppose it's too much to expect him to contravene the usual rock-n-roll narrative by pointing out Jagger's drawing on Bulgakov, but man, the song is a samba first, moreso than a blues.

Kim, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong there.

Also, Roger Daltrey is not a valid source to articulate how revolutionary The Who were. Sorry.

UPDATE: Sweet fancy Moses, they're putting Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground and David Bowie together. One of these things is not like the others...

YOUR NOT-QUITE-WEEKLY MICHIGAN FOOTBALL UPDATE: There was hope, and then disappointment, and then paranoia, and creepy-obsessive tracking of flights, and then a firm resolution (only infrequently violated) to not, under any circumstances, get caught up in the coaching madness until the whole thing was resolved. End result:

In Rod We Trust.

The idea of a Michigan coach who has ever at any time run anything resembling a spread offense is... hard to compute. But it's exciting.

Bonus for having stuck it to West Virginia twice in the last year.

On the other hand, when the governor's getting involved, there may be some hard feelings:

West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin blamed the involvement of what he termed "high-priced agents" in college sports.

"I have known Rich for most of his life, from a boy whose only wish was to play football at WVU to a young man whose only wish was to coach at WVU," Manchin said in a statement. "Something is wrong with the profession of college coaching today when a leader's word is no longer his bond."

I am considering altering my route up for Christmas. Somehow, driving through West Virginia with my "I'd rather be in Ann Arbor" bumper sticker seems like a recipe to get pulled over a lot.

WELL: The account below is, as was pointed out in the comments, incomplete. Whence the conviction that reading will somehow provide the answers I'm looking for? Only because that was my previous experience: it matters that I had parents for whom reading was an important activity, who cultivated that sensibility and didn't let me give up on it in my early teenage years when the desire to turn to video games or sports (among other options) was strongest.

Small-but-telling anecdote #1: My brother, I believe, once remarked to the effect that he knows when he's with his family, since we're all sitting in a room reading books (100% true, that).

You get raised to read, and you read. It's not that easy; rather like being raised in the church, there comes a point when you've reached sufficient maturity that you have to decide to make it part of your identity (it's never been surprising to me that people I know change political opinions, church allegiances, literary tastes, etc, in the approximately 20-to-25 time period). There's something pleasantly upper-middle-class about that story (though there are other contexts to be drawn on: the Book-of-the-Month Club or Penguin Classics in their original identities, or the emphasis on literacy that comes from what becomes the New Testament). But two countervailing thoughts: the story isn't universal--the people involved matter. Even amongst my grad student friends, I know a fair number of people for whom books are not nearly so vital (the most-frequent remark of first-time visitors to my apartment is 'wow, you have a lot of books'). I absolutely would not be in the same position without my parents.

It's also the case that this story has to start somewhere, and this is the part I have more difficulty understanding. At some point in the history of both sides of my family, reading and education were prioritized, and my presence in grad school is the end result of the decisions all those people made. Part of Lessing's lecture is to point us back to the question: we know what the end result should be, but how do we help people to take those first steps when the spiritual and material conditions around them militate towards almost anything else as a consideration?

This last question undoubtably underlies the modern human rights movement.

LINK: I have not intended to neglect you, dear readers, but it is the end of the semester, with all of its attendant chicken-with-head-cut-off insanity, upon which has been piled additional car problems (thankfully, finally in the hands of one who is competent to address them), and a new, interesting angle which may produce a chapter for me in the near-term (if anyone can recommend a book on the historical reading of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, especially 1 Samuel 8, would be forever indebted). So, little time for blogging. But via Opinio Juris, I came across Doris Lessing's Nobel lecture, which is well worth the time invested in it. A sample:

"I belong to a little organisation which started out with the intention of getting books into the villages. There was a group of people who in another connection had travelled Zimbabwe at its grass roots. They reported that the villages, unlike what people reported, are full of intelligent people, teachers retired, teachers on leave, children on holidays, old people. I myself paid for a little survey, of what people wanted to read, and found the results were the same as a Swedish survey, that I had not known about. People wanted to read what people in Europe want to read, if they read at all – novels of all kinds, science fiction, poetry, detective fiction, plays, Shakespeare, and the do-it-yourself books, like how to open a bank account, were low in the list. All of Shakespeare: they knew the name. A problem with finding books for villagers is that they don't know what is available, so a school set book, like the Mayor of Casterbridge, becomes popular because they know it is there. Animal Farm, for obvious reasons is the most popular of all novels."

On the whole, a very interesting meditation on books and education, the value of each, and how quick we are to forget these.

I am reminded, tangentally, of my favorite article that ever appeared on (late and much lamented) Stylus, on being a Christian and a popular music fan:

"I never intended to bury CCM, but over time, it happened. Any third party would’ve held it to be inevitable. Much of what Mr. Sullivan said in GQ about the tepid musical bounds of most CCM is true; but it would not have behooved his article to trumpet the numerous exceptions. To be sure, my journey into secular music has been quite the lesser salvation. The core principle informing my adolescent faves remains constant: Jesus Christ is the son of God whose willing death enabled the eternal life of a human race irredeemable otherwise. And if I shake my head wanly at a lot of my first choices in music, I still must salute the beliefs that informed both the product and my purchase. Yeah, the secular peaks or quality are higher. Yeah, there’s so much areligious stuff that lays bare the soul. Yeah, you can be a believer and operate outside the lines of CCM. Yeah, those were some resonant, joyous times."

The phrase "quite the lesser salvation" has stuck with me since I first read i. It seems vaguely right, with respect to music: my life is different because, at a certain point, I decided I was going to give punk music a try--R.E.M. begot Patti Smtih, begot the Sex Pistols, etc etc. The same is true with respect to literature: at one point in my life, I was beset by a number of problems philosophical and personal in nature, and I turned to literature (and then philosophy, and then political theory) out of the conviction that this was a way I could organize and understand my experience.

And "salvation" does seem to me to be the proper way to think about my experience: before literature came along, I had spent some time entertaining the notion that perhaps four-year college was not the way to go (I was a slacker and angry at the world--neither of these look particularly good in retrospect, but, Camus-like, I feel I should see my past for what it was), that I might be perfectly happy kicking around for a few years until I figured things out--think John Cusak in Say Anything, minus the charisma and general good-nature.

Dante and Eliot and Plato, well, it was something I was clearly made for; I remember, quite distinctly, reading the David Grene translations of Sophocles that were at the local coffeeshop while waiting for the rest of my friends to show for the evening. It was, well, someplace that I fit, and the mode of comprehension required was something I could do well, and the meaning and purpose I feel in my life, or in the work of my dissertation, is possible to me only because of those previous moments. So I don't pretend to know exactly what Lessing's people know, when they want so desperately to have something to read, but I think I know what it means to hang on a paragraph of Anna Karenina (or a similar work) as though something vital hinges on understanding the section just read.

I have some related thoughts on how this relates back to teaching, but those need to percolate more. Perhaps later this evening.

SO: Unwisely, this afternoon, as I was finishing the last of my grading (before the final), I decided to perform the mental calculation of how many pages worth of memos I've graded this semester.

It was sort of like looking down the cliff you've almost finished climbing because, hey, why not?

LINK: I apparently did not have a deprived childhood, at least as far as knowledge of Paddington Bear goes. I'd like to thank my parents for that, and for laying the foundation for my Anglophilia at an early age.