Lots of people feel they resemble the underground man, as this blog post attests. When I was in graduate school, my friend and I used to laugh about one of her high school classmates, a kind of black-wearing, photography-loving poseur who came to her h.s. graduation party, looked at her bookshelf, and declared: "Oh, Dostoevsky's Underground Man . I'm just like that character." An odd thing to declare, given that the "underground man" (whose name we never learn) is spiteful, vindictive, and lives in a dank basement room where he obsesses about his lack of social status. But maybe if you're a Goth-wannabe 17-year-old boy, it makes sense. In fact, of course, we are sometimes surprised at how spot on a literary description of a person or an experience can be. This week I taught Chekhov's classic short story "Let Me Sleep" about a 14-year-old nanny who works as a servant all day and desperately tries not to fall asleep all night while
A blog about travel and staying put, reading and writing, food and food for thought.