Hong Kong has been amazing, as is made obvious by the fact that Olivia hasn't had time to really blog about it. We've been sweating more than we thought possible, walking and hiking everywhere, taking all kinds of public and other transportation, even been out to the New Territories. But I won't spoil the surprise; we will all read about it from her point of view.
The purpose of this blog for me (Angela) is not just travel -- though we have been doing plenty of that lately and will be travelling even more in future -- but also, of course, books and recipes. So I wanted to write a little about a novel I've just read called The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown. This is an airport novel that I picked up on my way to Ukraine last month (figuring I might get stuck somewhere along the way and need something to do), but instead of reading it I simply brought the book with me through Istanbul to Alushta, Crimea, and back again. On the plane on the way to Hong Kong I decided to read it.
The book has some interesting aspects, though I don't think I'd recommend it necessarily. The premise is that three daughters of a Shakespeare professor end up back home while their mother is undergoing cancer treatment. (Sound like Moo crossed with A Thousand Acres, anyone?) Each daughter has been raised to be a big reader; each has gone her own way -- one a hippie chick travelling across the U.S. with no profession and no possessions, one a New York lover-of-expensive-shoes-and-night-life, and the third an adjunct mathematics professor at ... wait for it ... Columbus University. Each has failed at something -- the first is unexpectedly pregnant with no father in the picture, the second has been fired from her job as an office manager of a law firm for embezzling to pay for her cocktails, jewelry and fancy clothing, and the third can't commit to her quite lovely fiance who has a job at Oxford. All end up at home with the vague father and suffering mother. All five regularly quote the Bard.
For me, of course, the amusing part was the lampooning of Ohio. (Though reading about cancer treatment hit home as well.)
Because of course the Shakespeare prof works at a small college about 45 minutes outside Columbus. I kept imagining a cross of Gambier and Yellow Springs -- Antioch has been dead for too long to have it really set in YS, but I thought about home every time the girls walked out of the house to the public library or the grocery store. It was funkier than YS, though -- the grocery was a coop-like place, everyone wore even more hemp clothing than we do, etc. The girls all went to this small college (for free, one assumes), though they didn't all graduate. Descriptions of the hot summer and the lazy, empty town both reminded me of home -- I have enjoyed June in OH more than I thought I would -- and again didn't mesh with Yellow Springs, which frankly has been hopping. We don't depend on our college students for liveliness. Perhaps we will again some day when there are more of them again!!
The oldest sister is Rose -- who stays at home and takes responsibility for her parents. (Sounds familiar!) But more importantly, she is a typical Ohioan who doesn't want to leave the state. She has gotten her PhD at Columbus University and has stayed on there teaching. Descriptions of her job, alas, fit very well with the work I've been doing in thinking about graduate education in the U.S. When her fiance gets a temporary position at Oxford, he says to her "You haven't got a job past next year, right?" And it's true: "Rose had been told this spring, in no uncertain terms, that her adjunct contract wouldn't be renewed after this year. No hard feelings, nothing personal, but they hadn't any tenure-track positions open, and it was so important to keep the department adjuncts fresh, to keep the curriculum vital, you know. Yes, Rose had thought sourly, and because you can keep milling through those brand-new Ph.D.s and never have to give them a penny more than you think you can get away with." (page 20)
It certainly seems that Eleanor Brown has spent some time at Ohio State -- and she's not so concerned with pointing fingers as Jane Smiley was. There are two other rather sad and horrible passages about Rose's adjunct teaching: one where the experience is described in no uncertain terms (with good laugh lines, but in fact rather unfairly), and one later in the book (which I'll mark with a spoiler alert):
That's enough for now. Book blogging, it turns out, is rather fun, and at least I will have a record of what I read.
Louis Menand is next.
From Hong Kong,
A.
The purpose of this blog for me (Angela) is not just travel -- though we have been doing plenty of that lately and will be travelling even more in future -- but also, of course, books and recipes. So I wanted to write a little about a novel I've just read called The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown. This is an airport novel that I picked up on my way to Ukraine last month (figuring I might get stuck somewhere along the way and need something to do), but instead of reading it I simply brought the book with me through Istanbul to Alushta, Crimea, and back again. On the plane on the way to Hong Kong I decided to read it.
The book has some interesting aspects, though I don't think I'd recommend it necessarily. The premise is that three daughters of a Shakespeare professor end up back home while their mother is undergoing cancer treatment. (Sound like Moo crossed with A Thousand Acres, anyone?) Each daughter has been raised to be a big reader; each has gone her own way -- one a hippie chick travelling across the U.S. with no profession and no possessions, one a New York lover-of-expensive-shoes-and-night-life, and the third an adjunct mathematics professor at ... wait for it ... Columbus University. Each has failed at something -- the first is unexpectedly pregnant with no father in the picture, the second has been fired from her job as an office manager of a law firm for embezzling to pay for her cocktails, jewelry and fancy clothing, and the third can't commit to her quite lovely fiance who has a job at Oxford. All end up at home with the vague father and suffering mother. All five regularly quote the Bard.
For me, of course, the amusing part was the lampooning of Ohio. (Though reading about cancer treatment hit home as well.)
Because of course the Shakespeare prof works at a small college about 45 minutes outside Columbus. I kept imagining a cross of Gambier and Yellow Springs -- Antioch has been dead for too long to have it really set in YS, but I thought about home every time the girls walked out of the house to the public library or the grocery store. It was funkier than YS, though -- the grocery was a coop-like place, everyone wore even more hemp clothing than we do, etc. The girls all went to this small college (for free, one assumes), though they didn't all graduate. Descriptions of the hot summer and the lazy, empty town both reminded me of home -- I have enjoyed June in OH more than I thought I would -- and again didn't mesh with Yellow Springs, which frankly has been hopping. We don't depend on our college students for liveliness. Perhaps we will again some day when there are more of them again!!
The oldest sister is Rose -- who stays at home and takes responsibility for her parents. (Sounds familiar!) But more importantly, she is a typical Ohioan who doesn't want to leave the state. She has gotten her PhD at Columbus University and has stayed on there teaching. Descriptions of her job, alas, fit very well with the work I've been doing in thinking about graduate education in the U.S. When her fiance gets a temporary position at Oxford, he says to her "You haven't got a job past next year, right?" And it's true: "Rose had been told this spring, in no uncertain terms, that her adjunct contract wouldn't be renewed after this year. No hard feelings, nothing personal, but they hadn't any tenure-track positions open, and it was so important to keep the department adjuncts fresh, to keep the curriculum vital, you know. Yes, Rose had thought sourly, and because you can keep milling through those brand-new Ph.D.s and never have to give them a penny more than you think you can get away with." (page 20)
It certainly seems that Eleanor Brown has spent some time at Ohio State -- and she's not so concerned with pointing fingers as Jane Smiley was. There are two other rather sad and horrible passages about Rose's adjunct teaching: one where the experience is described in no uncertain terms (with good laugh lines, but in fact rather unfairly), and one later in the book (which I'll mark with a spoiler alert):
"Rose would be lying if she said she actually liked her job. Since she had refused to take a job out of state, she had accepted a position at Columbus University, where she was a cog in the wheel. The mathematics building was cold concrete; hallways on the outside by the windows, classrooms inside, devoid of natural light. Her students stared at her, their beer-bloated, sleep-deprived faces gone sickly under the fluorescent lights glaring and sputtering above her, punctuating her lectures with an angry hum. [...] Rose felt as though she had been jailed, Kafkaesque, for an unspecified crime. In a university so large, the staff interacted little, ships in the night; she felt unmoored, washing from classroom to office to faculty parking lot. Some days the only people she spoke to were her students, and you could hardly call that an actual interaction (or, Rose might say on a particularly bad day, you could hardly call them actual people)."
This from page 58. And so on. Not a nice characterization of Columbus, but not entirely untrue, at least as a perception by an adjunct. SPOILER ALERT: Don't read the below if you want to read the book.
"When she had sent her letter of resignation, artfully written to vconvey in the most genteel manner possible that Columbus University cold take its job and shove it, a sudden weight had lifted off her shoulders. She would never have to go back to her dingy office and the gray classrooms and the exhausted students. That the lethargy plaguing her since she had set foot on the campus would never wrap its tentacles around her again, that she might even, dare she say it, be happier without that place" (346).
Ms. Brown did learn a few things at the OSU Creative Writing Program (or wherever she did her MFA), and the most interesting thing about the book is that she writes it from the first person plural, as though the sisters were united in their thinking, though so disparate in their lives and characters. Doesn't quite work, but it's interesting and might have, perhaps, with a few more drafts.
That's enough for now. Book blogging, it turns out, is rather fun, and at least I will have a record of what I read.
Louis Menand is next.
From Hong Kong,
A.
Comments
Post a Comment