Tag Archives: literature

My “-Ology” Phobia: Anthropology, Psychology & Biology

Gym class?

Near the end of senior year, my advisor asked what I planned to do after graduation.

“Maybe the Peace Corps?” I said timidly.

He tried not to laugh. “I’m not sure your classics background would benefit the people of third-world countries.”

I felt a little relieved, because I don’t even like camping.

Then my advisor got down to business. “Are you aware that you need two more core courses to graduate?”

So that was the problem. ” I’m sticking around this summer. And I’m taking German, too, so I don’t go mad.”

Most students at the university hustle to get the core classes out of the way. I excelled in two subjects, and one might argue that they are the same subject: languages and literature. But I was not crazy about taking any class with the suffix “-ology.” My solution was to sign up for more languages and literature and hope no one noticed. Damn it!

Freshman year, I fulfilled the Social Science requirement: Anthropology and Psychology. Good God, if they could have made it more boring, I don’t know how. A friend and I stayed up all night before the psychology exam frantically reading the textbook (sometimes we just highlighted and took nothing in) and the Lecture Notes we had bought at the Student Union. We passed, but how? And the science class is a blur – perhaps it was called: Physics Lite?

But it was all worth it for the the “Culture” core requirement: I was enraptured by two semesters of Drama in Western Culture. Reading plays on the page has a special virtue if you don’t live in a city where there is “real” theater. We started with Greek tragedy and ended with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Leon, one of the T.A.s, pictured in the back at the right

And I adored the two kind T.A.’s who ran the discussion group: Leon was the co-founder of a whimsical comedy group, and Jan later founded The Haunted Bookshop, a used bookshop, in her home. (The shop has new owners.)

Jan and her husband founded The Haunted Bookshop in their home..

But back to that last semester senior year: I still needed a gym class, or was it called P.E.? And a science -ology class.

“I wonder,” I said, “if for gym I could do a study of whether women’s attitudes towards sports are changing. Are we taking over men’s sports or are we still rebelling against pointless, violent games?”

Did my advisor gasp at my genius? He was tactful. “That might be a controversial Women’s Studies thesis, but not, I fear, P.E.”

And so I timidly signed up for Archery (I was under the influence of Daniel Deronda) and an -ology class.. In spite of gym and -ology, I graduated with honors. And then on to graduate school – which was far less cozy – did I even have an advisor? But the experience was worth it.

Anyway, I appreciated my undergrad advisor. Today I read his obituary and moaned, “How can you be dead? You were the wittiest and best!”

And he really was. Ave atque vale…

Does Gender Matter? And The Strangest Book I’ve Read This Year


Change is inevitable. So they say. At this point, near the winter solstice, on a cold, gloomy, short day, tucked under a quilt, I look over my book journal and make a discovery: I no longer care about the writer’s gender.

Gender was an important literary issue before women busted into the canon in the mid-late 20th century. In an English class, “The Image of Women in American Fiction,” we analyzed classics and pop fiction by both men and women. We discussed gender issues in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (suicide after a love affair), Norman Mailer’s An American Dream (about a man who kills his wife), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (utopian science fiction), and Mickey Spillane’s pulp mysteries.

“Read any book by Mickey Spillane. They’re all the same, ” the professor said with a twinkle in her eye.

Spillane’s detective, Mike Hammer, was obnoxiously macho, yet we were amused by him and the paint-by-number female characters. We laughed at Spillane’s sexism. We could not take it seriously. Even Edwin, the impecunious writer-hero of George Gissing’s novel, New Grub Street, couldn’t have found a grubbier way to earn a living.

Fiction takes us to places we cannot travel. I am a longtime Henry James enthusiast: his enchanting novels are complicated fairy tales for Anglophiles. And he does understand women, though his heroines often make unnecessary sacrifices. But I love his charming, earnest, innocent Americans, among them Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady), tricked into marriage by an impecunious Italian prince, and Milly Theale (The Wings of the Dove), a rich, terminally ill American who attracts fortune hunters. James makes us identify with the characters, even (or especially) in the 21st century. And yet do we know an Isabel Archer or a Milly Theale? Are they the least bit real? It doesn’t matter. It’s the invention, and the gorgeous prose

It has been a long, strange trip from the male canon to a more inclusive canon. And at this point, I can say that men and women are equal – on the page, not in necessarily in life.

The Strangest Book I’ve Read This Year

Perhaps the strangest novel I’ve read this year is Richard Powers’s Playground, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. I am astonished Playground didn’t at least make the shortlist.

Like all of Powers’s novels, Playground is science-driven. He describes in detail the threats to our planet: the plastic trash that clogs and pollutes the ocean; the dangers of AI; and the sheer greed that drives pollution.

But Powers is not just a science guy: he creates a cast of extraordinary, connected characters.

My favorite is Evie, a Canadian oceanographer who, during decades of studies, not only documents but befriends creatures in the ocean. In one moving scene, she saves a mantee, who is tangled and wounded by a net: it approaches her for help. There are also Rafi and Todd, who bond at a Jesuit school over Chess and Go: they attend the University of Illinois together, then argue and are alienated from each other. Rafi becomes a poet and teacher; Todd a computer mogul who creates a game-cum-social-media site (I don’t know what the hell to call it) known as Playground. And Rafi’s wife, Ina, is an artist who makes a sculpture out of plastic found on the beach. Everyone comes together on a tiny island.

AI also is developed at Playground. Todd is very proud of it. But this generates new problems for humanity, and will affect the the environment (perhaps because of the power it takes for the “servers?”). But for those of us who do not keep up with science, this brilliant, sad, life-embracing novel is also a lucid source of information about the possible futures of our planet.

A Brainy Battle: Literature vs. New Books

At this year’s bookish cocktail party (that is, if there were such a party in plague times), I might have read just enough new books to hold my own in conversation. Perhaps the latest books are actually more like cultural commodities, wrapped in bright jackets and praised or panned by the critics. They are certainly ephemeral, as the new lists of Highly Anticipated Books of 2021 have already begun to eclipse them. I can imagine a reader wailing, “Wait, I’m still shopping for Christmas this year.”

We just can’t wait for the new books. If only we could all slow down. These 2020 books can be read any time–even in 2021. I consider a book “new” if it has been published in the last decade. For God’s sake, that’s much newer than Gilgamesh!

I admit, I read mostly classics and older books, because they are much better-written than contemporary books. I do not mean that there are no great living writers. There are. My mind is a blank at the moment, but I promise to list some at the end of this post.

Of course I am not as strict in my standards as the critic Joseph Epstein, a former editor of The American Scholar. In the essay, “Our Literary Drought,” recently published at the National Review, he laments the state of 21st-century literature, which he believes has been diminished by the Digital Age. He begins by talking about the flourishing of literature of 1955, the year the National Review was founded: Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Albert Camus, André Malraux, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, Kingsley Amis, and Jorge Luis Borges were all working then.

And I agree the middle of the 20th century was a great time for literature, though my list of ’50s writers would include Jean Stafford and Mary McCarthy!

Epstein goes on,

When and why [the good times for literature] stopped rolling are complex questions. That they have stopped, that we are in a less-than-rich period for literature today, cannot be doubted. Ask yourself whose next novel among living novelists you are eagerly awaiting. Name your three favorite living poets. Which contemporary critics do you most rely upon? If you feel you need more time to answer these questions — a long, slow fiscal quarter, say — not to worry, for I don’t have any impressive answers to these questions either. Recent years have been lean pickings for literature.

Epstein notes that some periods of time are naturally richer in literature than others. He cites the Elizabethan age and 19th-century Russian as brilliantly productive ages. We can’t argue with that! But he adds that some periods of literature are lacklustre, and we are in one. The Digital Age has taken a plunge for the worse.

Epstein writes,

Everything about it, from 280-character tweets to Kindles, is anti-literary. What the Internet offers is information, whereas literature sets out in pursuit of something deeper. Reading online, I have found, is different from reading a book or serious magazine. I, who rarely skim books or magazines, online find my fingers twitching on my mouse when confronted by any piece that runs to more than ten or so paragraphs.”

I do agree about the problems of reading online–it is the madness of abundance. Online I keep clicking from article to article to find more news about a specific item–and paper keeps me calmer, perhaps because it limits the amount of reading.

Joseph Epstein isn’t the only one who yearns for more golden literary ages. Another fan of classics is Emily Temple at Literary Hub. During this plague year, she fond herself turning to older books. In her essay, “Want to Feel Better? Stop Reading New Books,” she writes about losing herself in Daphne du Maruier’s Rebecca, Edward P. Jones’ The Known World, Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, José Saramago’s Blindness, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Temple writes:

While reading each of these novels, and others, I found myself transported in a way that the newer books I was sticking between them could not accomplish, as good as I might have found them. And look, I read some damn good new books this year, like Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. and Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks.

Temple concludes these books helped her escape from the problems of 2020, but I wonder if that was all. Many readers eventually reach the point of wanting to go deeper in their reading and turn to the past. New books speak to current events and experience, and even historical novels are interpreted from a “modern” point of view every 20 years or so. It is always good to get some distance, to read from a different point of view, to come to realize that “now” is not necessarily “best.”

And now can I deliver on my promise to list some great writers of the day?

Of course!

Some of my favorite living writers are Louise Erdrich, Jayne Ann Phillips, Isabel Allende, Larry Woiwode, Deborah Eisenberg, Anne Tyler, Ellen Gilchrist, Tessa Hadley, Jonathan Lethem, Gail Godwin, and John Irving.

Alas, some of the greats have died this year, among them Elizabeth Spencer and Alison Lurie. We will miss them.

Who are the great writers of today?