On Definitions: HR 3

When I was seven years old, my notoriously conservative state elected a Democratic, pro-choice governor.  The child of conservative evangelical parents in a conservative evangelical community, I recall bursting into tears when I heard on the radio that this candidate had won the election.  When my parents asked why, I said that I was afraid she was going to force my mother to abort the baby sister my mother was carrying at the time.  That was basically my understanding of the abortion debate:  Democrats wanted to kill babies.  A few years later, I would write a letter to President Bill Clinton along with a (painful to recall) poem about how babies were people and therefore didn’t deserve to die because adults made mistakes, etc.

Yes, I was a child who had internalized the values and prejudices of the adults surrounding me, but it wasn’t until midway through college that I finally turned around on the abortion issue as well as gay marriage, abstinence only education and a host of other socially conservative positions.  That was also the point when I decided–three months before the 2004 election–to do the unthinkable:  vote for John Kerry.  I was terrified that my parents would find out.

I am not proud of the positions I held when I was younger, and it makes me cringe with shame to remember some of the things I said about rape victims, gay and lesbian people, trans people, single mothers, and unemployed people back when I still thought Dr. Laura was a reasonable human being.  I often feel distinctly under-qualified to comment on social justice issues due to the fact that I am still learning.  I find it is helpful, however, to remember that person whenever I find myself wishing that certain conservatives might be consigned to some god-forsaken portion of Hell for coming up with shit like HR 3.

HR 3, the bill that would restrict the federal “funding” of abortion to draconian new levels, preventing even rape victims from using Medicaid to pay for abortions unless they can prove that their rape was “forcible” (whatever that means), is a human rights fiasco.  Yet I am reminded that once upon a time, I thought abortion was a human rights fiasco for one simple reason:  it killed babies.  From my perspective at the time, it had nothing to do with the desire to curtail the rights of women or run roughshod on the rights of rape survivors or participate in slut shaming.  It was just that the plights of even unborn babies seemed immediately, palpably, even if only symbolically “real” to me at the time, whereas the plights of the women for whom pregnancy meant economic, social, psychological, and even physical death were not.  Babies were visible.  Rape survivors were not.  I was incapable of imagining circumstances in which abortion might be the lesser of two evils because those circumstances were so far beyond my experience and the experiences of anyone  I knew.

That’s privilege for you:  the ability to walk blithely through life without having to bear witness to the sheer extent of human suffering that exists in the world and the ability to allow the limits of your own experience to define the options available to everyone else.  Because here’s the thing, as a conservative religious person, I was only capable of articulating the freedoms of others according to the terms in which I understood my own freedoms.  I was not allowed to have sex before or outside of marriage, and I fully expected to be punished if I did.  For me, the fact that I was struggling to “remain pure” with my boyfriend was not (at least initially) a story about how my values had become untenable and needed to be reconsidered.  It was a story about how I was a sinner who had to overcome this particular struggle.  And in order to rationalize the pains I was going to, those standards had to be universal, otherwise what was the fucking point? Because I could not imagine circumstances in which it would be ok for me to get an abortion, therefore it was not ok for anyone to get an abortion.

This is why I so frequently vacillate between hope and despair when it comes to convincing people like the ones who support this bill that they are so deeply, unimaginably, and inhumanly wrong.  When she talks about the stases of argument in rhetoric class, a professor of mine frequently uses the abortion debate to demonstrate just how difficult it is to overcome disagreements that occur at the level of definitions, of what things actually are.  For pro-lifers, abortion is murder.  For pro-choicers, abortion is health care.  It is difficult to imagine a rhetoric that would be able to overcome that monumental difference.  It is difficult to imagine methods of mass persuasion that might make those who think they are saving the lives of babies realize that the lives of millions of women are at stake as well.

There were two essential factors in my “conversion.”  First, I finally realized that the whole abstinence thing just wasn’t going to work out for me.  Once I had removed the limits on my own expression of sexuality, it became easier to imagine a broader range of options for other people.  The second thing that happened was that a member of my family came out of the closet, and the humanity of a group I had previously been taught to fear therefore became immediately relevant and sympathetic to me.  Other factors were at work:  attending a feminist and politically liberal college, spending a summer internship in a notoriously liberal major city, a crisis of faith that made me question the whole foundation of my morality, etc.  But the biggest factor was that the invisible became visible to me.  Suddenly, I was capable of sympathizing with, respecting, and validating the experiences and choices of people who were vastly different from me.

And I have seen other members of my once very conservative family turn around on these same issues for very similar reasons.  People we grew up with and love and respect turned out to be gay, and we found we still loved and respected them.  People who once seemed righteous in our eyes now appear to be hate-filled human nightmares.  Marriages we once thought were invulnerable turned out to be living horrors.  The invisible became visible.

The anti-choice right has been very successful in convincing their followers that unborn babies represent an invisible class of people whose rights must be recognized, a class of people that pro-choice advocates wish to exterminate.  As I said, aside from the deeply personal transformations, the re-evaluations of possibilities and moral priorities that I underwent, it is difficult to imagine a rhetoric that would change their minds.  That is why I fervently hope that the organized left is able to make the plights of people who would effectively be consigned to the darkness by HR 3 visible.

Also, go check out Tiger Beatdown’s Twitter campaign, #DearJohn.

(Image found at What’s Wrong with the World)

“I Have a Voice”: Deconstructing Power in The King’s Speech

I will be honest.  I did not expect to like The King’s Speech nearly as much as I did when I saw it this weekend.  The previews generally left me with the following impression:  handsome, wealthy heterosexual white man has speech impediment, undergoes Eliza Doolittle transformation, becomes King of England, triumphs.  Also, Geoffrey Rush acts outrageous.  What I was surprised to discover (though perhaps I shouldn’t have been) is that while this was a film about a wealthy heterosexual white man with a speech impediment, its narrative arc–while borrowing many of the conventions of the “makeover” film–is hardly that simplistic.  After all, this is really a film about disability and about abuse and about the permanent impact of both.  And as such, it is a film that subtly deconstructs power without tell you it’s doing so.  Fair warning:  spoilers below.

By way of a brief summary, The King’s Speech , directed by Tom Hooper and written by David Seidler, depicts the life (with some deviations from actual history) of Prince Albert (Colin Firth), the man who eventually becomes King George VI.  The film opens as he is set to deliver his first public address at Wembley.  Afflicted since childhood with a debilitating stammer, he is shown in obvious agony as he prepares for the appearance, and indeed, his radio audience is met with near silence and brief spurts of unintelligible speech as he attempts to choke his way through the speech.  The scene is positively excruciating.

As the film progresses, Albert’s wife Elizabeth (the fabulous Helena Bonham Carter) solicits the services of a–you guessed it–quirky and unorthodox speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian Pygmalion (rhyme both unfortunate and irresistible) who helps him prepare for public appearances whilst also acting as a kind of psychotherapist, gradually getting to the bottom of Albert’s intense emotional pain, brought on by a lifetime of what amounts to emotional and occasionally physical abuse at the hands of his parents, brother, and caregivers.

This would all still have a “poor little rich boy” feel to it if the story were not accompanied by a rich and emotional documentation of the British Empire in decline.  Both the interior and exterior sets are marked by a palpable sense of decay.  Everything–even the lavish fixtures in the royal palace–looks positively ancient and creaky, a monument to faded glory.  I was hoping to find a better image of Logue’s office, but this will have to do.  You can see the layers of paint coming off the walls and a corner of this sad old Victorian sofa, a piece of furniture on which the camera fixates–centering it in a particularly prolonged shot, when Albert first meets Logue.  Upon entering the room, he sits down on one side of it and seems almost swallowed by it.  The shot makes his diffident, snobbish attitude seem immediately ridiculous.

And, in fact, there are many scenes that make ridiculous the entire notion of royalty as the British monarchy is steadily moving toward a more ceremonial and indeed nearly irrelevant role.  There is a scene where George V, Albert’s father– previously seen terrorizing his adult son by forcing him to read the speech the King has just delivered in hearty, stentorian tones, berating him for his cowardice and inability to even spit out one word (Colin Firth’s ability to telegraph repressed emotional pain is pretty astonishing)–is shown near death, demented.  He is so weak and unaware of what’s going on that a servant has to hold his hand to help him sign an official document.

I was initially leery of the film’s portrayal of Wallis Simpson, the woman Albert’s brother, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry.  Twice-divorced and *gasp* American, she was the target of some pretty vicious gossip.  Yet the film is really portraying the monarchy’s prejudices against Wallis and reveals their snobbery for what it is.  Albert is, perhaps, justified in his concerns that his brother cannot get his head out of his own ass long enough to even think about this dude named Hitler who is proving to be a bit more of a problem than anyone had anticipated, but there is something almost pathetic about the way Elizabeth (the future Queen Mother) brushes past her at a party dressed in the frippery of the Victorian era while Wallis stands there statuesque and stylish and looking much more like the person I would like to have a drink with.

In other words, this is a film capable of creating sympathetic royal characters without necessarily celebrating or glamorizing the system they represent.  It has its share of “prince imprisoned by his royal duties” moments, but most of these come from Albert’s insufferably self-involved brother and are played as a kind of laughable melodrama.  Yes, the royals are constrained by tradition, but the film manages to make this revelations more profound than it usual is.  We discover, for example, that Albert’s insistence that Logue respect royal traditions–even to the point of calling him a traitor to the crown at one point–this is largely because the Throne absolutely terrifies him.  The Sceptre is both the destiny he is eventually forced to embrace and the rod that was used to beat him into submission as a little boy.

Ultimately, the film argues, the King of England is a man who has never been able to get past the age of five, when his caregiver deliberately starved him without his parents even noticing, when his father encouraged his brother to verbally abuse him for his stammer, when his knock-knees were placed in excruciatingly painful metal braces, and when he was forced to use his right hand instead his left.  The Throne, which Logue in a more brilliant-than-it-seems-on-the-surface scene shows to be a just a chair in which people have irreverently carved their names, represents a power so monolithic and impenetrable, so layered in arcane traditions and pieties that it eclipses the subjectivity of everyone in its shadow–even that of the man who sits in it.

The film opens with text that talks about the fact that King George V ruled a quarter of the world’s people, and the film visually telegraphs the fact that this is about to come to an end, that the dominance of the British monarchy is pretty much over, but that it’s ability to terrify, to abuse and oppress remains very much alive.  Ultimately, Firth’s character says, he only has power because the people believe that he speaks for them, and he cannot even do that much.  But as Logue eventually gets him to say, he deserves to be heard not because he is royal but because he is a man with a voice just like every other man.

Insofar as this is a Pygmalion narrative, we get plenty of conventional “makeover” tropes, including a montage in which Firth, Rush, and sometimes Carter go through vocalization exercises and moments of intense personal revelation (still tear-jerking even though we’re conditioned to expect them).  What I did appreciate, however, is that though this is a Pygmalion narrative, there was no Eliza Doolittle “Rain in Spain” moment, no sudden or permanent transformations.  Albert continues to struggle with his stammer throughout the film despite moments of progress and frequently reverts back to square one in times of intense emotional stress.  The climax of the film hinges on whether or not he will be able to successfully deliver a radio address about the newly declared war with Germany, an address that is meant to comfort and encourage its listeners.  And even though convention and history dictate that the speech must be delivered successfully, that success qualified and incomplete.  It is a reminder that the King is living with an essentially permanent disability, that the scars of his childhood will never completely be healed but that ultimately the demystification of the monarchy and even the British Empire would wind up being a pretty good thing for everyone concerned.

That soundtrack for that scene is the Second Movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, easily one of my favorite pieces of music.  While its drama probably seems overwrought and heavy-handed, there is a poignancy to the juxtaposition of Albert’s haltingly delivered speech with the music of Beethoven, also an abused child, a piece of music composed while he was almost completely deaf.  It would be easy to say something very trite about the power of the human spirit or something here, but ultimately I actually think it is a statement about human frailty and damage and the moments of grace that emerge from the wreckage.

I won’t claim for a second that this is a perfect film, either as a film itself or as a commentary on the dynamics of power.  The moment when Logue’s lack of formal credentials emerges the day before his coronation feels slightly contrived, though to Seidler’s credit this is played off as a momentary tension between the King and his therapist rather than a cataclysmic rupture.

And of course, this is a film about the royal family that centers the royal family’s experiences, and as such we see little of the people they supposedly rule.  The scene in which Albert delivers his climactic speech shows the faces of all those listening–middle class, military, servants, factory workers–which serves as the film’s only real commentary on the vast structural inequalities in Britain.  Lionel Logue, an Australian, is our only representative from the wider British Empire, though we are repeatedly reminded that the British snobs think he is a backwoods rube not good enough to play the role of Richard III for a local amateur theatre society (though the scene in which he auditions sets him up as an interesting foil, a man who is capable of delivering the lines of a king though not with the right accent/breeding).  This was, of course, the time in history when British imperial authorities in Australia were rounding up indigenous children and taking them from their parents and native cultures in order to be educated (indoctrinated) as Europeans.

But then again, the film isn’t trying to comment on that, so it’s hard to criticize it for not doing something it never claimed to be attempting in the first place.  It is, all in all, a very small story about personal problems and personal relationships that serve as metonymy for the larger dynamics of power and abuse.  I won’t argue that this is a subversive or even a liberatory film, but it is much more than it appears on the surface, and it richly rewards a careful viewer.

Assignment Design and Making Your Grading Sessions Less Mind-numbing

Tenured Radical has a fantastic post up today about designing assignments in a way that encourages students to write scintillating analysis instead of boring dreck:

Whose fault was this?  My fault, that’s who.  I had given a highly conventional assignment that signaled to the students (correctly) that they were being tested (without being honest about saying so), and so the vast majority of them stayed in the right-hand lane and drove slightly under the speed limit (metaphorically speaking.)  Furthermore, I had failed for years to attend to this whole business of what students were talking about when they referred to a “prompt”:  hence I had given one assignment, and they had essentially received a different one than I intended.  So the next time around, lest I should be tempted to drive a pencil into my ear while grading, I gave them complete and utter freedom.  I asked them to choose their own document and to choose it based on something they were passionate about now.  I asked them to compare their own enthusiasm for this topic to the enthusiasm expressed in the document, and to use the document to understand better how their own passion was rooted in a history of other people who cared about this thing too.  When students asked me if it was OK to write about something they didn’t really care about, I said no.  Then I took the time to talk with them about what they did care about, and urged them to write about it.

I’m probably stating the obvious, but the way an assignment is designed and presented will, for better or for worse, greatly impact the quality of student’s output.  As TR argues, a rote, conventional assignment that suggests that a student is being tested on course content will inevitably generate rote, conventional regurgitations of that content.  If the major objective of that class is to get students to memorize and apply content, then that may be perfectly fine.  But if the major objective of your class is to get students to practice the analytical skills relevant to your discipline–as it is with many introductory humanities courses–then it pays to allow a bit more room for creativity, and it can be a good thing to get students to practice those skills on objects that appeal to them.

I’ve been using a literary studies version of this assignment for the past two years, and I have been thrilled with the results.  Since the Writing Flag program at my university requires me to assign a variety of assignments with varied lengths (which is something I would probably do anyway), I determined that reading one hundred odd essays on course texts would probably bore me and my students to death, so I have them produce a conventional literary analysis on a course text at the end of the semester, but before that, they write three short (1000 word) analyses of artifacts they find outside of class employing one of the critical methods we discuss.  They can pick a painting, a song, a poem, a novel, a film, a television show, a video game–pretty much anything is up for grabs.  And the results are not only twenty entirely unique essays for each assignment but essays that are actually fun to read.  For one thing, while many students feel intimidated by Literature with a big L and mistrust their abilities to even understand them, much less say something new and interesting, many of them are capable of producing erudite readings of texts and artifacts with which they are more immediately familiar.  And no, I do not receive sixty essays on television shows each semester.  In fact, current pop culture makes up a surprisingly slim percentage of the topics chosen, and even when it is the selected topic, we’re usually talking about sophisticated and original assessments of the movie Pulp Fiction from an RTF major who bothered to do secondary research.  Last year, I also had a student who wrote three essays on paintings from the escuela cuzquena school, a student who wrote about a Czech shrine, and a student who compared an Obama speech to John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity.

My class is actually a topics course in Literature and Religion, and other teachers frequently express surprise that I’m willing to talk about religion in my class, since the potential for controversy is so high (made a bit worse due to the fact that our state legislature now reviews our syllabi).  However, I have yet to encounter a problem, and I suspect that this assignment is part of the reason.  While I insist that their analyses avoid confessionalism or polemic, there appears to be something both cathartic and educational about getting them to talk about cultural productions that are important to them and allowing them small space for sorting out their own beliefs relative to a much bigger world of ideas without ever having to debate Biblical literalism in class or argue about whose god can beat up all of the other gods.  In other words, while the essays are academic essays, they allow some small space for self-expression and creativity as well as critical thinking.  And that’s pretty much what any assignment in a course like this should be designed to do.

Finally, while there’s no way to scientifically prove it, I do think that making this the dominant writing activity for the lion’s share of the semester makes the end-of-term essays on a course text more original and more interesting.  The short essays do seem to make students more sensitive to the context in which texts are produced and build confidence in their own abilities to tease out an author’s agenda.  At the very least, the short assignments seem to demystify the whole notion of authorship and of Literature as a monolithic, impenetrable body of signs by encouraging them to use the same tools of analysis that they use to unpack more familiar, more accessible cultural products.

Putting the Passive-Aggressive in Ph.D

Today in “Duh:”  A study of graduate students at a major Western U.S. university discovered that over half of the graduate students surveyed had experienced major emotional stress.  Over half also reported knowing a colleague who had experienced major emotional stress.

Today in “DUUUUUHHHH!!:”  experiencing emotional stress was correlated with have a dysfunctional relationship with one’s advisor (also, precarious financial status, lack of contact with friends and family, being single, and being female).

Graduate students–and probably females in particular–spend an absurd amount of time worrying about what professors think of them.  This is not just because they are insecure, needy little babies.  It is because the academic survival and career outlook of a grad student depend significantly on the quality of her relationships with senior faculty.

As such, I was intrigued to hear that faculty in my department have been doing a bit of bitching about graduate students during Graduate Program Committee meetings, an issue which prompted one of my fellow grads on the Professional Skills Committee to organize a session on Faculty/Grad Student Relations for younger graduate students.  Now, some of the faculty’s complaints were entirely legitimate.  Students who wait until the very last minute to request job recommendations or feedback on materials rightfully deserve to be admonished.  I gave my reccommenders 8 weeks, so I don’t think I am one of the problem students, but no one has ever told me one way or the other.

But that’s actually sort of a problem in itself.  One would sort of hope that faculty members could tactfully tell their students that they need X number of weeks notice on a recommendation or a request for feedback on a chapter or article themselves, rather than making it a topic for committee gossip.  One would hope.  Yet the colleague who ran the Professional Skills session reported that pretensions about openness and honesty between faculty and grad students followed by confessions about dissembling and manipulating in touchy situations was sort of a theme.  When she asked each faculty participant to talk about how they wish to be addressed by grad students, one faculty member declined to answer.  I am, as of this moment, now obsessing about the fact that I once called this same faculty member “Matt” in an email, thinking I remembered him introducing himself that way, only to go back and realize he signs all of his emails with an ambiguous “MC.”  How can something as simple and straightforward as “How do you like to be addressed?” become such a locus for anxiety and misunderstanding?

Later, when they were discussing the need for directness and openness when setting the terms of an advisor/advisee relationship (how often you expect to meet, what kind of turn around time the advisee can expect for feedback, when the advisee feels they need to finish, how long it usually takes students of that advisor to finish, etc.), one distinguished professor admitted that when he doesn’t wish to work with a grad student, he becomes “really busy all of a sudden.”

From the safety of my pseudonymous blog:  that’s fucking ridiculous.  I am gradually–as professors begin to seem a bit less like towering, impenetrable monoliths and more like human beings–beginning to realize that many faculty members are as socially awkward and terrified of confrontations as their students are.  But really, the standard needs to be a bit higher.  Given the enormous amount of power an advisor has in a grad student’s life, the refusal to honestly negotiate the terms of a relationship and occasionally have difficult conversations about the student’s performance or etiquette  isn’t really a simple personality quirk.  It’s downright passive aggressive and detrimental to the grad student’s academic development and overall well-being.

Graduate students often feel as if they are constantly breaking rules and failing to live up to standards that no one has ever spelled out for them.  Worse, the rules and etiquette change depending on whose class you’re in or who is conducting a particular meeting or workshop.  Graduate students also frequently feel like they are imposters, as if someone at the university is going to realize that they do not, in fact, belong there and immediately send them packing.  But even worse is the sense that maybe you don’t belong here, but no one is ever going to tell you one way or the other.  All you will know is that the faculty members who work in your sub-field won’t return your emails, and the Graduate Advisor refuses to look you in the eye.

Ok, that’s not my situation, and I do know of excellent faculty members who were able to sit down and honestly tell them that things just weren’t working out.  I’m reminded of Notorious Ph.D’s excellent post about having that very conversation with two grads in her own department.  She describes that conversation as “difficult,” but I guarantee you that it was also compassionate.  Grad school is too huge of an investment of time, money, and energy, and faculty are being downright disrespectful if they allow grads to simply flounder through the process with no clear signals about their progress or their future in the field while complaining about them to the colleague down the hall.

Image Credit: Ph.D Comics

Why Did My Calling Have to Be This?

So it’s time I come clean and just say it:  I took a stab at the job market, and nothing happened.  It’s really ok.  I have a year of funding left, which means a luxurious 18 months in which to turn a merely defensible dissertation into an awesome dissertation, send off some articles, and generally get my house in order while taking another stab at the market next fall.  I made a promise to myself this summer that I would spend no more than two years on the academic job market before looking for opportunities elsewhere, and I am, for the most part, still committed to that.  At this point in my life, I am ready to leave the “student” qualifier behind and start making grown-up money.  I am not in any way enamored with the prestige that a university job confers, and I am open to considering a number of different career options in and out of education.  On some days, I’m even pretty sure that a high-powered academic job isn’t for me:  that the politics of university department are too oppressive, that jumping on the tenure track treadmill will require too many sacrifices, that I’m not sure how much longer I want to wait before reproducing, etc.

Then weeks like this one happen.  After an awkward first day, my class gradually begins to warm up.  They start asking interesting questions and propose provocative topics for their first writing assignment.  I spend an hour after class discussing Dante and C.S. Lewis and fantasy literature with one student.  Meanwhile, I’ve been emailing back and forth with an archivist at a research library that I want to visit this summer as she helps me identify holdings that I can reference in a fellowship application.  On the bus Monday, I got an email from her notifying me that the papers of a 1900′s female journalist I am interested in have just been made available to the public, and I think I may have squealed audibly, as this was quite possibly the most thrilling news of my month.  As I complete the funding application, I find that I am fantasizing–a little prematurely–about spending day after day walking to this library and devoting hours to perusing its holdings.  I can’t think of a single thing I would rather do this summer, and I’m sure that a little part of me will die if I can’t pull it off.

In short, I fucking love what I do.  I don’t love the low pay, or the uncertainty about where my career is going from here, or the students with shitty attitudes, or the colleagues with the shitty attitudes, or the ridiculous pressure to tailor research topics to the frustratingly narrow standards of “marketability,” or even the prospect of starting the tenure clock.  But during weeks like this, suddenly it all really seems worth it.  Maybe it’s just that I’m coming off a fellowship, where it was pretty much me and my computer in a daily staring match, and I’m remembering how much I love really working, how much I love my on-campus routine and just the experience of being at a university all day.  But all of a sudden, I’m sort of feeling like, “Dammit, I would really miss this if I did something else.”

When I read Historiann’s post on graduate school as a form of self-mortification with quasi-religious implications, the part of me who wrote this post last summer goes “Yeah,” and another part of me goes, “No, that’s not really it at all.”  In some ways, I am sort of attracted to the aura of sophistication that an advance degree confers, but in many other ways, I am just a huge dork who loves this crap and actually believes that what she’s doing is sort of important, even if no one ever recognizes it.  So in some ways, the analogy with religious vocation works.  Both academic and monastic life are about committing oneself to a belief, something you are willing to sacrifice a tremendous amount of personal comfort for.  And yes, there is a certain degree of masochism in that, as well as a certain degree of smugness.    But ultimately it is also about a kind of guileless love and naive belief and a willingness to put up a whole lot of bullshit in order to make that love the center of your life.

It’s a kind of sincerity that isn’t always easy to own up to at a time when irony seems to be the default mode of looking at just about anything, and as someone who has always prided herself on being responsible and pragmatic and adult about things, I’m hating myself just a little bit.  I’m reminded of an application essay I read recently in which the student talked about her complex relationship with her parents.  Her father was always the practical sort who was happy having a normal middle-class job and spending time with his family and taking pleasure in stability.  Her mother, however, was a former Navy pilot, skydiver, and documentary film maker who frequently sacrificed sleep and mental health in order to pursue her interests and follow her dreams.  The student always identified more with her father, having witnessed and resented the ways in which her mother’s aspirations impacted her life and always vowed that she would pursue a practical, remunerative career path.  Then she discovered that she loved acting, that she was outrageously good at it, that she never felt more at home, more herself than when she was on stage, and she went “Well, crap.”  Because there is nothing certain, nothing practical, and for most people, nothing remunerative about pursing acting either in college or as a career.  And yet, she writes, she feels she has to take it as far  as she possibly can.

In some ways, I’m not sure that we really choose our vocations or our dreams.  To a certain degree (mediated by biology, cultural background, family history, economic status, etc.), they choose us, and there is something profoundly weird about realizing that your vocation conflicts, to a certain degree, with your notions of what constitutes a healthy, productive, and socially responsible adult life.

Thoughts on the First Day of Class

Since I haven’t officially taught a class since last May, I had almost forgotten the simultaneous feelings of elation and horror that accompany a brand new semester–the wondrous sense of starting over with a clean slate accompanied by the nausea of confronting a room full of silent, groggy, impassive faces.  The start-of-semester nightmares arrived right on time for me this year, and none of them came true.  My session today was not held in an out-of-the-way building reachable only by a single bus that arrives 15 minutes after the start of class.  I did remember to dress myself this morning.  I did not speak in a stream of incomprehensible and uncontrollable babble.  My mother was not in the classroom taking pictures of me while I lectured.

Even though the first day wasn’t the disaster I dream about at night, it wasn’t quite the triumph I fantasize about during the day, either.  Here are the highlights (and, uh, lowlights):

• I got all of the classroom technology working all by myself.
• Said technology crashed in the middle of class.
• The helpdesk person (who was sitting right next door, thankfully), reassured me that it was an ongoing problem and therefore not my fault.
• When I asked students to introduce themselves and talk about why they were taking the class, even if it was just to get a Writing Flag credit for their major, the third student to introduce himself says, “I didn’t know this was a Writing Flag class.  I might have to drop.”
• Several students said they had enrolled in the class because they found the topic interesting.  I don’t play favorites, but just between you and me, those students are rapidly becoming the front-runners.
• As I laid out the broad themes of the course during my carefully planned-out opening speech, a student threw me off script by asking me to define “rhetoric,” something I was not expecting at all.  Even though I taught an actual Rhetoric class for two years, I could not, for some reason, came up with a definition that completely satisfied him on the spot.
• After class, this very same student looked me straight in the eye and said, “I need an A in this class to graduate, and I need you to tell me if that is going to be possible.”
• An hour after that, I received an email from a student who said he had taken too many downers the night before and had overslept his alarm  and wanted to know if he missed anything.

Happy start of term, everyone!

The Story Only You Can Tell

I was a little bit surprised that my last post on what I affectionately and long-windedly call the “How a PWD made me count my blessings by being like the very incarnation of Baby Jesus” genre of admissions essays turned out to be one of the more popular posts on this blog.  I was immensely gratified by the thoughtful and honest comments, where we semi-debated the risks vs. benefits of writing about various topics.  My hypothesis there was that this particular type of essay is ubiquitous because high school students and those who advise them, writing about that one week where you volunteered to work with children with disabilities or built an orphanage in Mexico and had a totally transformative experience seems like a good way to pander to the bleeding hearts who tend to read admissions essays.  They stress the more impressive parts of the student’s record and come instantly packed with a certain kind of drama.

This prompted a comment from Anna about her doubts that she as a person from a non-privileged group would be able to successfully write about her experiences without also taking on the stigma of belonging to that non-privileged group. At the time, I agreed with her, but now I sort of want to back off from that.  For one thing, over the course of the intervening month, in which I read over 200 admissions essays, I became more aware of my gut responses to particular types of essays.  Let me just say here that my gut response isn’t the sole factor determining how I score an essay.  As I stated in the previous post, I do not come to these applications looking to have my political convictions reflected back to me.  The score is a measure of the quality of both the writing and the thought behind it.  I recently gave a very high score, for example, to an applicant who wrote about the experience of belonging to a political family, the political family in question being one that I pretty much despise.

That said, essays that adopt cliche approaches tend to receive middling scores because they lack individuality and depth, while essays that talk about intense personal experiences in an emotionally honest and nuanced way tend to be better simply because they reveal more about the student as a person and, because they are intense experiences, feature a more sophisticated emotional vocabulary.  In the past few weeks, I have seen excellent essays about dealing with the aftermath of parental abuse or abandonment, identifying as queer in a conservative community, coping with a chronic illness, and assimilating to U.S. culture as an immigrant.  All of these could have invited a certain type of stigma, but I responded to these students well both as writers and as people, and I do not think that this is because I am simply an exceptionally sensitive, social justice-oriented person.  I actually think that most admissions readers would respond well to these essays.

The fact of the matter is that in admissions training both at my own institution and on a national scale, readers are taught to look for evidence of pursuing challenges and overcoming adversity in addition to more traditional markers of achievement.  Because of the backlash against affirmative actions, these injunctions are a way of taking all parts of a student’s background into account without resorting to identity politics.  And while it’s probably true that most admissions readers–who tend to be ensconced within the Ivory Tower–are bleeding heart liberals, evidence of pursuing challenges and overcoming adversity appeals to bootstrapping conservatives just as much.  When asked to score applications for a pre-med scholarship program, my Reaganite father admitted that he tended to be more sympathetic with kids from less privileged backgrounds at least in part because they reminded them of himself (not that applications should be scored on the basis of personal identification either.)

The essential point I’m trying to make here is that anyone who drives a student away from talking about the more harrowing parts of their background is probably doing that student a disservice.  No one should be pressured into leveraging their trauma in such mercenary ways, but if a student feels moved to write honestly about an experience, I think that student should just go right ahead. Furthermore, no student should feel pressured to embellish their narrative in order to make their personal history more melodramatic than it is.  I have also awarded high scores to students who wrote about the ups and downs of their entirely healthy relationship with their parents or their first experience in a debate competition in original and nuanced ways.  Just because an experience seems mundane doesn’t mean it can’t be the source of an inspired piece of writing.  It just means that the story you tell should be a story that only you can tell in that particular way, because writing from a place of true honesty and sincerity is one of the most effective ways to connect with your audience.

Many people commented with their stories about why they chose the essay topics they did and what role they think that played in the fact that they did not get into their first choice institution.  I have one of those stories too.  It goes like this:

I had a pretty privileged upbringing, attending a private evangelical high school in a very affluent area.  That said, I did struggle with depression for most of my teenage (and subsequently adult) years.  One of the sources of that depression was a slow-burning crisis of faith.  Quite devout as a child, my skepticism about Christianity–particularly the conservative version of it that permeated my community–intensified throughout high school.  Though that crisis hardly made me an extra special snowflake, it was the most vivid part of my personal experience at the time, and I had an essay about it written before I threw it away at the last minute.  See, the problem with writing about that experience is that I didn’t feel I could show it to anyone as to do so would be to disclose the very thing that made me feel so alienated from everyone around me and that I feared would invite ostracism.  When I did venture to describe the essay to someone, I was discouraged from sending it in by someone who thought it sounded “whiny.”  So I wrote a generic essay about how I love books instead.

I can say with conviction that this was terrible advice, but I cannot say that sending the first essay would have guaranteed me admission to my first choice, where I was ultimately wait-listed.  The truth is that top programs and top schools turn down amazing people all the time, and usually there is no “one thing” that you can point to that makes one individual just a little bit less amazing than a person who was admitted.  So, basing one’s admissions advice on one’s personal rejection experiences is a bad idea.  As someone who has read thousands of apps and attended numerous admissions seminars, however, I am saying is that college admissions, for all its problems, probably is one of the few places where a student should take a few risks and be honest about who they are.    I know I would rather read an essay that chances a bit of exposure than yet another essay about how some person with vaguely defined characteristics inspired the student with generic positive feelings.

Surely This is a Million Dollar Idea

When I started this blog, I promised myself that I would never apologize on my blog for sudden drop-offs in blogging activity, seeing as I do this entirely in my free time and largely for my own amusement.   However, in order to assuage that shame-ridden people-pleasing, neurotic part of myself, I feel the need to apologize for the recent drop-off in blogging activity.  There was a flurry of dissertation productivity.  Then I got angry with the internet.  Then there was Christmas, which was partly held at my house this year and was basically a three week-long parade of family events.  After that, I needed to detox from, well, humanity for a while.  Oh, and I got sick.  But I think I’m back in action now and do, in fact, have a backlog of post ideas I want to get out, including a follow-up to my last one.

While my holidays were mostly quite wonderful (though exhausting), I was reminded that being in graduate school and having to interact with friends and family who don’t really have a concept of how long it takes to write a thesis can be pretty demoralizing, judging by the horrified looks I got when I told some people I expect to finish in six to nine months, which is actually making pretty good time.  Furthermore, after trying to explain my dissertation, which does have to do with religion, to the fundamentalists I grew up with, I started just saying “it’s about Mark Twain” (which is sort of true) and moving on.

My sister who is a sophomore in college and I decided we should print cards for students to hand out to people who ask this sort of stuff.  Mine would read:

Yes, I’m still in grad school.

Oh, about a year.

I have three and a half chapters done.  Out of five.

It’s about Mark Twain.

No, we’re not having kids any time soon.

Hers would say:

I’m a psychology major.

Yes, I love ____ College.

No, I don’t have a boyfriend.

Yes, I’m fine with it.

I feel like there’s a fortune to be made here.  Or perhaps I’ve simply misunderstood the whole point of small talk.

How Not to Write About Disability in Your College Application

Things that make me feel slightly better about the world:  in my current stack of 75 applications for a prestigious honors program at my university, four of the 150 essays have been about the use of slurs like “the R word” to describe people with disabilities.  That strikes me a somewhat encouraging ratio given the sheer breadth of topics available for these kids to write about.

Things that make my forehead scrunch:  more than a quarter of these essays have been about how a person with a disability taught the student A Very Important Lesson about perseverance, overcoming adversity, or being grateful for what one has.

I understand why essays about disability come up a lot, particularly among this cohort.  Just about every single one of us knows a person with some form of disability, and these kids spend many of their volunteer hours providing care at summer camps and group homes.  I think it’s tremendously commendable that they commit their time in this manner, but I want to caution students away from writing this particular kind of essay or, at the very least, only writing this sort of essay with some of the following problems in mind.  Teachers:  if you’re in a position to give advice about this sort of thing, feel free to pass it along.

1)  Almost all of these essays sound exactly alike.  The formula goes something like this:

First paragraph:  “I’ll never forget the first time I saw [name], who suffered from [disability].  Initially, I   thought [stereotypical and somewhat offensive preconceptions] about that disability, but [name] changed my perspective through her [remarkable qualities like innocence, perseverance, or courage].”

Second and Third paragraphs:  a chronicle of what you did for this person while working at [summer camp or group home for persons with disabilities].  This section is ultimately about how wonderful and generous you are for providing this sort of care.  There is often mention of having to help this person in the bathroom or shower and how that uncomfortable intimacy helped you grow as a person.

Fourth paragraph:  summary of how your life changed because of this experience (usually a single week or a semester of bi-weekly volunteering).  Usually contains truisms about counting your blessings and emulating that person’s cheerful attitude.

Essays that don’t clearly differentiate you from the pack won’t get you far with a selective college or honors program, so you want to avoid the formula essay as much as humanly possible.  I have seen spectacular riffs on the sort of essay outlined above, such as an essay on how a sibling’s disability made the student aware of the myriad accessibility issues in his school and church, but unless you can provide unique insights that stem from long-term experiences with disability, I would steer away from this topic.

2)  The essay is ultimately about how wonderful the applicant is.  Yeah, that’s sort of what you’re supposed to do in a college essay, but it’s icky to appropriate another person’s life in this way, and some application readers are going to be sensitive to that fact (your reader may, in fact, have or be closely related to a person who has a the same diagnosis).  Furthermore, you typically have to flatten that person’s personality traits in order to fit the narrative of what a kind, generous person you are and how you learned this important lesson, and that ultimately makes for writing that sounds (and is) disingenuous and uninteresting.

3)  Your essays are an opportunity to talk about something that either can’t fit into a resume line.  Your time volunteering at that camp one summer–most of your short-term volunteer activities, in fact–will come through on a resume just fine.  In fact, it’s sort of expected from the types of students who apply to selective colleges and programs.  In other words, write about something that is a bit closer to your own personal experience.

Nothing points to the need for a better public discourse on disability than the ubiquity of this particular sort of college essay.  A person with a disability is always presented as an opportunity for an able-bodied person to learn a lesson about how great they have it, about how to accept adverse circumstances cheerfully and courageously.  Furthermore, it strikes me as a problem that such individuals are subjected to inexpert care from a person they will never see again in order for privileged college juniors to have something to write about.  Ditto for impoverished children in the developing world, people who frequent soup kitchens, people with terminal illnesses, the impoverished child you tutored for a semester, etc.

I don’t necessarily read college essays looking to see my own political commitments reflected back to me.  I don’t expect seventeen year-olds to be able to deconstruct privilege or fault them for using a vocabulary that the vast majority of able-bodied adults think is compassionate but is actually pretty infantilizing and problematic.  I do score these essays based on the quality of the writing, which usually isn’t very good.  It’s the oh-so predictable homogeneity of these essays–the prosaic quality that emerges any time someone is trying to expound on something that they lack the long-term experience or intimate involvement to be able to adequately describe–that earns them only middling scores.  It’s the symptomatic nature of these essays that makes my forehead scrunch.

The Political and the Personal: Thoughts on Freedom

(I selected Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom as my airplane reading for this latest conference and now feel compelled to write a post about it.  There will be spoilers.  You’ve been warned.)

In my more depressive moments, I used think of myself as sort of a glum, anti-social misanthrope with a penchant for stewing overlong in my own neurotic juices.  Apparently I was wrong.  Compared to many of the characters and, well, the whole narrative perspective of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, I am a happy-go-lucky Pollyanna living a blissfully unexamined life.  This novel, to put it succinctly, made me  feel better and worse about everything.  Yes, my life, my family, and my marriage are pretty awesome compared to those of the people I’ve just spend a week reading about, but that probably means I’m shallow.  Yes, I do, in fact, enjoy periods of contentment and happiness, but probably only because I do not sufficiently reflect upon the dire environmental impact of my very existence.

Ok, I’m projecting a lot here, and I sort of wonder if the novel does that to many of its readers.  In its bleak and relentless examination of the vicissitudes of white liberal upper middle class existence, it dredged some of my neuroses (my fear of being perceived–as a short, blond woman who likes shoes–as shallow and unserious) along with that part of me that insists that no, there is good in people, that things will work out in the end.  Freedom is as misanthropic a novel as I have ever read.  Its moral seems to be that everybody sucks, everyone is complicit, (though as I will discuss in more detail, the scope of that “everybody” is somewhat narrow).  In other words, it announces itself as one of those novels that bravely refuses to take moral stands about how we should live (except when it sort of does) and lets us just wallow in the messy complexity of it all.

But in the end, I don’t really buy it. Yes, there is plenty of rich complexity here, plenty of shades and layers to each of the major characters, but none of that complexity is left remotely mysterious here.  Consider, for example, the cudgel-like irony of Walter’s job in the middle section of the novel.  Mired in familial muck–estranged from his conservative, willful son, not yet aware of his wife’s infidelity even though its telegraphed through her guilty, self-destructive bout with mental illness–Walter Berglund seeks refuge from his family in his work for the Cerulean Mountain Trust, an organization dedicated to preserving land for a bird species that might one day become endangered.  His efforts on behalf of the cerulean warbler mimic his futile attempts to salvage his marriage, enterprises that are doomed by his willingness to cross moral lines and a ferocious paternalistic rage toward the people affected by his efforts.  In saving this one bird species, Walter allies himself with oil magnates, hunting pals of Dick Cheney, surrenders huge swaths of West Virginian mountain range for strip-mining via mountain-top removal, forcibly relocates two-hundred poor people from their ancestral lands and sends them to work for defense contractors.

As if this cruel irony weren’t enough, Walter’s environmentalism and anti-population growth activism prove to be part of a generations-old familial psychodrama that boils down to the following:  Walter grew up among poor people and now Walter hates poor people because they are so polluting and messy and gross and have too many kids because of religion.  Also women, but we’ll get to that in a sec.   In Franzen’s absolutely relentless, often clinical deconstruction of not just his characters and their relationships–a troubled marriage, troubled parent-child relationships, and two love triangles at the novel’s center–but the political ramifications of everything these people do, he almost seems to be resisting a symptomatic reading.  His desire is to expose, not to be exposed, to in some way totally expunge ideology from this novel by revealing ideology and all of its attendant political commitments to be the product of Oedipal drama.

Yet there clearly is ideology at the heart of this novel.  Despite Walter’s inner nastiness–a “nice” man whose niceness conceals a seething core of misanthropic rage–we are clearly supposed to walk away with a message about sustainability and the impact of our middle class existences on the environment.  We are supposed to care about Walter’s birds and the fact that Walter feels deep psychic pain on their behalf.  But even more than that, Freedom is committed to a whole ideology of non-violent political correctness that demands that we dissect every idea, every action for its political content and ramifications,  that we endeavor to examine and root out privilege from every aspect of our lives.  It is in this way that I think Franzen documents a very specific brand of white middle class liberalism of the past decade most accurately.  As Walter considers beginning his own affair with his beautiful young Indian assistant, he ponders the patriarchal and imperialistic overtones such a relationship might have.  Or, I might say, Franzen’s free indirect discourse examines those things for him.

Yeah, the prose is sort of a problem.  Through free indirect discourse, Franzen attempts to lay bear the interiority of each of his tortured characters but with such a clinical precision that it almost feels unreal.  Yes, I know many neurotic white liberals who really do the kinds of contortions that Walter does in the previous paragraph, rooting out the politics of their very feelings.  I sometimes find myself doing this, trying to figure out if my feelings about my gay uncle are sufficiently progressive, sometimes at the expense of allowing feelings to just be feelings, anger to be anger, and just sit with the fact that sometimes I feel ways that I shouldn’t feel because I’m a work in progress and human relationships are messy.  That relentless sort of self-examination is exhausting, and spending an entire novel with a narrator who does this on behalf of the players in his drama is not only exhausting but alienating.  We spend an entire third of the novel reading the autobiography of Patty Berglund (estranged wife of Walter), an autobiography that, for some strange reason, has to be told in the third person, that uses the same free indirect discourse as the rest of the novel.  The writer of this autobiography is so psychologically sophisticated, so self-aware and adept at accurately describing the inner make-up of the people closest to her, so capable of stating with absolute precision the mistakes she made with her children that the autobiographical conceit falls apart.  The person who writes the autobiography is so virtuous and generous in thought, so right about everything and so similar in style and diction to the narrator of the rest of the novel that the character of Patty Berglund–a character who is quite simply a hot mess at every other point in the narrative–strains the bounds of credibility.

To summarize my meandering critique thus far, this is a novel that refuses to allow its characters any real ideological blind spots that can’t be unveiled by an epiphany by the end of the book.  Joey–the Berglund’s son who winds up working for a Halliburton-esque operation right out of college and who strings along his obsessively over-attached high school girlfriend hoping to score some choicer tail in his early twenties–only wanders in the moral wilderness for a few chapters before realizing that his politics and his attitudes toward women are all just an extension of his adolescent rebellion against his father.  Then everything is just sort of ok with him.  The sadistic element in his relationship with Connie is just sort of gone and their problematic marriage sanctified because he gave up his dirty war profiteer money.  It’s a little too easy and yet manages to be excruciatingly painful to read.

This sort of PC-ness tries to masquerade as a kind of non-ideology.  As long as these characters maintain or discover the right sort of politics, everything is ok.  Walter’s love of birds, his staunch environmentalism, is supposed to make him lovable.  Joey’s decision to forsake filthy lucre and pursue a fortune in eco-friendly designer coffee is supposed to endear him to us.  At least I think.  You may have heard that this book is even-handed toward conservatives, but that’s just false.  Yes, liberals are morally compromised and complicit, but conservatives, in this novel, are mustache twirling cartoon villains who merely look at their neighbors’ Obama bumper sticker and think (ok, the narrator thinks for her) that this person is in league with the devil or who blithely sell sub-standard equipment to the DoD for pure profit.  Yeah, those caricatures are grounded in a certain amount of truth, but…

I just sort of wonder if this novel’s enshrinement such unobjectionable liberal values as peace and sustainability as well as its commitment to such brutal dissections of its characters dirty psyches, is designed to sort of protect it from the most obvious bit of criticism that one could make of it:  that as an attempt to document America in the post-9/11 world, this novel is profoundly limited in its scope.  Now, the fact that this book was quite literally (though tongue-in-cheekily) hailed as the Great American Novel probably isn’t a charge that can be laid at Franzen’s feet.  One suspects that he didn’t exactly ask for that, wasn’t even reaching for it, in fact.  But even as an attempt at social realism, this novel is really only documenting the lives of white middle class liberals involved in monogamous heterosexual relationships who have the resources to spend a great deal of time in a therapist’s office, people who have connections in New York City, people who can (or whose children can) get wildly implausible jobs with war profiteers before graduating from UVA, people with connections close to Dick Cheney. Conveniently, these are the people who tend to write reviews for the Times and Salon.

In other words, even while I felt the sting of some of Franzen’s satire, I have ultimately come to the realization that this novel is not really about me.  For one thing, I’m a woman, and Franzen appears to be woefully inadequate when it comes to realistically documenting the lives of women who aren’t slavishly committed to a man.  For another thing, I don’t have access to the ideas and resources for activism that are so richly available to these characters.  But I am not the only person for whom this novel does not speak.  Indeed, this novel seems to have little to say about non-white people (except for one brown secondary character who is barely a person), about queer people, about trans people, even about disabled people, and it is especially condescending toward lower or lower-middle class people.  Franzen has Walter and Patty’s daughter Jessica remind her father that he really shouldn’t air his resentment of ignorant poor folks in public when speaking for Free Space, the anti-growth movement they are attempting to start.  But otherwise, Walter’s belief that poor people are destroying the planet by having too many children, a product of their disgusting ignorance and allegiance to religion, is sort of allowed to remain intact.  In fact, when bringing up the fact that his neighbors use the recession as an excuse not to care about the environment, the novel seems to tacitly suggest that people who complain about hard times these days are just whiners who refuse to give up their ridiculous luxuries.

I might be reading that wrong.  The narrative voice slips between earnestness and irony enough that it can be difficult to tell what we’re supposed to hang onto, whether this little jab at suburbanites facing joblessness or foreclosure really is as devoid of compassion as it seems to be.  Similarly, it’s difficult to tell if this novel is as misogynistic as it seems to be.  In the wake of Franzenfreude, one reviewer for Salon was quick to insist that Franzen writes great female characters.  I’m just not convinced.  Yes, we spend about 160 pages in the consciousness of Patty Berglund, but we also spend time in the minds of three other men:  her husband, her lover and her son.  The rest of the women are flat.  Jessica, the daughter, exists purely to say reasonable stuff when her family members are losing their shit, though her other personality feature is having terrible taste in men.  Lalitha, Walter’s young assistant and eventual lover, is exclusively defined by her slavish adoration of her boss. Similarly, Connie is defined by her slavish adoration of Joey, and Jenna–a young socialite whom Joey dreams of bedding–exists purely to be a bitch to Joey and prompt his political awakening.  I think this novel may actually fail the Bechdel test, but I’d have to re-read it to be sure.  Yes, Jessica and Patty have scenes together, but they mostly talk about Walter or Jessica’s boyfriend.

In other words, most of the women lack subjectivity outside of their relationships with men, and even Patty proves willing to totally abase herself in order to win the affections of two men who are, quite frankly, total assholes:  Richard, a misogynistic hipster indie rock “star” and Walter, who is a classic Nice Guy.  Patty’s entire neurosis seems to be about her quest for a good fuck, and the implications of that quest get decidedly creepy when you consider the fact that she was raped as a teen and finds sexual catharsis in acts with both Richard and Walter that bear an unsettling resemblance to rape.  Later, Walter will blame Patty not only for having a brief affair with Richard but for making him want to have an affair with his assistant by being so depressed and insufferable all the time.  And we’re sort of supposed to feel sorry for him at that point.  And then, after throwing her out of her home and shutting her out of his life for six years, he only takes her back after she nearly kills herself by sitting on his doorstep in the Minnesota winter in a scene in which she is metaphorically compared, I shit you not, to a cat (in a book that deploys that makes “pussy” jokes with depressing frequency).

If the end of the novel makes any recommendations about how to live, it appears to be this:  you should get back together with your spouse who doesn’t really love or respect you;  you should bake cookies for your Fundamentalist neighbors and then educate them about how to prevent their house cats from killing endangered songbirds; and you should bulldoze your vacation home and make it into a bird sanctuary dedicated to your dead former lover.  It’s sort of depressing that this novel, which proves so willing to champion a certain amount of radical progressivism when it comes to the sustainability, winds up being so terribly conventional and, dare I say it, sentimental in the end.