“A house that’s full of books makes a different kind of people.”
A house that’s full of books…
Author Archives: Nerdishly
Inheritors
Over the weekend, we saw Boy at TimeLine Theatre (timely, moving, worth your time) and Remy Bumppo’s staged reading of Susan Glaspell’s 1921 play, Inheritors.
From the latter:
SILAS: You took aplenty. Tell in your eyes you’ve thought lots about what’s been thought. And that’s what I was setting out to say. It makes something of men — learning. A house that’s full of books makes a different kind of people. Oh, of course, if the books aren’t there just to show off.
GRANDMOTHER: Like in Mary Baldwin’s new house.
SILAS: (trying hard to see it) It’s not the learning itself—it’s the life that grows up from learning. Learning’s like soil. Like—like fertilizer. Get richer. See more. Feel more. You believe that?
FEJEVARY: Culture should do it.
SILAS: Does in your house. You somehow know how it is for the other fellow more’n we do.
I love that… A house that’s full of books makes a different kind of people.
“You’re standing on a stage…”
From Alexander Maksik’s novel You Deserve Nothing:
p. 87
You always begin the same way. You’re standing on stage, presenting yourself, happy to be back. Which is not to say that you don’t believe in teaching, because you do. There are few things you believe in more and you want to do something good. But along with that comes the wonder of standing before a group of people who love you, who imagine that you are strong and wise.
All that attention, it’s hard to resist. And if you’re honest you acknowledge that before you ever became a teacher you imagined your students’ reverence, your ability to seduce, the stories you’d tell, the wisdom you’d impart. You know that teaching is the combination of theater and love, ego and belief. You know that the subject you teach isn’t nearly as important as how you use it.
p. 169
That’s why the ones who stay are some of the most depressing people you’ve ever met in your life. It has nothing to do with their age. They’ve stayed because of their disposition — bitter, bored, lacking in ambition, lonely, and mildly insane. With few exceptions, these are the people who are capable of staying in a school. This is what it takes to teach for half a life-time. The ones who care, who love the subjects, who love their students, who love, above all, teaching — they rarely hang around.
Earlier this week
Chocolate nirvana coffee and good books have helped me negotiate some of the inevitable letdown that follows my daughters’ return to campus after break. My work takes me out of myself, too, and we’ve also had a number of those “Well, life is just like that, isn’t it?” moments this week. Examples: The plumber has visited. My car required a repair shop visit. Our ductwork was replaced. (And no one put his foot through my ceiling!) Now I’m feeling a bit like I need another break. Heh, heh, heh.
An Enemy of the People
From Act IV:
Dr. Stockmann (with growing fervor). What does the destruction of a community matter, if it lives on lies? It ought to be razed to the ground. I tell you– All who live by lies ought to be exterminated like vermin! You will end by infecting the whole country; you will bring about such a state of things that the wholecountry will deserve to be ruined. And if things come to that pass, I shall say from the bottom of my heart: Let the whole country perish, let all these people be exterminated!
Voices from the crowd. That is talking like an out-and-out enemy of the people!
Billing. There sounded the voice of the people, by all that’s holy!
The whole crowd. (shouting). Yes, yes! He is an enemy of the people! He hates his country! He hates his own people!
Aslaksen. Both as a citizen and as an individual, I am profoundly disturbed by what we have had to listen to. Dr. Stockmann has shown himself in a light I should never have dreamed of. I am unhappily obliged to subscribe to the opinion which I have just heard my estimable fellow-citizens utter; and I propose that we should give expression to that opinion in a resolution. I propose a resolution as follows: “This meeting declares that it considers Dr. Thomas Stockmann, Medical Officer of the Baths, to be an enemy of the people.”
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By the way, if you haven’t already nabbed tickets to A Red Orchid Theatre’s Traitor — an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People written by Brett Neveu and directed by Michael Shannon — stop what you’re doing and get them. Elsewhere, I have described it as think-y, inventive, and, well, feckin’ brilliant.
Near the nightstand
Macaws
Yesterday we visited “The Bird House” at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum before seeing a brilliant adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People at A Red Orchid Theatre (Traitor, written by Brett Neveu and directed by Michael Shannon).
At the Shedd
Acquisitions
No, I haven’t broken my resolution already. These are a preorder and the last few holiday-gift-card purchases.
Reading resolutions
So, as I reported last week, I finished 157 books in 2017. It’s less about the number and more about the experience, though, and this year was enhanced by my participation in the “Shakespeare in a Year” project, Robin‘s War and Peace read-along, and a slew of terrific non-fiction. In short, 2017 will be a tough act to follow.
While mulling over my reading goals for this year, I stumbled upon a post in which a virtual friend mentioned that turning sixty has made her keenly aware of how finite her reading life is; she chooses books even more carefully now. Her wise insight now informs my own reading choices. I also came up with a short list of reading resolutions for 2018:
1. Read from the shelves.
2. Complete a close reading of Moby Dick.
Yes, I have already read it. More than once. It’s worth it.
3. Reread at least one Vonnegut novel.
I appreciated rereads these past two years but wonder how much of his oeuvre “holds up.”
4. Finish reading several books abandoned in 2017 (or *gulp* earlier).
Six Four (Hideo Yokoyama), Will in the World (Stephen Greenblatt), and Providence of a Sparrow (Chris Chester) come immediately to mind. Yeah, I may have been a shamelessly promiscuous reader in the past, but these are good books that don’t deserve such treatment.
5. Read at least thirty non-fiction titles.
Twenty-six has been my goal in the past. I beat it in 2017, so now I’ve raised the bar.
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My first book of the year was Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro), a family book club selection and a reread for me. Tonight I will finish An Enemy of the People (Henrik Ibsen) — a selection made in anticipation of seeing Traitor (based on this play) later this winter break and An Enemy of the People over spring break. Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End is up next (another family book club selection).
Nerdishly 