Cheeseburgers and Pepsi at the Lord’s Table

Posted on November 5, 2016 by Boz

unknownI have walked around with the name of Charles Darwin taped to my back. I have written personal questions on a paper airplane and thrown it across the room. I have been blindfolded and forced to navigate an obstacle course by following the verbal instructions of a stranger. In each case, I recoiled at the juvenile inanity of the ubiquitous icebreaker. However, one of those team-building activities not only taught me a great deal about the personalities and the priorities of those with whom I would be working in close quarters during an intensive three-day workshop. It also allowed me to discover and reflect on one of the most moving experiences of my life. We were sitting in a circle of about 36 chairs, and I was one of the last participants when I told the story of my most memorable meal. Continue reading →

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Rutherford B. Hayes, Who Are You–and Why Are You Tormenting Me?

Posted on October 30, 2016 by Boz
At least they both have an iPad.

At least they both have an iPad.

In the summer of 2012, my husband and his 12-year-old daughter went on a 2,200-mile bicycle trek from Selma, North Carolina, to Austin, Texas. They slept mostly in tents, usually in a manner known to long-distance hikers and cyclists as stealth camping. Thus, they had few showers and fewer opportunities for personal grooming. As a result, when he returned home, I heard him grumbling before the bathroom mirror, “I look just like Rutherford B. Hayes.”

I was not exactly bowled over by the resemblance, and my only reaction was to comment, “My students probably don’t even know who Rutherford B. Hayes was, much less what he looked like!” And I put my theory to the test that very day. Out of two freshman composition classes that morning,  two students knew that Hayes was a President, and one said he was someone she had heard of in an American history class. The others, including not a few active-duty soldiers, had no idea. Continue reading →

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Sticks, Stones, and Mayhem in the Marketplace of Ideas

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Boz

In a lifetime of writing, I have spent many grueling hours perfecting the art of the compelling introduction–to say nothing of the time spent crafting clever and thought-provoking titles. For my current topic, however, I am afraid that I have only a series of introductions and a not-too-clever title–all pointing to the same chilling thesis, but with no well-planned argument (or too much), no evidence that hasn’t already assaulted us to the point of saturation (hence, the “too much”), no inspiring peroration that offers hope if only . . . Continue reading →

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A Napple, a Norange–and a Numpire

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Boz

In the third grade, we guffawed about Little Johnny, who left out the P when reciting the alphabet because it was running down his leg. Those of us with more highbrow tastes in humor also found amusing his further adventures:

Teacher: Johnny, name two fruits that begin with the letter N.
Johnny: A napple and a norange.

But today, more than five decades later, I have learned that the ubiquitous classroom clown wasn’t such a dunce after all–just a few centuries behind the times. Continue reading →

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The Artist’s Left-Brained Creative Sister

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Boz

These are some of my dirty secrets:

  • I won first place in the Arizona state spelling bee in 1967, and I got a prize (not first) in the state math contest in 1971.
  • My entire freshman year of college, I had a calculus class at 7:40 a.m. Monday through Friday.
  • When I actually had a place to store them, my books and records (yes, it has been that long) were in alphabetical order.
  • I always put things back where I found them.
  • My favorite iPhone app is the American Heritage Dictionary ($19.99).
  • I can calculate square roots and do Celsius-Fahrenheit conversions by hand.
  • I have a poster on my office wall with several famous opening sentences in literature–diagrammed.
  • A friend from graduate school proposed that I infiltrate the Moral Majority because I would fit right in.
  • My culinary motto is “If you can read, you can cook.”
  • I suspect that I belong with the “instruments of precision” at  the end of Lionel Trilling’s short story “Of This Time, Of That Place.”
  • If you have read this far, the factoid that follows should be no surprise: On the pop-psych quizzes I love to take, I usually score about 75% left brained.

In sum, lists, schedules, logic, and order comfort me; the second law of thermodynamics–that entropy will win in the end–terrifies me. I am a master of linear thinking, induction and deduction, and the appeals of logos, ethos, and pathos. Continue reading →

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Finding World War I: Fact, Fiction, and Truth in Pat Barker’s “Regeneration Trilogy”

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Boz

barkerphoto

We are living moment by moment through the centennial of the war that neither ended all wars nor made the world safe for democracy–catchphrases so cheap and aims so lofty that even as the armistice was being signed on November 11, 1918, cynics had taken them up in sardonic parody. In September 1916, a century ago, the bloody battles of Verdun and the Somme continued on the Western Front. Specifically, September 25, a hundred years ago today, saw Lesboeufs and Morval captured; Combles hemmed in by Allies; French progress at Rancourt, Le Priez Farm and Fregicourt; Zeppelin raid by seven airships on England, casualties, 43 killed, 31 injured.

We don’t know these battles, are scarcely aware that over a million British, French, and German boys and men perished in them during that one year alone. Of course, these casualties took place on foreign soil, and the United States didn’t even enter the war until the spring of the following year. We also have other excuses: Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Hiroshima, the Tonkin Gulf, the World Trade Center. I am reminded of the gut-wrenching opening of Lisa Peterson’s play An Iliad: “Every time I sing this song, I hope it’s the last time.”

However, to ignore the anniversary of World War I is to deny its undeniable legacies and the banality with which we recite them: chemical warfare, trench warfare, shell shock, and the machines of war–tanks and submarines and airplanes. The atrocities of that war made it easy for the Western world to accept the meaninglessness inherent in Freudian psychoanalysis and Einsteinian relativity. The horrors in the trenches likewise spawned the Lost Generation and “The Wasteland” and Dr. T. J. Eckleberg. Continue reading →

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Extrospection: Globe, Google Maps, and the Wound of Geography

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Boz

I have studied with depth, breadth, and passion not only the literature, but also the history–both political and intellectual–of the American South. During the most impressionable years of my intellectual formation, I was reading Wilbur J. Cash on The Mind of the South  and Ulrich B. Phillips on “The Central Theme of Southern History”–and H. L. Mencken on “The Sahara of the Bozart.” And I can still experience a frisson of recognition when I read anew the exchange between Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon in Absalom, Absalom:

“Tell me about the South. What do they do there? How do they live there? Why do they live at all? . . . Tell me one more thing. Why do you hate the South?”

“I don’t hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I don’t hate it,” he said. “I don’t hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”

Pat Conroy’s opening sentence in The Prince of Tides thus exposed layer upon layer of significance for this student of the South: “My wound is geography.” The South–specifically, South Carolina’s Lowcountry–was not just the setting, but a main character, in Conroy’s thinly veiled version of the Southern gothic. I understood the wound, but, to be fair, I also understood the refuge described in the following line: “It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” Because I have studied, written about, and lived vicariously in the South–and because I have for forty years lived actually  in the South (but never called it home)–it is easy for me to understand how mere geography could have such evocative power.

However, despite my penchant for introspection, I have seldom spent much thought on the formative geography of my own beginnings. Continue reading →

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Where There’s Smoke

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Boz

At the beginning of this month, I received an email from one of my online students. She told me that she was confused about an assignment and needed some help. “I can go to the learning lab,” she continued, “but the last time I went the lady who was assisting people with English was allergic to cigarette smoke and she could smell it on me and I don’t want anyone to have to get an allergic reaction or anything just because they are helping me. ” Continue reading →

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Shared Experience, Shared Language: A Review of Lakoff and Johnson on Metaphor

Posted on August 24, 2016 by Boz

Each of my efforts to write about George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By uncannily comprises a demonstration of its thesis.

As I started to plan my review, I wrote, I am late to the dance—referring to the fact that the book was published in 1980. As I began this very sentence, I was tempted to refer to the book I discovered only this summer. Previous drafts have included the idea that I devoured in two large gulps Lakoff and Johnson’s brilliant tour de force. However, as each phrase and clause entered my mind [does it ever stop?], I became aware that I was simply providing more and more evidence of the intricate arguments in the book.

Lakoff and Johnson denote the metaphors we live by in small caps; lacking those, I will use boldface. I clearly cannot express my admiration for their book without myself using metaphorical language, much of which fits their thesis about conceptual metaphors—i.e. that we think and communicate only via a consistent network of conventional metaphors grounded in our physical experience. In the italicized passages above, I have used the following metaphors, which we all share:

  • The scholarly conversation is a dance.
  • The written word is a hidden treasure.
  • Ideas are food.
  • Thoughts are light.
  • Argument is war.

Continue reading →

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It Quacks Like a Duck

Posted on August 13, 2016 by Boz

I have learned many important lessons since beginning this blog three months ago, and I have relearned many others. Already this morning, I have experienced one of each (in reverse order):

  • I know a minuscule amount; and
  • Amazon Prime is the greatest   the worst  . . . the jury is still out.

That first lesson is one I suppose we all need to be reminded of often and with baseball bats. The second is its corollary. Continue reading →

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