Some observations--Prince Hamlet

“Alas, poor Yorick”: Hamlet, Act 5.1

I have just finished reading Hamlet with my Shakespeare class. It’s a difficult play to teach—as well as to read—and I tried something new this year: I invited students to take on the role of an expert—on words, on psychology, on the text, on acting, on historical context—and to bring that point of view to class each day. It helped. It gave, at least to the students who took the task seriously, both a voice in the class and, what’s more important, a little wedge by which they could crack their way into the play. Good!

I was struck by a few things as I read through the last act early in the morning on my way into class. The first is this general observation, one that has been creeping up on us since Act 4, namely that we think the play is about how to live (how should Hamlet react and act?), but we discover that is a play about how to die. My reading of the last act is governed by Maynard Mack’s insight that when we see Hamlet in Act 5 (he’s been sent off to England in Act 4), we find “a different man,” a man who has come to a kind of peace with the world he has fought so hard to understand and the self he has also fought with so famously (“To be or not to be” and all that). That peace is somehow defined by words he (rather, Shakespeare) drops on us in stages: “divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10), “heaven ordinant” (48), “special providence” (217-18). It’s hard to gather these scattered leaves together (the “special providence” speech is one of the toughest in Shakespeare, also because its text is vexing), but Hamlet seems to accept that he is less an actor than an agent, and he trusts something larger than himself to bring justice and to make his life (or death!) meaningful. “Let be,” he says, which is a long way from “To be or not to be.”

To the observations. I don’t like the label comic relief, but when I check my Bedford glossary of terms to make sure I’m not abusing the phrase, I find the gravedigger scene (5.1) cited (along with Macbeth’s porter’s scene) as a classic instance. What bothers me about the label is that it can imply the word just, as in “just comic relief.” It says, “There’s nothing more going on here. It’s a break, a bit of relief, an orange thrown back at the groundlings.” But with Shakespeare, there’s always more. In fact, his minor characters often are given the most profound insights, and here’s an instance. The gravedigger, through his jokes, his song, his tossing of bones on the stage, his observations about how long a tanner’s body would be preserved in the grave, brings to the fore the central issue of the play: the common, comic, serious banality of death. This is exactly what Hamlet is coming to grips with in the scene.

I also notice that Hamlet is acutely in touch with his senses in the scene: he mentions that his bones “ache to think on’t” (92) when he contemplates the bones strewn on the stage; later he says his “gorge rises” (187) when he remembers Yorick (he means he’s feeling nauseous); and later he reacts to the smell of Yorick’s skull with “And smelt so? Pah!” (200). These reactions signal the intensity of Hamlet’s thoughts and feelings at this moment—he’s very sensitive to his surroundings—and they point to his being in better control of his emotions: the Hamlet of Act 1 could not have held a skull in his hand without complete disgust. He’s calmer. At the same time, he’s intense. Hmmmm.

His speech on Yorick gives me a hunch: I think you could find in Act 5 Hamlet talking back to each one of his earlier soliloquies—from “Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh” through “To be or not to be” to “How all occasions do inform against me.” In the last act, Hamlet reconsiders everything.

Dr. De Smith

How to write an ivy-league essay. . .

In a bit of a snooty how-to advising high school seniors how to write the perfect college admission essay, Kathleen Kingsbury, who writes for The Daily Beast and Time magazine, lists seven basic rules for getting into big-time colleges. I don't know if any of our own prospective students are thus engaged, but her guidelines for good writing shouldn't simply be written off as a how-to for snobs.

Here's what she says:

Rule #1: When Tackling a Global Issue, Make it Personal

Such advice may not make sense on a paper for poly sci or world affairs, but making things personal almost always makes writing more vivid and strong. But if you haven't been to the Sudan, don't try to fake it. When you're finished, go back over the paper, I'd say, and cut out at least half the personal pronouns. Making things personal doesn't mean crowding the real issues off the stage with your own story.

Rule #2: Show That You Have Some Perspective

I don't know a college prof who wouldn't say the same thing. "Perspective" has a specific meaning at Dordt College, but what Ms. Kingsbury is advising here is simply this: being able to see a bigger picture. Know how to do that?--get an education. Or read. Turn off the TV and the iPod. Get some ears. Know what's going on in the world, and you'll write far, far more authoritatively.

Rule #3: Essays Succeed or Fail in the Details

Couldn't agree more. I don't care what the assignment, specificity always bests generality. "After supper, we went right back at it" isn't as good as "After some greasy liver and onions, we went back at it." Generalizations are pretty much useless. Always show the reader--don't tell. The best preachers are always the ones who understand this timeless truth about writing. I'd move it up to #1, in fact.

Rule #4: Make Sure You're the Hero of the Story

My guess is Ms. Kingsbury knows what she's talking about. If you want to get into the flashy schools, show your colors. But if you're writing for any other reasons under the sun, who cares? Tell the story.

Rule #5: Make Your Intellectual Curiosity Clear

Absolutely on the money. Every teacher worth her salt wants, more than anything, a class full of bright eyes. Accomplishment, intelligence--sure, that's good too. But what profs want more is curiosity, an insatiable hunger to learn. I could teach forever with hungry kids. In many places, that kind of intellectual curiosity is scorned outright by the dominant youth culture. Don't be a victim. Get hungry. God's world is incredibly complex, powerfully beautiful, endlessly fascinating. See for yourself.

Rule #6: Know your audience.

I've been teaching writing for almost 40 years and writing for almost as long. If there's one skill that I see sadly lacking in college students it's consideration of the reader. My students always write primarily for their own ears, not for someone else's. When it comes to our own scribbles, we're often--at least initially--nearly tone deaf. Think about your roommate, your little sister, your grandpa--how would they read what you're writing? Listen with their ears. Good writers are immensely attentive to their audience. If they aren't, they're going to miss.

Rule #7: Don't Be Afraid to Show You're Not Perfect

What made Charlie Chaplain a comic genius?--a lot of gifts, but a healthy dose of self-depricating humor. Pride is the first the seven deadly sins, and even though we all have to fight it, we pick it up in a flash in others. And dislike it. Who wants to hang out with a know-it-all? Humility may well be the most precious of virtues.

Interesting stuff. Basic really, but worth repeating, methinks.

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You can read the article--and winning essays, by the way--at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-25/7-perfect-college-essays/2/

Landscape Writing from the Margins

Everything, I thought to myself yesterday, is landscape writing. This, after finishing Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in Ethnic Lit, where the main character, Milkman, discovers his identity in the landscape of his ancestors; after encouraging Core 120 writers to take me through “the landscape of their particular issue” in writing literature reviews; after considering the paths cut and re-cut by parents and children over three generations in the fiction of Alice Munro. All writing is landscape writing.

Last weekend was pheasant opener in Minnesota. Since both my hunting buddies had deserted me (I have two friends), we loaded up the entire family and drove out to Grandpa’s old farm for the 9:00 start to the season. On a corner adjacent to our farm, a quarter section my dad used to rent, there’s a small piece of CRP that always holds birds. As a one man show, I figured it was the perfect piece to walk. It turned out the piece was flanked by corn this year. Even better, I thought to myself, the birds will have moved out from the corn to bed down in the grasses and the blanket of snow we’d received overnight would keep them locked in—they would sit tight in order to avoid contact with the snow, offering me good shots once I’d flushed them.

Leaving the wife and kids in the idling van, I donned my orange vest, loaded a shell in my pea-shooter single shot, and blew in my hands, which weren’t cold yet but were bound to be on this thirty-degree morning. I waded through the thickest cover of canary reed grass, high-stepping through it to flush the tightest sitting birds. Then I moved up to the thinner if taller switch grass, raising my gun slightly in case a bird would flush in grass that was high as my head. Since I don’t have a dog to do the work for me, I paused every so often in order to unnerve some skittish hen—if I could just get one bird to flush it might cause a maelstrom of flushing birds this early in the season. I traipsed around every corner of the five or so acres of grass for at least a half hour. Nothing. No birds, no shots, no tracks in the snow. Turns out the birds must have stayed in the corn.

No matter. Just over the hill from this corner was another one-man piece to hunt: two waterways, one of them bordered by gnarled trees craving alms of the sun, that bend around a three-acre hump of land and meet to form one larger waterway thick with canary grass and cattails and a few clumps of sorghum-like grasses higher than your head and thick like young bamboo. After the snow, this thicker cover would be a better refuge from the snow. Surely, I could jump a rooster or two from there, providing other hunters hadn’t gotten to it first. It’s a favorite spot to hunt among the locals.

Cresting the hill, however, I saw a vision quite different than what I’d expected.

The waterways have been decimated. The trees have been dug out. The pile of rubbish left from what was a farm place, the one where my dad was born, has been buried or carted off somewhere. Both arms of the waterway have been neatly tiled out and tilled flat. I am breathless at the change.

There will be no birds here this year.

I’m trying to figure out what they’ve gained, the two brothers who farm thousands of acres and rent this land from my dad. I suppose they’ve gained a couple of acres. No doubt they’ll be able to farm what were the edges of this waterway next year. In fact, they may be able to farm right through the waterways. It’s so nice not to have to turn your large equipment around more than you have to. Turning is so inconveniencing. As Paul Gruchow has written satirically, it’s so too bad we can’t just have one huge tractor with one huge implement that could farm an entire section in one pass.

But then we’re getting close.

Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself. Yes, grass will grow here again. Probably some nice tame brome grass that might hold one pheasant. But I still wonder why. Do farmers think about the inches that they can "put into production"? Because these particular farmers don’t have livestock, aren’t diversified at all except for corn and soybeans, do they get bored during certain seasons of the year and think up how they can wreck hunting ground—or, more the point, how they can wreck my hunting ground? Do they fantasize about a completely flat and featureless landscape?

However, it’s not just about me, this ire I feel at more land being put into “production,” narrowly defined.

Several years ago already, just up the road, on the border of this same quarter section, our neighbor took out the fencerow that marked where our neighbor's land ended and ours began. I remember that fence: rotted fence posts like old bones, broken down barb wire and one ridge of built up dirt and grasses, a last refuge for wildlife. It’s one of the great ironies of the prairie: the hated barbwire that broke up this ocean of space had become one of the last refuges—albeit marginal—for wildlife. Now that’s gone.

Where the fencerow used to be.

(I’m not sure we’ve seen the last of those hated fences. Like Robert Frost, I know that “good fences make good neighbors.” If inches of land are worth the effort of radically altering the landscape, then it’s only a matter of time before farmers come to blows over whose is whose.)

The point, beyond my selfish concerns, is margins. Wendell Berry wrote about the importance of margins more than twenty-five years ago. In eliminating the margins—of a field, of society—we remove integral elements from creation, elements we may need to survive, elements as stewards of creation that we must remember the Creator cares about.

Farm policy in the 1970s famously encouraged farmers to farm “fencerow to fencerow.” Now, we’ve moved beyond even that. The fencerows are disappearing. Even ditches are under attack: I’ve seen ditches in South Dakota fenced up to the very shoulder of the road for grazing.

At a literature conference I recently attended, I heard Dan O’Brien, a South Dakota author and rancher, read an essay about his search for a rare butterfly, the Dakota skipper. He’d been asked to write a series of essays on the Great Plains and had been hesitant to do so: He was comfortable writing about the western plains, he’d said, but Minnesota—that was hopeless. It’s too late there, he said. The prairie’s gone there.

Still, he took on the task and the essay he composed was about his search for the Dakota skipper in Minnesota and Iowa, an essay that’s pure horror. O’Brien couldn’t find any Dakota skippers, try as he might, but his nightmares were filled with the unremarkable butterfly trying to get in his window. The Dakota skipper, he said, was probably responsible for pollinating a few rare prairie plants. Both of them may be gone forever.

Marginal creatures. Marginal creations. Is that what we’ll tell the Creator when he asks us about their disappearance?

Last night, after I drove home with landscape on my mind, I decided I had to photograph this decimated landscape under the heavy gray rain clouds of a soggy October, my marginal camera and photography skills notwithstanding. I decided I had to write about it. No, I don’t make my living directly off the land. No, I don’t have to think of it in financial terms, and especially during this wet fall, I’m glad I don’t have to.

But my marginal perspective on the land still counts, and I can still write about it and so I am. All writing is landscape writing. It’s of the utmost importance to consider the landscapes we inhabit: the economic, the psychological, the familial, and the actual landscape. That’s why writing is so important. It shows us the landscapes we inhabit which we shape and which shape us and which we sometimes deform and which in turn sometimes deform us.

And yet I’m not convinced that the pen is mightier than the plow. Much writing is marginal writing in that it comes from the margins in a voice that has been marginalized. Ultimately, all I can do is write what I see, call for action, write from the margins. I can continue the marginal voice of Henry David Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Paul Gruchow and others on how we should deal with landscape.

The tallgrass prairie of Minnesota and Iowa is one of the most deformed landscapes in the world. We’ve lost so much of it that I’m afraid it’s permanently deformed. But here I stand, on the margins of the land, describing the landscape I see. As Christians, as thinkers, as writers this is what we must continue to do: describe the landscape we see from the margins, calling for preserving and even expanding those margins, lest more margins are lost to our Creator’s masterpiece.

Miracles

Something about it just sticks in my craw, even though the longer I think about it, the less surprised I am. Shoot, I could have guessed. Still.

According to NPR, a company called Music Intelligence Solutions--and that makes sense--has created a computer program that assesses a pop tune's marketability. If you're a singer/songwriter--and there are millions--you fork over a hundred bucks or so, submit your latest to their software, and its crystal ball lays out your success or lack thereof. A low score, and you do some tinkering. Creating and selling music isn't hocus-pocus, and writing it isn't magic. It's science. A computer can do it. Art by algorhythm.

There's something repulsive about that, even if it isn't shocking. After all, I could dang well increase the sales of my novels if I scribbled out a full-blown bodice ripper: say, under a yellow, harvest moon an aging, paunchy college English professor/werewolf hunts down young couples taking late night walks in the shadowy cottonwood grove just behind the President's house--no, make that "President's mansion." Hmmm. I'd bet good money I'd increase sales locally a hundred fold. Cut the werewolf and make him a vampire, and I'll do even better these days.

Aging, paunchy, scar-faced English prof mysteriously transforms his American lit class into attack-dog zombies, who march en masse on Wal-Mart singing Ms. Emily's "Because I could not stop for death" to the tune of "Amazing Grace"? That'll get some attention.

Still.

There's just something disappointing about artists sticking their work in a computer and altering thereby. I know, it's done all the time. People used to say that the most-read Iowa novel of all time, The Bridges of Madison County, was written by a marketing formula--by a business prof, too. It was schmaltzy and steamy, but good night did it sell copy--and a movie.

It's not rocket science, after all, to guess how my two favorite novels of the last few years became so. One, Marilyn Robinson's Gilead, is basically the reflections of small-town Iowa preacher who calls himself a Calvinist. The other, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, is a series of short stories connected, basically, by a retired teacher in a small town in Maine. Hmmm.

Of course, I'm not alone in my leanings. Both won Pulitzers.

Maybe I ought to be the machine that calls winners.

Here's my take. Maybe algorhythms can predict platinum, but not every last winner. There's always going to be those stories and tunes that come out of nowhere. There's always going to be the outsider, the shocker, the one that no one would ever have guessed. There's always going to be a dark horse. There has to be. I wouldn't want to live in that other world.

Here's what I think--there's always going to be the miracle.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE ENGLISH MAJORS GONE?

What happens to English majors after they leave Dordt? Now and then, alum visits and emails brighten our days. This year I've received quite a few.

Last this summer, Melissa Drake ('05) walked into my office. Last I'd heard, she'd completed her MDiv at Drew Seminary in Madison, NJ. When this imposing women appeared out of nowhere, I was struck by her exuberance, the trait she always brought to my classes. Our conversation went like this:

"Melissa Drake, what on earth?" (Big hugs). I recalled she loved to run summer youth camps and write academic papers.

"I'm Pastor Melissa now, for two churches in Iowa, one with over 200 members, the other with about fifteen. My favorite time is Sunday night--I host all the young people at my place for food and conversation."

After exchanging stories, I asked "How did Dordt affect you?"

"It was a good experience, and it prepared me for seminary--we did a lot of deconstructing texts [she smiled]. It also helped me see things in a different way, though I'm still a Methodist.
I mostly want my people to love Jesus.

"What are your plans, Pastor Melissa?"

"I'm ready to go or stay, wherever the church needs me."

In a recent email, she wrote that she is taking two online courses and will start teaching a Lay-Speakers class on Hospitality and Leadership. As to the women of '05 she writes, "I have as of yet to encounter again a group of such intelligent and wonderful girls all in one place. I believe those relationships and that group, along with the practice of getting together to engage in serious and silly discussion, will always be one of the most important experiences of my Dordt Career!" No doubt, Pastor Melissa will lead her congregations with the same infectious fervor she brought to Dordt.

A few weeks later, I heard from Jeff Gutierrez ('06). Last spring, he completed his Masters in Arts and Letters at Drew University, with a thesis on Thornton Wilder's structure of time in several plays. He's currently working on a second Masters at Boston College in English (or Interdisciplinary Studies, not sure which) and is considering Princeton for his Ph.D. A lover of scholarship, he writes that he "gave a conference paper on Tolkien at UC Riverside, and right before graduation...received the Robert Campbell Prize for Excellence in and Commmitment to Literature." Now at Boston College, Jeff is a Writing Fellow. He'll be giving a paper on C.S. Lewis at a conference in Boston later this year. Closing with, "Good times, keeping busy, sleeping when I can," he lives in Boston with wife Beth (Ochsner), who completed her Masters in Social Work at Columbia U last spring.

Cheryl Korthuis Hiemstra ('08 grad and editor of the Canon) also wrote this September, from her first year in law school: "Just wanted to say I'm using so many things I learned from you (and the rest of the English Dept, too) in law school. Already we've used Derrida's deconstruction in parsing out definitions of statutes and common law phrases." She reports thata her case briefs "are getting great reviews by the professor" and that she's "editing a Civil Procedure text written by one of [her] professors." This future attorney encourages us to be "just as thorough with your students this year."

Here are several other alums you might have wondered about. Andrew De Young ('05) completed his Masters in English at St. Thomas U, worked a year for a publishing company, and has started his own publishing company, Replacement Press, with his wife Sarah (Versluis). Rosemarie Grantham ('05) manages an Apple Computer store in the "silicon valley" of California. When we last talked, she laughed at her resistance to teaching, now admitting she loves to teach her customers how to use their computers, to solve problems for her company, and to manage the "boys" who work in her store. Gloria Ayee ('06) emailed in February to say she'd finished her Masters in Liberal Studies at Duke and works as a research associate with the Center on Globalization, Governance, and Competitiveness at Duke. She began her Ph.D. in Political Science at Duke this fall. She writes, "Although I have diverged from my English LIterature roots somewhat, I continue to see tremendous value in the wonderful Engish classes I took as an undergraduate." Linda Van Wyk ('07) emailed me last week from Kosin University in Busan, Korea, where she teaches English. "I've been here for over a year now, and I love it. I adore my students and it's been a lot of fun to teach them. I've even been able to teach a couple of lit. classes, which have been a joy to me." More recent grads, Julie Ooms and Jessica Assink ('08) are working on their Masters in English at Baylor University. When I saw Julie in San Antonio last fall, she raved about her program and said we'd prepared her well.

Sharla Dirksen Kattenberg ('04) met me in the Children's Park last week to talk about the lit. course she teaches in a small Christian school in Hull, Iowa. As her young son Willem endangered himself every minute with mud cakes, slides, and swings, she told how she loves being a mother of two toddlers and teaching high school English and chemistry. Mostly we talked about Shelley's Frankenstein and Austen's Pride and Prejudice, works she's currently teaching. She especially wonders what the women in Austen novels did with "all their time!"

I'll end this litany with news from '09 graduate Rachel De Smith. When Rachel began her Masters at Creighton U this fall, neither of us knew that Creighton houses the Center for Henry James Studies, which means Rachel's been reading much of his work. Though she doesn't sing his praises as loudly as I do (yet), she does appreciate his work. Good news is that she received a full scholarship as well as an assistantship. One of her favorite courses in one in editing texts. She writes that she holds a key to the HJ Center and will happily give any of us a tour. Way to go Rachel.

All you English major alums out there, let us hear from you!

ColecoVision Vs. Crayfish

(Pictures by Christina Van Singel)

I had a ColecoVision as a child. If you don’t know what a ColecoVision is, it’s one of the missing links between the Atari and the Nintendo, and its run lasted from 1982 until about 1985. I spent my fair share of hours in front of the ColecoVision, “turning over” Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong Jr., as well as classics games such as Mr. Do and War Games. “Turning it over” meant running the score out of digits, turning it over just like you do the odometer on a car, back to all zeros; it meant complete and utter mastery of those incredibly sophisticated games.

I also spent my fair share of time down by the creek (Elgersma insists on calling it a crick, that hick) as a child. In and along this creek, I came upon minnows and pheasants, ducks and even a beaver once—and crayfish.

Crayfish looked cool. With their beady eyes, many legs, stellar armor and oversized claws, they were veritable monsters of the deep. Here I was, about as landlocked in midcontinent as I could get, and in the creek in my backyard lived Leviathan.

Crayfish became my mortal enemy. I spent hours scouring the mud bottom of the crick—creek—in order to catch a blue-green crayfish on its ominous march to wherever it was going. When I spotted one, I’d prod it with a stick and get it to flip its powerful tail backwards into a net which I had positioned for just such a move, and then I’d haul them up onto shore. The crayfish, like a fish out of water (hmm, weak simile there), would go into battle mode and I would proceed to be petrified (I was 17—no, like 12). Eventually, I’d smash it to goo with my walking stick and take the claws for souvenirs, which stunk up my bedroom in a day or two and so I’d throw them out.

Fast-forward a dozen or so years. One Sunday, I walked into my mother-in-law’s kitchen, and there in a bowl were perhaps fifty bright red crayfish. Yes, you can eat crayfish, my mother-in-law and wife informed me, and then they showed me how: break off the tail, peel off the shell and you’ve got a tiny white piece of meat, sweet and pure—like lobster but in miniature.

From there, my passion for crayfish has multiplied. It turns out my wife’s cousin has a seining net. It turns out there are crayfish to be had in the Rock River, and that there are wonderful Cajun-based recipes for what’s called a seafood boil with ingredients that include corn on the cob and potatoes and andouille sausage. It turns out my wife’s cousin and I will do anything for a haul of crayfish and a seafood boil, including walking the Rock River up to our waists in mud, snagging snapping turtles in the net—my standard joke is to call this process southwest Minnesota’s somewhat dangerous catch—all to get at these Rock River lobsters. It is indeed a sort of love affair.

Robert Frost knew about love affairs with nature. His poem “Birches” pictures for us a boy who lives “too far from town to learn baseball,/ Whose only play was what he found himself.” Frost waxes nostalgic over “swinging birches” in that poem, admitting that “So was I once myself a swinger of birches;/ And so I dream of going back to be,” and ending with the benediction that “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

If my mom had held onto it, I don’t doubt the ColecoVision would fetch a modest price on ebay these days. Today, I myself have a daughter and two sons, and they already know of the wonder of video games. We have a couple of Walmart cheapies that you plug directly into the TV on which we play some throwback games: Pole Position and Dig Dug and Ms. Pacman.

But my kids also like to tag along on the seining runs, to touch minnows and to catch frogs and to see turtles and to step in cow pies and be scared of bulls. And they know how to eat crayfish, to peel the tails and get the sweet white meat. Soon, they’ll know how to catch them: to dig the poles of the net down into the mud bottom, to chase crayfish from out of the weeds along the bank, to pluck them out of the net just behind the head so they don’t pinch you with their mortally fearsome claws. Needless to say, I’m biased toward which one of these two pastimes I think is more important to their development, their sense of the world.

One could do worse than be a lover of crayfish.