Friday, August 25, 2006

tried and tested

Term started two weeks ago. Eleven weeks to go and then it'll be over. You see where I am going with this.

There are good days. This Wednesday for instance. By some stroke of grace, one of the two modules I teach got its lowest enrolment since I started running it three years ago. It's the perfect size: 8 students. The small class means that I can teach it in the old-fashioned way, the way things used to be before university education was globalized (i.e. Americanized): I meet the students in my office where it's civilized and cosy, a change from the norm of gathering in faceless seminar rooms somewhere in the warren of the Arts faculty.

We spent an hour discussing two poems by Seamus Heaney, "Underground" and "An Artist". A number of interpretations for each poem were aired, most of them sensitive and shrewd, though the majority of the students looked awkward and abashed as they said what they thought. I talked about literary allusion, how they are like ghosts in a work they have been newly embedded in, how it's not possible to talk about literary allusion if one starts off by thinking the poet is showing off how much he or she knows.

There are not-so-good days. The lecture theatre is too cold, the students' faces show impatience, irritation. Some of them stare fixedly at their laptop screens. You wonder if they are surfing the web, or chatting with their friends in other lecture halls via MSN messenger. You feel like a mad person on a rock, shouting to the wind.

Labels:

Saturday, August 19, 2006

the long and short of it

Short stories are symmetrical in ways that novels, long drawn-out affairs, can't be. That is why I am reminded of poetry when I read a patiently crafted short story. A good short story is like a good coffee after dinner, a complement to the day that is almost over, a reverie after things have run their course. Nothing needs to be added to it.

Often, there is a moment of surprise at the end, a point at which the reader realizes how much he or she still doesn't know and never will know. The story fades into the blank of the space after the last words, and the reader is as desolate as an orphan. What else is there to do? It seems wrong to start on the next story in the book when the story just finished is still filling up the corners of the room where the reader is seated or lying on the sofa. Everything outside the story seems frivolous and immaterial.

With stories that have such an effect on me, I have all the time in the world. If you are looking for an experience like the one I've described above, stories that are manifestly from another hand and yet seem imaginable within your everyday span, then the stories of two writers, the first a master and the second a stellar first-timer, Franz Kafka and Yiyun Li, should more than satisfy.

Labels:

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Germany's example

The protagonist in the film Sophie Scholl made a deep impression with her heroic stance on freedom of speech and ideas, yet somehow the images my mind keeps returning to are of the faces of the Gestapo police inspector in charge of her case, the woman prison officer at the cell she was held a few hours before she was beheaded, the German general who hung his head briefly after her brother Hans Scholl's defiant testimony. Especially the Gestapo police inspector - the scenes of him grilling Sophie took up most of the film.

There were instants in which the distance between Sophie and her Nazi persecutors seemed to disappear - when the inspector seemed to respect her patriotism, when Hans's speech seemed to bear the face of truth to the general who had seen the truth at the battlefront with his own eyes, when the prison officer saw the young girl and her brother and friend and offered them a cigarette and a few minutes together in the cell.

Why can't these moments have been less sparse? Why are they impotent? Why is violence never the last resort when communication and exchange of ideas between opposite camps break down? Is it possible to silence the opposition forever through fear and coercion?

Labels: