In Which My Students Encounter Susan Boyle, Some Are Perplexed, and I Respond in a Great Many Complexities

This week, I thought I’d join the legions before me who have written about the Susan Boyle phenomenon. (If you have been on top of the Himalayas or down checking out the Titanic for the past two weeks and so are the last person alive who has not yet seen the Susan Boyle audition for Britain’s Got Talent—as of Friday afternoon, not quite two weeks after the original audition, there had been more 88 million plays of the several videos of the audition on YouTube[1]—then you can see it here.)

I got to thinking in more detail about the current media wonder because one of my students asked me the other day, “What’s the big deal about Susan Boyle? Why is everyone so excited?” My first reaction was to ask her if she had seen it, as the excitement seemed intuitively obvious to me, but she had, and so a less cavalier answer was called for. I expound here on the short version I gave her. The answer that I was able to produce on the spot is that the reaction is archetypal: Susan Boyle is the living breathing embodiment of one of the most emotionally attractive of all narratives: the Cinderella Story.[2] She went from utter hopelessness to absolute victory in the space of four minutes—less, actually: as my sister pointed out, the audience was on its feet before she got through the third line. The hopelessness, furthermore, turned out to exist only in the eyes of the beholder, which meant that as audience members, we unexpectedly and abruptly found ourselves in the position of having our own cynicism shattered by incontrovertible evidence that there is, in fact, hope even when hopelessness seems the only possible rational position. While Susan Boyle herself won the full joyful force of transformation, everyone watching also got to experience something of the effect of an emotional slingshot.

Most of my students had no trouble responding to the rags to riches story at least to some degree. It was a student, in fact, who first brought the video to my attention: she used it in our IB Philosophy class to exemplify some of the features of chapter 5 of Charles Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity. The student (rightly) thought that the video served to exemplify Taylor’s claim that in our effort to realize our potential selves as fully as possible, it is necessary both that we have the recognition of others as a form of validating that our opinion of ourselves is not mere delusion, and that we simultaneously consider the validity of that recognition so that we do not make the mistake of allowing the opinions and values of others to distort reality and thus keep us from something essentially ours. My student could hardly have chosen better. Susan Boyle was all about recognition: the dowdy, unattractive almost-48-year-old never-been-kissed spinster presented the perfect vision of completely self-delusional visions of grandeur. The audience had NO trouble recognizing in her all the American Idol contestants who had come before and who had made complete fools of themselves during widely televised (and perhaps even more widely ridiculed!) auditions. William Hung and his infamous rendition of “She Bangs” positively leapt to mind.[3] Before she started singing, Susan Boyle had already been recognized as a failure.

The expectation of impending humiliation was heightened by Miss Boyle's proclamation that she wished to be as successful as Elaine Paige, an apparently outrageous aspiration which my students were universally unable to appreciate, as, though they are universally familiar with the musical oeuvre of Mr. Hung, none of them had ever heard of Elaine Paige. I, however, have been fortunate enough to have encountered Ms. Paige before (particularly in the original cast recording of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Whistle Down the Wind). Elaine Paige is a giant of the musical stage and a household name in England. I tried to help my students draw a parallel by suggesting that it would be like someone in America proclaiming that she wanted to be as good as Barbra Streisand, but all that accomplished was the underlining of my own generational distance from the kids, as none of them had ever heard of her, either. So I asked them to provide me with the name of the biggest female star in contemporary American music, to which importunity they offered Celine Dion. I had at least heard of her, and the general point was made, but I did feel that they were still missing something by the comparison, as Ms. Dion is not known for leading roles on Broadway, for instance. (Having learned from my abortive Barbra Streisand attempt, I knew better than to try Sarah Brightman or Betty Buckley. Perhaps Kristin Chenoweth would have gotten me somewhere, since she has television experience, but she hardly has the stature of Elaine Paige.)

The thing that’s too bad about our failure to arrive at a meeting of the minds over effective exemplars is that those who don’t know who Elaine Page is lack the ability to appreciate in a visceral way the true extent of the audacity with which Miss Boyle approached her audition. The judges got it, of course (as did the British audience), and the television editors, sensing an impending bloodbath, took care to leverage for all it was worth the eye-rolling and eye-brow raising and sidelong glances and general expressions of incredulity (lip reading helps!) in the moments preceding the audition. Worldly and cynical recognition positively leaps off the screen.

That kind of recognition, however, would not be the kind of recognition that Charles Taylor wishes for us all to experience as a means of helping us become fully-realized, successful human beings. Miss Boyle however, and rampant cynicism notwithstanding, went on to demonstrate the second part of Taylor’s claim and, in so doing, ultimately got all the positive recognition that one would wish.

Susan Boyle knew what to do with the eye-rolling skepticism of the judges and the audience: she ignored it altogether and proclaimed, in fact, that she was going to “…make that audience rock!” This confidence, ironically one of the many factors that actually contributed to the viewers’ sardonic and scornful expectation, was in fact a quintessential demonstration of Taylor’s theory. Miss Boyle had, over 36 years, developed what everyone who heard her sing on April 11th came rapidly to understand is an accurate and balanced assessment of her own abilities. Better still, she had the self-possession necessary to allow her to keep the scorn of the disbelieving masses from shaking her judgment. She just smiled and sang. When she sang, she did, indeed, rock the audience which, despite its rapid leap to cynicism, knew a phenomenally talented singer when it heard one. The wonder that arose from the sheer rapidity of the change is, perhaps, part of what my student couldn't quite appreciate: since she had no idea what Elaine Paige represented--and, I might add, no earthly idea in advance of how difficult the song itself is--she couldn't understand the magnitude of Susan Boyle's claim, didn't, therefore, formulate the level of scorn others did, and thus also failed to experience the full potency of the contrast between expectation and production. Much of the impact arises directly out of that contrast and the speed with which the transformation from scorn to awe was executed. (One of the great joys of the video is the reaction of those present—who knew Simon Cowell could exude real pleasure and admiration??? My personally favorite bit is the moment when the two guys backstage register the fact that Miss Boyle did, indeed, hit with perfect control that high note that they, and everyone intimately familiar with the song, knew was coming. It’s a fabulous moment of pure vindication for the singer no one thought could sing--no one except Susan Boyle, of course.)

In fact, it was in part because her judgment was hard-nosed and completely justified that Miss Boyle has commanded so much admiration. A lot of the commentary online (and there is a TON—between the blogs, mine included, the news pages, and the fan club sites, the web is crawling with Susan Boyle references) focuses on how “brave” Susan Boyle was. Part of the answer for my student, then, is that we can all relate, on some level and to varying degrees, with the feeling that some part of us is too ugly to be overlooked by others, and most of us go to great lengths to hide those aspects of ourselves in fear of what we know must be inevitable rejection. Few of us have the nerve to stand up in public and proclaim to the world that those bits absolutely don’t matter in the face of other bits of great value, and fewer still, having found that nerve, turn out to be right. Susan Boyle’s triumph is, in a way, a triumph on behalf of everyone who has ever been laughed at or picked on, or been chosen last for softball in 5^th grade PE. Susan Boyle revealed that she is endowed with the fortitude not to care what the naysayers will think; she showed that she has mastered a way of valuing herself grounded in solid, rational awareness of her own nature and abilities, rather than in hubristic, stubborn delusion—and I never met anyone who wouldn’t be glad to have that ability.

But courage in the face of universal incredulity wasn't the whole story and, I think, wasn't even the main story. The real reason for the widespread adulation of Susan Boyle, the reason I would have given my student had I had time to think it over and to explain in detail in the three minutes before class started, is that in four minutes Susan Boyle went from laughingstock to human being. Before she sang the audition, Miss Boyle was not a person, but rather a stock character, an abstraction, a type: "self-delusional loser," but almost the moment she started singing, a cog shifted inside the brains of all the listeners, they traded one perceived reality for another, utterly different one, and by about six bars in, they cared what happened to this person they had never seen before. In the space of those six bars, the audience went from wanting Susan Boyle to fail, because that failure would provide a satisfying, if mean-spirited, sense of superiority, to wanting Susan Boyle to succeed, because success is vastly more satisfying than failure. Once success became a real possibility on the stage of Britain's Got Talent, everyone started hoping. Hoping meant risking being let down, and when Miss Boyle didn't let anyone down and, in fact, surpassed the wildest possible expectations, the ensuing joy was the reaction to a promise fulfilled. That's the archetype I was trying to tell my student about: in a world littered with disappointments, the universe came through with a massively fulfilling surprise. The hero, against all odds, negotiated the road of trials and came home with the ultimate boon.

The nice thing that this suggests is that, cynical armor notwithstanding, people are mostly more generous than our day-to-day interactions sometimes suggest.

My students can understand that, because, as they have demonstrated to me through their discussion of the literature we have studied this year, they know how to empathize. They might perhaps best understand the Susan Boyle phenomenon in terms of Cyrano de Bergerac, which we recently finished studying. Un-Susan-like, Cyrano compensated for his ugliness in the eyes of others not by raising himself up on a deep assurance of the true worth of his real talent with words, but rather by developing a persona--the swashbuckling hero--in whose essential truth he didn't believe, but the appearance of which, he believed, would fool the world into according him a measure of respect that allowed him to function in society. The value of that persona, in other words, was not intrinsic to itself, and Cyrano didn't value himself the more or feel himself more successful and more human because he could manifest it. The value of that persona lay solely in its instrumental capacity: he was able to get what he wanted from others because they valued it. The commitment to the persona came with a very high price, however: to keep it up, he sacrificed any chance he might have had of a life with the woman he professed to love, and to whom he devoted himself, Lancelot-like, in the role of platonic champion for more than 15 years. My students understood in nuanced ways what those choices meant, and they recognized that Cyrano’s deep suffering over the ridicule he reaped as a result of his monstrosity of a nose kept him from becoming the person he might otherwise have been.

Cyrano died before he found a way to transcend people's attitude toward his nose. Susan Boyle didn't have to die before people looked past her hideous, if metaphorical, nose, but for whatever reason, something kept her, too, from becoming the person she might have been for nearly 48 years. The opportunity provided Miss Boyle by Britain's Got Talent, then, is that much more poignant. Most of us are a good deal more like Cyrano than we are like Susan Boyle, and so a great deal of the wonder over Susan Boyle arose from encountering the rare exception: someone becoming, despite the odds and long after all expectation would seem to be past, the person she might have been. That the world can experience such pleasure in that simple fact speaks better for human nature than our behavior often suggests we deserve: in this case the widespread furor suggests that in great numbers we believe that nobody should have to die without ever casting off the Ugly Duckling.

The general public at large, lacking the technical vocabulary, wouldn't express that desire in terms of a belief in an ethic of Authenticity, but my Philosophy students could. Whether the public at large is familiar with the formal terminology of Charles Taylor's ethical theory or not, I think Taylor is right in his claim that the underpinnings of Western culture in general and American culture specifically lie in just such a belief. The ideal of opportunity for all, which formed the basis of the American constitution and the framework of the American dream, toward which generations of immigrants have traveled, inheres the idea that every individual deserves equal chance to discover and create a unique self. Taylor argues further that our social institutions--governmental and legal systems in particular--have been designed to accommodate that belief. Taylor does not mention schools, but it seems to me that just as the government and the judicial systems ought to support and protect the ability of each member of our society to work on becoming his or her best self, so should the schools promote authenticity. My objection to No Child Left Behind and its consequent state programs of testing (about which I have written in detail in past posts on this blog) arises from the fact that those structures are designed to steer schools away from the service of the individual and toward a herd mentality.

The title "No Child Left Behind" is rather painfully ironic, as, though it appeals directly to that same desire for individual self-realization that sparked the Susan Boyle revolution, it actually works against any ability to attend to the true nature of each individual child. No Child Left Behind leaves all children behind, because it forces schools and educators into a gristmill of testing, bureaucratic record keeping and bean counting that discounts entirely any question of individual student's gifts might be. No Child Left Behind leaves all individual children behind, because it requires that all children be forced into the same mold and mandates a system in which all students are shaped to know the same things, posses the same skills, and think the same thoughts as all others. No Child Left Behind proscribes an anti-authenticity, anti-individualistic program better designed to churn out unthinking clones than it is designed to generate diverse minds. Students who are mandated by law to spend all their energies on the four core subjects, who are schooled in places which have to eliminate the arts (and a slew of other elective subjects) in favor of double-blocked remediation periods will find that their opportunities to explore options, and thus discover whatever it is that speaks uniquely to their most essential selves, have been greatly curtailed. Given that lack, it is to be hoped that my students, and all students, will be able to find some other path to their Susan Boyle moment, and that that moment won't be delayed until they are nearly 48. As much joy as the world found in Susan Boyle's eleventh-hour rescue from obscurity, I would trade the community pleasure for the longer-lived individual pleasure of finding recognition for one's essential talents at an early age, that that recognition might serve better and last longer. I find it a terrible contemplation to consider the possibility that we have cast our lot behind a school system which, in its subjugation of individual development to the fulfillment of societal needs is essentially instrumental, leads, ultimately, to a generation comprising many more Cyrano de Bergeracs than Susan Boyles.

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[1] I added the numbers up myself from the totals posted for the dozen or so videos, so if the estimate is wrong, it is my math skill and not simple unchecked hyperbole which is to blame. Note that this does not count the myriad video responses, video biographies, Susan Boyle fan club websites, and so on. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the total hits on all video sharing sites, as tracked by some company that tracks these things, was greater than 116 million. At that pace, she's probably over 200 million now. I Googled "Susan Boyle" at the same time as I did the adding up, and I got more than 19 million hits. She qualifies as a bona fide phenomenon.

[2] Online access to this article requires membership in http://www.questia.com. The reference is:

Waters, Jen. "Cinderella: Biography of an Archetype; Enchantment of Fairytale Spans Centuries." The Washington Times. 31 May 2003.

[3] For those of you so unfortunate (?) as to have missed Mr. Hung’s fleeting time in the spotlight, you can see it here.

Education and Creativity--From TED

The World According to My Books

I was halfway through a new blog column (on the subject of the role of the arts in education, following on Mr. Obama's renewed push for a focus on science and mathematics), when a friend of mine sent me this "quiz."  I found myself intrigued; what one reads, it seems to me--and more, what one loves to read--can be quite telling.  So I thought I'd give this a crack for a more light-hearted change.  Thanks to Jen at Corrodentia Weekly for the tip!

 

* * * * * *

 

"Book Maven" Quiz

You have received this note because someone thinks you are a literary maven. Copy the questions into your own note, answer the questions, and tag any friends who would appreciate the quiz, including the person who sent you this.

1) Which author is most thoroughly represented in your personal collection?  How many of his or her books do you own?

That would have to be Agatha Christie.  I own all of her books--murder mysteries, plays, short stories, and her Autobiography; I also own all of her books written under other names:  a second autobiographical work written under the name of Agatha Christie Mallowan (the story of her life with her second husband), and six novels written under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.  Mrs. Christie chose a pseudonym for that work because she was concerned that readers might be mislead.  These novels are psychological studies, not murder mysteries, and rather than trade on her reputation and disappoint readers who were looking for more mystery, she chose to present herself as an unknown writer.  This seems to me to have been an honorable pursuit.  One of those books, Absent in the Spring, is a quite brilliant study of what might happen inside the mind of  even a very self-absorbed, self-delusional person who was suddenly stranded for several days without another soul to talk to. 

 

Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple are Agatha Christie's most famous detectives, but my favorite books have always been some of the others--those featuring detectives who only appeared once or twice, and who often weren't actual detectives, just regular people who got caught up in extraordinary situations.  (Very reminiscent, now that I think of it, of the heroes in the books of the author who would be second on the list for this question:  Dick Francis.)  My favorite Christies include:  The Man in the Brown Suit, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, Murder on the Links, Murder in Retrospect, and Toward Zero. Not a comprehensive list, of course.  Altogether, I own about 100 books by Agatha Christie (including some collections of short stories not published in the US).  Last year, I re-read them all, in order of publication.

 

I see that I answered this question in terms of raw numbers; there are other authors, less prolific, though, of whose works I also own 100%:  Dick Francis, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth George, and Harper Lee (whose one book surely counts as a lifetime oevre of considerable note!) come to mind.  I must be within one of owning all the works of Bill Bryson, too.  I would like to own all the Trixie Belden books, but so far I do not.  I do have all those written by Julie Campbell--those constitute the really good ones--but I do not have all the Kathryn Kenney editions (she took up the task when Julie Campbell stopped writing).

 

2) Of which book do you own the most copies?

Either the collected works of Shakespeare or The Secret Garden.  I have at least four complete collections of the works of Shakespeare.  The first one I ever owned  was the Riverside Shakespeare, which I had to buy for a class as an undergraduate at UC San Diego.  It's a classic; I was using it a year or two ago in a class on Shakespeare (a perfectly DREADFUL class, as it turned, that purported to investigate how well various film versions of Shakespeare's works realized the original text, but turned out to be a poor excuse to watch a bunch of movies), and one of the other students in the class came and asked me where I had gotten that as, she claimed, she had "...been looking for a copy for years!"

 

I also have two sets of the complete works of Shakespeare on CD; one of those is a reproduction, published by Octavo Press, of every page of one of the First Folios owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library.  Very cool.  (I use the CDs for teaching; I do a whole segment on the First Folio and the authorship controversy and so on, basically to establish the First Folio, along with other early printings, as the best we've got in terms of trying to know what Shakespeare "intended."  Then I ask the students to ignore all the editorially interpolated stage directions, and decide for themselves what they would like to see on the stage.  After all that, when I get to the "Exit pursued by a bear" bit in The Winter's Tale, I need a bit of authoritative evidence for its being the legitimate thing, and not the phantasmagorical delusion of some self-important academic.)

 

I have at least six copies of The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, including a beautiful leather-bound copy.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

Must have.  I rewrote them.  Not merely pedantic nitpicking; they really sounded awkward to me the way they originally appeared.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

Fitzwilliam Darcy.  Ever since I was 15.  But I don't think it counts as a secret, since pretty much everyone I know knows that.  (Note:  Having just answered number 6, I am reminded that for may years the secret love of my life was Jim Frayne, who makes his first appearance in the very first Trixie Belden mystery:  The Mystery of the Mansion.  He was a secret--I am sure I have never told anyone before now!)

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)?

Definitely The Secret Garden.  Or possibly Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis.  Or maybe Pride & Prejudice.  (Now that I think of it, I have quite a few copies of Pride and Prejudice, too.  I can see at least two from where I'm sitting....I bet I have six....)  Those three books I reread pretty much every year.  I would have to think The Secret Garden has the edge, though, since I started with that one in fourth grade.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

We spent my fifth grade year living in Alexandria, Virginia, while my father was on sabbatical leave from UC Berkeley at the Smithsonian Institute.  That was the first year that I can remember being really happy as a result of having lots of real-life friends, so I don't remember anything I read that year at all.  (Except for a book called Almost Twins, that my mother bought me to read on the plane on the way to Virginia from California).   My favorite book from my 10th year, then, will have to be a favorite book from the year before.    I was already onto both The Secret Garden and the Trixie Belden series by then, so those would have been the gold medal winners.  I also loved the other Frances Hodgson Burnett books:  A Little Princess and, much more obscure, The Lost Prince.  For awhile in there, Johnny Tremain was my very favorite book (there was a time when my secret fictional love interest would have been Rab, from Johnny Tremain), but that might have expired by the time I was in fifth grade.  Still, The Secret Garden and the Trixie Belden mystery series were my best friends for many years, and, as a result, I love them still.

 

Ironically, it was while we lived in Alexandria that I suffered my most frustrating reader's moment ever.  I got my first two Trixie Belden books in a box of used books that someone gave us.  They were out of print, and I had only managed to get one or two more (of what was then a fifteen-book series) from used book sales.  Right at the end of our year in Virginia, we went into a drugstore, and I was met by a big display of all the Trixie Belden books--brand new, freshly released.  My mother agreed to buy me one.  I chose Mystery on the Mississippi, and I've always hated it; resentment, no doubt, due to its function as a constant reminder of the fact that I was within touching distance of every Trixie Belden novel ever written, and I had to walk away from all the others. 

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?

I read half of Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins before I got so fed up I actually threw it in the trash.  It was one of the selections for my book discussion group, but I couldn't get through that one.  Relentless pointless sex.  I got very, very bored.  I am assured by someone who LOVES the book that there was a point; I just couldn't last long enough to figure out what it was.  I read all of What Came Before He Shot Her, by Elizabeth George (normally a perennial favorite), and loathed that.  WAY too depressing, and no Lynley in sight.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers.  But I could list a dozen more that I loved!

9) If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?

 

At the risk of sounding supercilious, I have to say that I don't like the idea of forcing anyone to read a book.  I come close enough in my working life, because I get to assign books for my students to read, and they have very little choice in the matter.  One can argue that since the IB program is elective, the IB English class is elective, and so they "chose" to be there; but that's a little weasly.  The truth of the matter is that one way or another, they would be in some English class with someone telling them what to read.  Short of dropping out of high school, they really don't have much choice. 

 

Since I spend my days coaxing and coercing students to try to get them to see all the wonder in the books I love and give them to read, I haven't got much stomach for mandating other people's reading!  That said, I am fond of saying that no one can really consider him or herself to be a literate American unless he or she has read To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby.  These are truly great American novels. If I'm going to pick a book I wish everyone loved as much as I do, it would be Pride and Prejudice.  At least this week.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?

The next one?  I don't know.  How old do you have to be?  How many books do you have to write?  My vote to win one, next or later, goes to Richard Powers.  His capacity for seeing meaning, patterns, and connections between events is unsurpassed.  Reading his books is like seeing into new dimensions you didn't know were there before.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

Difficult call.  As a rule, I do not love movies of books that I love.  Partly, this is because the books I love the most tend to be first-person narratives, and it is just not possible to translate a first-person narrative onto film.  A Separate Peace, a truly wonderful book by John Knowles, was made into one of the all-time worst films, (starring Parker Stevenson, which should tell you something!) for example.  There are, of course, some seminal movies which are versions of books (To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind), but even when they are quite good movies, they are never the same as the book.  (Actually, to be totally fair, Beaches was a fantastic movie which far surpassed the trashy book upon which it was based.  An anomaly.)

 

Murder mysteries translate to film better than most books (third person narratives, mostly!), so I might be interested in seeing an Elizabeth George novel translated to the big screen.  PBS has done a series of Inspector Lynley programs, but they got his partner, Barbara Havers, completely wrong, and most of the programs are just random stories using the characters rather than versions of the actual novels.  If I were to pick one E. George to start with, it might be Playing for the Ashes, which has fabulous characters.  Deception on His Mind  has an action-packed chase scene in a boat at the end, though--complete with cops pointing guns at each other and someone going overboard.  I expect that Hollywood would love it.

 

Plays work much better; there is a remake coming of "Master Harold"...and the boys.  I am quite looking forward to that.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

Till We Have Faces.  It's a first-person narrative, and a brilliant one.  The whole story hinges on the narrator's believing the world and her life in it to have been one thing, only to discover, near the end of her life, that it was something else altogether.  If someone tried to make it into a movie, he or she would no doubt turn it into some sort of cheesy mystery.  The mind boggles.  (Note:  I have discovered, as I have come back to add hyperlinks, that Walt Disney made Johnny Tremain into a movie in 1957.  I bet that's wretched.)

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

I've had some weird dreams in my life, and I suppose that somewhere in the murky past there have been some dreams involving books, writers, and/or literary characters, but I'm darned if I can remember one right now.

 

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?

Bridges of Madison County.  I read that for another book discussion group (in St. Louis).  It was loathesome.  Dreck.  Sludge.  Absolute trash.  Actually, I have also read The World According to Garp, the book I hated more than any other I have ever read, and I would call that lower than low.  (I refuse to link to those books; if you want to read them, you can Google them yourself!)

 

But both of those no doubt pass as "literature" in some people's eyes, and the question is probably trying to get people to own up to reading pot-boiling bodice rippers and that sort of things.  I have read a few; I just can't remember any of them.  When I was in high school, I read (wait for it!) Harlequin Romances by the truckload.  I could read four or five a day.  I've read hundreds of them.  Deep dark secret:  as an adult, I have actually collected up most of the Harlequin Romances written by Mary Burchell and those by Essie Summers.  I do not have them all; they are actually collectors' items, and some titles run $50 and up.  I confess to having read all of those in the not too distant past.  My favorites?  The Oscar Warrander series from Mary Burchell--all of those are about young unknown singers who get discovered by some handsome rich guy and end up vaulted to fame and fortune.  (It occurs to me that this might be some weird precursor to my guilty and fascinated interest in American Idol, for which my sister and I write pithy commentary every week.)  My favorite Essie Summers book must be Beyond the Foothills, but that might be mostly due to the extremely good looking red-haired man painted on the cover.  Designed specifically to appeal to 15-year-old girls.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?

There are numerous books that were so hard I never managed to finish them.  "Hard" in that case usually meant extremely difficult  to engage with, and so, ultimately, too boring to finish.  I tried War and Peace, for instance, twice.  Couldn't get more than a few chapters in.  Famously, I have never made it past chapter 2 of Catch 22.  Much too hard to swallow.  If I consider the question from the perspective of choosing the most difficult book I actually finished, I'm going with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.  Richard Powers' first novel.  I've read it three times, I think.  each time, I get a bit more, but I am always quite certain that I missed a lot.  Everything Powers has written is extremely difficult:  thought-provoking, mentally challenging, and just plain work to read.  But supremely smart and deeply fascinating.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?

 Cymbeline,  maybe?  I've seen a lot of Shakespeare plays.  I haven't seen Timon of Athens  or Titus Andronicus; those would be more obscure than Cymbeline, I think.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

Goofy question.  The only French literature I can remember reading are some Maigret novels (murder mystery again!) and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre.  I've read some Russian novels, but they are quite turgid.  I would have to say Russian, but it's cheating, because it's by virtue of a fabulous production of The Seagull by Chekov that I saw in Stratford-Upon-Avon two years ago with Sir Ian McKellen.

18) Roth or Updike?

My book club is reading The Witches of Eastwick this month in memory of Updike.  I have never read an Updike before, and I haven't read a Roth yet.  I don't even know enough to understand why the two of them are paired in this question.  I'm on about page 50 of Witches of Eastwick, and so far, I am finding it quite palatable.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

As with the Roth-Updike choice, I know too little to understand the pairing.  I have never read Dave Eggers, and I've read only one David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day, for my book discussion group.  Oh, correction--I actually liked it enough that I picked up Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim at the library.  Enjoyed that, too.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

Shakespeare without question.  I will get kicked out of the English teacher's guild for saying so, but I LOATHE both Milton and Chaucer.  Possibly this has something to do with the fact that I had to read them in a Humanities class at UC San Diego when I was 18 and I didn't understand a single word I read, but I loathed them enough to never try again.  Shakespeare, on the other hand, I have loved fanatically since I got the chance to go to Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, for six weeks in 1992 on an National Endowment for the Humanities Grant.  That experience was one of the highlights of my life, and I have been sold ever since.  I have made many good friends through Shakespeare--Miriam Gilbert (the professor who ran the seminar), Skip Nicholson, Sandi Forsythe, and several other Stratford aficionados including John and Susan Ford.  After my real home in Maidens with Tim, the place in which I am the happiest and most comfortable is Stratford-Upon-Avon.  Crazy, maybe, but there you go!

21) Austen or Eliot?

Austen.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

The fact that I have more gaps than wall is probably the most embarrassing reality of my literary history--especially for an English teacher.  I am, infamously, the only English teacher in Virginia who does not have an actual degree in English (I have the equivalent coursework without the degree, which is why I am legally qualified to teach), and, as a result, my English credits were acquired as a random gallimaufry comprising whatever happened to interest me.  As a result, I know very little American literature except 20th century literature, and only a little of that.  I know very little English literature after 1850.   I know poetry on a random, single-poem basis, rather than being familiar with a range of work by any single poet.  I've never read a whole SLEW of the "Classics":  Madame Bovary, Anna Karenenina, War and Peace, or David Copperfield.  I've read a bunch more that I promptly forgot:  Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Grapes of Wrath. 

 

Perhaps even more shamefully, if one is an English teacher in America, I absolutely HATE John Steinbeck's work--particularly a dreadful thing that I had to read in high school called To A God Unknown that had something to do with some guy worshipping a tree which dies in a drought; the book ends with our hero (?) sacrificing himself to feed the stump of the tree with his blood.  I just thought the guy was nuts.  And don't even TALK to me about Huckleberry Finn  or anything whatsoever by Ernest Hemingway.  

23) What is your favorite novel?

Pride & Prejudice or Till We Have Faces or Galatea 2.2.  This week.

24) Play?

The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare.  Or "Master Harold...and the boys.  But if you want to get into musical theatre, I can really go to town!  (Current favorite there:  Wicked.)

25) Poem?

"One Art," by Elizabeth Bishop or "Patterns," by Amy Lowell or "Proud Songsters," by Thomas Hardy.

26) Essay?

"Once More to the Lake" by E.B. White.  Maybe the best last line ever written.

27) Short Story?

"My Sister's Marriage," by Cynthia Marshall Rich.  This is a brilliant portrayal of a good and loving girl who sells her soul for the love of a worthless father who abandoned her, for all intents and purposes.  That is an absolutely TERRIBLE summation--you have to read the story.   This is another of those deeply important works in my life; I first read the story when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the early 1980s.  I read it for a class in Oral Interpretation of Literature; it was the breakthrough class where I finally learned to understand the whole concept of the narrator.  It was an amazing experience.  I did an oral interpretation of a scene from the short story and it taught me about unreliable narrators.  Eventually, an actress friend of mine wanted to play Sarah Ann, the lead character, and I wrote the stage adaptation that was professionally produced in Chicago.  We got great reviews--including from the author.  She wrote the story when she was 21 years old, and won the Mademoiselle magazine short story contest in 1951.  Amazing that someone so young could see so much.

28) Work of nonfiction?

This one is a tough call; I have been a kind of non-fiction junkie for the last decade or so.  Here's a short list in no particular order (not even the order in which I read them):

Cold Beer and Crocodiles by Roff Martin Smith

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The Greatest Game Ever Played, by Mark Frost

The Perfect Mile, by Neal Bascomb

The Great Bridge, by David McCullough

No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Blink and Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman

In a Sunburned Country, A Walk in the Woods, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and Shakespeare:  The World as a Stage, all by Bill Bryson

Body of Work, by Christine Montross

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Waiting for Aphrodite, by Sue Hubbell

Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt

 

I could go on at some length.

 

29) Who is your favorite writer?

If that means the writer of my single favorite book even if I don't love the rest of her work as much, then Jane Austen.  If it means the writer of the overall most magnificent collection of work, even if I haven't read it all and even if I wouldn't sit down next to the fire on a snowy night and read one, then William Shakespeare.  If it means the writer whose work I have read the most, then Agatha Christie.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

Ha.  Now there is a question.  So many choices.  Danielle Steele?  Does she count?  Is she still alive?

31) What is your desert island book?

The Collected Works of William Shakespeare.  It would keep me occupied for years.

32) And... what are you reading right now?

The Witches of Eastwick.

How We Decide; non-fiction by Jonah Lehrer.  I'm on the last chapter.  It's great.

Broadsides from the Other Orders, by Sue Hubbell

Winter's Tale, because I'm teaching it.  (Just finished Long Day's Journey Into Night, by Eugene O'Neill, and will be reading "Master Harold"...and the boys next week.)

Sports Illustrated:  Great Baseball Writing

This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin (re-reading that one)

and

Foul! a very old biography of Connie Hawkins by David Wolf.  Reading that because I read it when I was a kid and loved it; it got me interested in the Harlem Globetrotters, and my husband just took me to see them--courtside seats--for my birthday.  Had never seen them before.  Very cool!

 

* * * * * *

 

This was a very fun exercise for me; in the process of trying to answer those questions, I remembered a lot of books I read and loved and haven't read for a long time, I prowled around my house looking at the bookshelves, and I re-lived, somewhat vicariously, the experience of reading those books before.  Books have always been my friends.  They have opened up the world for me, made me see people differently, helped me understand better why people do what they do.  Books have been the main source of my hope that there is meaning and value and that the future will be better than today is.  This is what I wish for my students, and when I teach them one of those books I chose that they would never choose for themselves, I always hope that I can crack it open just wide enough that they can get at least a single glimpse into what riches there are between the covers of a book.  This is what reading education should give our students, and this is precisely the thing that the multiple choice tests and the concomitant frenzied reduction of literature to collections of grammatical units rob our students of. 

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