17 How to read the classics

As someone who makes (often unwilling) young people read classics as my regular job, a question I get a lot is: how do I learn to like these things?

They bounce off. It happens! Everyone has modern expectations of narrative, which is to say, fast-paced, fitting a certain pattern, full of cliffhangers and other excitement. The chunky cloth covers and small type put them off. The feeling that this is steamed broccoli meant to be good for you is definitely not helping.

There are a couple great roads into finding ways to love the classics. And I say that as someone who makes people read them practically daily. I also adore them. I talk a lot about genre fiction and so on here, but the classics are my whole thing. The older the better.

Here's how you get into them:

One, try listening to an audiobook instead of reading. Truly, it counts exactly the same. The voice actors interpret for you and make sense out of the long sentences. Downsides: it takes a lot longer, if you read fast at all, and you can't make notes on it, unless you're following along on the page. Which lots of people do! If this is something you ever need to write a paper about, definitely follow along on the page so you can put a post-it note where it needs to go.

Two, slow down. Slow way down. The pacing is much slower than modern fiction. It takes some getting used to. Even the sentences are often longer and more complex. The language and vocabulary and usage is different. When someone in a book written in 1800 is "making love" to someone, they are not having sex, okay? They are charming or romancing that person. You might want a book with footnotes to help with this sort of thing. Get a second-hand anthology if it has full texts.

Three, prep. Read a synopsis first so you know who's who and what on earth is going on. There's nothing wrong with watching a movie adaptation of a text before you read it. If it's a play, definitely watch it first! I don't think people should read plays anyway. It's like reading a recipe and expecting to be full. Those are directions for a thing, not a thing. But at minimum hit Wikipedia and read a synopsis so you know what the hell is going on.

Four, learn the background and context before you even start reading so you're not totally lost or confused by a truly alien culture compared to ours. An edition with a good foreword can be great for this. 

Five, a more complex point: remember that people back then were just as snarky and sarcastic as we are. Chaucer was snarky as hell. Sophocles loved putting people in impossibly awkward situations. Jane Austen was extremely sarcastic about people and their flaws. They were the same as us.

Take the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife." Okay, does she mean that, or is she being ironic? 

We figure out very quickly she's being ironic when Mrs. Bennet comes flying in and says a rich man has rented a house in the neighborhood, what a great thing for our girls! She has all these marriage-aged daughters and an aging husband and NO MONEY, no security, not even a house as they will lose it if the husband dies. One of those girls needs to marry this rich man and be able to take care of everyone else! 

Does he want to get married? Who is he? What's he like? Nobody knows anything about him except: rich and unmarried. But it's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife, after all, so let's go get him, girls!

I've had students say this makes everyone shallow and so forth. No! Women of their class could not go out and work. They had to get married to support themselves. Yes, you can be upper class and poor. This is also shocking to modern Americans.

So knowing that background changes the first sentence, right? Now we get it. The joke is that everyone assumes this guy who just rented a house wants to get married. Let's all go see him and see which sister he wants to marry! It's embarrassing to the two oldest sisters, but the younger ones are kind of idiots like the mom. 

Six, if it doesn't ruin the story for you, get spoilers! Who marries whom? How do we get from here to there? There are many obstacles in the way. How do Jane and Lizzy not absolutely die of embarrassment from the behavior of their mother and sisters?

It helps to get the tone and plot beforehand, truly. Like if I am teaching The Iliad as I often do, I tell the class: okay, spoilers, here's who won the war. So that lets us see one hero as tragic, the other as favored by the gods. And the gods literally show up and help or hinder these people! 

Seven, tone. Jane Austen is being funny. It helps to know that. She's writing about the serious business of finding a husband and having a life. She writes about Lizzy's friend making an awful choice, but a choice that lets her survive. But she's being very funny about all the intricacies of trying to find a person you could marry and live with when it's deadly serious survival, but also absurd. It's easier to see this in a film adaptation, where everyone is trying not to roll their eyes every time Mr. Collins goes on and on about Lady Catherine, who treats him like dirt even while he's fawning over her and pretending that his connection with her makes him something special. Look how complex and human and funny that is.

Eight, start with something you like. Do you like war stories? Henry V. Do you like the supernatural? Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Do you like stories about young people figuring it out? Austen, Dickens. 

Nine, take a class. Sometimes you just need someone to walk you through them as you go. I swear I have shepherded dozens (hundreds? oh no) of classes through the densest classics and showed them how they are awesome. You can take a class, but make sure the person teaching it loves these texts AND can show you what's great about them. (Not everybody does, fair warning.) Also ultimately you're going to have to sit down and read them.

Ten, I hate to say just do it, because I find it nearly impossible to sit through 95% of nonfiction and saying "just do it" doesn't help me. I will be up and doing something else within five minutes and I will not retain anything I've read. Yes, I've read lots of nonfiction, and no, it doesn't help me get any better at it. I have to MAKE myself read it. Put the phone far away, get a relevant beverage, and sit there. I find the hardest barrier to get over is the initial one where you have to turn everything else off and sit there.

A few more strategies to try: 

• Take notes as you go, even if it's like "p278 Genji is a complete perv about some new actual child and says he's not." Taking notes helps, for real. It makes you focus on taking info out of what you're reading.
• Ask questions as you read. Write them down. Is Genji ever going to realize what a horrible user of a person he is? (No.) Is Genji going to get attacked by wild dogs that eat his liver? (Alas, no.)
  
• Setting a timer helps because then you don't read to the point of failure, which makes you hate doing it. Read for five minutes and stop. Read for ten minutes and stop. 
• Read a set number of pages. Don't keep going if you're not absorbing it.
  
• Cast the roles in your head so it's more vivid. 
• Imagine texting what you read to a friend. Or if you won't get distracted by touching that phone, ACTUALLY text it to a friend. 
• Get a friend to read along! That can be fantastic if you're struggling equally. Team reading.
• Draw brief sketches of what you're reading. This works very well for visual readers as you have to convert the story into images.
• Get mad about it. This got us through what we called "Frigging Genji," truly. Want to read something maddening? Here's someone presented as a hero who's a terrible philanderer and pedophile and child rapist. But it's written so brilliantly that if the person portrayed read it, they'd be like, yes, I am awesome and justified, it's true. They wouldn't be offended. While others reading would be backing away in horror. We all hated Genji so much! Hating a character is surprisingly effective in driving your reading forward. Unfortunately he doesn't get murdered by a child as we all hoped. Oh well. In my version he would be. 
• Articulate what's working and what's not working. This is extremely effective for me. Not just "I don't like it" but "I hate how the author writes women in xyz ways." Bonus, you can turn this into a paper if you do it right. My first academic publication came from something like this.
  

Classics are classics for good reasons. That doesn't mean you will like them if you go in cold. Sometimes you need a guide or other strategies to help you get to the good parts. Never take it as a reflection on you if you don't like something, though. Some of these things are not for you. 

The reason to get familiar with the classics is that they're part of the conversation you want to understand. You know how every TV show has a Rashomon episode? You want to see the original Rashomon so you get it. 

Once my VW bus broke down in Grass Valley CA and I was stuck for a couple of days waiting for a part, with nothing to do but read the paperback Shakespeare collection I'd stuck in there for emergencies. A few years later, a friend and I were watching My Own Private Idaho. I gradually freaked out because it was absolutely Henry IV. They even quoted from it. I kept saying, "This is Henry IV." My friend got mad because he was an English major with a master's and hadn't caught it and I was a composer conservatory dropout in those days. So maybe this isn't the best anecdote, or possibly it's a brag, if being a dropout with a broken down VW bus is a brag. (It definitely is not.) But knowing those plays absolutely affected how I saw that movie. 

Can you enjoy it without understanding all that? Sure! But why not get the whole thing, not just a piece of the picture? It's good to know where you are in the whole conversation that is fiction.

16 "Objects in Space"

Episode 16 Objects in Space is up!

*******

Very strange to rewatch the series! Strange how much I'd forgotten about this specific episode, one of my favorites. 

For ages I couldn't understand how the show didn't make it, because I loved it so much, but now I get it. The tone and angle of the episodes are all over the place. One heartfelt, one silly, one dramatic, one truly violent, one horror, one a heist, and so on. I could see how that would make the money people extremely nervous. How would an audience know what to expect?

I suspect the fans like me were there for the characters and the world more than anything else. If you're a character person, you'll take anything that lets you spend time with those characters. Not that there's anything wrong with these stories! They're all wonderful. But they are unpredictable. Compare to a sitcom or a procedural or a regular drama. They deliver the same goods every week. This does not.

Anyway.

"Out of Gas" is the episode I wanted to look at specifically because it's about treating people like objects. 

There's a bounty hunter, Jubal Early, who is after River and Simon. He shuts the crew in their bunks and then runs into Kaylee. He says truly appalling things to Kaylee and threatens her with rape. There's no earthly reason to have that in the episode, obviously--he beats up Mal and Book and Simon, so non-sexual violence is on the table--so I have to wonder whether it's the treating people like objects theme that's doubled as Early treats River as an object to be retrieved and returned for the bounty, not as a person. 

In the end, Mal throws Early (in a spacesuit) off the ship and into space to die. He will become an object in space himself. 

Early says something about Serenity's design as he is forcing Simon to search the ship for River, something about how he likes the ship's design--people don't appreciate the shape of things, objects in space--but he says a lot of weird things in passing and Simon lets it go. 

Objects in space is such an odd phrasing. What ISN'T an object in space? Everything is. But I suppose what it means is: the way things fit into and belong in the spaces they're in.

I removed two chairs from my living room today. You think that didn't entirely change the nature of this space? It's astounding. Space and the way objects fit into it or obstruct it or clutter it. Mise en scene. Oh the relief when I take anything extra or awkward out of my house.

Early is an invader of Serenity when they're far away from everything. He invades the ship, but then when they can't find River, she gets on the comm and says she isn't on the ship, she IS the ship. Simon jokes that he can't keep track of her even when she's not incorporeally possessing a spaceship. It's River's disappearance and her mysterious takeover of the comm that lets her communicate with everyone, almost telepathically, and organize their resistance and attack and success.

Space invaders, crossing boundaries, obviously the overt spoken threat of rape, identifying the spaceship with a body and entering it against everyone's will, then River becoming the ship and organizing everyone to kick Early out and kill him. There's so much in this episode about bodily autonomy and violence. It's a simple story: invader enters, hurts people, locks everyone in or ties them up, but then they organize and kick him out and kill him. So is it a rape revenge fantasy? Maybe so. 

Early treats all of the crew as objects. Look what he does. Beats up Mal, drops him down into his bunk. Locks Mal, Jayne, Zoe, and Wash into their bunks. Beats up Shepherd Book. Threatens Kaylee with rape and ties her up to use as leverage. Knocks Simon around but needs him to find River. Beats up Inara and locks her into her shuttle. River is the ninth character but she escapes. We never see her go. She just disappears. 

Want to talk about the fantasy that Firefly thrives on, of being mobile and independent and able to get away from anywhere you don't want to be? This is a huge fantasy of mine. I used to have dreams of a shuttlecraft from Star Trek: The Next Generation. A runabout from DS9. Any mobile, independent self-contained space, with power, heating and cooling, a bathroom with bathtub, a kitchen, a couch, a desk/table, a bed. Make it a caravan of a diverse crew of misfits that form a found family. Just like DS9, Farscape, STTNG, Battlestar Galactica. No coincidence, all my favorite shows. 

Mind blown. I want it!

I never wanted to live on the Enterprise. Too antiseptic and too dangerous. Deep Space Nine, absolutely--I had invented a character for myself and everything. I dreamed multiple times I was on the Promenade. DS9 is found family while TNG is not. TNG people had it together far too much to be found family--and they were all Starfleet, anyway. Moya on Farscape would be the ship for me, though that gives me an anxiety surge just thinking about it. Never mind, DS9!

"Out of Gas" taps into something truly profound for a self-contained episode about a bounty hunter who breaks into the ship, beats up the crew, and gets booted right back out.

15 Treating People Like Things. "So much water so close to home" and The Hollow

Update: 

Episode 15 is up. It turned out to be about "So much water so close to home" and Agatha Christie's novel The Hollow.  

Previous post below:

***** 

I'm going to work on a short story I hate called "So much water so close to home" by Raymond Carver. 

Here's why I hate it: it gets under your skin. And because it's a male writer writing from a female POV about a deeply upsetting topic with a powerful gender divide to it. But even that is different now from how it used to be, or else I think about it differently. The future! It's more nuanced than the past! I also hate how realistic it is. I hate how she goes back to him at the end. I hate the drive with the green pickup. I hate so very many things about it.

Sometimes you're supposed to hate things about a story. That's the point of the story sometimes. 

How can I get mad that Carver thought about the man's wife's point of view more than the man's? What is up with my brain that I would even think that?

Anyway I recommend reading this story before listening to the podcast. 

Not that I've recorded it yet. Here is why:

The power company trimming back trees and chipping them.

The landlord building his house bang bang bang.

The road out front getting repaved.

Barky barky barky.

And the eternal road noise.

Also my innards were trying to kill me for the past few weeks but I have prevailed by way of Austerity and Not Being An Idiot. And Bloodwork. And next week a CT scan. Whee. They had another good go at me today, though, boy oh boy. 

The enemy within. Or something. The call is coming from inside the house. Inter arma enim silent leges? 

I feel like rewatching DS9 but the pacing is EXCRUCIATING now. Oh, olden times. So slow!

Goddamn, I hate this story. 

Want a quick synopsis?

Some guys go on a fishing trip and find a dead woman in the creek. But rather than lose their vacation, they just tie her to a tree and LEAVE HER THERE and spend the next two days or so fishing and drinking and washing their dishes in the creek RIGHT NEAR HER. They come back home and everyone finds out what monsters they are and the narrator silently freaks out, smashes some dishes, goes to the woman's funeral, gets chased and bothered en route, comes home, and for whatever earthly reason forgives her husband. WHY.

I mean, people do.

But that's horrifying to me. You're married to someone who cares so little for women that he'd leave a dead woman in a creek TIED TO A TREE so she won't float away for several days so he can GO FISHING.

If this were a class, I'd ask: would they have done that if it were a man? Obviously not. No way. To me that's what this story is about: how callous men are toward women. Pay any attention at all to true crime and this is the entire theme of it. Women's bodies are nothing but objects to be treated any old way these men want to treat them, then disposed of as garbage, not like they were ever people at all. They don't see women as people, alive or dead.

It happens CONSTANTLY. If that doesn't make you enraged, I can't begin to fathom why not. 

In the story, the narrator character sees this about her husband, is furious and repulsed by him, and then accepts him again by the end. Now granted it would be a very different story otherwise, but even within the story it's nauseating to have that juxtaposition of events. It's framed in terms of sex, refusing him, pushing him away, then inviting him back. That's super gross juxtaposed with the dumped naked corpse. Again with the true crime, but if a body is dumped naked, that's sexual assault.

I think it's okay to break up with someone when you find out that they don't think people like you are people. Put it that way. It's not everyone. (Not all men.) So if you find out he's one of the ones who doesn't think women are people, then get gone. 

I feel pretty strongly about this. Someone who doesn't think people like you are people--stay with me here--doesn't think people like you are people. And they will do whatever they want to you, because you're not people. Maybe it doesn't really become a problem until they're crossed or cranky or humiliated, but then there it is.

But there are a lot of ways to read this story. Maybe it's about forgiveness, or redemption (what has he done to deserve to be redeemed?) or gender imbalance, or eighteen million other things.

It would be a good story to teach because it's not clear what it's saying, so readers have to interpret for themselves, which also brings out biases and excuses and why some people get to behave certain ways and others don't. It would be a nightmare to teach because 18 year olds haven't articulated their assumptions yet or identified them as such and believe they're just truths. It would be easier to teach now than say 20-30 years ago because modern kids are infinitely more capable of talking calmly about sex and murder and violence and know infinitely more about it.

I'm just saying though, imagine four women on a camping trip alone with a naked dead man in the creek, tied to a tree by his hand. You can't see that to begin with. But also you can't see them fishing and drinking and hanging out like that. It's impossible. Because they would see that murder victim as a person.

Well anyway. That should be a fun podcast, between the nail gun and the wood chipper and the road paver. And the rage.

The road paver machines are fascinating and terrifying. They shoot orange flames out from underneath and cook the pavement as it goes down. The men working around them are in heavy gray clouds of choking fumes and incredible heat. Even driving by, I roll up all the windows and try not to breathe. How are they surviving that?

Nail guns and wood chippers of course feature in murder stories. There was a nail gun in a Bones episode. And the wood chipper is in Fargo as well as Bones. Want to talk about how the procedural-industrial complex treats women's bodies as objects and fodder for their machines? That's a mixed metaphor or three but so what. Also Bones tended to have gender parity for victims AND treated everyone like a person. I love Bones. 

If I were writing a Bones spec right now, I'd want to use that road paver. Imagine the terrible things it would do to a body for the geniuses at the Jeffersonian to figure out. But see the bones would have to be chopped up and mixed in with the asphalt, maybe using a cremation bone grinder. A challenge for Brennan and her team. It would make a great spec. 

Bones is always, always, always careful to humanize their victims and show grieving families and their current friends and relationships and so on. It's a good show to talk about in this context. Maybe I'll talk more about it in the future.

I keep coming back to Kaylee in Firefly, ship invader Jubal Early threatening her with rape, saying to her, "Ain't nothing but a body to me. And I can find all unseemly manner of use for it." Horrifying. "Objects in Space." Extremely good episode, though. One of the best.

The moral is don't treat people as objects, even when they're dead, OBVIOUSLY, stupid fishing guys in this story I hate. 

The wife is so astonished and horrified. But we know these guys, she thinks. Their kids are in school with our kids. And they could just do this. Just treat her that way. It's what you hear over and over about people who do horrible things to people. But he's a nice guy! Yeah, that's who does those things. Just other people. It's not some distant monster who does it. It's the guy next door. 

The moral is do the right thing or you're the monster. It's that easy. It's just a matter of doing the right thing or the wrong thing. There aren't actually good people and bad people, just people doing good things and bad things. Don't do the bad thing and excuse it by saying you're a good person so it must be okay. Maybe that's why I hate the story so much, because it comes down on that exact comforting exonerating cop-out at the end.

Really hate this story. Doesn't mean it's not good! Obviously it's a good one. But I still really hate it. Maybe I can record my episode tomorrow, inner rebellion and external cacophony allowing. 

Raymond Carver has another excellent story I hate called "Cathedral" about an utter asshole who gradually figures out how to stop being so prejudiced against a blind friend of his wife.

The thing is, I don't enjoy spending time with utter asshole characters. Tricky, huh?

Also: don't treat people like objects. 

Up next: Firefly in general and "Objects in Space" in particular.