Seems Cool. Nice Guy. Overall, Terrible.

My more loyal readers will remember that I once received some negative feedback from a few--well, more than a few--angry students. I am happy to report that I have not repeated that experience. Selling out is a small price to pay for a good review.

That's a joke, by the way.

Still, I continue to have a low rating on ratemyprofessors.com, that nefarious online soapbox for yellow-bellied students who have nothing better to do than ruin teachers' lives...anonymously.

Here are the two negative things that have been said about me, neither of which is very original or clever:

"Got and NP [NOTE: that's kind of like an "F," but not really] for no apparent reason. Really hard on grading compared to other professors I've had. We're not all in English majors, and seems to completely disregard that fact. Overall, terrible."

and

"Seems cool. He is a nice guy, but he is really hard. He expects a lot from his students, like everyone is in an english major."

Ironically, the first review--which I think is the more angry of the two--rated me as "average quality," while the second review--which is shamefully passive-aggressive in its attempt to compliment me--rated me as "poor quality".

The one good review that I got says this:

"requires a decent amount of work, but if you put in a good amount of time and work, you will do well."

Of course, this review is something of a Pyhrric victory since its author forgot to capitalize the first word of the sentence. Still, I'm glad he or she wrote "you will do well" rather than "you will do good". That nearly justified my continued existence on earth.

Obviously, I don't take ratemyprofessors.com seriously. In fact, I don't care what people write about me on the internet.

It's not like anyone important gets on the internet.

Besides, I really shouldn't take anything to heart that was written by someone who was bored enough to log on to ratemyprofessors.com, seek out my name, and slander me and my posterity.

Good grief!

One thing that does bother me about my reviews on ratemyprofessors.com, though, is my "hotness" rating. "Just for fun," the website offers students the option to rate their professor's appearance as "hot" or "not". When professors are rated "hot," they get a red-hot chili pepper icon next to their name. So far, I don't have a chili next to my name.

I guess my students didn't see that part of the survey.

Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol: A Review

Recently, I picked up a copy of Dan Brown's newest novel The Lost Symbol (Doubleday, 2009). Although I hated Brown's last novel (the best-selling cheese festival, The Da Vinci Code), and doubted whether I even had the time to read all 509 pages of this one, I decided to give it a try.

I started reading it last week, but I only made it through the second sentence. Here is why:

"The secret is how to die.

Since the beginning of time, the secret had always been how to die" (3).

That is a direct quote, folks: the first two sentences of the book.

"Since the beginning of time"...come on, Dan Brown, you're a professional novelist! You can do better than a college freshman!

Call me picky, but that's why I stopped reading the book. I couldn't get past those lame first sentences. Besides, I still need to finish the fourth Twilight novel.

Better luck next time, Mr. Brown.

(Also, just in case anyone was wondering, I didn't buy the book. I checked it out of the library using one of those handy self-check-out machine that make it possible for you to check out any book, DVD, or CD without worrying about whether or not the librarian is judging you.)

Ballet Recitals and Little League Failure

Last month my oldest daughter had her first dance recital. She did about as well as any five year old could do with limited dance experience and a tea cup tied to her head.

Going into the recital, I was nervous for her. I had spent the past week worrying that she would be the kid everyone in the audience felt sorry for. Images of her tripping over her ballet slippers or falling off the stage kept me awake at night.

Worst of all, I spent too much time worrying that I would finally learn what it must have felt like for my parents to watch me embarrass myself during the one summer I played little league baseball. I was an extraordinarily untalented right fielder back in '87. To this day I don't blame my parents for wearing dark glasses and false beards at each game. I would have too. After all, what parent wants to admit that their kid's the one who clears his throat every time the coach tells him to "choke up," or who squints like Popeye every time someone tells him to keep his eye on the ball?

Fortunately, after watching the opening act of the recital--a thrilling tap-dance number by a chorus line of elderly hoofers--I realized that I had nothing to be embarrassed about.

As it turned out, my daughter did a fine job. All the worry was for nothing. Still, one of the hardest parts of parenting is letting your kids get into situations where they could fail and bring shame upon the family. But these situations are a part of growing up. If you deny them to your kids, you run the risk of them turning into Boo Radley--or worse, professional bloggers.

Of course, I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off as a Boo Radley than a failed little league right fielder. I mean, that definitely would have stopped my chain-smoking ex-coach from suing my parents.

Best and Worst Reads of 2009

2009 is ending, and I've finished another year of reading.

Since January, I've read thirty-four books, each of which are listed on this blog. Not included in this tally are the several short stories, poems, children's books, magazine articles, critical essays, and Peanuts comic strips that I've read. Also not included are books I started reading, but never finished for some reason or another.

Generally, I've counted any novel, novella, or graphic novel that took me longer than a day to read.

The following are my best and worst lists. Unlike last year, I am making separate lists for the best fiction and non-fiction books I read this year. I am still lumping all the crappy books together.

Five Best Fiction Books

1. The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy

2. Jack Maggs, Peter Carey

3. The Amalgamation Polka, Stephen Wright

4. Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy

5. The Deerslayer, James Fenimore Cooper

Five Best Non-Fiction Books

1. In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick

2. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

3. Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, H. W. Brands

4. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, Joseph J. Ellis

5. A Year of Living Biblically, A. J. Jacobs

Five Worst Books

1. The Bridge of the Golden Horn, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar

2. The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich

3. Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier

4. The 19th Wife, David Ebershoff

5. New Moon, Stephenie Meyer

Here are some additional lists...for the heck of it:

Five Mediocre Books

1. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski

2. The Unvanquished, William Faulkner

3. Eclipse, Stephenie Meyer

4. Massacre at Mountain Meadows, Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard

5. Some Dream for Fools, Faize Guene

Two Books that Nearly Made the "Best" List

1. A Mercy, Toni Morrison

2. Tropic of Orange, Karen Tei Yamashita

Two Books that Transcend Lists

1. The Book of Mormon

I've read this book more times than any other book. I read it again over the summer and with it had one of my best reading experiences of the year. It is the book that has influenced my life the most, and I recommend it to all.

2. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

Somehow, I made it through high school without ever reading this book. This year I finally read it for the first time and decided that it is likely one of the best novels ever written. I think it is hardly fair to judge the average book against it. I recommend this book as well.

Twitter is Lame (With a Capital Tweet)

It's funny how a day unfolds. Yesterday morning I woke up with a plan. The plan unfolded reasonably well. Everything happened the way it was supposed to.

Then I had some down time.

Down time is not a bad thing, except when it leads to wasted time. So, at first I wasn't wasting time, since I was merely exploring the various avenues available on www.brucespringsteen.net, which happens to be one of the reasons the Internet is still around. Then I discovered the Boss had his own Twitter account. "Hmmm," I thought. "Maybe Twitter isn't as lame as I thought."

Since pretty much anything the Boss writes is profound and potentially life altering, I decided to check out the Boss's tweets (which, I know, sounds dirty). To my disappointment, http://twitter.com/springsteen offers little of true value, being nothing more than news updates and advertisements.

So much for working class wisdom in 140 characters or less.

Still, I became intrigued with Twitter. Although I am habitually long-winded, I liked the challenge in condensing my aimless musings down to something that could fit on the inside of a gum wrapper. After all, it worked great for the guy who came up with Bazooka Joe.

So, I set up a Twitter account.

Part of me was really excited about tweeting. I figured since no one reads my long blog posts anyway, shorter posts might attract more readers. A Low-Tech tweet might be my ticket to a loyal fan following.

I was wrong. As soon as I posted my first tweet, I expected to have at least twenty-five followers in fifteen minutes. No such luck. It has been at least an hour and a half since that first tweet, and I am yet to have one follower. Either my friends hate me, or they don't know I'm tweeting.

Gaining followers is not the only challenge Twitterers face, I've discovered. Despite what the makers of Laffy Taffy and fortune cookies might think, coming up with something funny or profound in 140 words is not as easy as it sounds. My first tweet was about reading Ovid on Sunday morning. My second tweet will be about how lame my first tweet was. My third tweet will probably be about taking a nap.

Chances are, my Twitter account won't survive a fortnight--or any kind of night, for that matter. Unless, of course, I get my twenty-five followers by Wednesday. Then it might last a month.

Tweet out.

http://twitter.com/lowtechworld

Recycling the Classics, or Magwitch and Hamlet Get a Make-Over

"Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us."--Ecclesiastes 1:10

The Preacher was right: there is nothing new under the sun.

For instance, I recently finished reading two contemporary novels that take their cues from the classics: Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (a loose retelling of Charles Dicken's Great Expectations) and David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (a modern re-envisioning of Shakespeare's Hamlet). Both novels stand on their own, independent of the works that inspired them, so readers don't need to bone up on Dickens and Shakespeare to appreciate them. Still, I had read Great Expectations and Hamlet before reading these novels, and I was surprised to learn how much my exposure to these "parent texts" affected my reading--and judgement.

Jack Maggs is a smartly veiled retelling of the life of Abel Magwitch, the secret benefactor in Great Expectations. Like Magwitch, Jack Maggs is a English convict from Australia who returns to England illegally in order to visit a young gentleman whom he financially supports. Able to locate the gentleman's home, but not the gentleman himself, Maggs finds work as the neighbor's footman. By means natural and (seemingly) supernatural, his dark past quickly comes to the attention of his new employer and his staff, who subsequently treat him with mixture of fear, contempt, wonder, and sympathy. He also becomes an object of interest for Tobias Oates, an up-and-coming novelist, who wants to turn Magg's life (or the life he imagines for Maggs) into a best-selling novel.

Jack Maggs works extremely well as a novel in conversation with another novel. Wisely, Peter Carey does not try rewrite Great Expectations; rather, he uses elements Dickens's novel as a springboard for the exploration of possibilities: What if Great Expectations had been Magwitch's story instead of Pip's? or What if Pip had been a completely selfish, despicable person? This exploration of possibilities, however, is not crucial to the success of the novel. As I mentioned earlier, a reader can appreciate Jack Maggs without having read Great Expectations.

Still, the novel works best as a novel about novels. Aside from Maggs, the most important character in Jack Maggs is the novelist Tobias Oates, whose fictional life mirrors the life of young Charles Dickens. Through Oates's attempts to fictionalize Maggs's life, Carey is able to underscore the artificiality of narrative and the act of literary creation, which helps to explain the novel's anti-climax. Likewise, Maggs's violent resistance to Oates's desire to confine the unpredictability of life into the predictability of narrative convention lends further support to the idea that this novel is a critique of its own form.

If Jack Maggs is a lesson on how to borrow from the classics, then David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a lesson on how not to borrow from them.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is about a mute boy and the crisis he undergoes when his uncle murders his dad, shacks up with his mom, and tries to take over the family's dog-breeding business. If the plot sounds familiar, then you've probably read William Shakespeare's Hamlet or seen the movie Strange Brew. Consequently, reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle often feels like you're listening to a mediocre cover of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone".

To be fair, Edgar Sawtelle is not a bad novel. For the most part, it is an interesting and entertaining read; its characters are well-rendered, especially those of Edgar and his mother, and the prose never bores or annoys the way the prose of, say, Louise Ehrdrich bores and annoys. Still, the novel gets too close to its source at times, making the plot predictable. I often found myself betting on what would happen next in the novel and hitting the jackpot every time.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is at its best when it isn't trying to be Hamlet. Unfortunately, it is rarely at its best.

Ultimately, the major difference between Jack Maggs and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is devotion. Jack Maggs consciously borrows from Great Expectations, but it doesn't need Great Expectations. In a sense, Carey's use of Dickens is strategic, not devotional; by re-imagining an influential classic novel, he reevaluates the classic or traditional form exhibited in that novel (and novels like it). Wroblewski, on the other hand, is too devoted to his source story to accomplish anything similar with his re-imagining of Hamlet. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, therefore, adds nothing new to our understanding of Hamlet, Shakespeare, or tragedy.

In my opinion, you ought to stick with Hamlet. While there are no new things under the sun, there are some things that manage to shed new light. Jack Maggs is such a thing. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, on the other hand, is not. When it comes to shedding light, if fact, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is about as bright as a glowbug.

The Loveland Castle--A Triumph of the Independent Spirit

People who are really into medieval stuff are weird. For example, when I was in college, there was a campus medieval club that would set up a canvas tent outside of the building where I worked an early-morning custodial job. Around this tent, they placed two or three guards to keep watch over their collection of wooden swords and home-made chain-mail (you know, just in case anyone wanted to steal them). One morning, maybe to raise my twelfth century street cred, I told one of them that I had an interest in medieval literature. The thane looked at me with a ye olde twinkle in his ye olde eye, and said, "Then you are a friend."

The sincerity of his words were moving, but I still thought it was a weird thing to say.

I've kept an eye out for medievalists since then. They are generally easy to spot, mostly because they are the only ones in the neighborhood who dress like Robin Hood. They like to do medieval things, like lay siege to a dog house or storm a mailbox. Also, they are the only people you know with names like "Ulf" or "Hrothgar" or "Erowen."

It is easy to poke fun at these people. Outsiders interpret their behavior as a strange attempt to escape the modern world. I don't know if that is the case, but I wouldn't put it past either Ulf or Hrothgar. Anyone who would lay siege to a dog house is escaping something.

Still, I think there much that we--the outsiders, the modernists--could learn from these medievalists.

Take Sir Harry Andrews, for instance. Harry Andrews was a committed medievalist. He spent the last fifty years of his life building a medieval-ish castle (christened "Chateau Laroche," but best known locally as the "Loveland Castle") along the Little Miami River in Loveland, Ohio.

Why did Sir Harry do it?

Good question. During my recent visit to the Loveland Castle, the man who took my admission fee ($3.00 a person) explained that Harry built the castle because his loyal knights (who were actually members of his Boy Scout troop) needed one.

Fair enough, I thought. At least he didn't do it to impress girls.

* * *

Although I grew up only a town away from Sir Harry's Chateau Laroche, I never got around to visiting it until this week. My expectations were high; I had heard and read a lot of good things about the castle. On their official website, for example, Sir Harry's knights, the Knights of the Golden Trail (KOGT), describe it (and themselves) in these terms:

"Chateau Laroche was built as an expression and reminder of the simple strength and rugged grandeur of the mighty men who lived when Knighthood was in flower.

"It was their knightly zeal for honor, valor and manly purity that lifted mankind out of the moral midnight of the dark ages and started it towards the gray dawn of human hope.

"Present human decadence proves a need for similar action. Already the ancient organization of Knights have been re-activated to save society.

"Any man of high ideas who wishes to help save civilization is invited to become a member of the Knights of the Golden Trail, whose only vows are the Ten Commandments.

"Chateau Laroche is the World headquarters of this organization, started in 1927."

Wow! Who wouldn't, on the "simple strength and rugged grandeur" of that description, expect anything but the best from the world headquarters of a society that "wishes to save civilization" from "present human decadence"? Personally, I was so inspired by those words that I nearly forsook the modern world and changed my name to Unferth.

Good thing I'm not a drinking man.

What can be said about Sir Harry's magnum opus? The exterior of the castle is impressive, especially when you consider that Sir Harry did it all with his two knightly hands. And, to their credit, the KOGT have done a nice job keeping Sir Harry's castle grounds courtly and colorful. I mean, if I were throwing a medieval-themed wedding (or even a medieval-themed Tupperware party), I would throw it there. As castles along the Little Miami go, it's one of the more picturesque.

Still, inside the castle is a different story. While the KOGT are big on saving civilization, they are not big on dusting. Walking through the castle, I felt like I was taking a tour of the home of Pig Pen, Charlie Brown's perpetually dusty friend. Everything--Sir Harry's framed photographs, swords, and suits of armor--was covered with the stuff. I think I even saw where some medieval smart aleck had taken a finger to the dust and written the words "WASH ME" in both Celtic and Old English.

Don't get me wrong: the Loveland Castle is worth the three dollar admissions fee--even with the dust that hasn't moved a millimeter since 1985.

You see, Sir Harry's Chateau Laroche is a monument to the Independent Spirit. To the rest of us, Sir Harry and every other hard core medievalist seem like they're three motes shy of a drawbridge, but they don't seem to care. They are who they are, chain mail and all. They seize that independent spirit with a gauntlet of steel.

It takes a lot of courage to be a dork in this world. It takes even more courage to be a dork with a big dream. Sir Harry had a big dusty dream, and he made it a reality. That's more than most people can say.