Another year (almost) down

Even worse than the end of the semester is the end of the spring semester. I don't know if it's the April weather or the fact that I've only had a two-week break from them for the last 9 months, but I find myself contemplating student homicide by finals week. After a particularly trying morning troubleshooting printer problems and answering basic questions about research assignments that I know were due days before, I spent the afternoon sitting at my desk thinking, "I hate you all."

In hindsight, I should have taken a cue from my favorite coworker, who, weary of research paper-induced hysteria, set yesterday's Facebook status as "Everybody calm the fuck down!" Next spring I think I'll get up on the table and shout that when things become unbearable.

Since tomorrow is the last day of the semester, I shouldn't have to do it this year. Because our administrators are masochists, semester grades are due at 5, which means no one can realistically hold class much past Wednesday. Tomorrow will be faculty panic day, but they usually require at least slightly less hand-holding, and if they're rude to me I can withhold the copier bypass key.

Next week is semester break (for the students and faculty, that is; we staff are expected to be in our seats as usual), and then comes 16 weeks of summer classes at 25% enrollment. In an interesting twist, because of odd student worker schedules, the fact that there are zero classes scheduled for Fridays, and I think my boss is a little afraid of me when I'm crabby like I was today, I'm going to be working 4 (longer) days instead of 5. I'm not a hundred percent sure that's even allowed (our dictator predates the concept of flextime by about 50 years), but my boss proposed it as an option this morning and I immediately created the student worker schedule around it. Huzzah for 3-day weekends!

If nothing else, the extra day off will give me time to recuperate from dealing with the mental exhaustion brought on by students like the freshman who came to me this afternoon and asked, "Are you one of the student workers who's graduating this semester?"

I would have been more flattered if he weren't so stupid. Still, I won't have to see him for 4 months, so I smiled graciously and said, "No, I'm a grown-up--I'm here all the time."

The bright side

Thanks, Eyjfjallajokull, for making me feel better about the fact that we are not preparing to leave for Paris on Friday, as I had originally envisioned.

Fragments of story and truth

I picked up a copy of The Things They Carried this week and read it straight through. It was even better and more moving and more well-written that I had remembered--I honestly think it's close to a perfect book. I need to own a copy.

There were a couple of passages in particular that I felt the need to copy and post here, because they do a much better job than my feeble attempt at re-creation to explain what O'Brien was talking about last week.

From "Spin":

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.


From "Good Form":

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Here is the happening truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

"Daddy, tell the truth," Kathleen can say. "did you ever kill anybody?" And I can say, honestly, "Of course not."

Or I can say, honestly, "Yes."

But if you're only going to read a few parts, read "On the Rainy River" and "Speaking of Courage" and "Field Trip." And the part about the baby buffalo in "How to Tell a True War Story," even though it'll make you feel like a jerk for being like the women at the readings and being as affected by the description of a buffalo's death as of a soldier's.

The things we all carry

A couple of weeks ago I saw an ad in the local paper for "An Evening with Tim O'Brien," commemorating the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Things They Carried and sponsored by the library and our local independent bookstore. We generally don't get authors of that caliber here, so I tore it out of the paper and put it on the fridge.

Yesterday it was 35 degrees in Chicago and I had a generally crappy day. I came home, put on my yoga pants, and sniffled, generally feeling sorry for myself. The last thing I wanted to do was go back out. But that little voice in the back of my head kept suggesting that I'd regret it if I missed Tim O'Brien (not to mention that other little voice that keeps reminding me that pretty soon it's not going to be so easy to do this kind of stuff). So I dragged my ass off the couch, put on real pants and a coat, and went.

And of course, that little voice was right, because it was amazing.

Anytime an author comes to town, I automatically assume it will be a reading. This was more of a lecture, although he did read a short passage from the book, as well as a letter from a fan. But for the most part, he just talked, about writing the book, its reception over the last 20 years, and the power of stories and storytelling. I wish I had taken notes, because I would have loved to be able to quote him verbatim when he read the fan letter, from a young woman whose father never talked about the war until she read the book in high school and then gave it to her dad to read. He got quite choked up at owhile he was reading it, even though he said he's read it several times over the course of this tour, and he talked about the difficulty he and many vets have talking about their war experiences and how something like a novel is a way of starting the dialogue.

But one of the most interesting parts of the evening came during the Q and A, when one of several high-school age attendees asked him to address the fact that the book's opening (I think; it's been a long time since I've read it) states very clearly that it's a work of fiction, despite the fact that there's a character named Tim O'Brien from Minnesota who goes to Vietnam in 1968. His answer was long, and really fascinating.

He talked about the section of the book where Tim the character going for a swim in a river on the Minnesota/Canada border the summer he was drafted and wrestling with whether to go to Canada and avoid being sent to a war he didn't believe in, or staying true to his small-town Minnesota roots and making his family proud by acquiescing. Did that literally happen? No, he said--during the summer of '68 he played a lot of golf, which would have made for a really boring story. But the inner turmoil was there, and incorporating it into that setting was, in a sense, truer than what really happened, because it gave the reader more of an insight into the essence of the story.

I'm phrasing it really badly, but I found that really powerful, and a perfect description of what good writing--whether "fiction" or "nonfiction" ought to do. I never got too caught up in the whole James Frey controversy, in part because I had no interest in the book itself, but also because I think of memoir as a completely separate genre from straight reporting, or even biography. While Frey obviously misrepresented some essential facts in his story, the idea that memoirists should be held to a strict definition of truth when it comes to remembering dialogue and actions that happened years before seems unrealistic to expect.

Calling his book a novel got O'Brien off the hook in that respect, but I think his book is at least as true as a lot of the nonfiction out there. And if it gets people like me and the high school students and the baby boomers in the audience to read and think about issues like war and morality and the nature of truth, then I think he is more than doing his job.

If nothing else, he made me want to go out and re-read the book ten or more years after I first picked it up. That's something right there.