The Dunkirk/Fredonia Big Read: Fahrenheit 451

My university is participating in the Chautauqua/Cattaraugus counties' version of The Big Read, with their focus on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. As the last person in the department to teach our Science Fiction course, I'll be contributing to a panel discussion on "Fahrenheit 451 as Novel" with my colleague Dustin Parsons early this afternoon. The goal is to get the audience thinking and talking, so I'm aiming for short and sweet.

Here's my talk's outline (with page numbers keyed to the 50th Anniversary Edition):

I. Where It Comes From

• A. History: Fascism, McCarthyism, The Great Depression (132, 150-154), the Bomb (158-162)
  
• B. Literature: Dystopias, American Pastoralism (140-145, 157), World Literature (150-153), The Martian Chronicles (Grand Master Edition 31, 108, 180)
  

II. How It Is Relevant Today

• A. Postmodernism and New Media: Entertainment (81-82, 84, 87), Information (61), Knowledge (105-108), Wisdom (75, 82-86, 163-165)
  
• B. Democracy and Capitalism: Mass Culture (54-55, 89, 108), Diversity (57-60), War (73-74, 87, 158-162)
  

Here are some suggestions for further reading. First, a few novels:

• Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection (1967)
  
• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
  
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
  
• Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (1991)
  
• Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
  

Then, a few links:

• Paul Brians from Washington State University on Bradbury and the dystopian tradition;
  
• Amy E. Boyle Johnston in LA Weekly on misinterpretations of Fahrenheit 451;
  
• Cory Doctorow responds to Bradbury's comments on winning the Pulitzer, as reported by Johnston;
  
• Anthony Lappe reports on a tough question he asked Bradbury at a recent Comic-Con;
  
• Bradbury biographer Sam Weller weighs in on the controversy;
  
• Robert Blechman looks at Bradbury's statements from another angle;
  
• Karen Stearns explains why she and a colleague at SUNY Cortland organized their Big Read event around Fahrenheit 451;
  
• My colleague Chris Taverna is planning to blog Fahrenheit 451, at least when his newborn allows him to [Update: like today!];
  
• And of course check out The Big Read Blog.
  

On Language Explosions

Imoto has been making incredible strides in communication over the past few weeks in particular. She gets mad now if you don't immediately understand her combination of looks, gestures, and made-up words (like "acamba") or otherwise show any hesitation in figuring out and doing what she wants. She can kind of say "mine," a key word for a year-and-a-half-year-old surrounded by older girls in day care and by onechan everywhere else (yes, onechan's just that fast). She tries to sing the "atsui, samui" song I made up (to the tune of Frere Jacques), loves to chime in on choruses like "ee aye ee aye oh" and "ai ai," can repeat about a quarter of the Japanese alphabet, and points out Dora wherever she can find her (and believe me that's just about everywhere) with a triumphant "Do-ah" (door in Japanese). I'm thinking by her second birthday in late April she'll be having some real conversations with onechan.

Speaking of whom, onechan is going through a language explosion of her own. If you put her on the spot, she'll claim she can't do it, but she's been making up stories a lot lately (often telling them to her toys)--and answering questions about them. When I told a friend about Suweet and Saja, it occurred to me to ask her how they make the earth spin. "They jump up and down," she said. "And they tickle it. And dance." My friend asked her if they blow on it, too. She thought for a while and politely said yes, but when I asked her about that in the car a few days later, she nixed it. And she's been quick to pick up on how they're relevant to her usual time travel scenarios. This time she went from saying she wanted to be little again to saying she wanted to skip right ahead to her 6th birthday to complaining that she didn't want night to come. "You can't stop time," I told her. "To keep it from getting dark, you'd need to make the earth stop spinning." When her eyes lit up I knew I was in for a long story about the Super Prius and her visit to Suweet and Saja at the North Pole.

Come to think of it, I never finished that story. Maybe something for the car ride to Buffalo later today!

Onechan: Poet, Scientist, Myth-Maker

The day before Halloween, onechan was running down the stairs in tights and socks and slipped when she transitioned from the carpeting on them to the hardwood floor and tried to change direction too quickly. "I slid like an ice cube!" she exclaimed with a smile. It sounded to me like her first really poetic simile.

This came in the midst of a period that's started even before our return to the States in which she's been trying to get her head around the difference between U.S. time and Japan time. In the morning, she'll seek out confirmation that "It's getting dark in Japan" or "It's bedtime in Japan." At night, before she goes to sleep, she'll tell/ask me, "People are eating breakfast in Japan now?" This has lead to questions about why day and night alternate, which she's been asking often enough that we've moved from "the sun goes up and the sun goes down"-type answers to trying to get across the notion that the Earth rotates and revolves around the sun (though the latter is more relevant to discussions of her birthday, which is coming in less than two months, and why she has to wait for it to come and can't just turn four tomorrow). We've explained it and showed her shadows on various balls using lights and flashlights. But now she wants to know why the Earth spins. Partly b/c I can't really explain it (b/c I don't really know), partly b/c I'm swamped and stressed, and partly to see how she reacts, I haven't gone online with her to look it up or asked the storytime librarian at the local library for a good book on the subject for an almost-four-year-old, but I have encouraged her to come up with an explanation herself and played devil's advocate on all her attempts. She's really into it b/c she's moving from the definite "that's why" to "probably..." (her new favorite word) as her favorite way of attributing a cause to something. So she likes searching out alternate hypotheses, so to speak.

She started with the wind. "Probably the wind makes the earth spin, daddy," she told me in the car on the way back from her Fredonia hoikuen a couple of weeks ago (she seems to like to have these kinds of conversations then and there). When I tried to explain that the wind was probably an effect of the Earth spinning and get across the idea of a vacuum in space (hah!), she grew tired of that hypothesis or my questions and comments or all of the above. So she hadn't said anything about it for awhile. But last evening in the car ride home she informed me she had figured the whole thing out. "There's this big giant, a nice one. She makes the Earth spin. She's pretend." So of course I had to ask her a few questions. Name? "Suweet." What does she do? "She does homework and takes care of her little sister. She goes to school." Wait, what's imoto's name? "Saja. She's three and a half." Oh, how old is Suweet? "Three and a half, too." So they're twins? "Yeah. Saja was born in April. And Suweet was born on the same day."

Not a bad start for onechan's first myth. Suweet and Saja have joined the Powerpuff Girls, Pretty Cure, Sparkychan and Gojochan, Iki and Ika, Jayla, Kake, Trak, and Zavis, the Super-Prius, and various friends and animals in our storytelling pantheon. Which, I freely admit, doesn't inspire as much hysterical laughter as my dad's stories about adults who can't do things right (eat, stand up, walk, etc.) and alternate worlds (say, where things fall up) did from onechan and her oldest cousin, the only other girl among all 7 of them, last weekend in Hershey, PA. Or my mom's playing the TV Teacher for them. But onechan's stuck with me and the tsuma (whose stories are more about everyday life in Japan, from what I can gather, and who tends to gravitate more toward Socratic dialogues with onechan to get her to think through a moral or interpersonal issue than straight storytelling). So tell me, what questions should I ask her about Suweet and Saja?

Mentoring Rules

We have three new tenure-track faculty in the department this year and it's my responsibility as associate chair to mentor them. This involves classroom observations (at least two over the course of the first semester), orienting them to department culture, answering any questions they may have, and especially adding department-specific information to the university-wide orientation that's spread out over the entire first semester (and maybe year). Oh, and presenting their reappointment files to the rest of the tenured faculty at the end of the first semester. (Yes, we have a crazy schedule. Doesn't everyone?)

Because I was away last year, I had nothing to do with the searches on which these new colleagues were hired and knew nothing about them when I arrived back in the States. So mentoring them has been a great way to get to know them, and, through their questions, reacquaint myself with everything I managed to forget about the department and university during my Fulbright year. I'm pleased to report that from my conversations with them about their teaching and research, our institution, and the profession, as well as my first observations of their classes, I've come to the conclusion that once again my colleagues made wise choices during the hiring process. Each of the new hires brings a very different set of interests and approaches to the department while contributing to our existing strengths. I'm not going to go into specifics here or now, but the best thing about the mentoring relationships we've already established from my perspective--someone whose first semester here is still quite fresh in my mind and who is in the middle of transitioning back to a familiar place after being on quite unfamiliar grounds for the past year--is the chance to see our institution through a variety of fresh sets of eyes. I'm at a place in my career where I can actually look back and note patterns in it, and so be relatively dispassionate about the costs and benefits of some of the choices I've made. So I can provide some context and perspective on choices my new colleagues are currently facing--and see where their situations and issues differ from the ones facing me when I first arrived here.

Sure, it's a lot of time and a lot of responsibility, but I can't recommend it highly enough, particularly to other newly tenured professors at teaching institutions.

Why We Should Sit in on Each Other's Classes More Often

Not content with sitting in on 6 of my new colleagues' classes this semester as their mentor, I also subbed for my chair the first day her class discussed Amitava Kumar's Passport Photos a couple of weeks ago and decided to sit in on the last day today. Talk about productive, for all of us. From the students' descriptions of it that first day, Kumar's book reminded me of a few passages from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, which I mentioned to the chair, who then passed them along to her students today. In the course of the discussion, a student pointed us to Kumar's response to Arundhati Roy's "banner of writerly protest": "If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic" (170-171).

A writer can do this. Declare that she is a nation unto herself! Even invite others. We're now open to immigration! The reason these bold declarations don't diminish my sense of alienation, and, in fact, only enhance it, is the quick realization that I'm not utterly mobile in history. There are miles of barbed wire. Of all sorts. And this becomes clear most of all when Roy rightly says: "However many garlands we heap on our scientists, however many medals we pin to their chests, the truth is that it's far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people." If I secede, if Roy secedes, we secede also from that difficulty. To put it differently, to secede is as easy as to make a bomb.

The real task, even for those who as diasporics think of seceding, is to contemplate that difficulty. Of how in our minds we allow ourselves to believe that it was ever possible to find a space of withdrawal. It is, also, inevitably, the problem of a collectivity, far beyond individual issues or even nations. Neither writers nor scientists can save the world by themselves. Or escape it entirely. That is the plain truth of the nuclear bomb. When it explodes, it finishes us wherever we reside in our mobile republic. (171)

Pretty useful stuff for starting to teach "The Custom-House" today. (And, for that matter, for plugging the WAAGNFNP.) Not to mention that the "Nationality" chapter from which this passage comes opens with a mini-reading of "Douloti the Bountiful," which I just taught last week in Postcolonial Hawthorne. Or that the "Date of Birth" chapter is particularly relevant for Hawthorne, who was, after all, born on the 4th of July. Or that the "Identifying Marks" chapter may prove crucial to my research on the picturesque, colonialism, and race. Or that the "Profession" chapter is perfect for the graduate course on professional development I'll be teaching next spring. All this from a guy who hasn't read Moby-Dick. Not bad.

Amazing Colleagues, Part I

Since I've been neglecting the Research Weekends part of the CitizenSE programming schedule for so long, I figure I'd better start bragging about my colleagues' work until I actually have time and energy to blog about my own. And since Aimee Nezhukumatathil has a new book of poetry out from Tupelo Press, I thought I'd start with her. You can read and/or hear Garrison Keillor read one of her poems from it, "After Challenging Jennifer Lee to a Fight," at The Writer's Almanac, if you didn't happen to catch it on NPR on my birthday last Thursday. If you want to read more of her poetry online, a google search on her name turns up quite a few, but a recent Verse Daily entry collects many of them. Right now, At the Drive-In Volcano is stalled in the low 200,000s on Amazon.com's bestseller list, but I'm confident that CitizenSE's 5 regular readers and 25 daily visitors will do such a good job spreading the word about it that we'll see it in the top 10,000 by 2008.

You know, it's actually much more difficult to write about your colleagues than yourself or your family. You never quite know what's TMI with a friend, do you? So I'm going to close by simply noting that Aimee blogs over at Gila Monster, but never lets on that she's a fantastic teacher, active with students in our Writers' Ring and Sigma Tau Delta English honors society, one of the driving forces behind our Visiting Writers Series, and a new mom. So let it be said that her son is super-cute, that her husband is a pretty damn good basketball player (among other things), and that it would be cool if he would find the time to start playing with us again (it's just two lunchtimes a week!)....

Onechan-sensei

So the other day on the ride back from school/day care, with both girls in car seats in the back, out of the blue onechan tries to teach imoto about the best way to cover your mouth when you sneeze, a fitting topic as both have been dealing with the sniffles for about two weeks now. She carefully explained how it's better to sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands, as you can pass along germs to other people much more easily the latter way. I reminded her about it this morning accidentally when I was telling the tsuma this story, and she proceeded to repeat the lesson, complete with the big idea, the rationale, a demonstration, and an attempt to move imoto's arm in the prescribed manner (this last part didn't go over so well). It's good to see she's learning something useful (about teaching as well as avoiding pandemics) at her hoikuen. As the elder child, I've followed in my dad's footsteps profession-wise. Now I'm wondering if onechan is predisposed to be a professor, too. I don't know whether to be proud or worried.