Summer school is in session, which will certainly reduce the frequency of my posts, since any energy I have for writing would be better served composing papers for class. I am taking “Age of Johnson”, the Johnson in question being Samuel Johnson; a class on Florida history; and another class on Romanticism, hoping I might be able to use what bits of information are still fresh in my mind from the spring semester.
The most agonizing part about summer school is that, with class occurring every day, any assignments are due the following day, whereas in fall or spring you have at least 48 hours before the subsequent session.
Another agonizing thing is paying $55 for a book which has almost identical contents to one I already own, but is just different enough to necessitate my purchasing it.
I’ve written in the past about my English Romanticism professor, James Twitchell, and how brilliant–if a bit monster-obsessed–he is. His class isn’t easy, and he doesn’t shy away from giving Ds and Fs if that’s what a student deserves. Grade inflation is not his style. Indeed, my marks have been disappointing, but not undeserved. When I conferred with him recently after doing especially poorly on a test, he was remarkably understanding and sympathetic, but the grade was fair.
Imagine my horror when, upon arriving at work this morning, I was presented with a copy of today’s Gainesville Sun, the cover of which featured this above-the-fold headline:
UF Professor Admits He Plagiarized in Several Books
Below these bold letters was a photo of James Twitchell and a damning article. I was astonished and dismayed. Twitchell has been a professor at the University since the 1970s, and has written many, many books. He is a frequent guest on a call-in show here at my work, and some of my colleagues, substantially older than me, had him as a teacher during their college years. That he could even be accused of plagiarism is shocking to me considering how serious a charge that is in a college setting. It is spoken of in the same tone used to describe genocide.
To tell the truth, I’m giving Professor Twitchell the benefit of the doubt. Someone as apparently gifted as he wouldn’t need to steal another’s ideas. If he says it was a note-taking error I believe it.
We had our first test of the semester on Tuesday in my English Romanticism class. It was brutal. The instructor, Professor Twitchell, had warned us that it would be difficult. He had emphasized it repeatedly, in fact. But you can never be too sure what one person’s definition of hard is, so I didn’t fret about it, and, in any case, he told us if we took decent notes we’d do well.
On Tuesday morning, however, as the test was handed to me and I looked over the fifteen or so questions, I was crestfallen. While I knew some of the material right off the bat, some of it had long since disappeared into the recesses of my mind. I hadn’t anticipated that he’d give us lines from poetry or prose and ask us to identify the author, title and significance of the passage. And I blanked on a question asking us to cite three “solitary” figures in Wordsworth’s poetry. Nor could I remember the genre of “The Prelude”, which I confused somehow with the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. I felt even worse, though, as my classmates all finished their tests before me and departed, leaving me almost alone in the room to struggle and wonder how they could possibly have been better prepared.
This morning I came to find out that they probably weren’t better prepared. My classmates were all chatting about how terrible the test was, trying to see if they could, between themselves, put together the bits and pieces that they missed. When Professor Twitchell entered the room he seemed to recognize we were all worried. He said he hadn’t graded them all, but he must have graded enough to know that a lot of people missed a lot of questions. Moreover, I think he sensed we were all a bit resentful. He is a cheerful and good humored fellow. Brilliant, too. “I know…you’re all angry. So, let me hear it,” he said. I expected a hiss and some boos, maybe, but one kid shouted, “you son of a bitch!”
I don’t read fiction often. In fact, the last novel I read was Picture of Dorian Gray…in 1997. This embargo hasn’t been by design, rather, it’s just how it happened. But for my History of Consumption course I was required to read Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, so the streak was broken. It is a wonderful book!
The gist: a terrifically average, middle-class man marries a lovely, but also terrifically middle-class girl. She is happy at first, but during an evening at the ball she sees how the other half lives–namely, in lavish opulence–and becomes disenchanted with her boring life of homemaking, and begins to associate her husband–a genuinely decent man–with all her dissatisfaction. She begins imagining a different life with different men, where she has all she desires, and her disdain for her husband grows.
Flaubert so perfectly captures love’s myriad torments, and imagination’s deceit:
And all this time she was torn by wild desires, by rage, by hatred. The trim folds of her dress hid a heart in turmoil, and her reticent lips told nothing of the storm. She was in love with Léon [a character that is not her husband], and she sought the solitude that allowed her to revel undisturbed in his image. The sight of his person spoiled the voluptuousness of her musings. She trembled at the sound of his footsteps; then, with him before her, the agitation subsided, and she was left with nothing but a vast bewilderment that turned gradually into sadness.
That is a brilliant description! And throughout the book there are countless depictions of the subtle particularities of 19th Century rural France, from every imaginable household item, to cuisine, to fashion and on and on. It is all vividly brought to life. This contemporary detailing of commodities is the reason we are reading the book. But the narrative is also rich. Spoilers follow…
I won’t lie to you people; I eat a lot of sugar. I suspect sucrose constitutes a substantial portion–if not an outright majority–of my daily caloric intake. An irony I only just acknowledged is that I know almost nothing about sugar production, including the planting, cultivation, refining and processing of cane into the delicious crystals we all know and love. I can think of no other subject so important in my life about which I know so little, outside of the realm of physics (I don’t understand Newton, but I obey the laws of classical mechanics, for example).
But that is all changing now that I am reading Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, by Sidney Mintz. I won’t call it a page-turner, since it is an academic book, with copious annotations and dull statistics. But it is informative. For instance, I never gave any thought to it, but up until a couple hundred years ago, sugar constituted a minuscule portion of the average person’s diet, and not long before that, almost no Europeans had ever even tasted it; it was unknown there before 1100. For someone like me, who frequently eats cookies for breakfast, those would, indeed, be dark ages.
I am taking a course on the history of consumption (consumerism, not the disease), and Sweetness and Power is one of our texts. Sugar’s rise from rare “spice” to global commodity was not miraculous, nor without victims. Indeed, sugar’s place in our daily lives probably would not have come to pass had the industry that brought it to all corners of the world not relied so heavily on slave labor for long. By the time human bondage was ended in the Caribbean, sugar had so endeared itself to us, that its place on our tables and in our recipes was secure.
I am looking forward to learning more about our shift from a society in which the gap between production and consumption was nonexistent, to a society in which we are entirely divorced from production of goods. That phenomenon is compounded in the United States by our gaping trade deficit: so few products are manufactured in America. I also wonder if we’ll explore a theory of mine, which is that we consumers no longer drive production for many goods, but that we simply buy what producers make us.
Summer school is in session, which will certainly reduce the frequency of my posts, since any energy I have for writing would be better served composing papers for class. I am taking “Age of Johnson”, the Johnson in question being Samuel Johnson; a class on Florida history; and another class on Romanticism, hoping I might be able to use what bits of information are still fresh in my mind from the spring semester.
Dana doesn't do what Dana doesn't want to do.