It’s not a good habit, but it’s an understandable one, I think.  And I suspect that most of us give in to the temptation from time to time.

But last week, I was reminded once again why it is that I need to re-read for class – and not just because I need to be sure that I’m completely prepared.

I was preparing to teach “A Rose for Emily” (and Faulkner happens to be one of my favorite authors) – and it’s something that I’ve taught at least once a year since 2006.  So I’m pretty familiar with the story.  But I re-read it anyway.

Because we’re focusing on setting in my course right now, I tried to pay particular attention to the details of setting, as described by the narrators.  Many are the details  I’ve always paid attention to in class (Miss Emily’s house as “an eyesore among eyesores” and the dust and stagnant air throughout the story); but this time, one small detail jumped out at me at the very beginning of the story.

As the narrators describe Miss Emily, they say that she “had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery.”

The cedar-bemused cemetery.

What an extraordinary description – and one that I’ve probably read (and perhaps even noted) in the past.  But this time, I was reading a clean copy (we just switched editions, so my book has no annotations yet) – and so this simply struck me.

And that’s the point.  While it is important to re-read in order to prepare for class, it’s also important to re-read to simply recharge.  I know that I get caught up in the frustrations of the semester and the general exhaustions of life, but I also know that when it comes down to it, I actually love the stuff that we do in literary studies.  Cheesy? Sure.  But honest? Absolutely.

And that energy and enjoyment is infectious – and students will notice it.

Like many a writer, I often find myself in coffee shops.   But I also happen to live in a town that is a prime destination for people in recovery programs, who also naturally find themselves in coffee shops.  And so one of the first things I heard was one highly caffeinated young guy saying to another, “It was a tell-tale sign when we did free hugs and Ted wouldn’t hug anybody.”

A few days later, walking out of the gym behind a young woman and her probably four-year-old son, I heard this exchange:

Toddler: I want a snack.

Mom: I have something in the car for you.

Toddler: What is it?

Mom: Juice.

Toddler: What kind of juice?

Mom: Orange juice.

Toddler, with outright exuberance: Hallelujah, baby!

Later, sitting in a Barnes and Noble café near the customer service counter, I heard this:

Female customer, probably sixty-something, brandishing the bondage bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey:  Do you think this would make a good gift?

Customer Service Rep: Well, I wouldn’t give it to someone you didn’t know well.

Next customer, a very thin woman around seventy in a denim mini skirt and high-heeled sandals: I need a ride home.

Customer Service Rep: But we’re a bookstore.

Meanwhile, someone I know posted on Facebook that he heard an old woman on the subway turn to the homeless guy next to her and say, “You smell like my husband.  He’s dead.”

The website Overheard in NY is full of such gems.  The truth, I guess, is that we’re a nation of eavesdroppers, whether we mean to be or not, and we find our fellow Americans pretty amusing.

There are lessons to be learned from these moments, sure.  The guys in recovery had a very particular vocabulary that they shared and used fluidly.  They were also way more intimate in the way they spoke to each other than most any other group of twenty-something males I have ever seen in conversation. And the child shouting Hallelujah for his juice was surely imitating adults he has heard.  Kid talk is often funny for the way they use words correctly but in slightly inappropriate contexts.  It was a touching scene, too, showing how well the mother knew her child, as well as how much he appreciated her knowledge.  And living here in South Florida, I’ve certainly observed the infinite variety of the elderly (some of the stereotypes are true—the driving is pretty terrifying), but as with any demographic, the individuals are many and they can be found everywhere, saying just about anything.

So a student given the assignment to eavesdrop certainly could learn this or that about the ways we speak to each other and who we are.  I might try an exercise where I have students copy down things they overhear over the course of a week, then share the best bits with the class so that the group can collectively determine what lessons can be learned from the snippets.  And I could see creating a writing exercise based on any of the snippets.  Part of what’s interesting about eavesdropping is how the absence of context sparks your imagination.  What kind of kid “Hallellujahs” orange juice rather than a bag of chips?  Who is Ted and why wouldn’t he participate in free hugs?  Did that lady ever get home from Barnes and Noble? (Last I saw she was talking to a very patient cop.)  And is that other lady pulling a “Rose for Emily” thing with her dead husband?

Eavesdropping works as an assignment because you can listen without the social obligation of participating in the conversation.  You can sit in on conversations by demographics of people you might not otherwise speak to (assuming those demographics speak to each other in public places).  But really I don’t know that it’s so important to go out and spy. Just now as I sit here writing, the guy fixing my air-conditioning said, “You can go ahead and close up the joint.”  My house has never been called a joint before, but I like it.

I suspect the real value in the eavesdropping assignment is not so much that it encourages students to be spies, but that it encourages them to be observant.  Go out into the world in your writerly identity, it says—and pay attention.  The writer’s life is one big eavesdropping exercise, though there are some problems inherent in that, as well.

Jane Smiley’s hilarious satire of academia Moo takes down the eavesdropping assignment pretty effectively.  One workshop student listens in on her roommate’s inane conversations and creates inane writing.  Louise Fitzhugh’s children’s novel Harriet the Spy also makes clear the hazards of eavesdropping on your close comrades.  They don’t care for it so much.  Especially not when they are twelve years old.

So what is the difference between overzealous, shameful Harriet-the-Spying and being a writer?  I guess in part it’s the dishonesty of it, of pretending not to be listening when you are listening, and it’s how you use the material you get hold of.  It seems safe to take a snippet of conversation from a context you don’t know and make it your own story,  less so to take your roommate’s private life and transcribe it.

But then again, I bet Harriet the Spy was a pretty great writer. What do you think? Is all material fair game?

It’s one of the few stories where I walk students through everything piece-by-piece, mapping out the major plot points on the board.  I do this, in part, because it’s helpful to have all those disparate plot points in visual form (the students figure out that the arsenic and the smell are connected once they see everything written up on the board).  I also do this because I typically teach the story at a time in the semester when the students are worn out and class participation has dropped off.

We walk through the sequence of the story, and then we read the final section of the story aloud (okay, I read it).  I love to pause at the line “The man himself lay in the bed.”  And we get to that closing sentence about the iron gray hair.

I almost always end class with some line about the fun of studying English because we get to talk about things like necrophilia and cannibalism and bodily functions.  It’s a habit of mine, but one I’m a bit ambivalent about.  On the one hand, I’m a bit concerned that it trivializes what we do.  There’s something about going for shock value that feels a little bit like the reasons that middle schoolers end up reading so much Poe.  It gets students into it (whatever that means) – especially students who are already reading those schlocky paperback horror novels (okay, maybe it was just me reading those).

At the same time, as students of literature, we read things that are, to one degree or another, supposed to genuinely entice and shock us.  I do have a preference for the macabre and the weird, though my preferences are now more for Faulkner and Melville than for Poe.  My students, I think, find “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Death of Ivan Ilych” as weird as I do, though likely for different reasons.

That last point occurred to me as I was teaching my summer students Tolstoy’s novella: these works, no matter whether they cover the grotesque or not, are received by students in our introductory courses as weird.  They’re weird because they’re unfamiliar.  Whether the text deals with extremes of human behavior (cannibalism, necrophilia), uncomfortable truths about the world (we will all die someday), or philosophical views  (“I would prefer not to”), they all confront our students with new ideas – startling ideas.

That’s the very point of what we do, as educators.  I wrote in a previous post about creating that cognitive dissonance for our students – and that’s just generally, I think, what good literature does for us.  It confronts us with new ideas and worlds beyond what we’ve imagined, whether those worlds are akin to the one we inhabit or are completely alien to us.  As the authorities in our classrooms, we can revel in that with our students, even when they’re a bit uncomfortable with what confronts them on the page.

Still, while I aspire to noble purposes behind confronting students with new ideas, I admit to appreciating the way shock value can draw students in through good advertising. I am, after all, the professor who advertised the upcoming Shakespeare class with a sign that reads: “Tricking people into cannibalism. Smothering your wife. Causing a storm to destroy your enemies. And these are the good guys.”