Apologizing for the time off, even though there aren't too many readers, I'm guessing. But here I am and here we are and here are a pair of books that come to you by way of a class I had during my senior year of college. I wrote about that class already, in maybe my favorite post from this site as of yet.
But there were other inspirational moments from that English class.
Our teacher provided us with the cheapest editions around, a topic I touched on in the linked post above. In the Melville book we only read "Bartleby".
Now, I'm having a hard time remembering having read the entire story, or novella, because I don't think I did. I do have a pretty firm grasp of what happens in it, because I was somehow focused in class long enough to listen to the lectures.
By the time you're a senior in college, I guess, you've figured the way to pass most classes is to just listen to the teacher and regurgitate the stuff they say onto tests. But I've always felt like going back and experiencing the story for myself.
Bartleby is the name of a guy, a scrivener in the story. The narrator is an old man who runs an agency that employs scriveners. In the time before photocopying, people with good penmanship, low occupational opportunities, and a high threshold for boredom could become scriveners--workers who spend all day copying legal documents and the like.
It was one of the tragic ironic jobs--a writer, for all intents and purposes, but one who never writes anything of their own creation, at least while on the job.
Bartleby, though, not long after getting hired, begins to show up for work but, upon being new assignments, protest to the narrator "I prefer not to." This confounds the narrator/business owner, but he keeps Bartleby employed. "I prefer not to." "I prefer not to..." it becomes something of a mantra and bonds the narrator to Bartleby.
I won't say anything else really, because that's almost all I remember from the lectures. But I would like to check it out again. Melville was way ahead of his time...
We also touched on the Romantics, the biggies anyway, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats...I was able to feel Wordsworth, and even went up to an old dorm hangout one day during this quarter and sat and tried to fashion my own facsimile of "Tintern Abbey..." set of lines, although mine's prose.
I respected Coleridge's wasted talent (pfff, junkies), and liked the stuff he actually finished and it's far out zaniness.
Keats, well, Keats was ultimately the heavyweight, if I remember correctly, having come in a world where Wordsworth and Coleridge were already well known. Too bad he died of tuberculosis when he was 26.
It may have been because of the later timing of the material's lectures, and a serious senioritis-fueled bender, but I don't remember too much of the Keats lessons, besides the names of some of his famous odes, like the Grecian Urn and the Nightingale.
Which is too bad. It's something else on the list of things to get back to. That whole "get back to old things" activity has actually been started, using a book from this exact class, but not one I've talked here yet about.
Uh...okay, so that's how that is...
I do, still today, have a soft spot for that stuff I wrote that day up in the dorm area of campus, aping Wordsworth. It needs a quick edit, and then it'll be even better. I usually resist editing certain things, wanting to keep them captured with all their flaws still speaking to my flaws. Sometimes, though, I have the urge to make one break through, speak to something human, something true...you know, become art...
