More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He was one of the few people Cassovan knew who was less attractive when he smiled: he wore the pitiful, wrenching grin of a suffering clown.
Shakespeare was the cornerstone, the fountainhead. To allow an undergraduate English major to earn a diploma without studying Hamlet and Lear, and either Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra, was, on the part of the faculty, an abdication:
And as for the bugaboo of “relevance”: to allow a student to believe that the value of a work of literature depended on its superficial resemblance to his or her life!
In his early sixties, a man with a doughy physique and a breathless, repetitive way of speaking, Dean Philip Hinckler was prone to semi-sentences that expired, half-finished, in rhetorical cul-de-sacs.
I wish this had the epistolary quality of the first book, but the author does know how to turn a phrase.
The university was gradually being taken over by brawny, networking businessmen and -women who knew nothing of students, and who would turn the teaching of undergraduates into ill-paid, incidental labor.
Having purchased a $39,000 ticket, they found themselves seated in a radioactive bunker, their instructor a one-eyed Cthulhu restlessly scratching himself and pacing back and forth on an isthmus of faded carpet at the front of the room.
1. He reminds me of professor Danner.
2. An old science lab is a good setting for his apocalyptic lit class.
These corporate benefactors weren’t only contributing funds; they were calling the shots, making decisions about research and curriculum. It was a deeply cynical and pecuniary model, the selling of intellect and faculty labor.
Discussion was always an unpopular option, leading as it did to calumny, stalemate, lamentation, and wrath.
Human beings, Janet thought, were a disappointment.
He was probably suffering from periodontal PTSD:
After going through July, I agree this is a thing.
Who would look forward to hearing from Hinckler? His speeches were generally reminiscent of a pair of tennis shoes thumping around in a dryer.
Booze was a mutual, frequently practiced activity; they did it well.
During his Literature of Apocalypse class, irriguous coughs erupting from every corner, Fitger had snapped in response to a student’s question: Why would any writer bother to make stuff up? Because, Fitger answered, reality was bleak and often unbearable, their puny lives a meaningless trudge toward the blank vault of death. One of the students named Sam—Fitger had trouble, still, distinguishing one from the others—gathered his books and his coat and walked out of the room.
Academia was, traditionally, a refuge for the poorly socialized and the obsessive; but English, at Payne, had a higher percentage of crackpots than most.
Going home had felt awkward and stressful over Thanksgiving, and Angela had told herself that it would be better at Christmas; but she was wrong. It was exhausting, every day waking up and pretending to fit into the costume of her former self.
With the tip of a finger, Cassovan straightened his stack of index cards. He found the smell of the library—the quiet, musty scent of books—oddly reassuring. It reminded him of the impermanence of his work: how deeply invested in it he was, and how little it meant to almost anyone else—which was as it should be. Men like Roland Gladwell imagined themselves with each completed project to be hewing their likenesses in bronze; but all scholarly endeavor was eventually reduced to these codified symbols tucked into endless paper beds, then bound between tombstone covers and seldom disturbed.
I really want to think about this. It's poignant and beautiful,, while also sad.
It had been snowing on the afternoon that Cassovan’s son had died at the age of fourteen. The vivid memory of that day, though decades old, occasionally rose up in Cassovan’s mind to assail him. Ben would be middle-aged now. Year by year, his brief, graceful life grew more distant, like that of a character in a novel his father had dearly loved but would never read again.
Education was expensive and inefficient; teaching students to think and write clearly was the same. But Hoffman, a business school graduate with the single-cell mind of a banker, had never taught anyone anything. Her ultimate plan would be to reorganize the campus into two simple units: “Numbers” and “Words.”
but in Angela’s case, she’d had to make an effort to refrain from additional counsel: Don’t get married in your twenties; don’t take a job at a university; use the word “underwear” and not “panties”; learn to speak in statements rather than questions; don’t waste your time being impressed by people (usually men) who are already adequately impressed by themselves.
Janet remembered that he didn’t like Caesar salad. She knew him and knew how to torment him—and wasn’t such specific, intimate knowledge a form of love?
his poems were directed at the K–5 crowd,
There is a way to sell this though: A reading for young kids to interest them in literature and reading early.
Fitger is so frustrating because he's sort of awful and not creative. He admires creative artists and writers, maybe because he doesn't have much of his own imagination.
Here was the future, Cassovan thought. Out with considered argument and nuance; in with publicity stunts, competitive righteousness, and the thrill of rage.
but he knew that almost everything else in his life had become a distraction he could no longer afford.
Much of Cassovan’s life had been spent grading papers, his career a never-ending attempt to inspire in undergraduates the idea that logically developing and clearly explaining an original argument—supported via relevant detail—was a desirable and significant skill.
Coriolanus. I am weary; yea, my memory is tired. Impossible to alter the past, and yet the desire to amend it in one’s mind was constant.
It was too easy to get married, she thought, whereas a number of painful years were usually involved in coming to the realization that one’s spouse was a dud.
When Angela had met with Professor Fitger in his office, he had told her that she might think of her life as a book, with herself as its author. She had told him that she couldn’t imagine writing a book, and he had said that lesser people than she had done it, and she wrote very well.
A moment of humility, which would be inauthentic if he had told her he was speaking of himself.
Strange: the overhead lights (had he turned them on?) had begun to flicker, and his wooden chair had suddenly reminded him of a cradle. There on his desk (whose missing right front foot had been replaced, forty years earlier, with a brick) were the incomplete essay exam, the banker’s lamp with its green glass shade, his mother smiling while she pinned up her hair, a black rotary phone, his wife admonishing their son about the washing of hands, an apple cut into perfect quarters, a velvet curtain splashing onto the stage at the end of the play, and a five-dollar clock purchased at a hardware
...more
Beautiful. Perfect.
