The Little Professor

Scholars & Students: A Compendium of Professorial Magic

(Excerpted from Scholars & Students: The Academic Role-Playing Game.)

0-LEVEL PROFESSORIAL SPELLS

• RENDER LEGIBLE.  When cast on bluebooks, turns illegible cursive legible.  Professors will be able to read illegible cursive written in pencil with a DC 12 Interpreter check.
• STAPLE.  Reminds Students to use the stapler in the department office before handing in papers.  May be blocked if multiple Professors utilize the spell within +2 hours of each other.
• DETECT BOREDOM.  Allows Professors to pinpoint daydreaming Students.  Professors at 0-Level can only Detect Boredom in students with two hit dice or less.
• CAUSE PARTICIPATION.  Provokes silent students into contributing to classroom discussion.  Eliciting intelligent classroom discussion, however, requires a DC 10 Course Management check; DC 9 or less may produce random comments or out-of-place queries.  Add 2 to the die roll for students with 3 hit dice or more; add 1 for each Professorial level over three.
• RECONCILE PAGES.  Allows Professors faced with a class of students using multiple editions of the same text to identify the correct page numbers for each edition.  If Students are using a text downloaded from the Internet, the Professor must perform a DC 16 Collation check.

1st-LEVEL PROFESSORIAL SPELLS

• CAUSE STUDYING.  +3 to Student Concentration and Reading rolls.  May be blocked if cast on Friday nights, at the end of finals week, during Homecoming Week, or before Thanksgiving.
• CANCEL MEETINGS.  Professors at Level One may cancel department meetings only.  (See Appendix 253 for a full list of levels and corresponding meetings.)  This spell may be countered by another Professor's Spell of Urgency, and will always be blocked by a Department Chair's Reminder of Contractual Obligations.
• ACCEPT GRADES.  -2 to Students' Argument rolls.  However, Students with 3 hit dice or more may retaliate with a Spell of Grievance  (-3 to Professors' Endurance rolls).
• MAGIC PEN.  Increases grading speeds by a factor of at least two.
• SUMMON SENIOR COLLEAGUE.  Professors attacked by Red Tape (q.v.) or under a Spell of Bewilderment may conjure up a tenured colleague for assistance.  For correct information, perform a DC 12 Bureaucracy check.

2nd-LEVEL PROFESSORIAL SPELLS

• CHARM CLASS.  +3 to Professor's Charisma.  If the spell is cast while returning graded exams or papers, Students receive +5 bonus to Resistance. 
• DETECT PLAGIARISM.  All instances of plagiarism will be highlighted; recommended for use in conjunction with Accept Grades. If a paper has been plagiarized using books instead of Google, however, perform a DC 14 Professorial Dedication check.
• MAGIC MEMO.  Automatically generates memoranda addressed to colleagues, administrators, etc.  Perform a DC 10 Spellcheck check before mailing.
• SPILL RED INK.  Instantly identifies all grammatical errors in student papers.  If Students have 2 hit dice or less, then Professors automatically take -10 in Charisma rolls for a minimum of 2 rounds; if 3 hit dice or more, then -5 in Charisma. 
• DESTROY CELL PHONES.  Fries circuitry in all cell phones within a 10 ft. radius.  Professor must perform a DC 16 Electronics check if his or her own phone is in spell range.

3rd-LEVEL PROFESSORIAL SPELLS

• DECODE TEXT.  Translates all e-mails written as text messages into recognizable English.  May be cast only once per day.
• CHOCOLATE EFFECT.  +5 to Professors' Charisma rolls; -3 to Students' Resistance rolls.  Best used while handing out evaluations.
• SUMMON DEAN.  Professors under a Spell of Grievance may rescue themselves by Summoning a Dean.  +3 to all Professors' Intelligence, Charisma, and Resistance rolls with a DC 15 Administrative check.
• HAND OF TECHNOLOGY.  Enables Professors to operate electronic equipment, including DVD players, Smart Carts, and projectors.  Lasts for one class period.
• SPEAK POP.  Temporarily grants Professors knowledge of contemporary music, television, film, and video games.  The Professor must perform a DC 13 Poseur check each time he or she makes an allusion; failure results in -8 Charisma rolls, plus +10 to Students' Resistance rolls. 

(Thanks to the D&D Wiki for helping me brush up on my very rusty D&D lingo.)

Understatement

I'm using this program to extract data from a badly glitchified DVD-R.  (Yes, I know that "glitchified" is not a word.  It's been a long day, OK?)  The main screen warns users that "In case of errors, read requests can take a long time to complete."  Do they ever.  IsoBuster has been running since around 10:00 on Saturday evening; so far, it has managed to read a whopping 54% of the video file.  To make matters worse, I may need to run the program multiple times.  But I am not paying $128 to have this DVD-R restored by a professional.  Not, not, not. 

(If my computer even thinks about freezing, crashing, or otherwise malfunctioning, I'm going to turn into the LAP--Little Angsty Professor.) 

British Library

There are no words. (Via Maud Newton.) 

Jane Eyre (2)

(Academic reaction: "Hooray! Any student watching this now knows how to pronounce 'St. John.'"  Baffled reaction: "'Clear the church'? There's nobody in the church...")

Positive responses first.  On the character front, I was pleased to see that St. John Rivers came equipped not only with a family, but also with the alluring Ms. Oliver.  (Viewers frequently cannot count on Rivers even existing, let alone existing with sisters and a love interest.)  Script-wise, I thought that using flashbacks for Jane's decision to leave Thornfield was an interesting and mostly successful choice, even if there was perhaps just a wee bit too much incipient erotic congress involved.  Moreover, Jane's quest to link love and selfhood worked nicely, and I liked the repeated use of both mirrors and paintings to indicate Jane's relative sense of independent existence; we even saw a bit of Jane's resistance in the shopping sequence.  Finally, both Wilson and Stephens continued to deliver well-calibrated performances (despite the aforementioned excessive moments of incipient erotic congress). 

Overall, though, I think large chunks of the plot became problematic--to say the least--once ground through the script's secularization mechanism.  St. John Rivers, Mr. Rochester, and Mrs. Reed all suffer from failures of niceness:   St. John Rivers acts like a jerk, Mr. Rochester neglects to mention that slight impediment to the matrimonial state, and Mrs. Reed both hates Jane and refuses to forgive her. In the novel, these behaviors are signs of far more serious spiritual ailments, all of them with potential consequences in the next world as well as this one; here, they are just unfortunate psychological quirks that inconvenience Jane to some extent or other.  Moreover, while the script tries to indicate the parallel between Rivers and Rochester, it does so in terms of shared passion--without noting the dangerous failure to practice humility, let alone accede to God's will, that also links the two men.  (We also lose the connection between Rivers and Brocklehurst, as the script remains determinedly vague about theology.)  The novel's insistent attention to moral decision-making and its repercussions, in other words, has entirely gone by the wayside; as usual, we don't come away from the miniseries with any awareness that Bronte ends with St. John Rivers' incipient death in the missionary field, not with the Rochesters' domestic happiness.  Without Bronte's interest in the distinction between "custom" and divine law, the plot actually loses much of its resonance. 

There are some other odd decisions.  For example, I've noted before that fictional bodies usually "signify."  Departing from the text's description of a character's face and form can unintentionally warp the narrative in all sorts of unexpected ways.  Here, Bertha Mason remains attractive and alluring, while the purportedly beautiful St. John Rivers is...nice enough, I suppose, but not Bronte's Apollonian man of marble features.   Yet Bertha's excessive body and vampiric features are supposed to suggest the inevitable outcome of wild, untamed passion, just as St. John Rivers' stone-like beauty is supposed to suggest the inevitable outcome of too much self-repression.  This St. John was entirely too warm, despite his protestations of chilliness.  Along the same lines, the miniseries added and subtracted sex in rather strange ways.  I've already noted the excessive moments of incipient erotic congress.  Here, Rochester suggests that Jane live with him platonically (not that the viewer altogether believes in his sincerity) as "brother and sister," the suggestion that Jane later offers the ultra-conventional St. John Rivers.  In the novel, Rochester clearly proposes that Jane be his mistress, an outrage to Jane's understanding of divine law, whereas Jane's suggestion that she go abroad as St. John's sister is merely an outrage to social custom.  More importantly, Jane's objection to marrying St. John is, in part, very much a matter of sex: she is horrified by her realization that he will go through with all the proper "forms," even though he finds her physically unattractive.  The mini very much muddies the question of what is important to Jane, and what not. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• William Anderson, An Exposure of Popery; With Special Reference to Penance and the Mass (Hodder & Stoughton, 1878).  Posthumously-published Presbyterian anti-popery polemic; there's a late-Victorian biographical account of Anderson here. 
• Edwin A. Abbott, Philomythus, An Antidote against Credulity; A Discussion of Cardinal Newman's Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles (Macmillan, 1891).  This is indeed by the author of Flatland. 

Concentrate! Concentrate!

I've got Book Two all neatly mapped out...so now I suddenly find myself contemplating all the potential spin-offs.  Something tells me that I should be thinking about the book more than the spin-off articles, but today I'm ignoring that something.  (It's a very Wordsworthian something, in case you're wondering.)  Strictly speaking, the Victorian sermons article [which you should be writing at this very moment--ed.] is also a spin-off, or perhaps more of a prequel.  In any event, two current plans for spin-offs (how about a franchise? Maybe a new Lord of the Rings trilogy?):

• Christian magazine verse.  Also known as the subject of my dialogue.  (Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt was astonished to find that everyone agreed with my insane self, even though he specializes in authors who don't exist.  Needless to say, DtEHoGRE thinks sanity might be more appropriate at this juncture; I, however, shall bravely carry on.  Besides, this stuff can be fun.)
• Historical "series" fiction.  Also known as all the other people doing what Emily Sarah Holt did at great length.  (Emily should be making her debut in May, incidentally.) Thus, Elizabeth Rundle Charles, the Rev. A. D. Crake, Emma Leslie, probably Emma Marshall (who worked her way through the cathedral cities of England), etc.  There's quite a bit to be said about both form and content here, as well as implicit dialogues between High and Low Church visions of historical process. 

The Group

The front-cover blurb on my copy of Mary McCarthy's The Group proclaims that it's "a gem of American social history as well as very good fiction."  Apparently, the "very good fiction" part was an afterthought on the reviewer's part.   At one level, the "social history" bit makes perfect sense: the novel dissects a rarefied slice of American culture--namely, the world of upper-middle- and upper-class breeding, mostly Eastern, almost entirely female, as experienced by a group of Vassar graduates.  To further the documentary illusion, McCarthy loads the narrative with references to "new" pop culture phenomena, new consumer goods, and new ideologies, some of which would have looked fairly dated by the early 1960s and many of which could now stand a few footnotes.  McCarthy's young women are interested in anthropology and Communism, the latest advances in dishware and in child-rearing techniques; they frequently find themselves politely (and sometimes tragically) baffled by religious, racial, and class differences, none of which answer to the coping techniques learned at Vassar. 

But McCarthy is not writing history, no matter how many historical references she packs into the narrative.  Instead, she's interested in representing how her various female protagonists try--and often fail--to make sense of their apparently stable, actually perilous world.  The novel begins in 1933, just a few years after the crash (which does in the family fortunes of a few characters), and ends shortly before WWII; in other words, the action takes place against the background of a deceptive calm, with financial calamity at one end and bloodshed looming at the other.  Suggesting this precariousness is the ultimately failed marriage of Kay to a social outsider, Harald.  Kay is dreamy and ambitious, but also impulsive and sometimes self-deceiving; Harald, through whom Kay initially yearns to realize her own aspirations, becomes a failed playwright and director who abuses Kay (both mentally and physically), cheats on her, and eventually commits her for a time to an insane asylum.  (The latter is an oddly Victorian moment.)  Kay, Harald, and their marriage knit the novel together: the narrative opens with their wedding, which highlights Harald's uncomfortable position, and closes with Kay's funeral, which also leads to the self-pitying Harald's summary ejection from the group's orbit.

We're told near the beginning that the girls fear becoming their parents: "The worst fate, they utterly agreed, would be to become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened" (12).  As the novel wryly demonstrates, however, most of the girls simply repeat their parents' fears in a different key.  McCarthy spends much of the novel in free indirect discourse, subtly slipping from one young woman to another; the only man to whose consciousness we gain direct access is Hatton, an English butler--who, significantly, is dedicated to the cause of both keeping order in his household and performing as the "eternal model of the English butler" (200).  The reader frequently suspects that McCarthy's characters are all "performing," whether performing the role of dutiful daughter and wife-to-be (the lovelorn Dottie) or the role of devoted mother (Priss).  There's a pointed superficiality about everyone's devotion to various -ologies, ranging from earth-mother Norine and her allegiance to "Jung" and "some of the younger post-Freudians" ("[n]ot," she goes on to say, "that I don't owe a lot to Freud" [443]) to the various Communist sympathizers.  The ring of jargon frequently obscures more than it clarifies, even as it also lends life a welcome air of clarity.  While the girls try to discard their parents' comforting rituals, they nevertheless adopt the newest -ologies and -isms--not to mention consumer goods--that come to hand.  As the rapid closing of ranks that follows Kay's death suggests, both young and old are all too eager to paper over any signs of chaos lurking beneath the superficial order of isms and things.  This is all very different from a novel like Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, which is earnestly and solemnly descriptive (as well as analytical) in a way that The Group is not. 

Obligatory YouTube post: college hoofers

Hoofers from my campus, performing with one of our African drummers.  If I read the tags aright, they're dancing at Eliot Spitzer's inauguration. 

First ominous conversation of the semester

DEPARTMENT SECRETARY: They've taken it away.

[Split-second pause.  Is "it" my office? The Norton Anthology? My job?]

ME: What's "it"?

DEPARTMENT SECRETARY: Your computer.

[Split-second pause.  Forever?]

ME: Are they going to bring it back?

DEPARTMENT SECRETARY: They didn't say.

[Happy ending, some hours later: the computer returns, and it even works!]

Jane Eyre (1)

Of the making of many adaptations of Jane Eyre, there is no end.  Since I'll be teaching JE yet again, beginning on Wednesday, I watched the newest import from across the pond with "great interest" (as correspondents are so fond of beginning letters to the editor).  Before I proceed to discuss this miniseries in a calm, dignified, and suitably academic tone, however, I must express my opinion of one revisionist choice in a more...vulgar...fashion.  Here we go:

Helen Burns, explaining to Jane how they can get out of Lowood: "We advertise."

WHAT.
THE.
*multiple expletives deleted here because innocent, easily-impressionable undergraduates might be reading this blog entry*
?!

Yes, Helen's universalist theology rarely survives translation to the small or large screen, but she's usually granted some sort of (admittedly trite) role in Jane's spiritual education.  Here, her most important contribution is job-seeking advice.  Who on earth thought this could possibly be a good idea?  (Well, presumably the same person who showed us a heartfelt reunion between Jane and Bessie, despite Bessie's near-total absence from the very truncated childhood scenes.)

We now resume our usual dulcet tones...

I'm not sure if there's any way to adapt JE without making the plot seem cheap and rickety; without Bronte's sinewy sentences--what the Victorians would have called "racy"--the events all too easily devolve into the stuff of pure pop fiction.  It's Jane's voice that makes the novel work, and first-person novels do not translate well to film--let alone first-person novels that are not really in the realist mode.  Still, director Susanna White shrewdly relies on off-kilter camera angles, tight and distorted closeups, and stylized visuals to remind the viewer that this is not, after all, an "objective" perspective on the narrative; it is, rather, very much Jane's.    Moreover, White and writer Sandy Welch preserve Jane's drawing and painting, which ties in neatly to her awkward position as both interested and disinterested observer. 

The casting is a bit of a mixed bag.  Ruth Wilson is a good, stalwart Jane, and it's nice (for once!) to see an actress in the role who isn't inappropriately pretty.  Toby Stephens, however, is inappropriately pretty for Rochester, not to mention insufficiently rough and gruff; he doesn't convey much in the way of inner conflict, let alone suppressed anger.   The child performers are uneven (and Cosima Littlewood seems too old for Adele), while most of the adults, like Francesca Annis, simply don't have all that much to do. 

So far, the miniseries has done a decent job of preserving at least some of the novel's main themes, including the importance of love, the danger of relying on appearances, and the need to accept personal responsibility for one's moral choices.  (Rochester has a bad habit of saying "it wasn't my fault.")  And the gothic atmosphere is handled quite nicely.  Like a lot of viewers, I suspect, I'm  troubled by the amputation of Jane's childhood, although it looks like we actually get St. John Rivers in the second half.  Still, at the risk of damning with faint praise, right now this miniseries strikes me as one of the better JE adaptations I've seen (bearing in mind that I don't think JE adapts well at all).  On to the second half.