The unbearable tristesse of grading.

Not that I'm actually grading. Not at all. I'm getting ready to grade. This means making contact with a handful of students who have been there all along, who have contributed in various ways to the class, and yet who have, somehow, managed not to turn in enough major assignments that the inescapable conclusion is--as in I cannot escape it--they will not pass. So: emails. You know, and then waiting for emails.

Perhaps you might say why are you doing this now? why didn't you do this weeks ago? At least these are questions I am asking myself. To which I reply, to myself: I was doing some things. Important things. Or anyway, I don't know, stop yelling!

It's kind of noisy around here, all the yelling, while I'm getting ready to grade.

Today was the last--the very last--day of teaching this semester. My poetry class met and we assembled our beautiful folios and then had a reading. When the students had a broadside from every other student, signed, I watched for a moment as they assembled and reordered their collections. It was perfect. It was everything I hoped for--the work of their colleagues collected in their hands.

This is why, at the moment, I feel a little sad. In fact, I had to lie down for a moment, that's how blue.

The way it works is, you prepare to grade (by grading, if you know what I mean). Then, you face the actual shape and scale of the reading ahead of you. You pace yourself (this is the luxury way of grading--if you are rushed, then your pace is a rush, and it is horrible and I do not recommend this rush strategy). You realize that you will be reading for a few days. You settle in for the pleasures (and frustrations and despair) of it all.

Essentially, you grade your way out of the melancholy, and that is good. It's the way of teaching, and it's a good way.

I am not at the moment on the 'having surmounted the sadness' side of grading. Also, I am still in need of more sleep. Tomorrow, I believe, it begins. And in a few days, I will feel better. If you're a teacher and you're about to grade, you will too.

No art.

Tomorrow morning, my daughter is leaving.

She had to find a home for her bunny.

This summer we've had colts in the back field.

We had a party to see her off.

The end.

This week, I've read the final novel in several detective/police series. I just finished The Troubled Man, Henning Mankell's final novel in the Kurt Wallander series; I also read the last novels in Robert B. Parker's Spenser and Jesse Stone series. On hand, I also have a new novel by Ian Rankin, whose final Inspector Rebus novel I read a while ago. I'm thinking about these final gestures--the final novels of the Rankin and Mankell series were decisions by the writers, who had, I'm guessing, come to feel these characters and the constraints surrounding their stories as a burden; Parker died last year, so these books were the last ones in the pipeline, (although I guess there's another Spenser novel that is "finished by" an assistant or something).

I found the experience of reading the Mankell novel to be unexpectedly upsetting, moving and sad, but also disturbing. I hope I'm not giving anything away when I say that Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus simply retired from police work in the final novel, but the fate of Wallander is not as straightforward (no spoilers here). I had to stop reading The Troubled Man for a little while this afternoon, because I realized that while I wanted to experience the resolution of the plot--what, after all, did become of the missing man, and who was he really?--I was not ready to say goodbye to Wallander, even though I found him to be a fairly frustrating character.

In the case of the Parker novels, and the character of Spenser specifically, I experienced something else again. I began reading his novels at another part of my life entirely, twenty-five years ago now. I always got around to reading the new novels as they appeared in my local library. After awhile, I knew that none of them would blow my mind, but the books were reliable in this sense: Spenser's voice was consistent, always; Parker knew and loved the great oeuvre of American hard-boiled; and he had a set of ideas to work through, about masculinity, about loyalty, about love, even. There was enough interest for me--and evidently for a lot of people, since he wrote dozens of books--that it felt like a small, if limited, delight to revisit the character, his scenes, his associations.

When I read that Parker had died, I felt a loss, personally. I read the last Spenser novel in the spirit of elegy, and in that regard, the experience of reading it was enhanced, or at least affected. (If you want to get a sense of how other crime fiction writers regarded Parker, read here and here.)

I am interested to know what my fellow Mankell-reading compatriots think of the final Wallander novel. It put me in mind of a wonderful B-movie-ish movie directed by George Romero, The Dark Half. (I loved that movie so much I bought it--in VHS!--but I did just discover in the course of my internet "research" on The Dark Half that both Siskel and Ebert could not recommend it. Tragic.) In the film, a writer who publishes literary fiction under his own name, but pulp novels under a pseudonym, writes what he hopes will be his very last pulp novel, then ceremoniously, and publicly, conducts a mock funeral for his pseudonymous "other half." It will not surprise you to know that, since the original story is written by Stephen King, the other half does not stay buried, and havoc--non-literary havoc--ensues.

I wonder, I wonder: will Mankell miss Wallander? Will the writer be sorry, finally, that his relationship with this long-time character, perhaps his other, has ended?

It's Bryce and Bruiser!

We are here talking to the missionary (Bryce is one of the missionary's friends). He (the missionary) can't stop talking Chinese. We can't stop crying. Bruiser is crying on the inside.