Beginning King Lear

I was about to teach the first class after a long break. I’d given the students no assignment. So we were going to begin King Lear by reading the play aloud in class. Did the students know that was coming? I don’t think so.

I was in my office before class, with no notes, prepared to tell the class that King Lear is a tragedy and that tragedies are about reversal. I walked to the classroom and got there ten or fifteen minutes late. And then I realized that I did not have a copy of the play. I walked back to my office, grabbed the book, walked back to the classroom, and realized that I had picked up a little paperback history of the New Deal. So I ran back to my office. Along the way, I thought that I should get a key made so that I could use my office after retiring. And then I thought, “What if someone else is using it?” And, “What for anyway?” I picked up my undergrad copy of Hardin Craig and David Bevington’s edition of Shakespeare’s works, ran back to class, and then spent the class time thumbing through the book from beginning to end and from end to beginning trying to find the text of King Lear.

Strange: I dreamed this dream after reading Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time, which collects Vladimir Nabokov’s experiments in dreaming as a form of precognition. And when, out of curiosity, I looked up the Craig and Bevington Complete Works at Amazon (still available for the Kindle), I discovered that the e-book has no table of contents. And when, another day later, I was reading W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, I came across these words: “Again and again, from front to back and from back to front, I leafed through the album.”

[Insert theremin music here.]

This is the twelfth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. Not one has gone well. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11.

Nabokov, dreaming

For eighty-odd days in late 1964 and early 1965, Vladimir Nabokov wrote down his dreams, following the instructions in John Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927). Dunne, an aeronautical engineer and a figure straight from the Museum of Jurassic Technology, advanced a theory of time in which future events may influence our dreams. “Many dreams more or less forgotten,” Nabokov wrote on December 29, 1964. But, on the same index card:

Clear end of one: am correcting, with other people, students’ examination papers. Of the three I get, the first read proves to be a little masterpiece. The name of the student is Mostel (not known in waking life)*. I am wondering what to give him, an A or an A+. Cannot find my pencil and am, moreover, upset by a sordid and complicated love affair with another’s wife (unknown in waking life and not shown in dream). A colleague (I have never in my life corrected papers collectively!) urges me to finish my batch. I still can’t find an implement to write with and furthermore am badgered and hampered in my movements by the betrayed husband, a very small man who works with his arms as he pours out a torrent of complaints. In exasperation I take him and send him flying and spinning into a revolving door where he continues to twist at some distance from the ground, in a horizontal position, before falling. Awkward suspense: is he dead? No, he picks himself up and staggers away. We return to the exam. papers.

* (V. says there is a famous American actor of that name).

Vladimir Nabokov, Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time, ed. Gennady Barabtarlo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

Four observations: 1. Nabokov’s dreams don’t seem any more interesting that anyone else’s. 2. They contain scant evidence to support Dunne’s theory, but are, unsurprisingly, filled with people and places from Nabokov’s life and incidents from his fiction. 3. Nabokov doesn’t always notice the connections to his fiction, but the editor of this volume does. 4. There is no getting away from grading, not even in dreams, or especially not in dreams.

Here’s a grading dream of my own. And another.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

[“V.” is Véra Nabokov, married to Vladimir. The actor is Zero Mostel.]

“A place remote and islanded”

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).

I can imagine Willa Cather reading this passage and thinking, Yes, exactly.

Also from this book
“When one really knows a village” : “It wears a person out”

One last cleaning

This morning Elaine and I went to our dentist of thirty-three years for one last cleaning. Our dentist, Dr. Robert Blagg, is retiring at the age of ninety. He has been practicing for sixty years. We brought with us a gift certificate for a local restaurant and a homemade card: “For thirty-three years, our mouths have been in your hands. And your hands have been in our mouths.” We reminisced with Judy, one of his assistants (she and a co-worker have been with him for fifty-two years, having started in high school). We left with new toothbrushes, a couple of photographs, and great gratitude. And I finally learned — I had to ask — what’s behind the door that says Employees Only: a furnace, a refrigerator, some shelves.

Here are two previous posts about our dentist’s practice, one about scheduling a visit, one about what’s likely to happen if you call with an urgent problem. There won’t be another Dr. Blagg.

“It wears a person out”

Mrs. Fosdick offers an addition to the philosopher H.P. Grice’s principles of conversation:


Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).

Also from this book
“When one really knows a village”

NECCO, no

The New England Confectionery Company, or NECCO, maker of Sweethearts, Mary Janes, and NECCO Wafers, has closed its factory (CNN).

Overheard

[Late. The television was on for “warmth.”]

“You know, you’re getting to be a walking typographical error.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

From the Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by “Anna Stiga” (“Stan again,” Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor) is highly doable. Why do I always want to type doable with a hyphen?

Two clues that I especially liked: 17-Across, ten letters: “Common pub fare.” And 44-Down, six letters: “Word from the Greek for ‘wanderer.’” No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Domestic comedy

[Dictating a text.]

”Lynn Manuelle Maranda is on Cole bear tonight, but the phone doesn’t know how to spell Lynn Manuelle Maranda or Cole bear.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

ProPublica on shelters

A ProPublica report on the shelters that house child refugees: “‘If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.’”

And it’s all the result of a politically calculated theater of cruelty. Is it crimes against humanity yet?