The Multifarious Horses of Instruction

...Virginia Woolf had two sessions devoted to her, Emily Dickinson two as well, May Sarton, for the fourth straight year, was enthusiastically, if not always accuraCely, talked about in a session devoted to her...

...The finder was asked urgently to call Mr...

...There are a few jobs here and there, almost all of them one-year appointments teaching Freshman composition in junior colleges, or at night, in East Lansing and Orono and Nigeria and Walla Walla...

...If this year's meeting had a theme (in '68 it was political action in the humanities, in '70 the Black phenomenon, last year was heavy with papers on and about women) it was Gay/ Lesbian life and literature...

...There was a meeting on "The Prostitute in 19th century French Literature," and a pleasant evening devoted to Elizabeth Bishop at which the poet read her work, papers were read about her work, and some of her poems set to music by Elliot Carter were performed...

...But Gardner is defensive about this kind of fiction, and it is this defensiveness that spoils the book...

...James Page, a 72-year-old Vermont farmer, has an unchurched belief in "the battle of spirit up through matter," rigid Yankee principles, and contempt for the present...

...This perspective and ks attendant language, the not quite Rockwellian minor characters, and the unlocking of James Page's armored self in his late October would have sufficed very nicely...

...With Bellow, Gardner and Updike have resisted both language games and the apocalypse of fact by continuing with narrative leavened by the possibility, at least, of transcendence...

...There were meetings to discuss professional security for gay teachers, and many sess i o n s - 2 4 in a l l - - t o deal with bibliography, lesbian and gay literature, samesex friendships in children's literature, language in the gay community, etc., etc...

...What were the actual meetings like this year...

...At some of the larger feminist sessions the tone of feminist rage still could he discerned: Kate Millett and others at a woman's studies section substituted sarcastic and careless rhetoric ("victimization," "oppression," raucous laughter at every mention of male critics from the huge feminine audience, etc.,) for scholarship...

...magazine PMLA, the Publications of MLA...

...The acronym may be unfamiliar: the Modern Language Association, organized in 1883 to "promote and advance all aspects of the study of modern languages and literature," now has a membership of more than 30,000 college, junior college and university teachers of language and literature...

...In his attempt to defend the out-of-fashion fiction that is the strength of October Light, Commonweal: 89...

...As for the rest, the same amount of solid, substantial scholarship seems to be going on, with perhaps a more than usual of often ephemeral stuff being loosed upon the air in "special sessions...

...He felt that individual members now had more chance to be part of the goingson, "on something approaching a human scale...

...I first reported the MLA Uprising of December 1968 when a "radical caucus" of politically active professors decided to start their part of the radical transformation of American campuses by taking over the governing body of the august society, then eightythree years old...

...There was a rousing session on "Homosexuality in Asian Literature," which heard a paper on Homosexuality in Urdu Court Poetry presented...

...In October Light and Marry Me, they write of men "born in an age of spirits" (Gardner's phrase) but living with few visible reminders of this past, anachronistic men in consciously anachronistic novels...

...Join with your neighbors in this community in helping expand the global feeding programs of Catholic Relief S e r v i c e s - b y con...

...demie community is serious and open about itself now, and moving toward a serious look at literature from its special vantage-point...

...I wish they had written better books...

...What does all the commotion, the cocktail parties by publishers and periodicals, the hundred or so booths in the book exhibit, the confabs in the hallways of the Sheraton and the Americana come to...

...Light notes: I passed a small room on the first day which had a sign at the door: "Fallen Women in 19th century Lit...

...This December, as I sat behind the red-velvet ropes separating spectators from the delegates with about twelve persons, everything was once again decorous, sedate and dull...

...the listeners sat inarticulate and incommunicative as always...

...for back in 1947, as Northrup Frye told us in his speech this year, there must have been a resolution which empowered the executive committee to send an inscribed drinking mug to a baby who had been named Pamela, after the DORIS GRUMBACH i$ the ]ormer Literary Editor o! The New Republic...

...This atomization produced papers that verged on the arcane, such exotica as "American Women's Poetry: That Generation Before Ours," during " which a paper was read on the poetry of Lola Ridge...

...However only in eight years, the terms of it have changed, the tigers of wrath have gone away, and the horses of instruction are now in the saddle...

...Had the great moves of political-minded members had their permanent effect...

...In some ways, quite simply, yes...

...Like Bellow's Mr...

...While they contest each other's righteousness, they consider how their experiences have brought them to their impasse and how it affects their family and friends...

...Sammler's Planet, Octboer Light is about the "unlocking" of an old man with hard opinions and little charity...

...There was "Semiotic (the in word this year: ~miology is old, big ones in everything but size...

...The speaker was unperturbed, went on with his remarks, the protester left . . . . Most poignant note: a black vinyl briefcase with chrome trim marked "Richard Sherry" was lost...

...By my informal count at least forty sessions dealt entirely with women in literature, so the great breakthrough accomplished by the creation a few years ago of a Commission on the Status of Women in the profession has affected the program...

...Gardner and Updike are skillful and necessary resisters...

...The rebellion was led by M.I.T...

...Even if this is true, the novel within October Light is a ham-handed way of demonstrating it...

...It seemed after that meeting that MLA would never be the same...

...Only activist note in the four days occurred when a young woman, Jane Schroeder, broke into the University Press's large forum on ' ~ n r Scholar and His Pub4 February 1977:88 lisher" with a confused but indignant protest about the sexist use of the pronoun, "and at a language association meeting," she shouted...

...English professors have not changed: they still occupy twice the time allotted for their papers, and so the special sessions became old-style forums----in fine...

...Sherry...

...There is very little mobility in the profession, professors at the top ranks are blessed with longevity and a stubborn hold on their places, and a whole generation of young scholars, because of budget cuts, falling registrations and severe shortages of everything, is suffering, with the real possibility of being lost...

...Any fifteen members could get toCommonweal: 87 the science of signs and symbols and their role in culture and society) and Iconographic Approaches to Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson," and "The Libretto as Literature: the Settecento...

...Scholarly manners had reasserted themselves: the only resolution with any teeth in it was one "strongly urging the passage of ERA by all states," and regretting "the necessity of holding its (MLA's) 1977 convention in a state (Chicago, Illinois again) which has to date failed to ratify ERA...

...It took 62 pages of a massive issue of the journal PMLA just to list the meetings, which ranged from large forums to division meetings to discussion groups to section meetings, workshops, society meetings (The Dickens Society, The International Courtly Literature Society) and "special sessions...

...And perhaps inconsistent too, since Smugglers is hardly affirmative...

...Following the takeover at the business meeting in '68, a delegate assembly had been formed to deal with association business...

...Yes, Louis Kamp had a good slogan there...

...Too long to work as parody and too meager to be taken seriously, Sally's book is reading only for a shutin with a shotgunned TV...

...The '68 Revolution was opposed to the restrictive, non-participatory, small number of sessions, to the old-boys method of choosing subjects and speakers, to the complete lack of democracy in governance and decision-making...

...At special sessions papers were read at too great length, very often, to allow for any participatory discussion...

...Seventy-six saw the logical extension of that opposition: instead of the less than 150 sessions held in 1966, for example, 700 were held this year...

...It insinuated onto the officers' slate its own nominees so that for a few years to come the presidency of the Association was in the hands of political activists...

...tributing to ihe 1977 American Catholic Overseas Aid Appeal...

...The ones I attended were marked by much heat, and occasional light...

...It contains portions of his dissertation...

...Things were growing more real, at least...

...professor Louis Kamp who got himself arrested in the halls of the Americana Hotel for putting up a poster which read: The tigers o] wrath are wiser than the horses o] instruction...

...Very little, for the hundreds of graduate students, recent Ph.Ds and Pb.Ds from last year and the year before who have not been able to find teaching jobs, and who swarmed daily into the rooms set apart for interviews...

...There's a mixed image, fit subject...

...One paper I heard might have accoun4ed for it: "Semiology of Eisenstein Montage...

...All was not sunshine and light however: there was a Lesbian Feminist Poetry Reading, at which Jodi Braxton, the black poet, was announced as a participant, but the MLA Convention Daily had to announce, somewhat ruefully, that "Jodi Braxton is not a lesbian feminist and will not participate in meeting 195...

...The employment situation in higher education is still bad...

...When forced into her bedroom retreat, Sally finds a beat-up paperback entitled The Smugglers o/ Lost Souls' Rock...

...Almost 10,000 members jammed the seven hundred meetings which resembled the gether, under the new dispensation, and form a session,-thus providing its organizers and speakers with that most desirable entry on their curriculum vitae, a "paper" at MLA...

...Most of the gains in that area were not scholarly but social: the gay acaAmericawl Catholic ()verseas Aid Ap a| i t e r e ' s your opportunity to do something concrete to Touch a Hungry World...

...In Denver the next year half as many members appeared as had in New York, and the resolutions dealt with such issues as a call to colleges and universities to oppose state laws forbidding contraception and abortion, and to support the provision of free information on these matters to all students and faculty members...

...Gardner's materials are the familiar ones of family chronicles--marital problems, parental failures, the twining of guilt and love---but with an interesting perspective of place, a Vermont small town where memory is long but the growing season is short...

...Sally believes Smugglers is "trash," yet it begins to influence the vcay she thinks about her brother and the past...

...Canceled, with a note on the closed door: "Gay Caucus on French Lesbian Writers...

...Meets Here . . . . Some film meetings were sparsely attended...

...for semiotic analysis, on a human BOOKS I I ,,,I UPDIKE & GARDNER: DOWN FROM THE HEIGHTS THOMAS LeCLAIR October I A g h t JOHN GARDNER Knopf, $10.00 Marsh Me: A Romance JOHN UPDIKE Knop/, $7.95 In October Light a Bennington coed asks her dance partner if he has read anything by John Updike, Gardner's nod of recognition to a fellow practitioner of spirit-flecked realism...

...All the expected figures---Glasgow, Sand, Cather, Lessing--were discussed...

...Gardner's point here and elsewhere in the novel is that literature (along with other media) does affect behavior and, implicitly, that the novelist has a responsibilty to tell an ennobling truth...

...A Pynchonized Dog Soldiers with a sci-fi ending, it kills much of her time and about a third of Gardner's novel...

...It passed, comfortably...

...Sickened by his older sister SaUy's TV, he shoots it and chases her into her bedroom, where she stays to set up a mighty conflict of wills that Gardner uses to examine the principles that lock James and "modernist" Sally into their comic but nearly destruotive combat...

...Old-timers moaned audibly about the multiplicity of meetings and subjects, causing William Schaeffer, the association's executive secretary, to remark that more is more, not, as some contended, that more is less...

...An estimated 450-million persons on this great Planet Earth are victims o f acute malnutrition...

...But Schaeffer was wrong...

...Four hundred special sessions were held, on such subjects as "The Sermon in England, 1650-1750," "Neo-Latin," "Dorothy Sayers," and my favorite which I didn't get around to attending: "Ideology and Narrative Technique in Television: A Semiological Analysis of Gynocentric Serial Dramas," which would have been called, in any other place, "The Study of Soap Operas...

...In that same year the radical caucus packed the usually sedate, dull business meeting and passed resolutions against the draft, the Vietnam war, the meeting in the following year in Chicago (to protest Mayor Daley's recent police brutality at the Democratic convention...