Search
Winner 2012 Canada-Japan Literary Award
Blog Archive
Subscribe To
Posts
Comments
Subscribe via email
Followers
My Reading List
- Book #66: Possession by AS Byatt
- Book #65: Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang
- Book #64: A Student of Weather by Elizabeth Hay
- Book #63: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
- Book #62: Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig
- Book #61: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
- Book #60: Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
- Book #59: In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
- Book #58: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
- Book #57: Alligator by Lisa Moore
- Book #56: Return Trips by Alice Adams
- Book #55: Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close
- Book #54: The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq
- Book #53: Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
- Book #52: A Mercy by Toni Morrison
- Book #51: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
- Book #50: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
- Book #49: Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden
- Book #48: After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
- Book #47: The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut
- Book #46: TOK: Writing the New Toronto ed. Helen Walsh
- Book #45: Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
- Book # 44: Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- Book #43: The Hours by Michael Cunningham
- Book #42: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 4
- Book #41: Brick Lane by Monica Ali
- Book #40: Finding the Words ed. Jared Bland
- Book #39: Shanghai Girl by Wei Hui
- Book #38: Room by Emma Donoghue
- Book #37: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 2
- Book #36: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Book #35: Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner
- Book #34: Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
- Book #33: The Professor's House by Willa Cather
- Book #32: Growing Up Jung by Micah Toub
- Book #31: Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers by Jo Hammett
- Book #30: In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
- Book #29: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Book #28: Jewels by Dawn Promislow
- Book #27: February by Lisa Moore
- Book #26: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- Book #25: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
- Book #24: Impounded by Dorothea Lange
- Book #23: Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
- Book #22: A Curtain of Green and Other Stories by Eudora Welty
- Book #21: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
- Book #20: Obasan by Joy Kogawa
- Book #19: The Ash Garden by Dennis Bock
- Book #18: The Professor's House by Willa Cather
- Book #17: Paper Shadows by Wayson Choy
- Book #16: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
- Book #15: The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
- Book #14: Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
- Book #13: Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
- Book #12: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
- Book #11: Corked by Kathryn Borel
- Book #10: Barnacle Love by Anthony De Sa
- Book #9: On Photography by Susan Sontag
- Book #8: Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
- Book #7: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- Book #6: The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi
- Book #5: Dubliners by James Joyce
- Book #4: The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul
- Book #3: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
- Book #2: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
- Book #1: Walden by Henry David Thoreau
My Blog List
BlogCatalog
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Book #18: The Elusive Life of Inspiration
I first read The Professor’s House in a seminar on American Modernism, halfway through my master’s. The professor appeared barely older than me – way too young to be a professor. Still, there was something wearied about the first grey wisp in her tendrils and the way she trudged into class, as though the epiphanies of modernism had long grown boring. She didn’t want to be there, and I couldn’t understand why.
But five years later, it was me up in front of the auditorium of students – now they expected me to be waxing lyrical and conjuring pearls of wisdom from the text. Pearls? I was more concerned with controlling the sweat drops on my nose. Dwarfed by their fresh-faced smiles and shining eyes.
It’s a strange thing being a professor. Everyone looks to you for inspiration, but what are you supposed to do when your mood plummets and you want to shut out the world?
This is why I’ve come to love The Professor’s House. It’s the story of a professor who has a mental breakdown. After decades of toil in the badly ventilated “office” of his attic, Professor St. Peter falls out of love with the life of the mind. Suddenly, he wants to break out of his head – he wants to do something real instead. His life of contemplation and critical navel gazing pales in comparison to the lives of the primitive men he studies (his discipline is Spanish colonial history). Sound depressing? Not entirely. For St. Peter has an active imagination. In the midst of his despair, he finds himself fantasizing about what it would be like to be one of his students, a young man by the name of Outland. Outland used to live on a mesa - a life as authentic as his name. As St. Peter gets to know him, Outland becomes his alter ego, casting light on the man St. Peter could have been.
(Since I have been warned by a certain follower not to give away too much – lest my entries turn into SPOILERS – I’ll leave off here. Suffice it to say that The Professor’s House is the perfect bed companion for anyone who has gotten used to going to bed alone, pondering how to go on when life seems to have lost all inspiration….)
There is a way to jumpstart your creativity. It begins with making up stories about other selves, fantasizing your alter ego....
Photo from: here
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
LinkWithin
About Me
- Leslie Shimotakahara
- Toronto, ON, Canada
- Leslie Shimotakahara is a writer and recovering academic, who wanted to be simply a writer from before the time she could read. Hard-pressed to answer her parents’ question of how she would support herself as a writer, Leslie got drawn into the labyrinthine study of literature, completing her B.A. in Honours English from McGill in 2000, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern American Literature from Brown in 2006. After graduation, she taught English at St. Francis Xavier University for two years. Leslie woke up one morning and realized that she’d had enough of the Ivory Tower. The fact that she wasn’t doing what she wanted to do with her life loomed over her, and the realization was startling. It was time to stop studying and passively observing life and do something real instead. She needed to discover herself and tell her own story. This blog and the book she has written under the same title (Variety Crossing Press, spring 2012) are her foray. Last year, Leslie was selected as an Emerging Writer in Diaspora Dialogues and read at The Word On The Street. Her writing has been published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, and GENRE.
9 comments:
and what about fantasizing our current self!
Too true! (But not easy to do....) I recently came across this Buddhist quote:
"The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly."
Yet there's something about the act of reading/reflecting/writing that always takes me out of the present into the realm of memory, inner wishes and desires....
The Professor's House is one of my favorites!
I came incredibly close to pursuing a literature PhD, even studying and taking that crazy Lit GRE, but at the last moment took the LSAT and embraced law school instead. Finally, after being an English major, I had made the first practical decision in my liberal arty life.
Yet here I am, trolling book blogs, looking at community college creative writing classes, and trying to summon even half the interest I once felt studying poetry and literature for cases that seem empty of meaning. The grass is not greener on the other side, it is just more expensive. Now I spend a lot of time calculating and recalculating exactly how long, and in how many ways, I'll be paying off this decision.
I'm sorry being a literature professor has not turned out to be what you hoped. But I applaud you for following your first love, something which must have taken more courage than I could muster.
It sounds like our paths have been similar in certain ways.... When I finished my undergrad, I contemplated applying to law school - the artistic and practical sides of me are constantly warring - and I often thought, once I'd become a depressed academic, that I should have chosen law.
To be honest, my decision to go into academia was something of a "practical" compromise, too (what I really wanted to do was write - not study - literature.... But the creative life seemed fraught with uncertainty.... It scared me.... I wasn't sure that I have what it takes).
Yet in the end I find that my desire to write is so core to my identity (and mental wellbeing!) that I've circled back to my first love irrespective of "practical" considerations....
The Pig is a lawyer but with a passion for knowledge and abstract thought.
Thanks for introducing yourself, Bushpig! I look forward to learning more about you & your diverse interests (both intellectual & swinely....)
thinking about your buddhist quote - if you haven't, I highly recommend reading some of the quotes and poetry by Ikkyu Sojun - a colorful and delightful monk.