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It has helped to publicize the apparently fully dastardly termination by the Arden Shakespeare of Patricia Parker as editor of the third series Midsummer Night’s Dream, an edition I am not alone in anticipating with the greatest eagerness.
The list of names on the petition to reverse this termination, perpetrated by the private firm Cengage, which now manages the publication of the Ardens, reads as a who’s-who in early modern studies. (Most amusingly, Gary Taylor writes succinctly that he has “written to the editors” at Cengage — how genuinely, and yet humorously, menacing!) As well it should read: Parker is a scholar of the highest order, and I can only imagine that her work on this edition meets, if not excels, the high standards of intelligence, creativity, precision, and integrity she has set throughout her career. I sincerely hope she will be reinstated, and that the Cengage brass will hang their faces in shame as they offer her their most profound apologies.
If Parker’s account of her relationship with the editors at Cengage is accurate, and I can’t believe we have any reason to doubt it, her termination not only smacks of poor ethics but casts doubt on the integrity of the entire enterprise of the Arden Shakespeare — which, as anyone who has ever taught from one of their editions or used one for research knows, constitutes a serious blow to the field of Shakespeare studies.
The scandal further raises a number of questions about the state of academic publishing, most of which I am not remotely prepared to address – I do hope it will raise those questions to a visible level of broad discussion. Meanwhile, assess the thing for yourself using the links above, and then sign the petition.
[I am amazed to find that I already have a "misadventures in editorship" tag -- how convenient.]
Cosy, cup of coffee, early Bloomsbury evening. Stunning sky. Smiling, occasionally, irrationally, to myself. Pop into Waterstones to pick up fresh Arden Merchant and Hamlet as I need them urgently, and I’m foolish enough to’ve left my overloved copies at home.
Sigh at the heft of the 3rd series Ham. Groan at thought of re-read.
Stroll slowly down Malet Street to Senate House, sipping coffee and reading the opening scene in the fast-fading light.
Stunning revelation:
Reader, Hamlet is a damned fine play.
I have re-had this revelation every single time I’ve re-read this play. And you know what? If everyone would just shut the fuck up about it, I wouldn’t forget to begin with!
If you know anything about me at all, reader, you know that my fondest ambition in life is to be crowned Queen of Discourse. My first act — my very first act, as Queen of All Discourse that Ever Was — will be to impose a 20-year moratorium on academic discussion of Shakespeare. That’s right. No books. No articles. No SAA (sorry guys, find something else to do with your beautiful spring weekend). No mandatory, or even voluntary, Shakespeare seminars, lectures, undergraduate-feeding-frenzies. No dissertations. No obnoxious letter-spats in the front pages of the TLS. Take every single volume with Shakespeare’s name in its title off the shelves of all academic libraries, everywhere. Lock up the early copies in a vault. Duct tape Brian Vickers’ mouth shut and take away his knighthood before someone gets hurt.
Let a new generation grow up unpoisoned. Let them write about Marlowe, or Kyd, or Fletcher, or whatsoever may please them. Let them come to Hamlet alone, unjaded, unfettered. Let them be awash in solitary, wordless, discourseless awe. And when, with a flourish, their Queen lifts her ban, let them, with bowed heads and pure hearts, begin to teach, begin to write, begin to read, afresh.
Because I love Hamlet. And I shouldn’t have to fight for that.
If it were up to me, reader, there would be no such thing as grades. I see where honors like “distinction” or, well, “honors” can be valuable, and can reward exceptional talent or skill, but regular-term grades? Nonsense. Useless nonsense.
Now, Brit Uni’s system is by far the worst I’ve ever encountered.
Bullshit item #1: Term papers are submitted “anonymously” to two “anonymous” examiners. Anonymous? My ass. One examiner is the tutor for the course, the other can only be one of two people currently teaching in my department, in my period. The course tutor will know which paper is mine, because, um, s/he helped me to develop it. Hello. And there aren’t that many students on my M.A. In one case, there were only two of us in the class, and our styles are totally different. It will be easy to tell which paper belongs to whom. Aside from “anonymous” commentary sent back through official channels, examiners (and thus tutors) are not officially allowed to discuss a student’s work with her. [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]
Bullshit item #2: The earliest (earliest) possible return date for marks and commentary is one month into the new term. Which is only two months long. Most students tell stories of having gotten their marks only at the end of the following term, and of never having gotten any comments at all. Now, how is this supposed to be useful? (Again. Very few students on this M.A. If my undergrad profs could turn around twenty or more twenty-page papers in a week, surely these folks can handle less than ten in a month?) At the risk of sounding like a snowflake, how the hell am I supposed to learn from last term’s experience if I don’t get feedback, or if I don’t get it in time to implement it in the next round of papers?
Bullshit item #3: These papers are treated more or less as unseen exams, with access to books. Faculty are not allowed to read drafts of their students’ papers, or to give feedback on anything more substantive than a “plan.” Students are not, in fact, allowed to have their drafts read by anyone who is not an official Uni writing-center worker. If one of my tutors or one of my classmates reads a draft of my paper, it is said to give me an “advantage.” Um, well. Yes. That’s correct. It would be pretty bloody fucking advantageous if I could have a conversation with my mentors and my cohort about my work. I might even, well, learn something. And write a better paper! Please explain to me what’s unfair about that.
The system, I’m guessing, was designed in part to protect students from faculty bias, and in part (mostly) to protect faculty from grade-grubbing students, and to reduce in general the risk of litigiousness that comes with any assessment arrangement. (The whole problem would be solved with many fewer person-hours and a lot less money and paper if you did away with grades entirely. Ahem.) I’m all for protection, and grub-prevention, but I think this is extreme.
The other side of that coin is that this not only impedes a student’s learning process, it also impairs her ability to develop a close relationship with her mentors through work. It forces her to operate more or less in a void. Worst of all, it puts the entire emphasis on product, and none at all on process. I couldn’t give two shits about grades, as long as they’re not awful enough to hurt me later. What I care very, very deeply about is… well, learning. Is that so ridiculous? What shows up on my transcript is so astonishingly much less valuable to me than even a half-hour’s conversation with one of my teachers. If that conversation could, just once, be about my written work, it would teach me more than I will ever learn from the number spat out by a big, unwieldy, “anonymous” bureaucratic assessment-machine.
This goes back to something that never ceases to bother me: the academy is a community, not a machine. Yet institutions, especially big ones, so often refuse to recognize that. A university should be based on human relationships, to the greatest extent possible. That sounds so idealistic. But really? All I want is to hand my work directly to the person who fostered it, and have her hand it directly back to me, with her near-illegible scribbled marginalia decorating it. That is human. It’s also, apparently, too much to ask.
The good news, reader, is that I have (almost) drafted my statement of purpose. The bad news… well. The bad news is that it will inevitably read as all such grabby-needy self-sale documents read. The following is a rough translation from what I have written into how it will appear to its lofty destinataires.
Dear Professor Elegant Linen-Trousers, FancyPants University,
HIiiiii!!!!!! So I’m doing all this really fantastic stuff right now [NOTE TO SELF: BE MORE SPECIFIC HERE] that is super-relevant to Your Area Area You Dabbled in Briefly Fifteen Years Ago, and I’m really really pleased with myself for being so fabulous. And smart! Don’t forget smart. Sooo I’m applying to NAME OF INSTITUTION HERE Some Institution that is Not Yours But Is A Strong Rival of Yours, because I think the work that is happening at Your Institution is revolutionizing Your Area, and I’m like so totally excited to be part of the revolution, man! Heavy.
[TRANSITION NEEDED!!] Okay so I did this sweet research paper this one time, right? And it like totally had to do with WHATEVER INTERESTS MAKE SENSE FOR THE PROGRAM exactly what you work on in so many exciting ways! Well no no no I don’t mean exactly, exactly, just kinda, I mean I’m original and innovative and everything and not just some copy-cat sap. Girl scout’s honor. Aaaaaanyway then I got this really rad, super-competitive awesometastic fellowship/prize/pat-on-the-head thing and did so much sweet research that ii”m not going to really tell about in detail because I don’t really remember it all that well and even if I did it doesn’t make any sense at all to me! Teehee. So I wrote this other thing that totally has everything to do with Your Colleague’s work in Field Your Colleague Has Never Worked On But Once Tangentially Said Something About. And that was totally awesome and I learned all this crap.
You know what else I really love, I mean besides mint-chocolate chip ice cream? I really really really love this Really Exciting Thing That’s Happening In The Field Right Now but That You Hate Because It Was Inaugurated By Your Evil Nemesis Whose Name I’m About to Drop as My Personal Hero. I’m using the work of Your Nemesis, whose work changed my life and rescued me from the brink of suicide, to do toootally awesometastic research, well not really research so much as vague thinking, in Area You Hate. How neat is that!
And then I won this other thing!!!! Which has never been heard of outside my tiny-ass college, but it was like so sweet and made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and enabled me to do more research that I don’t really understand that has everything to do with Your Area!!! I mean, not everything, exactly, but, well, you know.
Name Drop, Name Drop, and one more Name Drop for good measure.
[DON'T FORGET -- PUT PARAGRAPH ON UNDERGRADUATE THESIS HERE! BUT FIRST REMEMBER TO FIGURE OUT WHAT YOUR UNDERGRADUATE THESIS WAS ABOUT, IF IT WAS IN FACT ABOUT ANYTHING]
This project was deeply influenced by your thinking and I am very grateful for that will you please advise my Ph.D. dissertation.
Oh!!!! And Your Institution also has that Awesome Institute/Center/Program-Thing! Which I know absolutely nothing about but am totally totally prepared to praise to the skies because I just know it will be crucial to my research!!! Oh, man. Sweet.
SO now here I am over here working on these run of the mill MA term papers two really really exciting innovative original interesting research projects that just happen to involve the edgiest areas of the field! Look how eeeedgy I am. Neat! [NOTE: DEVELOP TERM PAPER TOPICS BEFORE FINALIZING DRAFT!!] These will dovetail seamlessly into a gorgeous innovative original exciting dissertation on [MAKE UP DISSERTATION TOPIC! QUICK QUICK!]
And then I’ve got all this other awesome experience that actually has nothing to do with the field, your area, or the academy at all but I’m throwing in here because there’s this awkward space between now and the end of the page and THERE now it’s full.
Oh right yeah and I have teaching experience? And am deeply invested in continuing the Great Tradition of Learning by teaching freshman comp at Your Institution? And stuff? Sweet!
See you in the fall, Prof!
hugs and kisses!!!!!!
<3 mouse
I hate coming out. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
It’s not my closet. I’m not hiding anything. A given interlocutor has a closet in her head out of which I am obligated to wrest myself. It is the assumptions of others that dominate those conversations. It makes me fucking insane. This is likely because I was lucky enough to spend five years in a place where, generally, heterosexuality was not assumed, or not as vigorously as it is here in New Eden.
Now, I don’t read as queer, even to other queers, because I’m not butch. (Dispensing, for the nonce, with the rant about the supposed equation between dykeness and butchness.) I’m not femme, either (another rant about binaries hereby dispensed with), but I’m a fey little thing and will always be read as feminine, no matter how I present. Body language can do a lot — folks with good queerdar will pick me up pretty quickly after a few minutes of conversation. But, sadly, New Edeners tend not to come with the right software for such nuanced observation. (In high school and early college, I wore a rainbow belt — and even that wasn’t enough.)
Since presentation won’t do it for me, language has to carry the burden of proof. Unfortunately, I don’t have energy to explain my identifications fully, but I also hate identifying with a simple label for the benefit of the clarity of mind of others. And there’s always the which-label problem: when pressed, I identify as queer or as a dyke. I despise “gay,” and “lesbian” makes my skin crawl. “Sapphist” is a fabulous throwback, but illegible in most circles. Further misfortunes occur surrounding the fact that, in a place like New Eden, “queer” and “dyke” must carry with them an ungainly Queer 101 lecture that is likely to sound threatening to these sweet little straights.
Not that I mind threatening, but some of these sweet little straights are my coworkers and I must continue to get along with them, for my own peace of mind. I’m not fully out at work yet, and it drives me nuts. Worse, of course, than any of the dynamics of coming out is the horror of being read as straight. But I refuse to engage in the kind of PSA-style revelation of my so-called “sexuality” that dominates narratives of disclosure in this culture. So how do I maintain my integrity in a way that also allows me to continue to have healthy working relationships with my coworkers, about half of whom are probably homophobes?
Sex lives, or even romantic lives, are not a topic of conversation at New Eden Books. And I’m not currently partnered, so the “my girlfriend” drop is out. So I envision a scenario like this one:
“Hey mouse, have you read the new Joyce Carol Oates?”
“No, not yet. But I was reading that Sarah Wa–”
“Oh, but the Oates is so great! There’s a galley in the back – grab it before someone else does. Hey, will you shelve these for me?”
“Sure. Also, I have sex with women!”
Clearly not the way to go about things, but what’s a little dyke to do when nobody knows she’s a dyke?
It’s open season on Ph.D. applications, ladies and gents. Contributing to my ongoing academic malaise is the fact that I just compiled a list of all the things I need to do to get those applications in gear before the summer’s out.
So far, fifteen programs at nine schools are vying for my affections (in fantasyland, grad programs apply to you!). Three other obvious schools sit on the back burner, waiting for me to figure out what they’re all about.
[Hang on a sec, Eudora just bleeped at me! Just a mo, while I frantically click over -- this could be an acceptance from Brit Uni!
...Damn you, MoveOn.org!]
The first order of business is to ask around, peruse the intertubes, make sure I’m not missing a desirable program or potential advisor. Then I need to condense all the information I have about my prospective programs (I sincerely hope this will involve Pro/Con and Compare/Contrast charts, Venn diagrams, and so on, because I just miss AP Euro that much). Never mind that it blew my mind when I realized I could do something other than the traditional sort of program I had originally envisioned (Critical Theory, anyone? And what is Comp Lit, anyway?). This more or less implies that I have no idea what I’m doing, and should probably figure some of that out soonlike.
Then I will need to contact current students in each of these programs and beg them for the dirt: Do you feel supported by the academic community in your department? Is your funding sufficient / your teaching load punishing / etc? Does your advisor strangle puppies?
Then I’ll bone up on potential advisors’ publications. (“Wow, I didn’t know Professor Hotpants was into early modern gender structures in Scandinavian tax codes…”)
Then there will be e-mails to potential advisors to draft and redraft: “OMG I like totes have the biggest crush on you pretty pls will you direct my diss!??!!?”
[Oops, wait -- new mail!!
...Go bugger yourselves, academic listservers.]
In the midst of all this, of course, will be massive amounts of GRE-studying. My rage regarding the literature subject test will merit its own post. For now I’ll just note that my Nortons are breaking my back, carrying them all over the damn place as I do. (Also, what the hell happened in the eighteenth century and why should I care?)
Then, sometime around, oh, say RIGHT NOW, I will remember that I never asked a third recommender for a letter. Now, what the hell do I do about that? More e-mails to draft: “hi, uh, ‘member me? so i’m like applying to grad school and you like gave me an A and stuff so maybe you could say some nice or at least non-incriminating stuff about me? pretty pls!?!?!?”
Then, in the name of producing a quasi-legible writing sample, I will hack down my fav thesis chapter from thirty-one pages to the desired twenty. Those who ask for no more than fifteen will have to cope. (That half-page block quote from Spenser stays, god damn it! Why? Because it makes me giggle and I’m entitled to my ray of light!)
Note that I have yet to mention the dreaded S.O.P. I can’t make the cognitive leap that dealing with that particular monstrosity would require. (Just a sec while I talk myself down from the roof…)
[New mail!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
... Hold off, would you, HRC, until you can tell me that you've accomplished something that actually materially improves someone's life? Bastards.]
Sometime I’ll find the time to visit at least half of these campuses. (Can I live in Harbortown, Midwest? Are Californians really like that? Does the campus have the right balance of half-naked, pot-smoking, Kierkegaard-quoting, frisbee-throwing undergrads to suit my accustomed comfort level? How far from the library is the nearest vendor of quality gin? What does a stipend of $13.50 yearly get you, real-estate-wise?)
Oh, and I almost forgot — there’ll be fellowships to research and fellowship applications to prepare, in the outlandish event that I decide to expatriate for the long term.
What else am I forgetting, neglecting, failing to address?
Now, all this makes me want to crawl into a small dark place and die.
But it’s nearly noon, which means the close of the workday in Jolly Old, so I can put the computer down and hold off on anxious mail-checking until tomorrow.
In between bouts of actual work, I’ve been reading – or attempting to read, and erratically at that, leaping from chapter to chapter and rarely finishing one – Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars, his account of the (violent and bloody, apparently) history of Shakespeare scholarship. I am deeply annoyed by it for reasons that don’t need to be gone into here. Suffice to say that it’s a paragon of that bizarre, generically schizophrenic community of books known as mass-market criticism, and is therefore Extremely Annoying.
But here’s the shocker that finally caused me to put the damn thing down, probably for good. It comes near the climax of his chapter on the editorial history of Hamlet – a fraught history at best, an indecipherable morass at worst, which Rosenbaum addresses with characteristic flippancy and disregard for nuance (sorry, I’m trying to restrain myself). He quotes J. Dover Wilson, one of the great twentieth-century editors of the troubled text: ” ‘The further I went in my investigations, the more the country seemed to open up.’” Sure. An awestruck editor, daunted by his own extraordinary task – by what Rosenbaum (beautifully, this time) refers to as Shakespeare’s “bottomlessness.”
Rosenbaum has this to say about Wilson’s comment:
‘The more the country seemed to open up,’ he says, choosing (consciously?) a rather curious locution for a Hamlet scholar who must be familiar with Hamlet’s obscene pun on ‘country matters’ in the dumb-show sequence. Implicitly trying to penetrate Hamlet’s inner mysteries becomes a ‘country matter’ in the sense that it’s like trying to penetrate ‘the secret parts of fortune’ — to penetrate to a forbidden and unreachable realm, the ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’
[...] It doesn’t take [Wilson] long to decide that ‘the textual criticism of Hamlet was as unsatisfactory as the esthetic, and that until the textual problems were solved [...] there could be no security for dramatic interpretation.’
In other words, one couldn’t even enter the inner temple of thematic interpretation until one had mortified the flesh intellectually in the thorny encounter with the thicket of textual problems that guard the entrance to the question of meaning.
Ahhhh, now I get it. Rosenbaum’s book is so weird because he’s afraid of having his authorial cock snapped off by the vagina dentata (or the ‘thorny thicket’) of Meaning In Shakespeare. The ‘forbidden and unreachable realm’ — the virginal damsel in the tower, as it were, the unmortified but terribly mortifying flesh that haunts the male scholar in his attempts to possess his elusive, virginal text. Privileged entrance into the temple, the inner sanctum, of Shakespearean textuality demands a denial of the self through pain modelled on sexual awe and humiliation.
Poor J. Dover Wilson. He’s blushing furiously in his grave, I’m sure. But that’s beside the point entirely. What’s fascinating here is the odd light this passage sheds on Rosenbaum’s unwillingness to engage the more, uh, thorny elements of Shakespeare scholarship — he writes off a body of work he refers to only as “deconstruction” without so much as a glance, and puzzlingly omits from his chapters on editorialship the exciting work of the past fifteen years on textual materiality and on Renaissance “authorship” — and his parallel unwillingness to admit that the figure of Shakespeare-as-cultural-monolith, the very idea of “Shakespeareanness,” merits careful interrogation. It’s very odd indeed, the more I think about it. Shakespeare remains for Rosenbaum the literary Man To End All Men, and at the same time his work is feminized as virginal – pure, untroubled, undisturbed – while the Scholar is cast as the highly masculine, valiant but deeply troubled, quester doomed to failure. Because in Rosenbaum’s terms the very virginality of the Shakepearean Text determines its inaccessibility – when once that Scholar with his mortified flesh succeeds in penetrating those inner mysteries, the Text is no longer itself, is ravished, tarnished, desecrated.
The issue of which is a troubling Catch-22. The Scholar must attain his goal, must get the girl, rescue her from the tower, as it were, or else she will never be visible to the world; but once touched by ravishing force of scholarship, she is no longer worth seeing because irreparably altered. To view the elusive Text, the Shakespeareanness of Shakespeare, as unassailable is, then, to render it an impossible ideal. But the simple fact of the matter is that we do have three principal extant texts of Hamlet, that we don’t know and never will know what Shakespeare wrote or what his company performed, and that even if we had a Shakespeare’s own manuscript with “This is the official, approved, undeniable, final TEXT of my play, you damned fools!” scrawled across the top in that immortal hand, we would still be at a loss to reconstruct the Immortal Author behind it.
It is perhaps Rosenbaum’s fear of these unknowns that accounts for all his martial language — he is, of course, to some extent mocking the self-styled martial male scholars who came before him, but he is also recapitulating that model in his attempt to write its history. Which brings me back to my point about the peculiarness of mass-market criticism: the attempt to colloquialize, to render “exciting” or “compelling” or in the words of a blurbist (Cynthia Ozick, of all people), “electrifying,” what the “masses” must, according to the condescending author, find boring and, well, impenetrable. A further paradox: legibility — unnecessarily, I’d like to note — comes at the price of careful, nuanced thinking, because rendered in language that does more to obscure than to elucidate the varied and complex problems such criticism addresses.
The virginal text does not exist. There is no temple and there is no thorny thicket guarding it. There are three Hamlets and, yes, there once lived a glover’s boy from Stratford who once turned poet and player. Poetry is, of course and thank god for it, mystical and mysterious and full of wonders, but these material texts and that glover’s boy are not. They are problems. Curious, fascinating, multi-faceted and difficult puzzles that merit more than warlike bravado or Romantic posturing or ecstatic idol-worship. These problems are not inaccessible, though they might be insoluble, and need not inspire fear.
Ditch the questing and the penetrating, Mr. Rosenbaum, the burden of the language of violence and assault, stop trying to find the damsel or the Man who isn’t there, and love the puzzle for itself. Don’t try to purify it or cover it up or penetrate it. Let it be, don’t even try to solve it. And slowly, in the silence that remains, allow yourself with awe to read it.
Last Thursday afternoon, at recess, I sat down in the sun on a bench next to Fanny, one of my youngest colleagues. She looked at me sympathetically – all the teachers at my afternoon school worry about me because my CM1’s are so evil – and said “Ça va?” with knowing kindness and a doubtful raised eyebrow. I shrugged and sighed, “oh… oui, de plus en plus… oui, ça va.”
I had just given a quiz to my CM1’s. It took them the whole class period whereas my morning classes took only twenty minutes. I gave four of them (out of twenty) zeros for talking or looking at each other’s papers during the quiz. I had threatened the same to all of my other classes – I don’t want to be a hardass, but come on, cheating? – but no one had yet given me reason to enforce. I gave four zeros, then spent half of my precious recess drying the shamed tears of the kids who earned them. My throat hurt from repeating quiz directions and giving dictations all day. I was sighingly tired, as I always am at the end of my Thursdays, during recess before my last class.
Fanny – who’s probably not much older than me but has a careworn look about her that can only come from time spent wearing the vexed, befuddled, exasperated grimace common to all institutrices – shook her head, rifling a bunch of papers stamped with the letterhead of the Académie de Toulouse (as requisite for une instit’ as that grimace). “C’est vachement dur… et ils sont terribles.” Ah, ben, oui, je le sais bien. “Non, mais c’est dur, ce que tu fais, là, tu te rends compte? Tu interviens, comme ça, ils savent que tu vas partir dans une heure, que tu n’es pas la maîtresse, que tu n’as pas autant de pouvoir, ils le savent, et toi tu n’as pas d’opportunité de t’imposer, et pas de soutiens structurels en plus – oh, oui, c’est dur.”
That was the nicest thing anyone had yet said to me about my job. It’s hard. Sometimes, it’s just bloody hard. The sincerity of Fanny’s sympathy, while not something terribly useful, is part of what little I love about l’Éducation Nationale. The madness of teachers’ lives here binds them all together in a kind of staid, grittily determined – if painfully pessimistic – solidarity. I don’t think of my directrices or of my colleagues as my superiors, even though strictly speaking they’re perched a little higher than I am in the hierarchy (see below). No one has ever tried to pull a power trip on me, no one gives me orders, no one asks anything of me that is not clearly laid out in my contract.
When I told a directrice at another school that I would have to miss a day, but that I would make it up, she told me that as long as I didn’t tell the Inspection, neither would she, and I would still get paid as though I had been there. While my instinct is to chalk that up to the same impulse of socialism-gone-awry that causes stagnation and despair and malfunctions in so many aspects of French life, I also find something lovely in the automatic, immediate care of one teacher for another. We’re all screwed by national education, by the ministère, by our irreconcilable but nevertheless simultaneous places at the bottom of an impenetrable bureaucratic hierarchy and at the center of French children’s educational experiences, and so we take care of each other.
I sighed and smiled at Fanny and said, “Merci, c’est gentil.” She sighed and smiled at me and with one hand untied the knots in a little girl’s shoelaces while with the other hand she signed and dated her way through her stack of papers.
This hangs in the teachers’ lounge of one of my schools (my favorite). The emblem of what the maîtresses, and now I, make of the Education Nationale:
The text, roughly translated, reads: “Let the shat-on at the bottom reassure themselves that, raising their eyes, they will see nothing but a bunch of assholes.”
