“Deliciae Baylorensis” …?

I want to register a complaint.  No, this isn’t going to be a complaining post.  This is no great moral umbrage on my part, just a failure to understand.  There is not, to my knowledge, a single building open 24 hours on Baylor’s extensive, Palladian, be-columned campus.  I know because the maintenance worker who closes up the SUB every night and I are almost on a first-name basis.  Or at least, he calls me “Chief.”  ”Closing time, Chief,” he’ll say in a jubilant voice, and while I want to remonstrate that he is denying me Wireless Internet, which has got to be on the Bill of Rights somewhere, he’s just so nice that I have to smile and wave goodnight, like it or not.  So the question is: how come my venerable undergraduate institution, with an endowment approximately the size of a good tip at P.F. Chang’s, was able to keep its student center open 24 hours, even in the bitterest, most lonely lacunae between terms?  And monstrous Baylor, with a budget that includes entries like “Bear Habitats,” “Artificial Bodies of Water,” and “Columns & Pediments,” can’t do it?  Seriously?

In other news, teaching college freshmen is both incredibly rewarding and tremendously exhausting.  I’d thought that I would be a nicely hard grader – not the sort who keeps you down in the mud with one be-tasseled foot while reciting a litany of your shortcomings, but just the kind who doesn’t flinch at issuing a couple D-minuses to shock everybody into “business time.”  Actually, though, just the concept of placing an objective value judgment on someone else’s thoughts (even the “thoughts” that one manages to gather at 4am the night before class, whilst still hung over from two nights ago) is proving terrifying.  Don’t let’s even mention the negative judgments.  But I’ll manage it somehow.  And I really, really like my students in general.  Sure, some of them are a pain.  But in a promising way.  I hope they all succeed; I really do.

The result of all the time I’m allocating to grading and such is that I’m currently trying to write a paper that proves that Hemingway uses France and Spain as analogues to the spirits of Lent and Carnival, respectively, and that he simultaneously does not do so.  Ample attention is being given to the Confessional Mode in Literature, to Moral Cartography, and to Tipping Waiters.  Yeah … this one is definitely going to the ALL NEW WRITING CENTER GOONS.  Just wait until you have to edit my rough draft, newbies!

Okay, time to go to bed and wake up all too early for last-minute lesson-planning/Common Grounds therapy.  Au revoir!

Metaphors be with you.

Dave Eggers, the first author on my Summer Reading Challenge list, is really satisfying my deep admiration for exuberant writing; now no doubt (since I possess no consistent style) my own fictional forays will bear the distinction of fervid overwriting (instead of my other vein, that of the petulant self-conscious minimalist).  Usually I’m a bit arch and secretive about my admiration for blatantly po-mo fiction writers and their M.C. Escher tricks: the footnotes, the diagrams, the “wink wink I’m writing about about me writing about me writing a book blah blah blah” thing.  Eggers, though, at least in his debut memoir, is simply a good enough writer that the gimmicks feel like fascinating arabesques, not loud wallpaper meant to cover a stained wall full of nail holes.  He uses the kind of metaphors that most authors would feel a need to build up to as though he’s got better ones to spare, these are just the cannon fodder.  A modest example:

At the same time, it would also be nice to make clear the mistake Laura in casting has made, to have our cameo make clear who the real stars are, stars who far outshine this dowdy Judd person — we the brilliant ringed planets, he just a tiny, cold moon. (245)

Very nice.  He’s talking, by the bye, about the casting agent who decided not to feature him on MTV’s The Real World.  That’s profligacy of talent for you.

On the other hand, I’m reminded of a luminary in my personal pantheon, Milan Kundera, who is incredibly more parsimonious with his metaphors.  There is a place in Testaments Betrayed where he castigates the translators of Kafka for muddling Kafka’s rare, spare, hugely meaningful metaphors.  For instance, one time in The Castle, K. is having sex with a woman on the floor of a bar, and Kafka describes him in terms of a foreigner wandering blindly in an unknown country.  Brilliant.  The fate of the casual lover is at once, electrically, united with that of the exile, and in one paragraph, Kafka has dealt with some of the major themes of the modernist age.  

So my question is: which is better?  Not Kafka vs. Dave Eggers, obviously; I think that one’s pretty much settled, good as the latter is.  But who deserves more respect — the virtuoso who can drop metaphors the way Sviatoslav Richter dropped notes in his Sofia recital (i.e. they make the final product even more impressive), or the brilliantly conservative minimalist who makes every single metaphor a sort of climax within the novelistic texture?  Or are they simply two different but equally respectable modes of expression, like blues and jazz?

Your thoughts are welcomed, nay, encouraged.