Memoir Experiment Part Eight—The Unplugged Shakespearian

By Patrick
28 Jul 14 at 05:20 PM
In: Micellanea

I’m going to teach an online course for the first time this semester. I have certain misgivings. More than that, I wonder if I can even master the bare necessities required to operate the electronic application through which I will be “delivering my content.” It is obscene that we have to debase ourselves by adopting the language of business to discuss what we’re doing, but online education, it seems to me, is the product of business people, not educators.

I’m slow to learn these new technologies; like some savage from a remote jungle presented with some maddeningly complex and advanced device, I stare at it dumbly as my heart fills with rage. But then as my mind wanders from the task at hand, as it always does, I remember the early days of my Ph.D. program. A graduate student named Sean started when I did. He was a renaissance scholar, focusing on Shakespeare. He brought his books and a few necessities down south with him from his native Michigan. He had an old typewriter he used for his papers. This was in the late nineties. I believe he wrote his texts out longhand first, in a most elegant cursive, though I might be romanticizing after the fact. His expression was melancholy, and while he loved the study of literature that engaged all his energies, he saw that the outward trappings of the field were inexorably changing, necessitating the use of the very technologies that had driven him to literature and the supreme humanism of the renaissance. There was email, for example. He didn’t use it. Student and faculty messages went unread. Announcements were unheeded. He was told his email account was already set up, he merely had to check it. But with a Bartleby-esque stubbornness, he preferred not to. Indeed, this was a good deal stronger than preference. There were also grumblings about his antiquated carbons and necessarily mono-spaced typefaces. Harmless eccentricity quickly seems pathological when one faces some minor inconvenience. The writing, alas, was on the wall. Sean knew his days were numbered. He told me one day he was leaving, returning to Michigan. He loved Shakespeare more than anything, but he had discovered that society would not allow him to be a Shakespeare scholar on his own terms. He simply would not use a computer; this would rob him of his very humanity. And so he was gone, abandoning his official studies.

I don’t know what happened to him. I like to think he ended up in a rough cabin on the Upper Peninsula. There he sits in my mind’s eye with long unkempt beard and a look of preternatural determination, rereading Timon of Athens for the 100th time, or going over some favorite passage from E.M. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture. He cooks beans in an iron pan over a wood fire, and drinks bourbon when he can get it. He mends his simple clothing and subsists on some old fellowship money he squirreled away. He writes his papers and types them up. He has over 500 dead stock Smith-Corona typewriter ribbons. He cannot send his papers to be published, as the journals only take electronic documents. He has no students. But he will not change, no he will not. I respect him immensely.