Richard Jeffrey Newman

For a vari­ety of rea­sons that I will prob­a­bly write about over the next cou­ple of months, I have decided I want to change the nature of my online pres­ence, begin­ning with the look and focus of this blog. I need to start putting writ­ing and my iden­tity as a writer, a pub­lished writer, back at the cen­ter of my life, where it has not been for far too long, and while the pri­mary way I will be doing that is by mak­ing more time in my life for my writ­ing and the read­ing that feeds it – not to men­tion try­ing more sys­tem­at­i­cally to get my work pub­lished – I have also been think­ing that I need a more dynamic web­site and that means chang­ing Word­Press themes. I liked Eru­dite, the theme I’ve been using for a while now; but I want a site that will make it eas­ier for peo­ple to see where I am read­ing, what I have pub­lished, how to buy my books, to con­nect with me if they want to – and Eru­dite is not really set up for that. So that means that the look of this blog will be very fluid while I decide which theme I am going to use, so please be patient with me.

Eru­dite, the Word­Press theme I have been using, has been mis­be­hav­ing lately and I am hav­ing a damned hard time fig­ur­ing out how to fix what’s wrong myself. More­over, the devel­oper has not been respond­ing to com­ments on the blog post he set up for the theme and so I haven’t been able to get answers to my ques­tions either. Not that I blame him; he gives the theme out for free and what­ever sup­port work he does he does on his own time; but it is awfully incon­ve­nient for me. So I have been pok­ing around for a new theme and I am really lik­ing this one, Brunelleschi, but I am also begin­ning to won­der if it makes sense to bite the bul­let and cre­ate a whole new site for myself. I’ve built sites before, and I like the lit­tle bit I’ve seen of Rapid­Weaver – I have not checked out the lat­est ver­sion of iWeb, though, which I will, since I kind of liked that too – but that would take an awful lot of time, more time than tweak­ing a Word­Press theme with plu­g­ins and such. On the other hand, build­ing my own site means I don’t have to depend on a devel­oper or teach myself code. (I actu­ally think I’d enjoy doing that, but I just don’t have the time.) Maybe some­one out there has had some expe­ri­ence and can help me out.

In the mean­time, I will be play­ing with Brunelleschi, which will hope­fully not dis­rupt the look of this blog too much. I also hope to get back to just plain blog­ging. I haven’t been writ­ing here enough lately and I miss it.

We buried my grand­mother this past Sun­day. She was 101 years old, and while I would not want to be 101 like she was 101 – espe­cially in the last six months or so of her life, her body failed in ways that made it hard not to hope for her to be at peace sooner rather than later – she lived a long, fruit­ful, adven­tur­ous, engaged and mean­ing­ful life; and so her death, while very, very sad, feels nei­ther tragic nor unjust. Indeed, the time she was here, with us, is some­thing to cel­e­brate, to be grate­ful for, not just because the qual­ity with which she lived is some­thing to aspire to, but because her being here gave us a chance to be part of her life, to make it a part of our­selves in the inti­mate, com­pli­cated, fraught and deeply pro­found ways that only come with being a family.

We used to laugh that my grand­mother would out­live us all, and while we knew of course that this could never be lit­er­ally true, there was, there is, some­thing endur­ing about her. In part, this comes from her per­pet­ual opti­mism. One way or another, she would always tell me, usu­ally over Hebrew National salami sand­wiches across the small table in the very small kitchen that was just the right size for her barely five foot frame, things work them­selves out. She was mostly right. Indeed, I can think of only one prob­lem that she con­fronted over the course of her long life, or that she helped oth­ers con­front, that did not con­form to that principle.

In that very small kitchen, on the two or three occa­sions dur­ing the year when the whole mish­pocheh would gather together – Rosh HaShanah, Passover, Thanks­giv­ing, and occa­sion­ally other times as well – my grand­mother would single-handedly, and then, later in her life, almost single-handedly, pre­pare a feast. Some­times, when I was younger, there were as many as twenty peo­ple seated around the table in her din­ing room, maybe more, and the food was always plen­ti­ful and deli­cious. Per­haps my most endur­ing over­all mem­ory of those meals is the gusto – I can think of no other word for it – with which my grand­mother would eat when she was finally sure that every­one else had been fed and that all the food that could be put on the table had been put on the table. She enjoyed food, per­haps espe­cially meat, and I owe to her my own habit of pick­ing off the bone – turkey, chicken, lamb, beef or pork – every last bit of the ani­mal that can be eaten.

My grand­fa­ther, when he was alive, always sat at the head of the table, and then after he was gone, I sat there, espe­cially on Passover. It’s funny what you remem­ber, but my two most vivid mem­o­ries from these fam­ily meals are from Passover seders that took place more than thirty years ago. First, I don’t remem­ber how old I was, is the time we were read­ing Chad Gadya, in Eng­lish of course, and every time I had to read the line in which the cat eats the goat, I butchered it, because in our trans­la­tion the cat didn’t sim­ply eat, it devoured and I just could not get into my head that the sec­ond syl­la­ble in that word rhymed with hour. The sec­ond seder I remem­ber – I had to be fif­teen or six­teen – is the one when my uncle Arthur showed up, and he and I read through the entire hagadah in Hebrew, some­thing I’d never done before, and because I thought, at that point in my life, that I would be a rabbi when I grew up, this made me very proud, espe­cially when my uncle told me I’d done a good job.

Miss­ing from these fam­ily gath­er­ings for far too many years were my uncle’s chil­dren, who, through no fault of their own, were almost com­pletely estranged from us after their father died. The details of how that estrange­ment came to be are irrel­e­vant here. What mat­ters is that my grand­mother felt great joy that she was ulti­mately able to build a rela­tion­ship with them, and it has been a won­der­ful thing for us as well – me, my mother and my sis­ters – to have them be part of our family’s life, for us to be a family. Ironically, and sadly, as my cousin’s estrange­ment from us has become entirely a thing of the past, my sis­ters’ estrange­ment from each other has grown more and more deeply entrenched. Here, too, the story of how the estrange­ment came about and what sus­tains it now is really not impor­tant. What mat­ters is that it would mis­rep­re­sent the last twenty or so years of our grandmother’s life not to say that the fact of my sis­ters’ estrange­ment caused her great pain and, more, that one of her deep­est regrets is that she was unable to help them unravel the knot of anger, bit­ter­ness and resent­ment that keeps them apart.

I know this because, on more than one occa­sion, she told me so, most recently right before she started to lose her abil­ity to say clearly what she wanted to say. We were sit­ting alone in the room in the apart­ment my mother had built onto her house in Hemp­stead that had, increas­ingly, come to define the bound­aries of the world my grand­mother lived in, and my grand­mother looked up at me from a moment of quiet in our con­ver­sa­tion and said, “You know, I’m bored.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“There’s noth­ing new. Not on TV, not in the news, even the sto­ries I hear from you and your sis­ters, and your mother too, are always more or less the same. There’s just noth­ing new and it’s bor­ing. Some­times I wish I could just go, but I can’t just wish it and make it happen.”

I let that state­ment hang in the air for a bit, and then I asked her, “So what are you hold­ing onto, Grandma?”

She turned her head to look out the win­dow. Her eyes focused inward, and her mouth was set in the thin, pursed line that char­ac­ter­ized one ver­sion of what my mother has called the Anne-Berner-look, and I knew my grand­mother was cal­cu­lat­ing how much to say and how much not to say, that she was weigh­ing what she thought the effect would be on me of what she said, what I might tell oth­ers and how it would effect them. “Well, I guess I still feel like I have things to teach them,” she answered wist­fully, and it was clear in con­text that them referred to my sis­ters and that what she wanted to teach them was how to let the anger, the bit­ter­ness and the resent­ment go.

My grand­mother was a trained col­oratura soprano when she was younger, though she never, as far as I knew, per­formed opera. She did, how­ever, sing com­mer­cials on the radio, and from every­thing I know, she orig­i­nally wanted to be a per­former. Her par­ents, though, would not allow it. The val­ues they brought from the old coun­try jived very nicely with the image of female per­form­ers in the US that was cur­rent at the time, i.e., that they were “loose,” and so there was no way my great grand­par­ents were going to per­mit their daugh­ter to enter that kind of pro­fes­sion. My mother tells the story, though, of how my grandmother’s singing did help to win over her future father-in-law. When she and the man who would become my grand­fa­ther were dat­ing, he would call her from the tai­lor shop his father owned and ask my grand­mother to sing to him. Then he would hand the phone to his father, who just loved to lis­ten to my grandmother’s voice.

And it wasn’t as if my grand­mother gave up all con­tact with the world of artists, writer, singers and musi­cians that she wanted to be part of. I have on my book­shelf two vol­umes of poetry by Henry Bel­la­mann, Cups of Illu­sion and The Upward Pass, each one very affec­tion­ately inscribed to my grand­mother. Bel­la­mann is best known for his novel King’s Row, which was made into a movie in 1942. My grand­mother hinted to me once that there was a story about her and a writer, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was. When I asked, she said, “Maybe some other time,” but, no mat­ter how often I asked, “some other time” never arrived. Then, last sum­mer, after I came across Bellamann’s books on my shelf, I asked her if she remem­bered him. When I said his name, her face lit up, and there was such hap­pi­ness in her eyes, it looked like she was reliv­ing what­ever had been between them, but she either couldn’t or wouldn’t (though I think by that time it was more couldn’t) tell me the story behind her joy.

I have often won­dered if my grand­mother regret­ted not defy­ing her par­ents to become the per­former she’d wanted to be, and I’m sorry now that I never asked her. To be hon­est, though, I don’t know that she would have given me a straight answer. At least with me, my grand­mother rarely talked can­didly about her­self. She pre­ferred, I think, to let her actions speak for her. By the time I was old enough to under­stand that she was a per­son unto her­self and not sim­ply my grandma, she had been for a long time a solidly proper, middle-class, Jew­ish wife, mother and grand­mother, and she had man­aged to chan­nel her con­sid­er­able cre­ative ener­gies very suc­cess­fully into that life. My mother talks about the force my grand­mother was to reckon with when she was grow­ing up, and I can attest to the dri­ving force she was behind both the Jack­son Heights Jew­ish Cen­ter and the co-op where I now live with my fam­ily, for which my grand­mother served as the first man­ager and board president.

Every time I deal with the co-op’s attor­ney – and he has been rep­re­sent­ing the co-op now for about 30 years – he tells me how much he learned from my grand­mother; and when the cur­rent man­ager of the co-op came to pay a shiva call, she told us about the ven­dors who still remem­ber my grand­mother as a remark­able woman to deal with. The Jack­son Heights Jew­ish Cen­ter which, when I was grow­ing up, was the cen­ter of a still thriv­ing Jew­ish com­mu­nity in this neigh­bor­hood, would not have been what it was with­out my grand­mother, and the peo­ple who knew her back then still talk with a kind of awe about the exam­ple she set through her energy and deter­mi­na­tion, her imag­i­na­tion and her commitment.

As I sit here in my liv­ing room, the seven-day memo­r­ial can­dle the funeral home gave us burn­ing behind me, I am think­ing that there is a lot more I could say about my grand­mother, but those four char­ac­ter­is­tics – energy, deter­mi­na­tion, imag­i­na­tion and com­mit­ment – informed by a deep and abid­ing love for the peo­ple around her, and for the insti­tu­tions that mat­tered to her com­mu­nity, cap­ture for me who she was at least as well as any other sto­ries I could tell. They are the lessons I have learned from her and, together, they con­sti­tute the exam­ple I hope to live up to in my own life. My grand­mother, Anne Berner, was a remark­able woman. The world may seem smaller with­out her, but it is def­i­nitely a bet­ter place for her hav­ing been here. I love her and I miss her.

Mark Nowak’s post on Har­riet, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a mem­ber of…”: On Wis­con­sin, Michi­gan, and the most famous ques­tion in the USA,” which is well worth read­ing in its own right, makes ref­er­ence to the essay by Langston Hughes that I’ve used in the title to this post. Pub­lished in 1947, “My Adven­tures as a Social Poet” was Hughes’ answer to the ques­tion, “Why do you write ‘social’ [what we would today call polit­i­cal] poems?” I don’t know if any­one asked him this ques­tion directly, but his answer is well worth think­ing about.

“Poets who write mostly about love, roses and moon­light, sun­sets and snow, must lead a very quite life,” he begins. “Sel­dom, I imag­ine does their poetry get them into dif­fi­cul­ties.” Then he goes on:

Unfor­tu­nately, hav­ing been born poor – and also col­ored – in Mis­souri, I was stuck in the mud from the begin­ning. Try as I might to float off into the clouds, poverty and Jim Crow would grab me by the heels, and right on earth I would land. A third floor fur­nished room is the near­est thing I have ever had to an ivory tower.

This expe­ri­ence, he explains, left him lit­tle choice but to write “social” poems. Not to do so would have been to deny his own life expe­ri­ence. Admit­ting that his “adven­tures as a social poet are mild indeed com­pared to the body-breaking…experiences” of poets in other parts of the world, Hughes goes on to relate his own expe­ri­ences in the US, which include being told by a Black min­is­ter in a Black church in Atlantic City not to read any blues from his pul­pit, the loss of the patron­age of the woman who spon­sored his writ­ing after he fin­ished col­lege, being threat­ened by the peo­ple of a south­ern uni­ver­sity town because of one of his poems and more. These might sound rel­a­tively mild to us now, but it’s worth remem­ber just how volatile an issue race was in Hughes’ day and how eas­ily poems like this one, writ­ten in protest of Scotts­boro case, might have caused an actual riot.

Christ in Alabama

Christ is a Nig­ger,
Beaten and black–
O, bare your back.

Mary is His Mother–
Mammy of the South.
Silence your mouth.

God’s His Father–
White Mas­ter above,
Grant us your love.

Most holy bas­tard
Of the bleed­ing mouth:
Nig­ger Christ
On the cross of the South.

The entire essay is really worth read­ing. It’s a reminder not just of a time in Amer­i­can his­tory that is too eas­ily for­got­ten these days, but of what it was like to try to live your life dur­ing that time. The entire essay is really worth read­ing. It’s a reminder not just of a time in Amer­i­can his­tory that is too eas­ily for­got­ten these days, but of what it was like to try to live your life dur­ing that time. Hughes was a remark­able poet, and for peo­ple who know him now only through the work of his that has been anthol­o­gized – where it is almost never pre­sented in its full polit­i­cal con­text – should also know that the stakes for him in writ­ing those poems were much higher than whether or not he would ever be anthologized.

I will end with the same pas­sage that Mark Nowak quoted in the post I linked to above:

I have never known the police of any coun­try to show an inter­est in lyric poetry as such. But when poems stop talk­ing about the moon and begin to men­tion poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, some­body [always] tells the police.

I started the book just about an hour ago over pork sou­vlaki at one of the din­ers around the cor­ner from where I teach, and I didn’t get very far. I am tired and I also had to read in prepa­ra­tion for class – which, iron­i­cally enough, is ENG 102, Intro­duc­tion to Lit­er­a­ture. We’re not doing poetry right now, though, so what David Orr has to say is not imme­di­ately rel­e­vant to what I have to say to my stu­dents (We are start­ing Women With­out Men by Shahrnoush Par­sipour.) Still, I enjoyed the intro­duc­tion to his book, which was all I had the time and energy to read, immensely – espe­cially his dis­cus­sion of how it makes sense to talk to gen­eral read­ers about poetry:

When a non­spe­cial­ist audi­ence is respond­ing well to a poem, its reac­tion is a kind of ten­ta­tive plea­sure, a puz­zled inter­est that resem­bles the affec­tion a trav­eler bears for a des­ti­na­tion that both wel­comes and con­founds him. For such read­ers, then, it’s not nec­es­sar­ily help­ful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assem­bled or a reli­gious expe­ri­ence to be under­gone [refer­ring to what Orr sees as the two dom­i­nant modes of response to mod­ern poetry that one finds in books on the sub­ject]. Rather, it would be use­ful to talk about poetry as if it were, for exam­ple, Belgium.

I did not laugh out­loud when I read that – I was, after all, in a diner and there were peo­ple around me enjoy­ing their meals – but I laughed inwardly, both because I knew where he was going and because I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to go there with him. I don’t know that I think Poetry: The Undis­cov­ered Coun­try is the best way to talk to “non­spe­cial­ist” read­ers about mod­ern poetry, but I do know that I liked the ride Orr’s explo­ration of his metaphor took me on:

The com­par­i­son may seem ridicu­lous at first, but con­sider the way you’d be think­ing about Bel­gium if you were plan­ning a trip there. You might try to learn a few use­ful phrases, or read a lit­tle Bel­gian his­tory, or thumb through a guide­book in search of muse­ums, restau­rants, flea mar­kets, or promising-sounding bars. The impor­tant thing is that you’d know you were going to be con­fused, or at least occa­sion­ally at a loss, and you’d accept that con­fu­sion as part of the expe­ri­ence. What you wouldn’t do, how­ever, is become par­a­lyzed with anx­i­ety because you don’t speak flu­ent Flem­ish, or con­vinced that to really “get” Bel­gium, you need to mem­o­rize the Brus­sels phone book. Nor would you decide in advance that you’d never under­stand Bel­gians because you couldn’t imme­di­ately deter­mine why their most famous pub­lic statue is a depic­tion of a naked kid pee­ing in a foun­tain (which is true). You’d prob­a­bly fig­ure, hey, that’s what they like in Bel­gium; if I stick around long enough, maybe it’ll all make sense.

There is so much that is dead on about this, from the way peo­ple do treat poetry like a for­eign lan­guage you can’t under­stand unless you’re already flu­ent to the assump­tion that not under­stand­ing a sin­gle image in a poem means you should just throw your hands up in res­ig­na­tion and never read another one; and I like the humor here; and there’s not really much else that I have to say, espe­cially since I need to go teach in three min­utes, except that I am look­ing for­ward to read­ing the rest of the book. Orr sounds like the kind of critic with whom it will be good to have the kind of con­ver­sa­tion you can only have in the act of read­ing, and I miss read­ing poetry and read­ing good books about poetry just for the pleasire of it, just because I am a poet and this stuff feeds me.

Off to class.

I can­not find the name of the pub­li­ca­tion in which I found this gor­geous trans­la­tion. I will, of course, add it when I do. What I like about the poem is the way the speaker’s mind allows the small beau­ties of the beloved to oblit­er­ate the small charms of the sub­jects listed in the first few lines. It’s a com­mon enough sen­ti­ment until you get to the bewil­der­ment at the end. What do you do with the soul and its many motions? What would it mean to have a soul that did not move? That could not be moved?

Frag­ment 103

It’s true the charm may lie
some­what
in the sub­ject such as gar­dens
wed­ding songs love affairs
against these few will speak and all
at one time
may have hoped—
but there is your bend­ing
neck and the small hol­low at the base
of your long back
and no charm
other

song likes its own delights and even sad­ness
in some modes
charms
those whose hearts have moved
so

what to do with the soul
its many
motions

–Sap­pho, trans­lated by Mau­reen N. McLane

Which is a won­der­ful thing. Just sayin’

Fan­tasy On Trial (Again) | CarnalNation

Read this post; it’s scary. Here’s an excerpt:

The pros­e­cu­tion tried to get me to say that most peo­ple who fan­ta­size are sick, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that people’s fan­tasies indi­cate what they want to do in real life, which I wouldn’t. They tried to get me to say that Mr. Jones’ calls and emails were typ­i­cal groom­ing behav­ior. I pointed out the fun­da­men­tal flaws in their rea­son­ing: he had met “Missy” in a cha­t­room for adults, not for fans of Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Broth­ers. And after a thou­sand emails and phone calls, he never said any­thing like, “Let’s meet. We’ll have a great time. When are you free? I’ll send you money for a bus ticket.”

There were plenty of ques­tions about me: my cam­paign against the con­cept of “sex addic­tion”; my obser­va­tions that Amer­ica is pan­icked over highly dis­torted esti­mates of how many preda­tors troll for kids online (I quoted sci­en­tific stud­ies, includ­ing the lat­est one from Har­vard); whether or not I believed it was OK for adults and 14-year-olds to have sex (which I wouldn’t answer, not want­ing to obscure the fact that there was no 14-year-old in this case), and many, many more. That’s how I spent yes­ter­day afternoon.

This morn­ing, the jury gave their ver­dict. After­wards, in pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions, they told Mr. Jones’ lawyer that I was clearly an expert, warm and per­sua­sive, and that they had learned a great deal from me about psy­chol­ogy and sex­u­al­ity. They said they were trou­bled by the flaws I had pointed out in the prosecution’s case, and they laughed at the D.A.’s inabil­ity to rat­tle or insult me. Sev­eral said if they were ever in trou­ble, they hoped they’d be rep­re­sented in court as well as Mr. Jones had been.

But they found him guilty. They were afraid to believe him.

One word: pla­gia­rism. I spend a great deal of time at the begin­ning of the semes­ter, on the first day actu­ally, talk­ing about it, explain­ing it and mak­ing sure my stu­dents under­stand my pol­icy, which is: If I catch you will­fully try­ing to fool me by pass­ing off some­one else’s work as your own, you will fail for the semes­ter, no sec­ond chances. I lec­ture in excru­ci­at­ing detail – with more than a few exam­ples of stu­dents who were pass­ing (one was even get­ting an A) whom I failed because I caught them will­fully pla­gia­riz­ing – about why I take it per­son­ally when some­one tried to do this: because it means that he or she thinks either that I am stu­pid, that I won’t know the dif­fer­ence between her or his writ­ing, which I have been read­ing all semes­ter, and the professional-grade writ­ing that stu­dents inevitably hand in when they pla­gia­rize, or that I don’t care enough about my job actu­ally to pay atten­tion to the work that stu­dents hand in. I repeat this warn­ing sev­eral times dur­ing the semes­ter, with a shorter ver­sion of the same lec­ture, espe­cially when I assign any paper that involves even the small­est amount of research. I even tell my stu­dents how I am going to catch them. Most pla­gia­rism these days involves stu­dents cut­ting and past­ing stuff from the web, and if it’s on the web, I tell them, Google can find it. “Please,” I ask them, “don’t put me in the posi­tion of hav­ing to fail you. If you are hav­ing prob­lems with an assign­ment, come talk to me. As long as you are some­one who has been com­ing to class and doing the work – even if you’ve been get­ting D’s – I’d rather work some­thing out (an exten­sion, what­ever) to make it pos­si­ble for you to do the work than to fail you for plagiarism.”

Inevitably, though, there are stu­dents who don’t believe me or who think they are smarter than I am, and this semes­ter is no excep­tion. I have caught three pla­gia­rists in my Tech­ni­cal Writ­ing class, and it’s really piss­ing me off. First, the assign­ment they pla­gia­rized – writ­ing a set of instruc­tions, a descrip­tion and a process analy­sis – while not nec­es­sar­ily easy, is not hard to do well on if you take the time to do it right. Sec­ond, two of the stu­dents were clearly pass­ing; one of them was on his way to get­ting a B. (The other would have ended up with a D+ or a C, depend­ing on how he did on his final paper.) Third, the remain­ing pla­gia­rist does not have Eng­lish as his first lan­guage, and so the work he’s been hand­ing me has not only been sprin­kled with the kinds of gram­mat­i­cal errors one would expect from some­one writ­ing in his sec­ond lan­guage; even when his writ­ing was gram­mat­i­cal, it had a slight “accent” that betrayed his coun­try of ori­gin. So what did he hand me? A gram­mat­i­cally per­fect descrip­tion of a light bulb, as if I wouldn’t notice the difference.

All three of them are going to fail for the semester.

And now that I have vented, I am going to bed. I need the sleep.

Edited because of pri­vacy issues.

Accord­ing to one of my stu­dents, in a paper he wrote meant to talk about the dif­fer­ent approaches to his­tory in Max­ine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Island, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, China has his­tor­i­cally been infused with a “racial ide­ol­ogy of male mas­culin­ity” and that is why so many “Chi­nese Amer­i­cans believe in racial inequal­ity.” I wish I could quote the entire two sen­tences for you; they are truly pre­cious. It’s not just the poor qual­ity of this writ­ing per se that gets to me, though, it’s that phrases like “racial ide­ol­ogy of male mas­culin­ity” appear all over the essays I have been get­ting from far too many of the stu­dents in the lit­er­a­ture class I have been teach­ing – as if the stu­dents were choos­ing one word from col­umn A, two from col­umn B, etc. in order to come up with a sen­tence that sounds so intel­lec­tu­ally pro­found that I won’t notice it doesn’t really mean any­thing. It is depress­ing and debil­i­tat­ing when the papers handed in by my fresh­man com­po­si­tion stu­dents are, in many ways, bet­ter writ­ten than the ones handed in by the stu­dents in an advanced lit­er­a­ture class.