the_professor epitome of incomprehensibility By Charlotte Brontë. The first few chapters struck me as important for what they said about society and jobs and the whole who_you_know angle (the "who" can also be bossy and force you into jobs you don't want). The later ones seemed to flow more, though, and today I kept reading reading reading them. The romance is well plotted, the character sketches exquisite...though marred by stereotypes that SHOULD make the narrator a hypocrite, but he seems unaware. Guy says he remembers Belgium fondly, then bashes "Flamands" for being flat-faced and dull, like their land. Guy says he's not going to judge Catholics for being different than Protestants, then keeps bringing up how they're either overly cowed or sneaky. All is not bad, though. There's a nice touch in one conversation, and I don't think I caught it the first time around: William (narrator) tells Frances (who's part English but hasn't spoken the language in years) not to say "all the two" but to use "both" instead. On the next page, she says "I have had many lessons both in grammar, history, geography, and arithmetic." Clever, Brontë. But don't go around saying the shapes of people's heads make them clever. That's all over Jane_Eyre, too, which I haven't finished, though I read part of it with/for a student. The Professor. The tutor, rather. "Professor" in Belgium meant a teacher (re "professeur," probably), but I'm not even that. ... Reading it for the second time brings me memories of the first - was it six or seven years ago? I sat in the sun in the park with the furniture sculptures overlooking the plunge from high downtown to low downer-town. Downer because of the bad news that awaited me at home. It was a Saturday and I'd just finished six hours of tutoring: 10-12, 2-4, 4-6. So I grasped a little time to read in the sun before coming home to no one. First no one. Then the news: Dad had taken Mom to the hospital because he was worried about her insomnia and depression. Another call. They would stay overnight. My brother wasn't home and I went to church with the vague idea that they needed someone to help with the music somehow. Even if I couldn't play the songs on piano, I could at least lend my voice to the choir. But when Charles or another chorister said something about me helping with music, I told Pastor Sybil, anxious, that I didn't know the hymns. I didn't have to play those, did I? My helpless voice annoyed her, as it had done in times past. No one said you'd have to, she snapped. Oh, oh, okay. It's just that I don't feel well, Mom's in the hospital. Yes, and you have to stop feeling sorry for myself. She got me in a corner to lecture me, saying a couple more sentences like that. In my mind, this was intolerable. Her form of tough love wasn't comforting. I expected some kind of "It's okay, don't worry." And that thwarted expectation, the cornering of my physical self, made my disappointment flare into rage. I slapped her across the head and ran downstairs. (Upon which I started crying to Naomi, who was watching some of the Sunday School kids. I stayed there and she ended up driving me home.) Coincidence: it was April 17. The day of the recent ten_years_ago. I didn't want to be the person who was always hitting people. But this took a weird turn when I was on the phone with Dad. "This time, at least the person deserved it, treating me like that. I taught her a lesson. Someone was going to slap her sooner or later. She deserved it! She was disrespecting me!" For a while, Sybil didn't want to speak to me OR my mother. I thought that she thought we were both crazy - in a bad way. That all I'd "taught" her was the wrong idea that mental illness passes unchanged from one generation to another and probably makes you violent. Also, in general social terms, if you introduced the case as White Woman Slaps Black Woman for "Disrespecting" Her, it'd be hard not to suspect racism. True, it wasn't intentional, if any existed. But I never said my Cedar_Christian_Academy teacher "deserved" to be hit. Did I? Maybe. It's lost to the sands of time. I'd be better off snubbing Belgians, judging Catholics, and wondering whether or not the bulges in people's foreheads indicated well-developed "organs of veneration." 220513 ... e_o_i "you have to stop feeling sorry for myself" should obviously read "yourself." First-person, second-person...the book's in first-person narration, by the way. The back says it's the only Charlotte Brontë novel with a male narrator. 220513 ... e_o_i On a lighter note, Frances from the book seems to have some sort of fetish for having her grammar corrected. Whatever snubs your nub, as they say. I still haven't finished the last few pages. 220519 ... e_o_i Forgot to say I finished this last week! Solid story - one thing I like is how it played out for a while after the climactic moment. This let let other characters' story arcs be rounded off, without it being too obvious or too epilogue-y. My favourite character was Hundsen, the narrator's friendly rival. It's interesting how William's usually framed as sensible and smart (despite making ill-advised stereotypes, as described above) but for the first bit of the novel, he gets Hundsen wrong, thinking the guy's not on his side. He is! He's just abrupt, with shades of rude, but his heart is in the right place: with the common worker. All we have to lose is our chains! (well, his meh-ness at concepts of national identity might make him more proto-anarchist than proto-socialist, but anyway) 220526 what's it to you? who go blather from