On vacation (Part I)

Christiaan van Vuuren, now known as “Fully Sick,” has been quarantined in an Australian hospital for some time with MDR tuberculosis. After going completely stir-crazy, he began to make a series of rap videos about his situation, filming them (by necessity) in his isolation room and editing them on his laptop. They've gained a sort of cult following.

There is a story by Anton Chekov, The Bet, in which a lawyer volunteers to be imprisoned for 15 years in exchange for two million pounds. His jailer assumes that he will renege on this agreement and forfeit the money. Meanwhile, the lawyer is provided with food, books, wine, tobacco, and a piano. Over the years, he becomes proficient in many languages and a wide range of scholarship, while his jailer falls into debt and realizes he will be unable to pay the two million. Hilarity ensues.

Susannah is now almost one hundred days post-transplant, and some of the more onerous restrictions on her own “imprisonment” are being lifted. She can eat fresh fruit and vegetables again, as well as baked goods, and certain kinds of restaurant food. (Though she can't go inside the restaurants.) Meanwhile, modernity has provided us with a set of luxuries that Chekov's prisoner could never have envisioned. Laptops and wifi and kindles and Hulu and JSTOR and Netflix and so forth provide an endless range of resources, and an even more endless range of distractions. We don't have a piano, but—like Fully Sick—we have music.

And while Susannah's rap videos have not yet become viral phenomena on the internet, she hasn't entirely been in a coma, either. Yesterday evening, she turned in the final draft of her dissertation, which she's been busying herself with for the last few months. She has also been assisting B Amore with translating pieces for an upcoming book of art by migrant workers in Vermont, which just debuted in Middlebury. And she's back to grading papers, working through a logjam of email, and so on.

I have been cooking my way through Nina Simond's Classic Chinese Cuisine, and to a lesser extent Julia Child. I've also been working on my pet programming project, and on the long-overdue analysis of two lovely databases that have survived my string of laptop failures. And I've just been reading Báez's A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, which I've written about on a different blog.

Mostly, though, we read and watch television or movies via DVD and Hulu. Anticipating this, we had had asked people for suggestions as to what we should watch. (I have never lived in a house with a television, and Susannah somehow seems to have seen even less TV than I have.) This turned out to be a more complex process than I'd expect. People read (and consume other media) for many reasons, including such prestigious goals as scholarship or personal enlightenment or inspiration. Most media is consumed for “mere” entertainment value, and it makes no challenges to the native assumptions of its genre: nothing that might jostle the reader out of a comforting routine.

But it's not at all clear where reading-as-therapy falls in this continuum. I don't mean by this the reading one does to negotiate some acute emotional crisis: for me that would be Blake or Whitman, and for Susannah Rumi or Dickinson: all of them very much “high culture” authors. Rather, I'm interested in the reading and TV-watching and movie-viewing that serves as a balm rather than a medication: the mental equivalent of the invalid's diet of rice and toast.

The thing I must love about The Bet, though it is rather incidental to the plot, is Chekov's description of an auto-didact's progression through knowledge, unhindered (and unsupported) by outside structure. He spends a year reading lowbrow novels and playing the piano, before getting down to work on a self-imposed curriculum that continues to evolve. Grace Llewellyn describes essentially this phenomenon, which she calls “the vacation.” Auto-didacts leave school in disgust, and then spend weeks or months doing mindless, unstructured things—typically absorbing low-culture media: television or comic books, or Chekov's “sensational and fantastic stories,” or YouTube videos about TB. Only afterwards do they feel comfortable imposing new structures on themselves. Llewellyn is writing about teenagers making the decision to home-school (“unschool”), but clearly the point is germane for college students and graduate students as well. If schools could teach students to create their own structures of motivation, and feel comfortable working in those, there would be no such thing as postdocs.

And I think that her point can be extended or generalized to the recovery of autonomy from many sorts of external structure, including—in our case—hospitalization. There seem to be some ubiquitous patterns to these vacations: if they are interrupted or minimized, for instance, they tend to get prolonged, sometimes indefinitely. And the media that is the focus of the vacation is almost always “low culture,” which is to say, the kind of stuff that will exasperate one's elders. Although of course, by some inevitable cultural magic, each generation's lowbrow media becomes the highbrow media of their grandchildren. Hence Boccacio's endless jokes about nuns having sex now sit at the high table of literature. In all events, there seems to be a vital role for this sort of media. Toast isn't medicinal, nor is it high cuisine, and you could certainly eat far too much of the stuff. But toast has its place. It is, as they say, part of this nutritious breakfast.

By now you will note that I haven't actually mentioned what we are reading and watching. I'm afraid this is typical; my own favored literary mode is the digression. You will have to wait a few days for further details.