Breaking news: Tristram Shandy added to my Netflix queue

A truly self-indulgent post in which the writer is reminded of Tristram Shandy by reviews of the new movie about the making of a movie of the book, and brags about how he once wrote a fantastic college essay on it. It is advised that those adverse to boredom ignore the post.

Like most people studying literature, I was once assigned the book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Like most people of those most people, I never finished the book. Didn't even get halfway through.

Then again, I didn't finish almost any of the books that I was assigned in college. Still, most people given the task of reading this monster of a book aren't up to it. I'm sure that the smart girls have all finished it off at least once. Probably consider it light reading. But for those of us who consider any version of the English language prior to 1865 to be as foreign as French, it's a pretty daunting task; slow-going and frustrating.

In spite of leaving the book at only a quarter read, I was still impressed with it. I loved the odd quirks of random blank pages and the bizarre punctuations (if you can call things like little drawings of a pointing hand "punctuation"), and I could definitely relate to a book that was about digressions and distractions. Whether it was an intellectual choice to digress so that they main character isn't even born until more than halfway through the book (so I'm told), or if it was if it was because Lawrence Sterne was ADD centuries before it was invented (probably the former, but I like to think it was the latter), the structure (or, to put it in pop music terms, the arrangement) of the sentences, paragraphs and story were brilliant. I appreciated it even if I couldn't truly crack it.

Of course, my interest in it was spurred by the fact that it was being taught by one of my favorite teachers of all time, one of the two who fall into the "changed my life" category. Becky Gibson taught me how to appreciate language. I didn't get the fuss over Virginia Woolf until I heard Becky's soft and wise voice read the line, "He had hold of her bag" from To The Lighthouse. I first heard the brilliance of language choice when she read out the end of "Araby" from The Dubliners. She was a notoriously hard grader (as it should be), a firm believer in the harm of grade inflation, and getting even an A minus on a paper in her class was a very rare occasion and cause for celebration. I only once made an A in her English intro classes, and it was a thrill. I worked harder on her papers than I did for anyone else, and the times when she would underline a phrase and write only "Lovely" in the margin made all the work worthwhile.

It didn't hurt that she was the dictionary definition of a distinguished academic: long grey hair, tweed jackets, reading glasses, a song of a voice, and a conversational gaze and a slight smile that managed to be professional, professorial and flirty at the same time. I worked hard on my papers for her classes mostly out of a desire to crack her tough grading, but I know for a fact that I was one of more than a few guys who wanted her to be impressed with my writing as well.

Tristram Shandy came along in my third consecutive semester with Becky, in the class Development of the Novel. I quickly found out that she was an even tougher grader in her higher level courses than she was in the introductory English classes, and she was a lot more stern (ho, ho) with the class than she'd been with us as wide-eyed first years. I was struggling, and starting Tristram Shandy didn't exactly help to straighten out my jumbled head.

But one of Becky's greatest qualities as a teacher was that she gave fantastically creative assignments. She would give a choice of three topics, one of which was basically "Discuss" for those people who just wanted to write a paper and be done with it, and then two inventive topics that would allow us to be more creative (like the time I was able to write a song based on a chapter in Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer). For Tristram Shandy, we had two topics: I chose the first, which was (if I remember right, which I usually don't) to write a review of the book in the style of late 18th century newspaper writing. It was due on a Friday, and I started it on the Thursday (of course) and quickly realized that I wasn't going to be able to make it work. I abandoned the paper, accepted that I would get the standard penalty of a minus-point off for each day it was late, and planned to turn it in on Monday. Becky was obviously disappointed when I told her it'd be late, but a procrastinator's gotta do what a procrastinator's gotta do.

So I took on the other assignment, which was to write a missing chapter of Tristram Shandy, and people: I nailed it. I was writing it on the weekend, but I was on fire. I intro-ed it with a short piece about finding it for .75 cents at a yard sale, and the rest of it was stuff that, when I was done, I felt I had something that I could actually convince people was a missing chapter of the book. It had diversions, physical humor, bizarre special characters (thank you Mac Classic), and it fit perfectly between two of the chapters I had gotten around to reading. I was more proud of it than anything else I had written before (or since). I didn't care that the best grade I could make was an A minus. I didn't even care at all about the grade. I dropped it in the mail slot on Becky's door feeling downright cocky for about the only time in my college career. No one could have done any better, I thought.

I got the paper back a few days later. I had almost no writing anywhere on it, except for a big 'A' on the last page, minus the minus. It marked one of the greatest triumphs in my life: the time I so impressed one of the hardest graders I've ever had that she forgot her late paper policy.