Features
Prof Talk with... Margie Thickstun
By Robert Marston ’17
November 10, 2016
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Position: Jane Watson Irwin Professor of Literature and Creative Writing Department Chair
At Hamilton since: 1988
Which books that you’ve re-read after a long gap have you most enjoyed?
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. I read it way too quickly in high school and hated it. But then we tried reading it aloud to our son when he was maybe 12 or 13. It is so funny! And very perceptive about abusive family structures, social class, being embarrassed about home, the way that the legal system creates “criminals.” And the plot is amazingly complicated. So now I teach it as often as I can—and spread the reading out over the semester in the hopes that students can slow down enough to enjoy it all.
Which musical artists, past or present, mean the most to you?
Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Josquin des Prez, but the pieces with the most emotional power for me are Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Smetana’s Moldau, and Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors.
Do youhave any literary “guilty pleasures”?
I do like to read Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances—they are for people who’ve run out of Jane Austen novels. But what I really do for guilty pleasure is watch re-runs of NCIS because Mark Harmon is a heartthrob.
You wrote a book about reading and teaching Paradise Lost. Was that process difficult? Enjoyable?
When I finished that book I had been teaching Paradise Lost to college students for about 25 years, so the process was being in the classroom, figuring out ways to make the text engaging, and then discovering that the poem is about education, with everyone in it educating, learning, parenting. Does a 25 year gestation for a project make it “difficult”? I could not have written that book if I did not teach the poem.
What is a very obscure interest of yours?
I am fascinated by accidental mummies—the children who freeze-dried on a mountain in Peru, the little Inuit baby, but especially bog bodies. Some are so perfectly preserved that you can see the stubble of their beards and the whorls of their fingerprints. Looking at them collapses time in a way literature doesn’t.
What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
The Great Gatsby. I’ve read it a couple of times. I don’t get what all the fuss is about.
What book have you always meant to read and never gotten around to? Derek Walcott’s Omeros? Ezra Pound’s Cantos?
I know I should read them, but I don’t have the discipline to do it. Ditto with all of Western Philosophy.
There are a lot of books in the world, to read and re-read. How do you prioritize?
There are certainly authors I read and re-read—Austen, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ursula LeGuin, Neil Gaiman—books I can pick up at any page and drop right in. But I mainly read non-fiction popular science books—about feathers, seeds, natural history and arguments about how humans evolved the way they did, as opposed to other apes.
What topic (or topics) do you wish you knew more about?
Geology. I love karst landscapes (all that eroding limestone does interesting things in different contexts).
What talent or skill don’t you possess that you wish you did?
I have always wanted to be a scary person, but it didn’t happen.
What is something you know now that you wish you had known when you were 20?
That once you’re out of college, it’s hard to learn new areas. I would have been a much more open-minded student, not so focused on humanities.