Thinking of world-building has me thinking of one of my old professors, Douglass Parker, brilliant classicist, translator, teacher, poet, and jazz musician. He suggested his epitaph be, “But I digress…” And nothing was a straight line with him. I remember passing his office door one day and noticing a shape poem. I stopped to read it and it told the students of one of his classes, in beautiful poetry, that he had not yet had a chance to grade their tests. I thought that in the time it took for him to create the poem the tests probably could have been graded, but then the world would never have received that poem. His “Zeus in Therapy” poems were a scream.
One of the classes he offered was “Parageography,” the study of places that exist only in the imagination. The list of books his students read would vary year to year, but they would all represent excellent examples of world building in a very physical, geographic sense. And the students would read such works as The Odyssey, to Gulliver’s Travels, LotR, and onwards to Oz and other worlds, but they didn’t just stick to the page.
For example, back then there were things called “shopping malls” (link for anyone too young to remember). Prof. Parker would send students, as an assignment, to a mall of their choosing. They were to consider themselves space aliens landing for the first time and figure out the values and goals of the “society” just from the layout of the place. I remember one student noting that Pea in the Pod (a maternity store) was right next to Frederick’s of Hollywood (a “sexy lingerie” store) and decided one of the main goals of the society was to encourage sexual reproduction.
The main impetus of the course for Parker was making students draw on their own creativity. In a NYTimes article on his class, he said:
“It seems to me that people who are getting their undergraduate degrees have to deliberately stifle whatever creative faculties they may have,” Professor Parker said. “You may not need creativity to get a job, but it is something that is important.”
As a graduate student, I never got to take the course, nor did I even get to TA for it. Yet, it had such presence that I was very aware of it. It was a topic of much discussion in the graduate student office and it has stuck with me all these years. When I was teaching at a different school, I made a bulletin board for the middle school of parageography, with maps from The Phantom Tollbooth, The Odyssey, The Chronicles of Narnia, Percy Jackson‘s America, Harry Potter’s London, The Earthsea Trilogy, LotR & The Hobbit, The Oz Books, and the His Dark Materials trilogy.
So this post is for Douglass Parker, whose own presence in the department enriched so much. 💙
Ramblings 