{"id":1119,"date":"2018-04-09T11:31:10","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T11:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/?p=1119"},"modified":"2018-04-09T11:31:10","modified_gmt":"2018-04-09T11:31:10","slug":"professor-stuart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/2018\/04\/09\/professor-stuart\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Stuart"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently made a new friend who is a bird artist. When he told me what he does for a living, I thought immediately of Howard Norman\u2019s <em>The Bird Artist<\/em>, a book I loved when I read it twenty-five years ago (around the time I started teaching at Bowdoin). This spring break, my friend and I spent a couple of long days driving along the Maine coast, standing in icy winds and looking out to sea at Harlequin Ducks, Long-tailed Ducks, Surf Scoters and Snowy Owls. I also re-read <em>The Bird Artist<\/em>. Norman\u2019s book is set in 1912 in Witless Bay, Newfoundland. It\u2019s about Fabian Vas, a young man who tells us in the first paragraph that he has murdered somebody. It\u2019s a love story, with at least one suicide, and features whiskey drinking, adultery and bank robbery. And yet it still manages to be a quiet book. I love it that the imaginary world of a novel is a place that you can revisit. When you do, it is in one sense just as you left it: the same words are there on the same pages. It is also different, because <em>you<\/em> are different. The last time I read <em>The Bird Artist<\/em>, I had only the haziest idea what Newfoundland looked like. I had no idea what a Thick-billed Murre looked like. This time around, I drew upon memories of long drives on bad Newfoundland roads, memories of thousands of Murres, Gannets and Razorbills nesting on the rocky cliffs there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently made a new friend who is a bird artist. When he told me what he does for a living, I thought immediately of Howard Norman\u2019s The Bird Artist, a book I loved when I read it twenty-five years ago (around the time I started teaching at Bowdoin). This spring break, my friend and &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/2018\/04\/09\/professor-stuart\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Professor Stuart&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-readers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1119"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1124,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions\/1124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}