Season of the Witch: Border Lines, Marginal Notes

Griffin, author of Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue, excels at describing both the difficulties and the exhilaration of teaching college. She's at her best in an essay titled ``The Bluest Eyes'' about teaching African American literature to a mostly white class, but she's also very fine in pieces on the culture of academe. Brilliant in its brevity, ``Dirty Pictures'' is an essay about some hate mail she received after her photograph was published in a newspaper and also about a female student who showed up to warn her that she might be receiving some old, pornographic photographs of said student in the mail. ``Dear Katie: The Scarlet Letter'', a lengthy response to a niece who asked about being a woman in academia, stuns with its straight talk about discomfiting situations. Her cultural examinations are apt too: both the differences between the written and film versions of The Wizard of Oz and her youthful obsession with the Beatles are dissected with good humor and insight. Sometimes, however, she slips too deeply into academic jargon, or worse, reveals that she is still enamored with Paul McCartney et al. after all these years. (The sappiest essay here compares the death of John Lennon with the end of a long and intense relationship and ends ``You were right, we all shine on. Here in the dark, when I look up, I still see you, brightest of all.'') One device is more than tired: the use of dictionary definitions of words to set off examination of their deeper meaning. (Dec.)