Minor obstacles in a major project

Show of hands, please: who wants to spend a morning fuming over inconsistencies in file-naming conventions?

I remember a time years ago when I had to insist that students follow a strict pattern for naming files submitted for grading so I wouldn't end up with an online folder full of Word documents all named something like Essay 1. These days a student submits the document through Canvas so it stays firmly attached to the student's name and the actual file name doesn't much matter. I no longer have to give instructions about file names or even warn students not to insert rude or obscene suggestions within the file name. (Apparently some of my students share the juvenile sense of humor demonstrated by the prior owner of my first campus computer, who applied a very special name to each drive in the directory: testicle, scrotum, penis....)

But today's file-naming mess has nothing to do with student work. My current administrative role requires me to read, edit, and bring into one consistent voice a bunch of Very Important Documents, and I say "a bunch" because so far I can't figure out exactly how many there are. It ought to be easy to locate the drafts amongst the shared folders devoted to the project, but because of inconsistency in naming files, I have to hunt amongst hundreds of documents to locate one that might be called 3A Draft or Draft 3A or Final Draft 3A or Final 3A Draft or any of an infinite number of possible permutations, each located in a different spot in the alphabetical flood of files. And then I see two files right next to each other, one named 2B draft final  and the next named 2B final draft. Which is the real final draft? I don't want to read and edit the wrong one!

The deadline for this project is tight and inviolable, but so far I've spent most of my time simply trying to locate the proper documents without any confidence that I've found them all or found the right version of each one, a situation that makes my brain hurt. Trust me--you really don't want me editing Very Important Documents when my brain hurts. Which is as good a reason as any to stare out the window until I can see straight again.     

Jammin'

My husband got home around dusk yesterday and said You've got to see this so I went out and had a look. It was definitely worth seeing: thick fog hanging above a creek so choked with ice that it bulged on the upstream side of our neighbor's low bridge,. The icejam caused ice chunks to pile up more than a quarter mile upstream past our bridge and sent water over the banks into the low parts of our meadow. The creek looked solid, but if you tried to walk on the jammed-in ice chunks you'd soon fall victim to gaps and instabilities. The ice chunks looked spooky in the fog but far scarier was the prospect of further flooding. If the ice and water can't move past the jam, there's nowhere for it to go except where it can do the most damage.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere but it's too hot to touch right now--or too cold to handle. 

 

 

Digressions toward upliftitudination

I'm standing at the gas station fueling up my salt-encrusted car, relieved that a sudden outbreak of warmth is melting the ice that keeps covering every stinking surface in the county, even the river, which was absolutely gorgeous this morning with that silvery sheen of icemelt shimmering over the frozen expanse--now where was I going with this?

Oh yes: pumping gas, grabbing a paper towel to wipe off the rear backing-up camera that keeps getting so thoroughly coated with layers of road salt and, now that the ice is melting off my driveway, mud, so filthy that when I back up the camera shows me only vague blotches where the road ought to be, when suddenly I see a big green truck. Meaning I see the truck in the gas station parking lot, not in my mud-covered driveway, which it (the truck) could never reach because even if a semi loaded with soda could cross my bridge without causing a collapse it would probably jackknife on the sharp turn just past the bridge and never make it up the mud-covered hill, which is a good thing because there's no room up there for a semi to turn around so it would be stuck there forever, in my driveway, a big green semi advertising 7UP--and again, I've lost my train of thought.  

I blame the weather, which started the week in single digits, made a brief visit into the low 60s, and now hovers in the 30s, leading to a freeze-melt-refreeze cycle that's driving us all just a little bit crazy, not to mention that the weather inside my building is so miserable that on Monday I had to sit in my office with my coat on even while wearing long-johns and two layers of sweaters.

But I digress. (So does the weather. Repeatedly.) I'm pumping gas when I see this truck, this huge green semi sporting a massive ad for 7UP, a beverage I literally never drink unless I'm at a baby shower or some such celebration where someone makes that super-sweet punch involving 7UP poured over sherbet, and I'm not sure why else 7UP exists except to make that punch, when suddenly (back at the gas station, pumping gas) I notice the words on the side of the big green truck: Be UPtimistic.

And this makes me smile.

Yes: despite the weather, despite the ice that keeps trying to kill me and the mud that makes my car slide all over the driveway, despite all the ways my department and my discipline and, yes, even my entire career are being marginalized and misunderstood and muddled, despite the lack of answers about health problems plaguing my loved ones and lack of certainty about funding for just about everything and the difficulty of getting that one annoying student to understand that the stairwell works both ways and therefore walking straight up the middle disrupts the flow--I mean, despite abundant reasons to be grumpy on a cold wet miserable morning, those two words on the side of a truck make me smile.

Later I look up UPtimistic and discover than in addition to being associated with a Danish electronic band called Laid Back (which ought to be the name of the garage band I'll start in my retirement if I ever get around to learning to play an instrument), the Be UPtimistic ad campaign dates back to 2024, which lets you know just how out of touch I am re: carbonated beverage advertising, and when I look at the rationale for the ad campaign I see that I've missed many opportunities to experience what some no doubt highly paid advertising copywriter chose to call "UPliftment." 

I confess that I felt uplifted when I saw the ad on the side of that big green truck this morning, which accords with 7UP's stated mission to "offer light relief from the mundanities of daily life by bringing moments of UPliftment, positivity and surprise." A little tautological there with the reference to the dailiness of daily life or the mundanities of the mundane, but what do you expect from a company that asserts that this ad campaign "signifies a refreshed strategic and creative north star for the brand that will inform all international programs moving forward"? Frankly, I was not aware that the north star needed refreshing or that it was capable of informing programs, forward-moving or otherwise, but then I'm not raking in the big bucks writing ad copy so what right have I to be critical?

No, today I'm choosing to put my critical tendencies aside and focus on abundant reasons to be UPtimistic, even if I don't drink 7UP and don't intend to start and even if the ice keeps making life treacherous and the mud makes me slide and the atmosphere in academe is as murky as it's ever been. Tomorrow we'll celebrate the College's birthday but today I'll warm up by celebrating a great class discussion in American Lit Survey this morning, a pair of colleagues wearing cheery pink outfits, a couple of writing buddies keeping my fingers on the keyboard, a semi-disastrous attempt to make a pumpkin dump cake that nevertheless resulted in deliciousness (not deliciousment), a warm coat, a good night's sleep, and the opportunity to do it all again tomorrow, only with cupcakes.

So life is rough but I'm UPtimistic. (But I draw the line at UPliftment.) 

Dusting off fusty old Modernism

Here I am taking my final lap around the American Lit Survey syllabus before I head off to Emeritusville, which means it's my last chance to make something stick in students' brains. If I get it wrong this time, I won't get another chance. 

Which is why I'm a little nervous about introducing my students to modernism. 

When I ask my survey students what they think modernism might mean, they guess it refers to stuff that's, like, really modern, fresh and new and up-to-date. How disappointing, then, to discover that we'll have to start out by stretching our minds back more than 100 years to touch base with Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson, two midwestern men who believed they were forging a brand-new path for American literature.

Today that path looks worn and ragged, hardly suggesting modernity. Years ago I sometimes had students familiar with Masters because in high school they'd read or even acted in a version of Spoon River Anthology, but I can't remember the last time a student expressed any familiarity with either author, even though Anderson, like most of my students, was an Ohio guy. The litany of modernist authors sounds like it belongs in a graveyard: Eliot, Sandburg, cummings, Frost. Williams, Stevens, Hurston, Hughes. Hemingway, Faulkner, Glaspell, O'Neill. They all thought they were doing something really new and different and earth-shaking, and they were! But this is my last chance to make students believe that modernism mattered--and still matters.

On Wednesday I'll get all excited and scribble a bunch of vocab up on the whiteboard--Alienation! Fragmentation! Experimentation! Grotesques!--which my students probably won't dutifully write down, despite my urging. Maybe they'll come up after class and take a picture of the whiteboard mess to file away with all the other pictures of words that belong to a past so distant it seems to be speaking a different language. 

When we tackle Wallace Stevens I'll ask them why we need thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, why we can't look just once and get the whole picture, why a poem wants us to engage in looking instead of memorizing, but I'll be lucky if one student scribbles something about the poem as the act of the mind finding what will suffice. The poem as the act! Of the mind! Finding! 

Last chance to make it matter! 

As I look down the months before I get put on the shelf, I'm taking refuge in William Carlos Williams's poem "A Sort of a Song":

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
--through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks. 

Let my teaching lodge the poems in students' minds like the snake waiting under his weed; let me plant a seed that sends roots deep into their rocky minds. Let the snake wait, the seed grow, the words finally strike with a bite that feels like rock splitting. Then they'll know why modernism matters. Then my job here will be done.

Friday poetry challenge: Scarfing up the rhymes

I walked out the door this morning to find my face being pelted by invisible precipitation, sharp little pellets that looked like nothing and sounded like dry rice being poured into a saucepan. What do you call this stuff? Not quite sleet, not quite snow, not quite freezing rain, just one more manifestation of this never-ending winter. When I was halfway to campus it turned to snow, and by the time I'd parked the campus sidewalks, which had only recently been cleared of ice and snow, were once again covered in white.

At least it's not windy, I told myself. At least the temperature is in double digits for a change. At least I'm well bundled up. But now, thanks to the New York Times, I have to think about yet another winter-weather hazard: looking old. Yes: a prominent headline asks "Does Your Winter Scarf Make You Look Old?" Apparently people with way too much time on their hands are out there in the blizzard obsessing over what sorts of scarves people wear and how those scarves are tied. One fashion expert avers that scarves that look "buttoned-up" make people look old while those tied more casually make wearers appear youthful; further, the Scarf Mafia asserts that "it's impossible to make an infinity scarf look relaxed and chill."

Do you know what what else does not look "relaxed and chill"? A person who has slipped on a pile of snow and landed SPLAT on the sidewalk. It happened this morning--not to me, for a change--and the victim, though well buttoned-up, looked neither youthful nor decrepit but simply embarrassed. Good thing the Scarf Mafia wasn't here to offer helpful suggestions: "Here, let me fix your scarf so you'll look more youthful while lying on the ground--or better yet, take advantage of this little hiatus to knit yourself a triangular scarf. So much less stodgy!"

I love my current winter scarf, a soft red wool with white and gold accents, but I wear it not to appear chill but to stay warm, or at least warmer than I would be without it. I have colleagues who strap spikes onto their shoes to walk to campus and others so bundled up that they I can't tell who they are when they greet me, but I'm not making any judgments about their winter-weather attire. I'm just hoping they remain upright in the middle of whatever you want to call this slippery mess. 

We've had snow and sleet and freezing rain,
and then we've had them all again,
along with wind and winter chill
and ice and slush. It's quite a thrill
to drive or walk to get to class
in this persistent Arctic blast.
But I can't ponder, in this cold,
whether my scarf makes me look old.
As long as I stay on my feet,
who cares if scarves don't look so neat
the way I tie them. I confess:
my winter garb appears a mess;
I may look old and tired too-- 
at least my lips aren't turning blue.
But if my scarf offends, I'll turn
the other cheek. (It's got windburn.)

 

Now your turn: let the weather do its worse--and put your efforts into verse. 

 

My cozy red scarf

 

But why can't you smile more?

I'd just finished doing a joint presentation with a wonderful colleague when another colleague offered praise: "It was good to see the two of you looking happy." Well, we looked happy because we were happy. We were presenting interesting information about terrific authors to illustrate fascinating ideas about the way history and literature illuminate each other, a topic on which we are both very passionate, so of course we were happy.

But I heard the unspoken part of my colleague's praise: "It was good to see the two of you looking happy for a change." Ouch. Maybe if we had a chance to celebrate our research and share ideas amongst interested listeners every day, we would constantly parade all over campus in great big clown smiles, but there's a lot more to campus life than a once-in-a-career presentation.

The problem is that the two of us have been around higher education for a long time. We've both served as Faculty Chair during particularly trying times, and we've chaired departments and committees and worked on projects that exposed us to the most irritating aspects of campus culture. We've been through the wars and we try to carry our scars with dignity, but sometimes we get weighed down by past struggles, current challenges, and the stark forecast for the future of academe.

So we have been known to complain about injustices on campus, but what of it? If tenured senior professors don't use their voices to address problems, who will? 

And of course our experience reflects the ongoing epidemic of men telling women to smile more, as if the only value we bring into a situation is aesthetic. We're happy to smile when smiling is appropriate, but if the situation requires a stern mien, a pointed critique, or even a raised voice, we'll step up.

So I'll accept my colleague's praise: we did good work, and we were very happy while doing it. But don't expect us to smile through every situation, especially when the context requires critique.  

A new Olympic sport?

I thought I'd gathered a good number of eggs from the chicken coop yesterday until I realized that two of the eggs were actually golf balls. "Don't fry them," texted the resident chicken fancier, whose temporary non-residence resulted in my being tasked with gathering yesterday's eggs, an easy task in balmy weather but downright treacherous when the intervening landscape would be most suitably traversed via luge.

After what feels like years but is probably just weeks trapped in a repeated snow/slush/freeze cycle, the slopes on our property are now covered with a thick layer of snow topped with ice that sometimes holds firm and sometimes allows the feet to break through. I wore stout shoes and carried a walking stick and stayed near the path beaten by my husband's boots, but I still found it difficult walking down the hill and then back up again without losing my footing or losing my cool or losing the delicate eggs (or the golf balls). 

As everyone except me obviously knows, putting golf balls in the nesting box encourages the chickens to lay eggs there rather than, for instance, under the coop or on the ground or in the feed trough. I would have noticed that two of the eggs I'd gathered looked different from the others if I'd been wearing my glasses, but I knew the trek would be a bit of a slog and I can't wear glasses when I'm sweating because they slide down my face, and what with the walking stick and gloves and egg basket, I certainly wouldn't have been capable of pushing my glasses back up again once they'd started sliding.

In this kind of weather, egg-gathering ought to be considered an Olympic sport: it requires special equipment, physical strength, and manual dexterity, and it would benefit by the addition of a luge and ski lift. Who will call the International Olympic Committee? I would do it myself but I've got to clean up the fried-golf-ball mess.