Excelsior

Feathered tales

2012-02-18T19:47:00.001-05:00

Where I saw random scattered feathers, my colleague saw a story: "This looks like an owl's feather caught on this thorn, but down here I see dark bars, and look at these rusty-brown spots. Could be a Cooper's Hawk, but it looks like the predator became prey."

She followed the trail of feathers to a tree and then looked up and pointed. "See the feathers caught on that branch? The owl sat up there and tore the hawk to pieces."

This is the advantage of going out bird-watching with an expert: she sees what the birds are doing even when they're not actually present.

In just a few hours at two local wetlands today we saw a host of cormorants, great blue herons, mallard ducks, hooded mergansers, kingfishers, assorted gulls and little brown birds, and one fat muskrat.

And did I mention the pair of bald eagles?

At first I had to take the eagles on faith. To the naked eye they looked like black lumps on a distant tree, and my telephoto lens just made them look like slightly larger black lumps. My colleague's high-powered binoculars rendered the lumps more birdlike, but she was certain their size and color marked them as eagles.

I was less certain until I got home and enhanced the photo. They're eagles all right--a little blurry but eagles nevertheless.

If I'd been bumbling about on my own, those black lumps in the trees would have remained black lumps--I wouldn't have looked twice or known what I was seeing. And later I wouldn't have understood the evidence of the battle of the owl and the Cooper's Hawk, nor would I have diagnosed the cause of the wedge missing from the trunk of a big dead tree. (Beavers!)

Through careful attention I'm learning to see what's happening in the woods and wetlands around me, but spending the afternoon with a real expert opened my eyes to how much I still have to learn. Binoculars are helpful only if you know where to point them and how to interpret what they reveal, how to translate scattered feathers and lumpy black blotches into a story, an image, and a truth.

Three cheers for shoes! (And other stuff)

2012-02-17T16:25:00.000-05:00

YES that was me standing on the stage at Founders' Day last night, but I'm not sure what all the fuss was about. Probably my shoes. In my expert opinion as an arbiter of fashion, I maintain that it doesn't matter what you wear under all your academic regalia or what color your robe is or whether you've got blue velvet chevrons on the sleeves or brown and orange satin lining the hood or a wee gold tassel on your silly velvet hat--no, none of that matters as long as you're wearing super-cute shoes. And if your shoes are as cute as mine were last night, your colleagues just won't be able to hold back the applause.

Of course, they may have had something else to clap about, like that prize thing. You know, that little teaching award. No big deal. Well okay, maybe it's sort of a big deal. And if the college press release wants to call it the "highest honor of the evening," who am I to quibble? All I can do is express my gratitude to everyone who made this honor possible (well, not everyone or we'd be here all night): Thank you for the applause. Thank you for your confidence in me. Thank you for the $support$.

And thank you for giving me a great excuse to step out in my super-cute shoes.

Mostly true (unless it isn't)

2012-02-15T11:13:00.000-05:00

In "Facts are Stupid," Dan Kois examines the ongoing debate about truth vs. fact in creative nonfiction, making a compelling case for the need for trust between author and reader. I can't tell you exactly how he twists the knife in your gut at the end; you'll just have to read it for yourself (here). But I will raise the question: are readers more likely to trust a writer who reveals his inaccuracies or one who denies them?

Of course there's an important distinction between outright untruth and exaggeration for comic effect--or at least I hope there is. (But what if that's a specious claim? What if the toaster manual I recently ridiculed was only 20 pages long instead of 40? Will revealing that inaccuracy destroy my readers' trust?) "Some inaccuracies are good for business," claims the Foundling Father in The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks: "Take the stovepipe hat! Never really worn indoors but people dont like their Lincoln hatless."

Truth hurts--but so does falsehood. My commitment to telling the truth may have initially arisen from an innate inability to lie convincingly. I won't claim that I cannot tell a lie, but I know that any lie I tell will make my head hurt and my heart race, and I'm convinced that a lie will telegraph its falsehood as if in blinking neon lights on my forehead. (But what if I'm lying right now about my inadequacy as a liar? How would you know?)

So while I'm pretty good at telling the truth, I'm even better at not telling the whole truth. More than 20 years as a pastor's wife have trained me to bite my tongue and keep big chunks of truth to myself. I haven't mentioned publicly, for instance, the campus brouhaha that's currently making me grind my few remaining molars into dust. (Would a fact-checker challenge that statement? If I tell you that I'm missing two molars and the ones that remain are so badly cracked that my dentist keeps asking me whether I've ever fallen face-first out of a third-story window, will you believe me or assume that I'm exaggerating to win sympathy?)

Dan Kois convinces me that writing effective nonfiction requires a commitment to both truth and fact, but that commitment needn't crowd out creativity, comedy, and art. If facts alone could speak for themselves, we wouldn't need writers; we would just point out the window toward the big wide world and say, "See for yourself!" But when a nonfiction writer tosses facts out the window, that's when he ought to lose my trust.

(Unless he doesn't--and then what do I do?)

The hard work of healing

2012-02-13T17:38:00.000-05:00

My surgeon's eyes lit up when he examined the incision left behind by my port removal. "Wow!" he said. "That really healed up nicely!"

"Thanks," I said. "Healing nicely is one of my hidden talents. I worked really hard to get it right."

Right.

If anyone ought to be thanked, it's the surgeon--he did, after all, make that incision and stitch (and glue) it back together. All I did was lie there obliviously while I was anesthetized and afterward refrain from scratching when it itched. I'm not sure my inaction contributed much to the final outcome.

But hey, compliments are hard to come by these days, so if my surgeon insists on commending me for healing up so nicely, who am I to object? And while you're at it, go ahead and congratulate me for how splendidly I manage to keep my blood flowing, my peristalsis proceeding, my joints bending, and my toenails growing. I'm just full of hidden talents!

Welcome to Epiphany City

2012-02-11T13:48:00.003-05:00

Yesterday morning I woke up with an epiphany, a sudden understanding about how I will frame the argument in my current writing project. This is always an exciting step in any writing project--the moment when a nebulous mass of ideas starts to crystallize around a core insight that will shape my work from this point on.

Epiphanies like that come along only after proper preparation; all the reading, thinking, talking, writing, and traveling I've been doing created the right conditions for the production of epiphanies. I'll have to work pretty hard to transform a momentary epiphany into a polished journal article, but that's what my sabbatical is for. For once, a great idea won't get shoved aside by committee work, grading, and all the petty annoyances of the academic life.

That's the magic of the sabbatical. I'm living in Epiphany City, where ideas can come out and play without fear that shopkeepers will shoo them off the sidewalk.

Final rusting place

2012-02-09T16:54:00.002-05:00

If I found a rusted hulk of a classic muscle car plonked down in the middle of my sodden potato field, I believe I'd call it an art installation, charge admission, and open a gift shop offering colorful postcards, bronze reproductions, and silk-screened scarves plus occasional appearances by the reclusive artist, Mephisto Limpet, who would earnestly intone pretentious twaddle about "interrogating the scintillating liminal continuum linking the conception, as it were, of the virgin-soil-qua-final-resting/rusting-place with the exhaustion of the catalytic vision of mobility stopped, as it were, in its tracks by the feeble hedonistic vacuity demonstrated in the post-industrial pre-apocalyptic anti-pre-postmodernist whatness of the artifact returning, as it were, to its natural elements."

But it is not my art installation or my potato field or my rusting hulk of a classic muscle car, so all I can do when I walk past is to utter a silent homage to the Ford Fairlane meeting its final reward: may it rust, as it were, in peace.

In a jam

2012-02-07T08:06:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I received hearty congratulations on a major milestone: the adoption of a new toaster. The thick multilingual manual greets me with "Congratulations on your purchase of an OSTER Toaster," as if buying a toaster merited a ticker-tape parade and a medal the size of a hubcap.

I'm not sure who needs a 40-page manual to learn how to operate a toaster (Conociendo Su Tostadora!), but I don't intend to read the whole thing. I have seen Groundhog Day, so I don't need to be reminded that it's a bad idea to use my new toaster in the bathtub--although maybe that would be a great place to use the old toaster. Nobody warned me not to!

Anyone who needs to be told repeatedly in writing to "Press the toast button if you are going to toast bread" probably shouldn't be permitted to own a toaster, especially considering the manual's stern warning that "Toasted food can be very hot." (Isn't this the whole POINT of a toaster? I mean, the reason we had to retire the old toaster was that it got out of the habit of producing heat, which transformed it into a clunky decorative item with little practical use. If the need arose I suppose I could toss it at an intruder, but what would stop the intruder from simply tossing it back? I can't keep a nonfunctional toaster clogging up the kitchen just on the off chance that I might someday want to play Toss the Toaster with a masked stranger!)

But I digress.

My new toaster has entered the Internet age: it comes equipped with directions for accessing the Oster Inspire Club, an online forum promising "Exclusive access to recipes, entertaining ideas, and exciting new products." Entertaining with a toaster? Sign me up!

A quick search for toaster-related recipes results in the luscious-sounding Toaster Petite Italian Hazelnut Chocolate Spread Puffs, but further exploration reveals that this recipe requires a toaster OVEN, which is a different animal entirely. If I had purchased an Oster Toaster Oven, Oster Inspire could inspire me to entertain a glittering assemblage of friends with Spa Pizza (prebaked pizza shells, one sliced tomato, and a dollop of goat cheese) or Meatloaf Enrobed in Mashed Potatoes. (Is this a bathrobe-themed party or what?)

For plain old toasters, though, Oster Inspire offers nothing except helpful hints about what the "bagel" button is for. (Toasting bagels. Who knew?) If I want to use my new toaster to entertain my friends, I'll have to come up with my own recipes. Whole-wheat toast with raspberry jelly, anyone? How about a nice bagel with cream cheese?

Be careful! Toasted foods can be very hot!

Sirens vs. silence

2012-02-05T17:16:00.001-05:00

Every once in a while I wonder how much easier my life would be if I lived in town instead of out here in the sticks. Just think of it: I could have city water and sewer service instead of a cranky well and septic tank, and if I accidentally left something important at my office, I could just zip over there and grab it instead of carefully weighing the time and energy costs of driving 20 miles each way. If I lived in town I would be surrounded by people and cars instead of possums and coons, and if I needed help, I could find some pretty quickly.

I wouldn't have to walk a quarter mile to pick up my mail.

I wouldn't get stuck at home in winter weather. Instead, I would have to go to work. (Score one for living in the sticks!)

If I lived in town I wouldn't find the neighbor's cows wandering through the yard, and I wouldn't have to worry about whether my driveway might be under water after heavy rains because I wouldn't have a creek.

Right: no long walks along the water's edge to fill my ears with the sound of the creek splashing over rocks. No kingfishers swooping above the water's surface, and no great blue herons wading in the shallows where the little fishes live. No golden sunshine reflecting off the surface of the water or shining on the mottled bark of tall sycamore trees.

In town I might have many other things--convenience stores, for instance, and trick-or-treaters at Halloween--but I wouldn't have a creek. I need a creek, and I need a meadow and a piney woods and a butterfly garden and silence. In town I could listen to the sounds of sirens and passing cars, but in the sticks I hear the creek, the birds, the wind, the silence.

All things considered, I think I'll stick with the sticks.

Doing our homework

2012-02-03T16:15:00.000-05:00

College professors of all stripes moan and groan about students' unwillingness to read, but try to organize a faculty event requiring a little reading and what happens?

Nobody shows up.

Well, usually. In the past when I've planned book discussions or teaching workshops requiring just a smidgen of advance reading, attendance has been abysmal. Apparently, faculty members don't like to do homework any more than students do.

But today was different. Since September, we've given away free copies of Arum and Roksa's Academically Adrift to close to half of the faculty on our campus, and we've talked it up at every workshop and event sponsored by the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence. We lined up two excellent colleagues to lead the discussion and served lunch to participants--all 24 of them. That's nearly a quarter of our full-time faculty, and certainly more than we've ever attracted for a book discussion. And even more have registered to attend the discussion of the second half of the book two weeks from now.

Was it the book's controversial content that reeled in so many of my colleagues or was it the free lunch? Were they so awed by the cool bookmarks publicizing the event that they simply couldn't stay away? Who knows? But as the discussion veered today toward questions about how to motivate students to study outside of class, I wanted to ask my colleagues: what motivated you to do your homework for today's discussion? Bottle up that motivation and sell it on the open market and we'll all make a bundle.

On reading bad books

2012-02-01T18:28:00.001-05:00

Life is too short to waste time reading bad books, and yet I sometimes find myself slogging through a book I'd really rather throw through a plate-glass window. Why?

Sometimes a bad book provides valuable context for a better book. Want to understand the convoluted logic of the Old Plantation Myth that enticed readers of popular American fiction from around 1890 to 1920? Then you're going to have to hold your nose and read Thomas Dixon's wretched novel The Leopard's Spots, full of abhorrent racist rhetoric that inspired a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. When I introduce students to the Old Plantation Myth to help them understand Charles Chesnutt's subversive short stories, I tell them, "I read Thomas Dixon so you don' t have to."

Sometimes a badly written book is a gift from a friend or colleague who is likely to ask me for a response, and I'd better read the whole thing so I can locate the bright shining moments to mention in conversation. (And if you think I'm planning to mention any titles or authors, think again.)

Sometimes a bad book is just silly enough to provide lightweight comic relief in an other wise gloomy week. Many of the self-published books sent to me by earnest strangers seeking my affirmation fall in this category, offering up mixed metaphors and sentences of such clunkiness that they make me laugh--but that doesn't mean I'll read the whole thing. If you haven't hooked me by the end of the first chapter, it goes into the recycling pile. (Sorry, self-published authors: I know there's some talent out there, but editors exist for a reason!)

Sometimes a bad book holds out the hope that it just might get a whole lot better, but by the time I realize it's a hopeless case, I'm too far in to turn back. Recently, for instance, I've received in the mail piles of unsolicited books from writers who read about my California Literature class in the Los Angeles Times and think my students would enjoy reading their work. Some of them are good and some are not half bad, but today I read a flimsy novel that is, essentially, a pale imitation of Nathanael West, and not even the mature Nathanael West who wrote The Day of the Locust but the juvenile West of The Secret Life of Balso Snell. We don't need another Nathanael West, number one, and number two, even if we needed another Nathanael West, we certainly don't need any pale imitations of Balso Snell.

But I think I'm done reading bad books for a little while at least. I would bet that the number of bad books I've read in my lifetime exceeds the total number of books most of my English majors have read. I've reached my quota; it's time for someone else to take over. Bad books, anyone? Just say the word and I'll send one on its way.

All I really want right now

2012-02-01T06:48:00.000-05:00

...is something to drink. Water, orange juice, tea, coffee, whatever--I just really want a drink. And some breakfast. I know for a fact that there's a little leftover veggie pizza in the fridge, and that would suit me right down to my toes.

But I am under strict orders: nothing to eat or drink after midnight. How will I make it through the morning with no caffeine? I'll be a basket case by the time I get to the hospital.

Yes: it's finally port-removal day! That handy little chunk of plastic installed beneath my skin to assist in the delivery of chemotherapy drugs has got to, and good riddance!

My surgeon tells me that the port is much easier to remove than to install, but it still requires anesthesia, boo hiss. I have requested something other than propofol, which provided Michael Jackson with a dose of euphoria (and death) but only gave me vertigo so severe I couldn't turn my head without getting seasick. I have to get to the hospital two hours early (!) for a ten-minute procedure that will eat up my afternoon, and I can't eat or drink a thing until it's over.

I intend to spend my morning not thinking about all the things I'd like to eat and drink. I won't think, for instance, about orange juice, chai latte, pineapple chunks, veggie pizza, peanut butter sandwiches, or water. This is me not thinking about water. Water water water water water. Someone get me some water! It's all I really want right now!

With Zora in Eatonville

2012-01-28T19:21:00.002-05:00

On the porch of the Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Eatonville, Florida, today, a group of teens performed James Weldon Johnson's poem "The Creation" with choral recitation, drums, and dance--and it was very good. Street vendors hawked shea butter, colorful hats, African masks, and music that inspired an impromptu dance in the middle of the street, where children and youths and gray-haired grannies shook and shimmied and showed off fancy steps. It's the final weekend of the annual Zora Neale Hurston festival, a sort of homecoming for all who celebrate the author and the town she put on the map.

I lived not far from Eatonville until 1980 but I don't recall ever hearing Hurston's name until a few years later in grad school; today, though, I doubt that anyone could grow up in central Florida without being aware of the cosmic Zora. The Eatonville she described so lovingly in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks on a Road, and other works has been bisected by an interstate highway, but if you step down a sandy side street past tiny houses and look on Lake Sybelia, it's easy to imagine Janie and Tea Cake bringing in a stringer of catfish and sharing a feast.

I ate some fried fish with beans and rice beneath an oak tree that must have been here in Hurston's time. The woman sitting next to me claims that she danced in one of Hurston's stage shows, and who knows? She may be right. The spirit of Zora lives in the energy of the street dance, the elegance of the hats, and the memories of the residents; it shines in the eyes of teens performing James Weldon Johnson's words and sizzles in the big pots of beans and rice. I kept expecting to see her laughing and singing and dancing with the crowd--and who knows? Maybe I did.

Feathery courtship

2012-01-28T09:25:00.000-05:00

This morning I saw a colony of Great White Herons nesting in trees in a park along a lake near my parents' house. Single herons displayed their plumage in one tree while couples squawked and spooned and carried sticks to build nests in another. I counted eight birds in one large tree and more nearby.

I used to ride my bike to this park in my adolescence, but I don't recall ever seeing this kind of assemblage of gorgeous birds. Maybe I was too distracted by the hunky young men rowing sculls on the lake, an entirely different type of courting behavior. What would human beings do with the herons' amazing plumage?

Angelic archivists and other observations

2012-01-27T13:19:00.002-05:00

Random observations on visiting college campuses:

No how big (or small) the campus, parking is a problem--but the early bird catches the parking space.
Cheese-stuffed olives, breaded and deep-fried: so good they're evil.
There are wonderful students everywhere, but no students are more wonderful than my students.
What do you call a college bookstore that stocks more T-shirts than books?
Let's give a big shout-out to academic archivists, guardian angels of special collections and always eager to assist researchers.
To inspire a universal groan from any assemblage of academics, just use the A-word: Assessment.
Our popular media may prefer to portray professors as stiff and arrogant, but I don't see it. So many busy professors have taken time to talk to me about their specialties that I don't know how I'll ever thank them all. I just hope that I can be just as gracious to those who need help from me.

Travels with Marjory

2012-01-25T09:12:00.002-05:00

"Look for the tower," I told myself, but the tower was shrouded in fog and so was I, wandering around the University of Florida campus looking for the library that was so easy to find yesterday. Where is Marjory when I need her?

Marjory is the name my old friend and I gave to her gps-equipped smart phone, which guided us around south Florida last week with exquisite patience even when we bluntly refused to follow her guidance. She kept telling us to make a U-turn, but we generally had other ideas. I don't remember exactly how we decided to name her Marjory, but it had something to do with our quest to explore parts of Florida that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings might call "not pretty but beautiful" and something to do with Marjory's serendipitously sending us down Marjory Stoneman Douglas Boulevard, which took us to some beautiful places. By the end of our travels together, Marjory felt right.

But my old friend is back at work this week, so I'm finding my way around northern Florida without her help. When I finally glimpse the UF clock tower rising from the fog to guide my way to the library, my inner Marjory tells me, "Make a U-turn"--and for once, I obey.

In the Sink

2012-01-24T18:31:00.003-05:00

I could have spent the whole day in Special Collections today but I quit at noon because I had an urgent appointment with an anhinga, a heron, an ibis, and an alligator, all hanging out in the slimy dampness of the Alachua Sink.

If the Alachua Savannah is a big bathtub, the Sink is its drain--a deep hole in the bedrock where water sinks into the underground aquifer. Right now, it's the sole wet spot in the drought-stricken area and a great place to see water-loving wildlife. The Sink itself is a slimy green oval surrounded by moss-draped oaks and a boardwalk, and at first I couldn't see the turtles for the leaves. Big gators drifted across the water while three juveniles sunned on a rock and ibises dabbled in the water nearby.

I really wanted to join them to cool off after the hot hike out there, but I'm not sure the gators would have appreciated my company. Next time I visit a Sink, I'll remember to take some soap.

W&S

2012-01-23T17:34:00.001-05:00

The Wood & Swink General Store in Evinston houses the oldest continuously functioning post office in the state of Florida. In addition to stamps, postcards, and mailing envelopes, you can buy a cold can of Coke, an ice cream bar, beets, beans, and peas; carrots with the dirt still on 'em sitting next to the biggest cabbage I've ever seen; jars of mayhaw jelly, local honey, and hot pickled peppers; dusty jars of patent medicines, shotgun shells, and books, both new and used. Plus more--much more--at the Wood & Swink General Store, where you can stop and sit a spell on an eclectic collection of chairs gathered around a space heater. But you'd better hurry--the U.S. Postal Service is threatening to close down the post office at the Wood & Swink, and then where would you go for your mayhaw jelly?

Just add water

2012-01-23T17:18:00.002-05:00

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings once wrote that the scrubland of northern Florida is "not pretty, but it's beautiful." I think I'm beginning to understand what that means.

Last week beauty bombarded me in the Everglades, the Keys, and Miami, but today I traveled through parts of Florida that wouldn't immediately grab a tourist's attention. When William Bartram first saw the Alachua Savannah in the 1770s, he waxed rhapsodic about the wealth of wildlife inhabiting the swampy prairie: deer, bison, alligators, snakes, and birds of all description.

Long years of development and drainage permanently altered the ecosystem, now preserved within Paynes Prairie Preserve (see it here). A narrow road winds through pine forest, palmetto scrub, and live oaks draped with Spanish moss, and then the vista suddenly opens up into broad grassland stretching to the horizon. In a normal year it's possible to see bison, wild horses, alligators, and many wading birds, but recent droughts have driven the wildlife away to swampier climes.

In the heat of the afternoon I hiked through woods to find a wide path leading to a viewing platform in the midst of the savannah. Signs warned me not to molest any bison, wild horses, or alligators that might block the path, and it was pretty easy to obey. I stepped over piles of manure in the path but never saw a living creature except a hawk, a few buzzards, and some nondescript little brown birds. The path was so long, flat, and featureless that the viewing platform in the distance never seemed to get any closer, but I kept plodding along anyway, wondering whether the bison, wild horses, and alligators were just waiting for me to turn my back so they could come out for a frolic.

The River Styx needs water too--I crossed it on dry ground--and I passed a swamp where cypress knees that should have been poking up out of slimy water were instead sitting high and dry. The lakes near Cross Creek are low and the swamplands parched, but Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's house and grounds still offer a rare look into the writer's life. I took a short hike through oak and palmetto scrub where the only sounds were a woodpecker's tapping and the gentle swaying of Spanish moss.

Most of what I saw today wasn't quite pretty, but looking at Cross Creek and the Alachua Savannah through the eyes of the authors who loved them, I can see how these places could be beautiful.

Just add water.

He-man's laptops

2012-01-20T07:57:00.001-05:00

Key West is the only place I've ever been where tourists applaud the sunset. Granted, it's a pretty impressive sunset: this big yellow disk touches the horizon and then slides out of sight to the sound of a thousand clicking shutters. What makes it disappear so quickly? (My theory: it's trying to get away from the horn blast from the cruise ship moored next to Mallory Square.) As soon as the sun is out of sight, everyone applauds madly, as if expecting the sun to come back up for a few quick bows and perhaps a dramatic encore.

I should have taken sunset pictures but I didn't want to get conch-fritter grease all over my nice camera.

That was before the key lime pie.

Yes, I am doing some heavy-duty literary research on my sabbatical. For instance, yesterday I interviewed several of the cats that inhabit Ernest Hemingway's house. In Hemingway's writing studio, a cat was sitting on the table next to a Royal manual typewriter, which made me wonder: would the He-man have written any differently if he'd had laptop computers instead of laptop cats?

Computers are more portable, which is a good thing. I'll pack mine up today and start moving north toward more literary sites and academic libraries. But first, let's give the sunset one more round of applause!

Dispatch from a different world

2012-01-18T15:56:00.000-05:00

This is what I look like after snorkeling. Trust me, you don't want to see what I looked like before snorkeling or even, to a certain extent, while snorkeling. I don't want to get too graphic here, but let's just say that I believe the fish enjoyed my breakfast more than I did. If you get my drift.

(Drifting is the problem: I felt fine during the 30-minute boat ride out to the coral reef, but as soon as the boat stopped moving straight ahead and started bobbing, I was lost. Yes, I took Dramamine, and no, it didn't help.)

But forget the seasickness: what did I see?

Well, reefs, for one thing. Coral and spiny things and leafy things waving gently in the rolling swells. Fish, in schools or solitary, darting amongst the floaty stuff in sparkly silver or neon shades of yellow, indigo, and orange. There's a whole world down there!

And there's a whole different world just minutes away among the mangroves along shore, and several different worlds just up the highway in the Everglades, where a few inches' difference in elevation or water level can allow two adjacent areas to support entirely different flora and fauna.

I can't hope to understand all these different worlds in just a two-week trip, but that won't stop me from immersing myself in the environment--sometimes literally. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

Birds, eyes, views

2012-01-18T15:38:00.001-05:00

Anhinga, front view

In the Everglades I was sorely tempted to uproot a gumbo-limbo tree and take it home with me, but how would I squeeze it into the overhead compartment on the plane, and how would I explain the new acquisition to my longsuffering husband?

I've never seen a gumbo-limbo tree before (that I am aware of) but now that I've seen one, I'll never forget it: the rubbery red-orange bark would be at home in a forest of animatronic talking trees, with the sharp-angled branches serving as arms. They're not very tall--few trees are in the Everglades--but a few gumbo-limbo trees would really liven up our Ohio landscape.

Anhinga, rear view

The alligators we saw looked similarly rubbery, but my, what big teeth they have! We saw a few solitary gators along the pathways and then a whole crowd them of gathered in a particular muddy pool. What attracted so many gators to that particular place? If it was a great place for tourists to watch the gators, it was an equally great place for gators to watch the tourists.

I don't need to take any anhingas home with me because it makes me happy just to say the word: anhinga anhinga anhinga. Their blue-gray plumage looks like a ball gown from the back and their long, sinuous necks are the essence of elegance.

Many Florida birds are a mystery to me. I know I saw cormorants, storks, ibises, and herons, and we saw both vultures and a sign warning that vulture may damage vehicles (!), but I can't put a name to many of the birds whose beady eyes ended up in my photos. I wish I could take them all home with me, but someone would squawk if I tried to smuggle them through airport security.

Maybe I could hide them in the branches of my gumbo-limbo tree. It followed me home--can I keep it?

Even in the dry season, it's easy to see why Marjorie Stoneman Douglas called the Everglades a Sea of Grass.

We kept trying to canoe out to this mangrove tree in Florida Bay, but we never quite got there, thanks to (1) wind; (2) sand bars; and (3) mad canoeing skills.

A sabbatical state of mind

2012-01-16T15:54:00.001-05:00

My flight was smooth. I had an empty seat to my right, so no crowding. The plane touched down 40 minutes early (!) and my suitcase was the first one off the luggage carousel. There were no hassles at the rental-car counter, and the weather in Orlando is pretty close to perfect.

Something is seriously wrong here.

Or else something is seriously wrong with me. Why can't I just accept my good fortune instead of skulking around waiting for an anvil to fall on my head?

Time to get in a sabbatical state of mind. My son wrote this morning that a Sabbatical "sounds like it should be some sort of monk's meditation period, wandering in the forest and living with families of bears and kangaroo" and then continued thus:

The Sabbatical is a metaphysical experience that transcends all environments and states of being at the same time. Scuba-diving with porpoises on a coral reef in Fiji. Having a conversation about Hungarian politics with Matt Damon on his private hovercraft on a hot day in Antarctica. Chopping down bamboo stalks in a remote forest near Shanghai. Eating a raw chicken-head whilst watching the mating habits of the platypus in Australia. Making a working hybrid car out of parchment paper on a small island on Lake Winnipeg. This is the essence of the Sabbatical, understood only by those who have experienced it.

If my son is to be believed, anything can happen on Sabbatical--planes can land early, luggage can avoid the usual side-trip to limbo, and rental cars can appear as promised. The Sabbatical State of Mind is a great place to be and I intend to stay there a while.

Now where's Matt with that hovercraft? Better get moving before the chickens come home to roost.

Ampersandicicles?

2012-01-14T14:57:00.000-05:00

Earth and sky mirror each other today, both painted in flat shades of gray and white. Yesterday's sharp wind that whipped my face and sucked the breath right out of me has gone to wherever the wind goes, leaving behind just enough snow and ice to make a walk interesting.

Rows of pointy icicles hanging from the rocks make the bluff across the road look like a giant mouth getting ready to chomp down on something juicy, while the drips refreeze below in impossibly fragile curving shapes--fountains or cascades or ampersands. Below the cliff, fungi inhabit a tree stump, while up above a red-tailed hawk circles and then perches not far from its treetop nest. After a vigorous tromp through the snow, I'm ready to find my perch--but not in the treetops. Time to go inside and warm up by chomping down on some hot spicy chili.

Eyes (and windows) wide open

2012-01-13T11:01:00.000-05:00

The low point of my week arrived on Wednesday when I got stuck in my car and had to beg a passing student for help. The seatbelt got jammed in the door so that it wouldn't close all the way or open at all, and I had to wonder which would be worse: to open the window and call out for help (inspiring a whole new series of "How many PhDs does it take to open a car door?" jokes) or hunker down so no one could see me and then slowly starve to death, hoping that someday someone would discover my desiccated skeleton so it could be properly interred.

(Which for some reason reminds me of the wonderful opening of Jo Ann Beard's novel In Zanesville: "We can't believe the house is on fire. It's so embarrassing first of all, and so dangerous second of all. Also, we're supposed to be in charge here, so there's a sense of somebody not doing their job.")

Now where was I?

Oh yes: the low point of my week arrived when I had to open the window and call out to a passing student to help me open my car door, a moment I won't mention in my annual review. The student's willingness to rescue me, however, did reinforce the lesson provided by the high point of my week: "We're a residential campus for a reason. The campus is group work."

That line was part of a session at our annual all-day teaching workshop, which happened yesterday but required my full attention for most of the week (when I wasn't trying to maintain my dignity while helplessly stuck in my car). Colleagues from many disciplines led sessions on various methods of getting students to work effectively in groups, but my favorite moment arrived between sessions, when I was busy attending to some petty details while participants sat around chatting with each other and informally sharing their experiences using group work. I love the sound of colleagues getting together to make each other better teachers.

The opening session included a hands-on component, and I wish you could have seen a whole bunch of highly dignified college professors trying to build tents out of newspapers while blindfolded. Even with our eyes wide open we don't always realize how much we rely on each other, a lesson I'll surely remember next time I'm stuck in my car.

The doubtful Dart

2012-01-10T11:36:00.003-05:00

Photos from the Detroit Auto Show reveal a sleek, shiny red compact car masquerading under the name Dodge Dart (see it here), but the new Dart has all the earmarks of an elaborate hoax:

1. The person who officially introduced the new model is purportedly named Reid Bigland, an obviously invented name.

2. This alleged Bigland calls the new Dart is "a revolutionary car," which is preposterous. The Dodge Dart of my youth looked like the car the vicar came to tea in, the car in the gray flannel suit. You'd take a battalion of Dodge Darts into a revolution only if you wanted to bore your enemy to death.

3.Similarly preposterous is the claim that the new Dart will sell for $15,995. We sold our last Dart to a pimply young Kentuckian for $650, an appropriately Dartly price. (He paid $500 in cash and promised to bring the rest the next week--and he did, miracle number one. Miracle number two was what he had done with our stodgy old Dart: scraped off the bumper stickers, installed a new sound system, and jacked up the back end. "I'm planning to race some cops," he told us, and we would have said "TMI" if the acronym had existed back then.)

4. The alleged Reid Bigland also claims that the new Dart will get 40 miles per gallon on the highway, which is patently absurd. Our Dart got 12 miles to the gallon on a good day--when it started up at all. The most efficient way to run it was to simply leave it parked.

5. The new Dodge Dart looks nothing like a Dart. This is a Dart:

In fact, it's a pretty good stand-in for the Dart I married: a sturdy 1970 two-door in a shade that testifies to the power of true love. This is a car you can trust: it raises no expectations and is therefore unlikely to disappoint.

The new so-called Dart sparkles and glimmers and seems to promise adventure, but a car like that could break your heart without batting a windshield wiper. I don't deny that it could be a great car, but a Dart? I doubt it.

Gone fishing?

2012-01-09T10:37:00.003-05:00

Yesterday a woman at church asked me when classes start up again and I told her I'm not teaching this semester.

She got a horrified look on her face. She thought I'd been fired.

I quickly cleared up that misconception only to replace it with another: the belief among the uninitiated that going on sabbatical means being paid to sit around doing nothing. How do I get people outside academe to understand that I'm still working when what I'm doing doesn't look much like work?

I'm not standing in front of a classroom or grading papers or attending committee meetings, and until August I don't have any good reason to drive to campus every day. But I'm not sitting around twiddling my thumbs either: I'm just letting my brain cells do the heavy lifting as I absorb ideas and try to turn them into sparkling prose.

In my youth my folks used to warn me that I'd never get ahead in life if I spent so much time reading. "Nobody's ever going to pay you to sit around reading books" was how they put it, but they didn't know about sabbaticals--and neither do many others outside academe. I suppose I'll have to find a good answer to the question about what I'm doing this semester.

"Research" sounds great when it refers to scientists seeking to cure the common cold, but my literary research trip to Florida sounds like a junket: "Um, yeah, I hate to run away to Florida in the middle of winter, but someone has to study these musty old manuscripts, so I guess I'll have to make the supreme sacrifice...."

"Exploration" sounds bold and adventurous, as if I'm beating my way through uncharted territory in search of unknown treasure. Maybe I'll post a sign on my office door: "Gone Exploring." Nobody really needs to know that most of my explorations will take place between the covers of a book.

Winter woods

2012-01-08T18:49:00.000-05:00

From a distance the winter woods look like dull compositions in brown and gray, but a closer view reveals variety--sun-dappled oak leaves ranging from rust to brown to beige, green mosses and ferns clinging close to the ground, lichens camouflaging rocks and limbs, violet brambles reaching across the path to sink thorns into a careless hiker's legs. The woods are mostly quiet this time of year except when hunters invade bringing orange vests and gunshots, but today the only sounds are the crunch and slap of bodies moving through dry leaves. From a distance the woods look insipid, but look out: there's treasure inside.

A forgotten sojourner

2012-01-06T10:51:00.001-05:00

The last novel Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published in her lifetime, The Sojourner (1953), differs from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) in almost every respect: Rawlings's novel follows the long, dull life of a character who clings to the slow pace of farm life, loves soil and people more than money, and never ventures beyond his county seat until his 80th year, while Miller's Pulitzer-Prize-winner play focuses on the frenetic last days of Willie Loman, the success-seeking traveling salesman who is most himself when he's on the move.

However, the two works are similar in one important way: both feature a wandering character named Ben who lights out for the territories to make his fortune and then, in his absence, takes on undue importance among those he has left behind. Willie Loman's dead Uncle Ben appears only to scoff at Willie's insignificance, holding out the promise of glittering success beyond the far horizon. The absent Ben plays a similar role in the Rawlings novel, heading west to seek success in gold, timber, or gambling and by his absence serving as a reproach to his brother Asahel, who stays home to tend the farm he can never own because it belongs to his absent brother.

Ben, then, seems to be the sojourner for whom the novel was named, but in the end Rawlings makes it clear that the more rooted brother, Asahel, has sojourned farther into understanding of the human spirit than has his rootless brother. Ase remains on the land initially not because he loves the farm but because he loves Ben and always expects him to return home to claim his rightful ownership. Ase sees himself as a mere steward of his brother's riches:

Why, any man had only temporary rights to the earth. His mother's talk of control, of ownership. Tim's talk of legal rights and papers, these were nonsense. No man owned the land....He asked himself now what he expected of the land....It was not what he expected of it, but what it required of him. He felt himself on firm ground. The land asked to be worked, to be taken care of properly, and in return it would nourish all men, as long as they were indeed its brothers.

The Sojourner follows the seasons of farm life and proceeds with the slow pace of the meager events the punctuate those seasons: the birth of a calf, the hailstorm that destroys a crop of wheat, the birth of a child and then another and then, sometimes, a death. His closest friend calls Ase "the most wordless man ever," but he proves a loyal and valuable friend, both to a rag-tag group of social outcasts and to the reader. He joys are subtle, his sorrows deep, and his final flight well worth the 300 pages it takes to get there.

Yes, it's a long novel and not without its flaws, but Rawlings writes with tremendous tenderness toward the man whose life appears narrow but whose inner landscape stretches deep into unknown territory that rewards exploration. When he finally manages to travel west, Ase discovers that a man's travels are not defined by his movements but by his mind; when the porter comments that "You could ride the train a hundred years and you'd always think it was the earth moving and not you," Ase replies, "I expect we're all moving all the time, all together, only we don't know where or which way."

Wherever we're going, Asahel Linden makes an excellent traveling companion.

Land beyond time

2012-01-05T07:01:00.002-05:00

It's a strange paradox: the less time I have available for writing, the more urgently I seize and use that time, but when I have plenty of time to write and no pressing commitments, I'm more likely to shrug my shoulders and say, "I'll do it later."

Already I can see that being on sabbatical will require a whole new way of thinking about time. With no classes to teach and no regular meetings, the days blend together and I have trouble remembering whether this is Wednesday or Thursday. In the summer months my days are structured around working in the garden in the cool of the morning and in the house in the afternoon, but when it's 20 degrees and blustery, I'm staying inside unless someone comes up with a really compelling reason to make me bundle up and step out.

Compelling reasons are what I need. Next week I'll be on campus preparing for a pedagogy workshop and the following week I'll be in Florida, but after I return, I'll need to develop a way to structure my time so it doesn't feel so shapeless and empty. Maybe I'll set up a standing lunch date on campus once or twice a week to give me a good reason to leave the house and use the library and rec center. Maybe I'll find a way to bundle up enough to make long walks possible in this weather. Maybe I'll set daily writing goals, so many hundreds or thousands of words, with rewards for reaching certain levels.Will it work? Who knows?

I only know that I feel more idle than I have in decades and I'm disgusted at how little I'm managing to write.

The call of the mild

2012-01-02T07:59:00.000-05:00

Before I opened my eyes this morning I could feel the presence of snow, that muffled silence suggesting that the world has been packed in soft cotton. It's just a light coating of white, but snow is a tremendous relief from the recent incessant cold rains.

And now a ray of sunshine beams into my inbox all the way from California. Some time ago--September?--a Los Angeles Times reporter called to interview me and some of my students about my California Literature class. The tone of his questions made me fear a headline like "Hicks from the Sticks Seek Gold in California," but the article has finally been published and I'm pleased to report that it's pretty good (read it here). I wish he had included more comments from my students, but the article puts my class in some pretty good company and also offers a pretty interesting reading list.

My reading list this week focuses on another sunny state. I leave for Florida two weeks from today but I've been living there in literature for quite some time, following William Bartram through the Alachua Savannah, Karen Russell through the Everglades, and Zora Neale Hurston through Eatonville. Do students in Florida and California take classes on Ohio Literature? Do they make pilgrimages to Clyde and Lorain and Columbus and Martin's Ferry during Spring Break? Do they even know why Clyde and Lorain and Columbus and Martin's Ferry are suitable destinations for literary pilgrimage?

Probably not. I'll be sure to tell them while I'm there.

Season's questions

2011-12-30T10:13:00.001-05:00

Why is it so much easier to un-decorate a Christmas tree than to decorate it?

How am I supposed to write reference letters to eight different graduate programs when all I've been given is the name of the school and the deadline? And what is it with the number eight anyway? Why have two different students requested letters for eight schools this season?

Is there any end to the holiday sweets? What kind of miracle is taking place in my refrigerator to make that wonderful fudge keep multiplying?

Why am I suddenly receiving requests from people who want to pay me money if I'll insert a little text and a few links into my blog posts? Haven't they read the post in which I explain that I once quit a brief stint as a newspaper reporter because the advertisers were allowed to dictate news content? Or haven't I written that story?

Are there bloggers out there who are accepting $50 payments for inserting text that doesn't even fit the intent of the post? What kind of person expects me to sell my soul for a measly $50?

What am I supposed to do with all these pretty Christmas cards? It seems wasteful to throw them away, but who has room to store them all? Fifty to 100 cards each year for going on 30 years...who has a closet that big? And what if the mice get into 'em?

Why does it feel so satisfying to delete items from my Amazon wish list after the holidays?

Why does my dog feel the need to keep track of every bone she's ever hauled home from the woods? Why can't she delete a few items from her bone list? Is it really necessary to make our lawn a boneyard?

Why can't I think of anything interesting to write about? Will the new year bring a new bag of ideas or will I keep kicking around the same old tired detritus?

What will be the final question of the year? Will it be this one?

Or perhaps this?

Aimless bullet-points of puttering

2011-12-29T13:47:00.001-05:00

Over the past three days, I have:

Driven north to visit relatives and driven back south again with snow all over my car.
Eaten Mexican food--twice.
Shopped for kitchen rugs, jeans, a bedspread, and books.
Watched the final two episodes of the first season of Downton Abbey on Netflix.
Engaged in conversations regarding family history, preachers' kids, attention-deficit disorder, gasoline-powered generators, the decline of the U.S. Postal Service, and cranky colleagues.
Experienced confusion when a relative asked me what odd sort of car I drive (Volvo) and who makes that model (Volvo) and what the name of the company is (Volvo) and what other brands of car they make (Volvo). I'm still not sure exactly what he was looking for but I don't intend to go back and find out.
Taught my husband how to text-message.
Set up a g-mail account so my husband can get his own mail.
Not blogged.
Not started my thank-you notes.
Not written a word except via text-messaging.
Not established any sort of research and writing schedule for my sabbatical.

And yet I'm feeling content. This aimless puttering seems like the right way to bring a busy year to a close.

Whitehead pays witness

2011-12-26T08:42:00.002-05:00

In Colson Whitehead's new novel Zone One, a character who calls herself Quiet Storm arranges wrecked cars in a pattern visible only from the air: "Ten sport-utility vehicles arranged one-eighth of a mile apart east-west were the fins of an eel slipping through silty depths, or the fletching of an arrow aimed at--what? Tomorrow? What readers?"

The novel's protagonist, called Mark Spitz for reasons even he does not initially understand, admires the immense complex text but admits the difficulty of interpreting its meaning. "We don't know how to read it yet," he says. "All we can do right now is pay witness."

Zone One pays witness to the End of the World as we Know It, a zombie apocalypse that nods to 50s horror flicks while the drifting gray ash of incinerated bodies draws to mind the more potent horror of the Holocaust. The novel is a profound meditation on how human beings adapt to horrific circumstances--but that doesn't mean it isn't a lot of fun.

This is, after all, Colson Whitehead, who gave us a rolicking romp through the detritus of folklore and history in John Henry Days, a memorable deconstruction of literary theory in The Intuitionist (with its warring philosophies of elevator inspection), a summer visit to the land of adolescent angst in Sag Harbor, and, in Apex Hides the Hurt, a comedy/romance/history/critique of popular culture focusing on the rarefied world of nomenclature, after reading which you will never again look the same way at flesh-colored bandages.

Some concerns of these earlier novels reappear in Zone One, including the reliance on nomenclature specialists to sell the general public on focus-group-tested terms to rebrand the chaos. PR flacks in the new seat of power (Buffalo!) label the postapocalyptic landscape "The American Phoenix," while massive compounds surrounded by barbed wire are called "Bubbling Brooks" and "Happy Acres" (an echo, perhaps, of Sweet Home, the horrific slave plantation in Toni Morrison's Beloved). Mark Spitz sees the return of buzzwords as an encouraging sign: "what greater proof of the rejuvenation of the world, the return to Eden, than a new buzzword emerging from the dirt to tilt its petals to the zeitgeist."

Spitz is hardly the traditional horror-movie hero; always a mediocre student, "His aptitude lay in the well-executed muddle, never shining, never flunking, but gathering himself for what it took to progress past life's next random obstacle." In Whitehead's version of the zombie apocalypse, Spitz's ability to muddle through without attracting attention turns out to be a vital survival skill:

This was his world now, in all its sublime crumminess, where intellect and ingenuity and talent were as equally meaningless as stubbornness, cowardice, and stupidity....Beauty could not thrive, and the awful was too commonplace to be of consequence. only in the middle was there safety. He was a mediocre man. He had led a mediocre life exceptional only in the magnitude of its uenxceptionality. Now the world was mediocre, rendering him perfect.

Zone One also departs from the horror-movie model by denying readers a happy ending--or a sad ending or, really, much of an ending at all. Whitehead rejects the tidy resolution, resists the heartwarming denouement. Moments of pleasure occur briefly when random people create temporary families on the fly, such as when Mark Spitz shacks up with Mim in an abandoned toy store or when he stumbles upon a well-barricaded rural farmhouse where a trio of survivors wait out the disaster by playing endless games of Hearts. "What were the chances of this raggedy bunch finding one another in the ruins," wonders Spitz, but he has little time to relish the luxury of human connection before the barricades fall.

In Zone One, barricades are both comforting and confining, keeping the horrors out while keeping the survivors locked inside, but even more threatening are the invisible barricades that separate individuals even while uniting them. "There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth," muses Spitz, but "it was precisely this thought of final, irrevocable isolation that united them all. Even if they didn't know it."

This sublime isolation lies beneath all Whitehead's novels, but in Zone One it becomes tangible in the form of zombified human beings wandering through a wasteland while struggling to satisfy a hunger they cannot identify. Whitehead's funny and insightful and profoundly moving novel bears witness to the horrors to erect a barricade and keep out the chaos, if only for the span of time it takes to read from cover to cover.

Hiding in plain sight

2011-12-25T14:24:00.000-05:00

All week my husband has been walking past the presents piled under the Christmas tree without noticing the distinctive shape of one of his gifts, but once he held it in his hands, there was no mistaking the heft of the wood-splitting maul.

First prize for holiday cluelessness, though, goes to me: I've been complaining for months about how bare the bar in front of the picture window looks since a bunch of our hanging plants died, but I sat in that room for at least an hour this morning without noticing two big new plants. I might never have noticed them if someone hadn't pointed them out.Which goes to show, I suppose, that sometimes the best place to hide a gift is right there in plain sight.

Merry Christmas to all! And may the new year be full of unexpected blessings!

A little light in the darkness

2011-12-24T08:02:00.000-05:00

You know those "blank spaces on the earth" that lured Marlowe into the Heart of Darkness? We live in one--a sort of darkness Joseph Conrad couldn't have imagined--but now a wee ray of light has slipped in and I think we're going to like it.

In an ongoing attempt to ease us into the 21st century, yesterday my son-in-law went exploring for some method of equipping our house with wireless internet service. Dial-up is slow, cranky, and unreliable, but I've put up with it over the years by limiting my use of the Internet at home while relying heavily on the high-speed network on campus. (That's why I often don't post on the weekends and why I don't try to post photos from home or do anything involving our bandwidth-hogging college portal.)

At the local Verizon store he learned that our house sits in the middle of a blank space on the map, one of the few spots in the county where service simply isn't available. Nevertheless, Verizon loaned him a little black box that sits on the windowsill and blinks silently and through which I am now posting this message.

I don't even know what the black box is called, but we can use the thing for four days to see whether it will suit our needs. So far, it does: it's not as fast as the campus network but it's much faster than dial-up. Last night we even managed to watch a bit of online video, although it was a bit herky-jerky. But that's okay--videos are not my main priority. This little box lets me use the college's course management system without waiting 10 or 12 minutes for it to load, and it makes checking my e-mail a breeze instead of a chore. I can even upload pictures:

See?

Of course, that one little photo took nearly four minutes to load, so maybe we still need to work out some kinks in the system. But there is hope! This blank spot on the map may not remain blank much longer.

Escaping the conflagration

2011-12-22T14:00:00.001-05:00

I've just finished reading The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz by J. Hillis Miller, and what a peculiar book it is. He proposes what he calls Miller's Law: "If Holocaust novels get more complex, more 'interest bearing,' narratologically and rhetorically, the closer the author was to direct experience of the camps, at the same time the rendering of the conflagration of community becomes more pronounced. Those novelists further away are most likely to want somehow to affirm that community survived the conflagration of the crematoria."

Interesting, but he bases this law on analysis of only four books. Give me four books on any subject and I'll bet I can come up with some broad generalizations about all books on that subject, except no one would pay any attention to Hogue's Law.

But I am not J. Hillis Miller, who in this book frequently repeats himself, cites Wikipedia while admitting its unreliability, and takes every opportunity to move smoothly from insightful literary analysis into extended political rants. His readings of Kafka's unfinished novels are immensely readable (even when he repeats himself), but why write about Kafka in a book focusing on Holocaust fiction? Because "Kafka's novels are uncanny premonitions of Auschwitz." He explains:

Though of course I do not believe in telepathic foreshadowings, any more than did Freud and Derrida, so they claimed, nevertheless it almost seems as though Kafka must have had some occult telepathic premonition of what the genocide would be like, though he got the details a little garbled....

I love that "of course," and his "so they claimed" could be applied to Miller himself. Miller claims that Kafka couldn't complete his novels because he saw his protagonists moving inexorably to a conflagration to which Kafka could not bear to deliver them; indeed, Miller all but implies that Kafka himself died to avoid the Holocaust his work somehow foreshadowed. Neat trick, that.

Miller makes a compelling argument for the importance of literature in helping us understand the Holocaust, but the book's digressions interrupt and ultimately weaken the argument, which is a real pity. I won't soon encounter another such charmingly telepathic Kafka.

Men at work

2011-12-22T13:19:00.001-05:00

In retrospect, it would have been a good idea to wear goggles, face masks, gloves--and why not a whole Hazmat suit? Taking down old acoustical ceiling tiles may be easy, but it's not what you'd call a clean job.

You would be amazed at the amount of stuff that accumulates above a basement ceiling over the years: dust, dirt, dead bugs (not too many, not too big), and mouse droppings were the more ordinary items. You don't want to know about the desiccated mouse skeleton. Or the snakeskin. Just forget I mentioned it.

Installing the new tiles and cleaning the mess kept me busy while the men made those tricky cuts in the tiles that had to fit around odd corners and heat vents. My son spent some time installing ceiling tiles while he worked for the physical plant at college, so at some points he had to tell his dad to step back and let the expert work. A dad and son who can work together without discord--who could ask for a better gift?

Sitting pretty

2011-12-20T16:20:00.000-05:00

I'm done grading, baking, shopping, wrapping, stamping, and mailing, and now I'm ready to do some sitting. For the true connoisseur of sitting, nothing beats Sidney Lanier's instructions for comfortably sitting on the deck of the steamboat Marion on a trip up Florida's Ocklawaha river in 1875:

Know, therefore, tired friend that shall hereafter ride up the Ocklawaha on the Marion--whose name I would fain call Legion--that if you will place a chair just in the narrow passage-way which runs alongside the cabin, at the point where this passage-way descends by a step to the open space in front of the pilot-house, on the left-hand side facing to the bow, you will perceive a certain slope in the railing where it descends by an angle of some thirty degrees to accommodate itself to the step aforesaid; and this slope should be in such a position as that your left leg unconsciously stretches itself along the same by the pure insinuating solicitations of the fitness of things, and straightway dreams itself off into an Elysian tranquility. You should then tip your chair in a slightly diagonal position back to the side of the cabin, so that your head will rest thereagainst, your right arm will hang over the chair-back, and your left arm will repose on the railing. I give no specific instruction for your right leg, because I am disposed to be liberal in this matter and to leave some gracious scope for personal idiosyncrasies as well as a margin for allowance for the accidents of time and place; dispose your right leg, therefore, as your heart may suggest, or as all the precedent forces of time and the universe may have combined to require you.

Sign me up!

In grading jail

2011-12-19T08:46:00.003-05:00

In my dream I'm reading a student paper including the following enigmatic Works Cited listing:

Brown, Joe. 1993. Jail.

Now what am I supposed to do with that? I always tell my students that the Works Cited must provide enough information to allow readers to locate the original source, but this student doesn't even tell which jail I'm expected to visit!

I'm just about done with grading jail, a little later than I'd expected. I confess that I took Friday off to go Christmas shopping with my daughter (and while we're on the topic: any ideas on the best way to wrap a wood-splitting maul?). On Saturday I sat down with the final batch of papers and worked through them until I had only one left, and then halfway through that paper I encountered a sentence that seems--what's the kindest way to say this?--alien. It appears to have wandered in from elsewhere without any indication of where that elsewhere might be. I was THAT CLOSE to being done, but now I have to try to track down the source of the alien sentence and take appropriate action.

No wonder grading invades my dreams.

I'm dreaming of a white ceiling

2011-12-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

I've been debating whether to wrap the big box I brought home yesterday, but how can I wrap it if I can't pick it up? The gentleman who carried the box to the car warned that it might look tempting to thieves since it's the right size and shape for a flat-screen television, but I'm trying to imagine the look on the face of the thief who breaks into a car and hauls off a large, heavy, unwieldy box only to discover that it holds a stack of ceiling tiles.

I don't believe I'll wrap it in red with a bow on top even though it's a great gift. I don't see anything in the Bible about the wise men from the East bringing gifts of gold, frankincense, and ceiling tiles, but surely baby Jesus could have used a roof over his head, and installing them would have given Joseph something to do besides stand there looking reverent. I'm not sure how you pack ceiling tiles onto the back of a camel, but that's a problem for the freight department.

The strong men in my house brought in the ceiling tiles so the box now sits on the floor in the living room, where last night it served as a fine playing surface for a game of Banangrams. Some time this week we'll remove the stained, moldy ceiling tiles downstairs and replace them with bright clean new ones. Hey, maybe on Christmas morning I'll attach a bow to the new ceiling! We can gaze upward and sing a new version of that old Christmas classic, "Away in a Manger":

Away in a manger, no crib for his bed,
The little lord Jesus lay down his sweet head,
The acoustical ceiling tiles looked down where he lay,
The little lord Jesus asleep in the hay!

Diversionary tactics

2011-12-14T13:18:00.001-05:00

I worked too hard yesterday and now I'm being punished for it--or that's one way to tell the story. Yesterday I plowed through a pile of papers (including one so good it made me want to dance on my desk and another asserting that understanding nature helps us understand nature), leaving me little to occupy my time while my Concepts of Nature students write their final exams. I read through the few remaining reading comments and I had intended to spend the rest of the exam time grading the Creative Nonfiction multimedia essays, but most of them include music or sound effects, which would distract my students, especially the sound effect demonstrating the noise your lips make when you're trying to play the French Horn. (Don't ask.)

So here I sit in a crowded classroom listening to pens scribbling and pages turning and I've got nothing.

Except my trusty computer! Earlier today (between the morning class session and the 20-minute wait to find a parking space at the Post Office so I could spend $60 on postage, not that I'm complaining because the people who are receiving those packages are worth every penny, but seriously--20 minutes just to PARK?!)--now where was I?

Oh yes: earlier today I was running through digital photo files to find some interesting things to put in our annual Christmas letter (which nobody ever reads so why do I put so much effort into it every year, not to mention the cost of postage?) and I was surprised at how many surprises I found. I had forgotten all about the foxes, for instance, and doesn't it seem like way more than nine months since I took my class to California? I saw lots of smiles in my son's graduation photos in May and our family reunion in August, and I was reminded of how much I love birds and wildflowers. (Maybe too much. How many photos of trilliums does one person really need?)

But the point (yes, there is a point to this little trip down memory lane) is that this was a really busy year, so busy that events that seemed really memorable at the time have been crowded out of my mind by the next big thing, and then the next. So maybe what I need is a few minutes of nothingness, some time to just sit and think and let my mind wander while my students write their exams. Which means maybe this empty time is not a punishment but a gift, and one I ought to accept with open arms.

Nah. Let's play Solitaire!

Graze your way through finals week

2011-12-14T10:27:00.005-05:00

Forget the holiday gift guides--what we need is a holiday grazing guide. This time of year it's possible to graze your way from one end of campus to another. Yesterday the Admissions office fed us all lunch, but today you can forage for wonton soup and egg rolls in the English Department office and then dip downstairs for cheese and crackers or Chex mix. For dessert, there's candy at the Records Office, cookies in Leadership, buckeyes and truffles in the library (if you know where to look), and muffins in the Worthington Center. I haven't even ventured down to the science buildings, and who knows what they might be munching on down at Fine Arts? If this keeps up, we'll all be too fat to get out of our offices!

I hear sabbatical calling

2011-12-13T09:27:00.001-05:00

Last Friday as I stood before my final class of the semester leading a group of wonderful students in a sparkling discussion of interesting ideas, I paused for a moment and told myself: I will miss this.

My sabbatical starts as soon as I submit final grades so I won't be in a classroom regularly again until next fall. I won't miss reading zillions of student drafts and I definitely won't miss listening to lame excuses, but I get such a buzz out of being in the classroom that it's hard to imagine giving it up, even for a few months.

What else will I miss? It will be difficult to give up high-speed internet access and daily conversation with some wonderful colleagues, but that just gives me a good reason to visit campus occasionally.

I won't miss committee meetings, especially the committee that meets for two hours Friday afternoons. (Who thought that was a great idea?) I won't miss faculty meetings or discussions of general education assessment or massive misunderstandings caused by faulty lines of communication between faculty and administration.

Instead, I'll write. First, though, I need to do some research, and if that research happens to take me to Florida in January--well, that's the price I have to pay for being a scholar. My two-week research trip is shaping up nicely: a trip to the Everglades and the Keys with an old friend, meetings with experts on Florida literature at Rollins College, a visit to special collections at the University of Florida library, side trips to the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings house and the Zora Neale Hurston museum. I may even be in Eatonville for the annual Hurston festival. If that trip doens't give me plenty to write about, then it's time to hang up the Scholar badge and take up welding.

Tomorrow I give finals and then I'll spend the rest of the week grading, but at some point the grades will be submitted and I'll be ready to lock my door and walk away from my office. A little voice inside me keeps saying, "No! Don't go! Your students need you!" But every day that voice gets a little softer, and it won't be long before it gets drowned out by the sound of gulls calling and waves rolling and pages turning, turning, turning. I can see my sabbatical looming on the horizon and soon, to borrow Hurston's lovely words, I'll pull that horizon from the waist of the world and drape it over my shoulders.

My favorite (Christmas) things

2011-12-12T13:49:00.001-05:00

I keep hearing "My Favorite Things" playing on the local Christmas radio stations and wondering when "Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens" became a holiday sentiment suitable for play alongside "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and "Silver Bells."

If I wanted to wrap up all my favorite things about Christmas, how many brown paper packages tied up with string would it take? Here's a start:

Mannheim Steamroller CDs.

Putting up the Christmas tree with help from the family. Three of us working together can assemble and decorate the tree in approximately one and a half Mannheim Steamroller CDs.

Fuzzy red socks.

Fingernails shining with bright red nail polish topped with glitter.

Window-shopping while wearing fuzzy red socks and sparkly red nail polish.

The Dave Barry Holiday Gift Guide, which this year includes the "toad purse: A gift she will always remember, even after therapy."

Merry Tuba Christmas, in which (mostly) amateur musicians ranging in age from 12 to 82 play Christmas carols to a packed house of carol-singing, key-jingling, laughing, chortling, and giggling listeners

Handel's Messiah, again.

Stirring fudge.

Packing fudge in boxes to send to people I love.

Eating fudge.

Finding great gifts--and keeping them secret until Christmas.

My birthday! (Which isn't exactly a Christmas thing, except that turning 50 surrounded by great friends feels like a gift.)

My daughter's birthday! (She'll always be my favorite Christmas-Eve gift.)

Egg nog. (Just a little. And then just a little more.)

Christmas cookies.

Finding little jars of specialty mustards to put in everyone's stockings.

Wrapping packages.

Sending packages.

Getting packages in the mail.

Playing board games with friends and family.

Holiday chai.

Christmas cantatas.

Christmas Eve candlelight services.

Advent wreaths.

Singing "Joy to the World, the Lord is Come!"

Deciding which of the Christmas gift books to start reading first.

And then, finally, the droopy eyelids, the nodding head, the falling book, and the very welcome Christmas afternoon nap.

These are a few of my favorite holiday things. How about you?

Airing out the exhaust fumes

2011-12-08T13:11:00.001-05:00

Today a student asked for special treatment because he's, quote, exhausted.

Look around the room, I told him: we're all exhausted. Students are exhausted. Faculty members are exhausted. Secretaries and janitors and campus police are exhausted.

Our energy is exhausted; our funds are exhausted; our exercise routine gave up the ghost weeks ago. The semester is nearly exhausted and so is the year. I'm all out of class sessions and the syllabus has called it quits. My patience is exhausted and my wardrobe is exhausted and my shoes keep wanting to stomp off in a huff, but I won't let them.

Why? Because despite all the exhaustion, we still have work to do. The library is full of exhausted students feverishly searching for sources, and the study rooms are studded with exhausted groups putting the finishing touches on group projects. My exhausted students are revising their own essays or offering comments on their classmates' papers, and a few are already preparing for next week's exams. I get exhausted just thinking about all the grading that lies ahead.

I could alleviate a lot of exhaustion just by canceling final papers and exams, but that would violate the spirit of the season. At this point in the semester, exhaustion is the normal condition, so the only thing to do is jump right in and join the club.

This morning's serving of Spam

2011-12-07T11:02:00.001-05:00

Seriously, people: don't send me silly Spam if you don't want me to notice its silliness.

Vocabula-palooza

2011-12-07T09:01:00.001-05:00

So you work with a class for an entire semester introducing methods of literary analysis and the vocabulary appropriate to those methods, but then when you read the final essays, you see too many broad generalizations and too much vague language instead of the sophisticated concepts you've been mastering in class.

How can we encourage students to employ appropriate vocabulary in their essays?

I can't hold a gun to my students' heads to make them use certain literary terms, but I can hold a grade to their heads. I've done it before and I'll do it again, this time on the final exam in my Concepts of Nature class. It's a sophomore-level class that fulfills two general education requirements, so I have a handful of English majors and a whole mess of students just trying to check off boxes on the degree audit.

On the final exam, they will have to respond to two essay questions worth 30 points each, and the remaining 40 points will come from their correctly employing a list of terms I will provide. If they use the terms in a way that demonstrates awareness of meaning, they get full credit; for each term they ignore or use incorrectly, they will lose points--and if they ignore all of them, the best grade they can earn on the exam is a D-.

I've tried this method before in several classes and I find that students go out of their way to make sure I notice how they're using the critical vocabulary: they underline or highlight the terms and sometimes they go overboard in explaining the concepts, but at least they're using appropriate language! And I am rewarded with an opportunity to read substantive essays employing sophisticated terms. What's not to love?

I love the smell of eggnog in the morning

2011-12-07T07:53:00.001-05:00

Charlie don't surf....and Ginger don't swim!

[Maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh.]

Mouse tales

2011-12-06T07:55:00.001-05:00

A colleague greeted me this morning by asking, "Any more rats in your car?"

That's what I get for opening my mouth. Since I wrote yesterday about receiving a surprise visit from a mouse while driving to work, many people have offered suggestions, some more helpful than others:

"You know that's a safety hazard, right?" Right. I was there, remember? I know how hard I struggled to maintain control of the car while the mouse went leaping about on the edge of my peripheral vision. But let's face it: driving a cranky 17-year-old car is a safety hazard, moreso because of the lack of cup-holders. (How did we ever live before cup-holders?) I silently accept a certain amount of hazard daily--but I can't keep my mouth shut when the mice start leaping.

"Nothing works better than an old-fashioned mouse trap." Right again, but picture me blindly reaching into the back seat for an umbrella or a Kleenex or a can of oil and unexpectedly locating the mouse trap. Talk about a safety hazard!

"Time to get a cat." In my car? Where would I keep the litter box?

"This wouldn't happen if you lived in town instead of out there in the godforsaken wilderness." I'm not so sure about that. I've heard stories of critters getting into cars even in the heart of the city. Some of those critters walk upright and find that opposable thumbs come in handy when it comes to stealing hubcaps. (Not that my car suffers from a surfeit of hubcaps.)

For a while now I've kept a cake of mouse poison in my car, the kind that makes vermin thirsty and drives them out of the car to seek water, but that did not deter yesterday's visitor. This morning I approached my car with some trepidation, and all the way to campus I kept expecting to hear a squeak or see a flash of gray fur or feel little mouse feet climbing up my neck. If merely thinking about mice in the car is a safety hazard, then it's time to find a better solution before driving Miss Mousy starts seriously driving me crazy.

Return of the Volvomice

2011-12-05T08:07:00.001-05:00

You know that annoying noise in my car? Not the mournful groan on sharp left turns or the occasional clickety ticking associated with the left rear wheel, but the tiny peeping sound like a mouse squeaking?

It was a mouse squeaking.

The last time I became aware that mice were visiting my car (read it here), I didn't actually see any mice--just the droppings and nesting material they left behind. This time the mouse was right there next to me on the passenger seat while I was driving down the highway at 55 miles per hour.

The next sound you hear will be considerably louder than a mouse squeaking.

You may notice how calmly I am writing this, but if you had seen me at the moment when I looked into the rear-view mirror and saw the mouse leaping from headrest to headrest, the last word you would have chosen is calm.

I had to pull over. Beside the highway. In the middle of the morning rush hour. I couldn't sit there calmly in the driver's seat while a mouse went leaping from headrest to headrest behind me. Who knows where it would leap next?

I saw it run into the way-back and I thought I might just open the hatch and let it leap out, but the lock back there is cranky and the only way to open it is to use the key, which was still in the ignition.

In the car.

With the mouse.

Now don't go thinking I'm some hysterical female who faints dead away at the sight of a mouse. We live in the woods, for heaven's sake! This is just the season when they're looking for a warm place to hunker down for the winter, so it did not surprise us to find a mouse in the kitchen mousetrap this morning. When I see or hear a mouse scampering across the kitchen floor, I don't panic. All I have to do is make some noise and it will find a place to hide--preferably near a mousetrap.

But my car is a different story. Where will a mouse go to hide? Up the leg of my pants? In my coat pocket? Under my foot while I'm trying to hit the brakes? Over my dead body!

So I had to steel myself to reach back inside the car (where the mouse was!) and grab my keys out of the ignition, and then I fiddled with the hatchback lock while keeping half an eye on the mouse, which seemed to enjoy sitting right on top of the rear heat vents, and when I finally got the hatchback opened and grabbed the big stick we use to prop it up (because the hydraulics don't work), the mouse ran back toward the front seats.

What would you have thought if you'd driven past and seen me banging loudly on the windows of a rickety old Volvo wagon and yelling my head off when there was no one there to listen? Loony. Time to call the Keeper of the Straitjackets.

Fortunately, it worked. Usually my car makes noise at me, but this time I directed a mess of noise straight at my car and I was rewarded with the sight of a little gray mouse leaping from the rear door and scurrying off into a nearby field.

Note to self: from now on, make noise first before leaving the driveway. Bang on the hood, yell at the way-back, kick the tires, crank up the radio, and if the first thing that comes on is Blue Christmas," all the better. If Elvis can't drive the mice away, nothing will.

Out to lunch

2011-12-02T08:35:00.001-05:00

It's the penultimate Friday of the semester, I've had evening meetings every day this week, I read a pile of student drafts yesterday, and my brain wants to take a little vacation, okay?

So here's some time-wasting silliness:

"Our shoes tell tales," insists Slate this morning, and I have to agree: the shoes I'm wearing today look as if they might have been stolen from a homeless person. But Slate isn't interested in my shoes but in "Comparing Shoes of the Very Famous" (read it here). Lawrence of Arabia's desert sandals don't look any more battered than a few I could find in my husband's closet, and I grew up wearing flip-flops just like the Dalai Lama's.

Inside Higher Ed informs us that "College Men Sometimes Think About Things Besides Sex." Don't believe me? Read it here. (Food and sleep. Those are the other things they sometimes think about.)

The linguistics experts at Language Log try to parse the following sentence: "Cash nor credit will not be issued for balance of gift voucher not redeemed in full" (read it here). Don't try to make sense of it yourself or your brain will explode, which would deprive the neighborhood zombies of a square meal.

The Oatmeal offers an alternative high-school curriculum in "What we should have been taught in our senior year of high school" (read it here). The math lesson alone is worth the visit.

And if you want to get all high-brow, the New Yorker asks "Who Wrote Shakespeare?" in an article suggesting that many of the world's great classics were penned by ghost writers (read it here). Moby Dick, for instance, "was written not by Herman Melville but by Herman Melbrooks, who wrote most of it in Yiddish on the boat over from Coney Island."

I don't know who wrote this blog post. Couldn't have been me, because until further notice, I am officially out to lunch.

When it finally clicks

2011-12-01T08:31:00.001-05:00

The final weeks of the semester hold many horrors--too many drafts to read, too many students panicking over projects, too many urgent meetings and special events--but it also offers the occasional magic moment when I look at a student's draft or project or paper and realize he they got it--he finally got it.

Yesterday before class a student came up to me and said, "Thanks for talking to me about my paper the other day. It helped." (I looked at his draft. He was right.) At the end of class, after peer review, he brought me his draft and asked where the period goes in relation to a parenthetical citation, and after I showed him, he said, "I've been doing that wrong all semester." He has--and I've marked the error on every draft so it's high time to start doing it right--but something finally clicked.

In this situation it would be tempting to say, "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: the citation is part of the sentence!" Satisfying, but not productive. So I bite my tongue and rejoice in the fact that he's got it--he's finally got it.

Why I was late for work this morning

2011-11-30T11:32:00.001-05:00

If you need proof that I spent that I spent much of the morning watching men remove a big tree from my driveway, you could look at the mud specks on my shoes or the sawdust all over my coat--or just look at the photos! Too bad they don't show the cold.

)

Treed

2011-11-30T08:22:00.001-05:00

Last time a tree fell across my driveway, it didn't take long to fix: smallish tree, pleasant weather, no rush. One man with a chainsaw and a tractor opened the driveway to traffic within an hour.

This time it's different. I need to get to campus for a meeting with the provost this morning, and it's cold enough outside to chill your toes pretty quickly but not cold enough to freeze the sodden ground. I don't dare drive down into the meadow to get around the tree or I'm sure to get stuck in the mud.

And it's a really big tree. Until my car learns to levitate, all I can do is wait.

On the plus side, that tree has been on the removal list for quite some time. It's thoroughly dead and close enough to the garage to cause damage if it fell that way. In fact, the resident woodsman had taken preliminary steps toward removing the tree, attaching a ladder to the tree so he could climb up and tie a stout rope around the trunk fairly high up there. The next step would be borrowing a bigger chainsaw to cut through the trunk, but not before attaching the rope to the tractor to pull the tree in an appropriate direction. (Not on the garage or the driveway.)

Well it missed the garage. The rope and ladder are still attached, utterly undamaged by the fall, but the tree took down two smaller trees along the way. A tree that takes itself down certainly saves wear and tear on the chainsaw, but that chainsaw is still to small to cut through a trunk that size, so I'm stuck.

The irony is that the resident woodsman spent much of yesterday cutting down trees. Several trees up the hill behind the house were knocked over during a summer windstorm, and yesterday he went up there and chopped sufficiently to serve as firewood. One of the trees was wedged against another tree at about a 45-degree angle, and when the woodsman cut off the top of the tree, the root ball started shifting and the trunk rose up to a standing position once again. A tree resurrected! But not for long. It will heat our house nicely this winter.

I don't know where the big tree sat on the tree removal list, but this morning it rose to the top. It successfully brought itself down--now if only we can persuade it to move out of my way...

Remembrance of futures past

2011-11-28T13:35:00.001-05:00

In one version of the future, my students will walk everywhere; in another, they will swim. Some envision a future that looks like the past (living close to the land, eating what they can hunt, gather, or grow) but with really nifty accessories: clothes that change color and texture at the touch of a button, pop-up wind turbines and solar panels.

My Concepts of Nature class has just finished reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and we're preparing to watch Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and in between these dystopian visions of a ravaged natural world, we paid a visit to the future. Several futures, in fact--futures of the past. We discussed the essay "Back to the Future" by James Howard Kunstler (read it here), who suggests that visions of the future reflect the concerns of the present. For instance, he describes a 1950s vision of the year 2000, "a city of towers cut through with swooping super-duper highways," but, he continues, "The amusing part is that the cars depicted all have giant tail fins--because people were cuckoo for tailfins that year. So, naturally, the future would be all about tail fins."

I told my students about my past future--the future vision of a childhood informed by near-daily viewings of Star Trek reruns. In that future, there would be no more harvest gold or avocado appliances, and human beings would have the ability to travel throughout the galaxy without running up long-distance telephone charges or being tethered to a dial phone that stretched only to the end of that tangled curly cord. Imagine that!

We could imagine personal communicators, but we never imagined Kirk and Spock playing Angry Birds on their communicators or Sulu checking his stock portfolio or Lieutenant Uhura keeping track of stats for her fantasy baseball team. The future was a Very Serious Place where communicators would be used for communication--period. (Except for that one time when Spock took a communicator apart to make some sort of laser. But I digress.)

That was my past future--but what about my students? This morning they worked in groups to examine their current relationships with nature and extrapolate from that a vision of the future. Their results varied, but none of the groups envisioned any major change in the nature of human beings. We might finally eliminate obesity and learn to get along with one another, but in my students' visions of the future, people of the future will be at heart pretty much the same, only with cooler stuff.

We started the semester looking at creation myths and stories of nostalgia for a lost pastoral paradise and we'll end with visions of a post-apocalyptic future in which nature has been subsumed by technology. The past and the future have a great deal in common, both existing primarily as stories that help us make sense of the present--which, when you come right down to it, is a pretty cool place to live.

I know the present is better than some of the futures my students envision, because, frankly, if the only way to get around is by swimming, my last words will be "gurgle gurgle."

Jingle bell time is a swell time

2011-11-25T19:39:00.001-05:00

I clearly remember the first time I ever heard the song "Jingle Bell Rock." I was in the fifth grade and visiting my friend Patty, who strapped on her tap shoes to tap her way to happiness to the tune of "Jingle Bell Rock." I thought it was snappy and peppy and much less stodgy than the holiday music the old folks made us sing. Who would croon "Away in a Manger" when we could tap to "Jingle Bell Rock"?

Since then I've heard the song approximately eighteen million times, give or take a few million, and it's beginning to wear. I still find the song snappy and peppy and a whole lot of fun, but my enjoyment is tinged by the bitter knowledge that a few short weeks from now I'll be tempted to pull the plug on any speaker that emits a single jingling note.

Ditto "The Little Drummer Boy." Double-ditto "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." Super-double-ditto "Frosty the Snowman," which makes me want to take a blowtorch to the next snowman I see.

A few holiday songs never lose their appeal; I can listen to Jose Feliciano sing "Feliz Navidad" any day of the year, and just about anyone singing or playing "Sleigh Ride" makes me happy. I never get tired of the Vince Guaraldi music from the Charlie Brown Christmas special, although I rarely watch the show. Christmas carollers singing a capella are wonderful even when they're not, if you know what I mean, and I'll even happily sing along loudly despite the fact that I can't carry a tune.

You should have heard me a little while ago trying to whistle along with the fluty parts of a Mannheim Steamroller song. Then again, maybe it's better than you didn't--or you might want to pull the plug on me!

The Thanksgiving puzzle

2011-11-24T09:37:00.001-05:00

Assembling Thanksgiving dinner for 16 people requires bringing together many different pieces, and it works best when everyone likes each other.

Last night the family sat down in my daughter and son-in-law's living room to assemble a jigsaw puzzle, arms reaching past each other to grab another edge piece or a bit of blue, and this morning in their kitchen we began putting together the pieces of our family Thanksgiving dinner.

The old guy fried bacon for breakfast while the young guy engineered a towering pile of potato-peeling. My daughter and I traded off time with the power mixer: she's baking custard pies and I'm making masses of dough for pumpkin yeast rolls.

Who will do the dishes? Don't worry, we'll have enough dirty dishes to give everyone a chance. Who will run out to the store to pick up a few forgotten ingredients? The young men will handle that. What about moving the furniture to make room for extra tables? We have enough strong arms to help.

I'm backing up to move the mixer when I suddenly bump into my son (oops). I spill pumpkin and sugar, adding to the palimpsest of stains on a well-used page in my favorite cookbook. Flour sprays and butter drips, but they're just more pieces of the puzzle.

In a few hours the guests will arrive, bringing the rest of the pieces: sweet potatoes and pies, salads and cranberry sauce and a coffee-maker. And let's not forget the turkey! It's a well-traveled bird--we smoked it Tuesday evening and transported it up here yesterday.

Many strong arms eager to help are bringing all the pieces together, but the puzzle isn't complete until we all sit down around the table and bow our heads to offer thanks to the author of our feast--the final piece in the puzzle.

Poetree

2011-11-22T10:46:00.001-05:00

In the new issue of The Writer's Chronicle, poet Rita Dove characterizes 20th-century poets based on the topography their works evoke:

The jungles of the Beats and Confessionals, a cityscape intersected by the neatly parallel thoroughfares of Pound Boulevard....Stevens gets a solitary Great Oak and Hart Crane's doomed Dutch Elm stands of course for his grand opus 'The Bridge,' which had a profound effect, though it's rarely read nowadays. Twin rows of poplars for Bishop's geometric elegance, which we all pass through but cannot seem to touch. William Carlos Williams earns a patch of sycamores....Langston Hughes is an American maple dropping its colorful leaves. And so on.

And so on indeed. If your favorite poet were a tree, what tree would he or she be? Rita Dove loves ballroom dancing and named a poetry collection American Smooth, so she can be the American beech, a smooth-barked tree with leaves that dance in the breeze.

Attack of the lounge lizards!

2011-11-21T21:42:00.001-05:00

I don't know which is more fun: hearing John Williams's Symphonic Marches performed or reading my daughter's analysis of John Williams's music. Doing both in the same evening is just double the fun.

"Fantasy and Humor in Music" was the theme of the college's fall band concert last night, and I don't recall the last time I laughed so much at serious music. Well, mostly serious. I've never seen a band perform the gargle quite so effectively, and the duck calls were, um, memorable.

Gargling, duck calls, gun shots, falling drums, and other odd sounds appeared in Grand Serenade for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion by P.D.Q. Bach. The director said the gargling bit was especially difficult to practice because students kept getting the giggles and spitting water all over the band room.

Also on the program were some circus marches by Karl L. King, Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, the Mars movement from Gustav Holst's The Planets, and Gandalf by Johan de Meij, all performed beautifully. The climax, though, was simply unforgettable: Godzilla Eats Las Vegas by Eric Whitacre.

There were graphics--and oh, what graphics: Godzilla stomping Frank Sinatra. Godzilla stomping Wayne Newton. Godzilla dancing a tango with the sphinx. A horde of Elvises (Elvii!) attacking Godzilla.

And then there was the music. My my my what music. Who knew Godzilla was such a lounge lizard?

What a treat to go straight from hearing terrific music to reading about it. My daughter is working on her M.A. in music theory and asked for my feedback on some papers, and I have to say that while I don't understand much about music theory or music history or, frankly, music, the papers were a ton of fun to read. I learned why John Williams isn't your ordinary movie music hack, and I always enjoy seeing what terrific writers my kids are.

I know my kids have occasionally heard statements like, "Of course you're a good writer! Your mom is an English teacher!"--as if they would let me write their papers for them. The fact is that I didn't teach them to write, and I've never made a habit of proofreading their papers. I rarely even see a sample of my son's writing, but when I do, I'm impressed. He can write! And so can his sister! Really well!

And that's something to sing about--if only I could carry a tune.

Now it can be told! (Well, some of it...)

2011-11-21T18:05:00.001-05:00

It's hard to write when I've been inundated with good news but commanded to keep silent about some of it, but here are the bits I am permitted to shout from the housetops:

1. Two years to the day after my final round of chemotherapy, all my tests came back clear. No sign of recurrence! And I've been cleared to get my port removed! Hurrah!

2. A recent job interview went well so my husband will soon be able to give up his booth at the Farmers' Market. Many of his customers will be unhappy, but we're looking forward to a time when he can sleep more than a few hours a night, escape constant back pain, and enjoy an occasional day off with the family. Hurrah again!

3. I've finally figured out how I want to celebrate my 50th birthday. I'm not big on birthday parties, but how about gathering a bunch of friends and family in a nice location on a lazy afternoon with munchies and a bunch of board games? Scrabble, Apples to Apples, Bananagrams, Monopoly--that's my idea of a good time! I realize that others may not enjoy a board-game party, but hey, I'm the one with the big birthday, and anyone who doesn't like it can stay home. Hurrah once more!

That's a lot to be thankful for, but that's not all. It's just all I can talk about. For now.

How about one more big hurrah?!

Yawn

2011-11-18T12:05:00.001-05:00

A very intelligent student wants to know why we can't have a class in napping: "We have classes in running and bowling, so why not napping?"

She has a point. I've never seen much difference between napping and bowling, so if students can earn a credit toward graduation by learning to bowl, why not earn a credit for learning to nap?

"We could learn all kinds of stuff--the health benefits of napping, power-napping techniques, sleep disorders, whatever," she said.

Sounds like my kind of class! Maybe I should write a course proposal--right after a little nap.

Rise or fall?

2011-11-18T07:33:00.001-05:00

There comes a point in every construction project when it's hard to tell whether it's a new building going up or an old one falling down, and our new dorm has reached that point. Standing bleak and forbidding on the edge of campus, it could be the ruin of a totalitarian Ministry of Obfuscation, a gateway to some bleak bureaucratic hell.

The artists' renderings indicate that this building, when completed, will present a warm and welcoming face to anyone approaching that side of campus, but right now it looks as if someone ought to hang a sign: Relinquish hope, all ye who enter here! But then the sound of nail guns and heavy equipment reminds me that this is not the ruin of something old but the promise of something new. It's exciting to see the steady progress day by day.

Now if I can just see similar signs of progress in the students who will live in that dorm, I'll be happy.

Come fly with me

2011-11-16T14:54:00.001-05:00

How is a hospital waiting room like an airport terminal? There's nothing to do but sit and wait; everything in the gift shop is overprices; and nobody really wants to be there.

At least the hospital has good wireless internet--free! The food options are pretty sad, though. All they'll let me eat is the wretched gluey "smoothie" that provides contrast for the CT scan I'll have in an hour or so. I'm still trying to get caught up on the work I missed last week so I've been sitting in the waiting room finishing up that pile of papers I started grading in the Zurich airport last weekend. I hope my bleak and colorless surroundings won't seep into the grades.

I'm really hungry because I haven't been allowed to eat anything since breakfast, but it just about kills me to swallow this thick white flavorless paste. As a food item I give it a D-. I hope its medical benefits earn a better grade.

I had a terrific smoothie at one of the airports I visited last week--but now I can't even remember which one, except I know the guy who waited on me didn't speak English. Could have been Brussels. Could have been Chicago.

A few more sips and a few more minutes and they'll take me back and strap me down into the big machine that will transport me to a colorless place where the only conversation will come from a recorded voice telling me not to fasten my seatbelt but to breathe in, hold my breath, and then breathe out. And again.

Restless legs

2011-11-15T07:20:00.001-05:00

Cleaning the bathroom at 4 a.m. on a weekday is just wrong--on so many levels. Cleaning is best done on Saturday morning during Car Talk or Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Four a.m. on a weekday is the right time for sleeping. Case closed.

And yet today I found myself cleaning the bathroom at 4 a.m. Why? Because I'm still suffering from jet lag and running on Prague time; because no matter how hard I tried to keep awake last night, I fell asleep before 9; and because my feet hurt.

All that walking in Prague (in a broken shoe) followed by all that sitting in tight quarters on the flight home resulted in leg pain that won't quit. Yesterday I taught in pain, worked in pain, and sat through a faculty meeting in so much pain that I kept shifting in my seat trying to relieve first one area of pain and then another. By evening I was so exhausted that I slept soundly--until the drugs wore off and the pain woke me up. If there is no comfortable way to sit, stand, or lie down without pain, then the only thing to do is keep moving.

So I cleaned the bathroom. It needed to be cleaned and I needed to keep moving, so we worked well together. Later on I'll regret getting up so early, but I'm looking forward to the time when this pain will be a distant memory and my early morning bathroom-cleaning will be good for a laugh.

Meanwhile, can somebody get me an aspirin?

Peripatetic in Prague (in pictures)

2011-11-14T09:01:00.001-05:00

People kept asking me why I was taking pictures of the table decorations at my hotel in Prague. "You must really like cactus," said one attendee, and the hotel manager told me I could take one home if I liked them so much. But it wasn't the cute little cacti that excited my interest. It was the curly little wood shavings dyed in the hotel's signature colors, saffron and scarlet. That's right: in Prague I found myself surrounded by--

[drum roll, please]

EXCELSIOR!

I explained several times that before the era of styrofoam peanuts, curly little wood shavings used as packing material were called Excelsior. Many people humored me by nodding and smiling and acting as if they cared. I can't help it: I encounter excelsior so rarely in the real world that it gives me a little frisson of pleasure.

Pleasure was easy to find in Prague, even when I didn't know where I was or what I was seeing. I spent a lot of time lost even though I had a map. You know how at Disney World you can orient yourself by looking for the spires of Cinderella's castle rising above all else? In the Old City of Prague, such spires rise on every other block, but that doesn't mean it's easy to get to them. Note to self: next time, take a guidebook.

At the center of it all is the lovely Vlatava River, lined with magnificent historic buildings, but you don't have to walk a block to find something thoroughly modern, like guns hanging in the courtyard outside an art museum or workers carefully removing and replacing ancient cobblestones so they can repair the drains.

The city's palimpsest of history is apparent in its architecture, with the lines of old construction visible despite newer additions, but Prague is more than just a picturesque tourist site. I had intended to tour the old Jewish quarter Friday afternoon but got well and thoroughly lost and then had to meet friends for supper, so I thought I'd try again Saturday morning. Stupid me: I had forgotten that Europe's oldest functioning synagogue would be busy functioning as a synagogue on Saturday. Earlier, I had walked up to the castle intending to finally get inside St. Vitus Cathedral, but they were celebrating Mass at the time so I stayed outside.

Despite my poor planning, I found plenty to enjoy in Prague. I got a ridiculous amount of pleasure from listening to these five gentlemen playing jazz on Charles Bridge as the sun fell and the full moon rose over the river on Friday evening.

By then my feet needed a break so I went down to this courtyard in Malo Strana to sit under the autumn leaves and await my dinner companions. While there, I noticed a bride and groom getting their pictures taken. I had seen several over the course of the evening and I saw more the next day: young brides in full white dresses, veils, and tiaras, accompanied by men in formal wear and photographers carrying masses of equipment. They posed on benches under the trees in Malo Strana, on the steps to Charles Bridge, near the Astronomical Clock, and in front of any number of religious statues all along the way. The brides looked chilled in the cold, damp air, and some of them bundled their long trains over their arms to avoid dragging them over the rough cobblestones.

This Asian couple bundled up against the chill, but I was most impressed by the groom's jacket: you can't tell from the photo, but the silver-gray fabric was so shiny it sparkled and shimmered in the autumn light.

I wandered around so randomly and saw so much I didn't quite understand that I've resolved to someday go back--with a guidebook and a good map and a plan and perhaps, if I'm feeling a little silly, a banner with the strange device, "Excelsior!"

Dullest

2011-11-13T15:54:00.001-05:00

Why hello, Dulles airport! Pleased to meet you! Except I can't say my first impression is all that impressive. Perhaps I'm just exhausted from enduring a flight long enough to allow me to finish Orhan Pamuk's Snow, take a long nap, and grade a dozen student papers. Perhaps I'm just a little cranky because I'm still wearing the same clothes I put on Saturday morning and it's now Sunday evening. Perhaps I'm just spoiled from the ease of navigating security in Brussels, Zurich, and Prague. For all these reasons and more, dear Dulles, I'm not finding you very friendly.

First, you're just dull. You sent me on this long labyrinthine hike through blank white corridors without making any attempt to entertain me. I'm not demanding those colorful neon lights that zoom through the tunnel in Chicago, but would it kill you to hang a mural or two? Give us something to look at while we're walking up this staircase and down that one and waiting for the shuttle to terminal A and going up this escalator and up that one. And I don't expect going through customs to be a barrel of laughs, but a little color on the white walls would make it feel less penal.

And take security--please. I know you need to make sure I'm not dangerous, but it's really not necessary to bark out orders like a drill sergeant. When you're dealing with people who have been cramped in economy-class seats for seven hours, a little gentleness wouldn't hurt. I'm tired and slow and suffering from jet lag, so if I forget to remove the Chapstick from my pocket, please don't assume I'm plotting to destroy the universe. And oh yeah, I forgot about those two Swiss coins in my pocket. Obviously the act of a desperate criminal.

On the plus side, you've provided very nice free wireless internet access, which will keep me occupied for the three hours I'll spend awaiting my flight. Unfortunately, you've got about twice as many passengers as seats in the terminal right now, and the constant announcements begging for volunteers to give up their seats on oversold flights are a little distracting. And now my battery is nearly dead. If I give up my seat to hunt for an outlet, I may never find a seat again. If you're going to force me to give up either my chair or my internet access, it's going to be a very long evening.

So thanks, Dulles, for being there when I need you, but after tonight, it's over between us. I'm moving on.

The imaginary Alp

2011-11-13T02:33:00.001-05:00

From what I can see from the airport, Zurich looks an awful lot like Brussels: blank and white. They tell me there are Alps out there somewhere, but I'll have to take it on faith since the only thing I can see is fog. Everywhere I go in Europe, fog follows.

In Prague we had a day and a half of bright sunshine, which fortunately coincided with my walking-around-the-city time. I walked so much that my right shoe began to fall apart, and I ended up with blisters and sore joints. I'm thankful that today I'll mostly be sitting.

Photos will come later: I'm using a borrowed camera and I don't have a way to transfer the photos to the computer right now. Meanwhile, I'm carrying mental images: the view from the castle; the teetering tombstones in the old Jewish cemetery; the accordion-playing man singing Russian folk songs on Charles Bridge. Yesterday when I was just about ready to fall over from walking all morning, I restored my tissues with a meal I won't soon forget: smoked pork with creamy horseradish sauce and dumplings. I've got to find the recipe!

Today I'll while away the travel time by reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow, jumping from the fogbank into the blizzard. I just hope this fog doesn't follow me home.

On not suffering at a suffering conference

2011-11-11T15:08:00.001-05:00

Last year's Making Sense of Suffering conference was so terrific that I was worried that this year's conference could not possibly live up to my expectations.

It could. Let me count the ways:

1. Intense listening. With so many presenters for whom English is a second (or third or fourth) language, we can't listen lazily or we'll miss too many interesting ideas.

2. So many interesting ideas! My must-read list is getting longer by the minute. Here's one question tossed off today: "Is there a biological purpose for suffering or is it just an unpleasant side effect of being sentient?" Discuss.

3. Discussions that continue outside of sessions over meals and coffee and long walks through the city.

4. The city! I can't recall the last time I saw anything so lovely a the full moon hovering over the opera house this evening. Everywhere I turn, I see something beautiful or historic or at least interesting.

5. The language! I don't speak a word of Czech but I keep hearing phrases that bring back my high school Russian.

6. Five guys who looked like my Lithuanian uncles standing in the evening cold on the Charles Bridge to entertain tourists by playing New Orleans jazz. In addition to a trumpet, clarinet, standing bass, and banjo, the combo included a man using eggbeaters and thimbles to play a washboard. And they were not bad.

7. Talking about my Lithuanian forebears with a scholar who teaches in Lithuania. I need to go!

8. Sharing ideas about suffering with philosophers, literary scholars, theologians, a linguist, a doctor, and others from America, Portugal, South Africa, England, Turkey, Montenegro, and I don't remember where else. I don't believe I've ever met anyone from Montenegro before.

9. Gaining insight about the European monetary crisis from intelligent people who are right in the middle of it.

10. The refreshing absence of anguish over Joe Paterno.

Resilient, positively

2011-11-10T12:01:00.001-05:00

At a conference with attendees from 12 countries and many disciplines, I'm bound to hear and see some interesting things:

1. The verb resile, which is what resilient people do. I don't recall ever hearing this word before but dictionary.com tells me it means either rebound or recoil, words that carry very different connotations.

2. Making sense as a phrase not universally positive in connotation: apparently, one can make either constructive or destructive sense of suffering.

3. People smoking over supper in pubs (yuck!).

4. Smoked trout on the breakfast buffet (yum!).

5. Engineers at the other end of the table tossing around terms like synergy and next-gen and The Cloud (which seems to be capitalized even when uttered orally).

6. Clouds so thick and heavy that the city is shrouded in darkness by midafternoon.

Tomorrow's forecast calls for sunshine, which is good because I'll be setting out on an excursion in the afternoon. Despite the weather, I intend to resile--in the best sense of the word.

Terrible twos

2011-11-08T13:08:00.000-05:00

Number of hours I spent traveling from Ohio to Prague via West Virginia, Chicago, and Brussels: 22.

Number of minutes I spent trying to figure out how to turn on the lights in my very dark hotel room: 22. Okay, that's just a guess. It could have been 2 or 122 for all I know since there's no clock in the room. If there are any hidden cameras in this room, someone somewhere is getting a pretty big laugh.

Number of e-mails and phone calls I made last week to make sure I would be able to use my college credit card to pay for my lodging in Prague: 2.

Number of seconds it took for that same credit card to be rejected at the hotel: 2.

Number of times I went down to the front desk to first borrow an adapter so I can plug in my laptop and then return the adapter they loaned me because it didn't fit the outlet: 2.

Number of hours I'll need to sleep before any of this starts making sense: 22.

Partly foggy

2011-11-08T04:46:00.002-05:00

Here I sit in the Brussels airport awaiting my flight to Prague and wondering whether the tune I'm hearing from the speakers can possibly be what it sounds like: a light jazz version of "Little Brown Jug."

I may be hallucinating. I got approximately zero sleep on the seven-hour transatlantic flight, thanks to sharing close quarters with a large man who (1) snored; (2) squirmed like a restless two-year-old; and (3) spoke no English. Lack of sleep plus in-flight entertainment (Planet of the Apes!) could well lead to auditory hallucinations of the "Little Brown Jug" kind.

I've never been to Brussels before and I can't really tell you what it's like because all I've seen is the airport. Belgium is pretty well socked in with clouds and fog, so from the air it just looked white. We plunged into this dense cloud layer and I kept expecting to emerge beneath the clouds, but these clouds extended right down to the runway.

Last year about this time I had about two hours to rest between the all-night flight and the first conference session, so that first day passed in a fog of tiredness. This year I'm arriving a day early so I can meet up with friends for supper tonight and then sleep off the travel weariness before the conference begins. As much as I appreciate this impressive fog, I don't intend to take it with me.

Dream trip

2011-11-07T08:34:00.000-05:00

I show up on campus on the morning I'm supposed to fly to Prague and all I have to do is teach one class, grab my passport, itinerary, and computer bag, and hightail it down to the airport--but power is out all over campus and the card-readers won't work so I can't get into my building to get my passport. Trip cancelled.

Relax: it's just a nightmare. I had no problem preparing for my trip or getting into my building, and my passport is now safely tucked into my bag so all I have to do is read some drafts and teach my class and I'll be on my way to Prague.

For weeks people have been asking whether I'm excited about my trip, and I've been saying yes even when it's not remotely true. I do the same thing when they ask about my sabbatical, but the fact is that I can't allow myself to get excited about an event that I can't quite believe is actually going to happen. It's a flaw in my emotional makeup: possible disasters, no matter how unlikely, are always more real to me than probable blessings.

I booked my flight to Prague, wrote my paper, and reserved hotel rooms while suffering from the constant fear that something disastrous would occur to prevent the trip: my travel grant request would be rejected (it wasn't); my parents' health would take a downward turn (it didn't); the Occupy people would swarm the conference venue (they haven't). Not until last Friday did I allow myself to start thinking about the people I'll see in Prague and how I'll spend my free time.

Am I excited? You bet I am. Once again, the disaster I've been preparing for has remained imprisoned within my nightmares, and I couldn't be more delighted.

Just don't ask about my sabbatical. A lot of things can happen between now and January!

Creative Nonwriting

2011-11-03T14:01:00.000-04:00

I just heard a student accidentally refer to my nonfiction class as "Creative Nonwriting," but trust me on this: we won't be developing a major in Creative Nonwriting any time soon, despite its potential popularity.

Many students arrive on campus as highly accomplished nonwriters and devote four years to further developing their Creative Nonwriting skills. Some are talented enough to tackle a PhD in Creative Nonwriting. In fact, much of a PhD's process depends upon the ability to come up with creative reasons to not write, so perhaps many of my colleagues have made careers out of Creative Nonwriting.

I suppose we could design a major in Creative Nonwriting, with Intro to Excuse-Making serving as the prerequisite for Survey of Procrastination I and II, Research/Shmesearch, Technology for Nonwriting, Nonreading for Nonwriters, Nontheory of Nonwriting, and so on. Such an unusual major would sell itself (negating any need to do any advertising nonwriting), but one big obstacle stands in the way of implementing a successful Creative Nonwriting program: Who will write the course proposal?

An educated adjective

2011-11-03T08:59:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I saw a letter (from someone smart enough to know better) that included the phrase "an educated populous." An educated populace ought to know the difference between populous (an adjective) and populace (a noun), even though they are indistinguishable when spoken: A populous city has a large populace. See? Easy.

More writers might be aware of the distinction if the words were used more frequently in writing, but the Google N-Gram Viewer indicates that the use of the words in books has declined steadily in the past two centuries

Of course, both words appear in such a teeny percentage of printed texts that the difference is not as dramatic as it might look. And of course this chart does not indicate whether the words are used correctly; for that, let's see how many times these phrases appear in a basic Google search:

an educated populous: 33,300 hits
an educated populace: 505,000 hits

So the general populace seems to be getting it right most of the time, but those 33,300 hits disturb me. Who are these people? The first hit led to an article with the phrase an educated populace in the title, so why did it show up at the top of the list for an educated populous?

Then I looked at the web address. Bingo: an educated populous was part of the url. Who got it wrong: the original author, the headline writer, or the tech person?

Many of the hits under "an educated populous" came from blogs, which is not surprising (and new searches will lead to this one as well!), but I was a little surprised to see an educated populous in this official statement on the site of a teachers' association: "Public education benefits all of us, from the children whose lives it enriches, to the rest of us, who, though out of school, reap the benefits of an educated populous."

Except for those whose education fails to introduce the difference between populous and populace. Time to go reap some more benefits of education, people! Let's not be part of the 33,300!

Follow the breadcrumbs

2011-11-02T09:24:00.003-04:00

At a teaching workshop this morning, a colleague inspired an idea for an assignment in an upper-level literature class: Follow the Breadcrumbs. Make students read an academic journal article and choose a source cited in that article; read the cited source and choose another source it cites; follow the breadcrumbs back through five or six sources and then write some kind of short paper analyzing the scholarly conversation. Would this work? Would students simply select the shortest/easiest sources or would they engage deeply with challenging ideas? I'm accepting suggestions.

A time to tweak

2011-11-01T16:34:00.000-04:00

Every time I mention this particular project, someone wants to tweak it some more. Frankly, I'm tired of tweaking. There's a time to tweak and there's a time to be done tweaking, and I am done.

Ecclesiastes tells us that for everything there is a season--a time to be born and a time to die, a time to sow and a time to reap, a time to mourn and a time to dance--but it doesn't say anything about tweaking or other important activities:

A time to tweak and a time to be done tweaking.

A time to speak and a time to speak a little louder.

A season for keeping the snow shovel by the front door and a season wherein the snow shovel should be kept out of sight.

A time to fidget and a time to sit on your hands.

A time to change the channel and a time to hide the remote.

A week to relax and a year to pay for all the relaxing.

A time for keeping something yummy bubbling in the crock-pot all day long and a time for stashing the crock-pot in the closet.

A time to write blog posts about times and seasons and a time to close the computer and go home to enjoy whatever's bubbling in the crock-pot.

Thank Q

2011-10-31T14:30:00.003-04:00

A colleague has decided to stop writing comments on paper in cursive because her students can't read her writing. Nothing wrong with her handwriting--it's neat and regular enough to earn high marks from my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Davis, who walked up and down the rows with her white hair piled high and a white handkerchief up her sleeve as she drilled her students relentlessly in the correct way to make loops of uniform height and tilt. My colleague can do that; her problem is that her students never learned to write in cursive and have little experience reading it.

I suppose it had to happen eventually, but already? As we move inexorably toward the day when texts written in cursive will be legible only to those with special training, let us pause to celebrate the moments those who don't learn cursive are cursed to never know:

As a child I had struggled to get the loops of the lower-case f to go the right way, but what a thrill it was to master the upper-case Q with its big loose swirl. Uniformity was the goal: Mrs. Davis frowned upon teetering cross-ties on the lower-case t and roundly condemned dotting an i with an open loop. But even the Palmer Method cannot hog-tie the personality forever; by junior high my friends and I were vying to create distinctive handwriting--dotting i's with bubbles or hearts or varying the way I wrote the capital Z to display varying levels of formality and flair.

Journalism killed my handwriting. I always took copious notes very quickly, but those hasty scribbles had a very short shelf-life: if I didn't transcribe my notes within 24 hours, they became about as legible as the Thorkelin transcripts of Beowulf.

These days my handwriting is hopeless. I think back to the first day of tenth-grade biology class when Mr. Hatcher told us students to go to the blackboard and write a word indicating something we valued, and amidst all the adolescent scrawls one girl I didn't know (yet!) wrote "Intelligence" in a cursive script so perfect it made the rest of the words on the board look lazy, unpolished, and stupid. Today all my handwriting looks that way, so I write comments on student papers electronically, thereby enabling students to forget that cursive writing ever existed.

The language of classification of ancient handwriting is almost hypnotic: insular half uncial, Merovingian minuscule, prescissa, curialis, cursiva Anglicana--words to conjure by or curse. How will future generations classify twentieth-century American cursive hands? Cursiva Mrs-Davisana, bubble-i totter-t, journoscrawl? It won't be long now before the experts unleash their vocabulary, tack a name to every departure from the Palmer Method, and direct disseration research projects on deciphering immense corpora of hand-written postcards and thank-you notes.

They won't find my thank-you note to Mrs. Davis because I never wrote it, so I'll write it here: Thanks, Mrs. Davis, for forcing me to master a skill that flourished for a while and served me well but will soon become a lost art.

Singing the Special-Case Blues

2011-10-28T16:36:00.003-04:00

I know the deadline's 9 a.m.
but I need an extension:
my goldfish died, my laptop fried,
and in case I haven't mentioned--

I'm special!
So special!
You can't expect a guy like me,
so special and extraordin'ry,
to follow rules so arbitrary
because you see:
I'm special.

I know it's Sunday afternoon
and you enjoy relaxing,
but I need you to hop right to
my project--and I'm asking

Because:
I'm special!
So special!
You can't expect a prof like me,
so special and extraordin'ry,
to follow rules so arbitrary
because you see:
I'm special.

There's a very special prize in store to the first person who sets this to music and sends me a recording!

Hot hot hot (and cold)

2011-10-27T19:46:00.000-04:00

I admit it: I gave up on our pepper patch way back in September. Fortunately, it didn't give up on me.

I would blame the weather, but I'm not sure which weather to blame: the cold, wet spring; the hot, dry summer; the incessantly soggy fall; or the warm days and pleasant nights extending well into October. The peppers grew slowly and ripened late; we've had some nice hot chilis and poblano peppers on and off, but those twentysomething pimento pepper plants produced maybe one edible specimen all season long.

I gave up picking peppers after school started and I haven't really thought about them since, but the peppers kept growing. This afternoon the temperature dipped into the 40s and the forecast calls for several cold nights, so any pepper that remains on the plant will soon freeze and rot.

This evening during a break in the rain I sloshed on down to the pepper patch to pick anything still worth picking: a few underripe habaneros, a handful of jalapenos, two (!) green pimentos, a pile of lovely red and green chilis, and about a dozen of the prettiest poblano peppers you've ever seen--small, yes, but deep green and glossy enough to hang from a Christmas wreath.

About halfway through the pepper patch I found some plants still covered in blossoms. My hands were numb with cold and tingling from touching capsicum oils, but the pepper plants were still devoted to producing new fruit. I'm afraid the next few nights will put an end to their endeavors.

Now I have this big pile of peppers in my kitchen. The weather outside may have turned wintry, but inside I've got poblanos to keep me warm.

Shopping 101

2011-10-27T08:31:00.001-04:00

It's the end of a hectic and confusing day full of many commitments and minor catastrophes and you find yourself standing in line at the grocery store trying to buy a gallon of milk before you can finally get in the car and drive home and get some supper and put up your feet and let your neck muscles begin to un-knot themselves, and the only thing standing between you and escape is the woman in front of you in line, who, despite her youth and apparent alertness, has somehow reached full adulthood without knowing how to shop.

How can this be?

How can any reasonably intelligent human being stand for eight or ten minutes in a checkout line without making any effort to locate her billfold and count her cash? With all those exhausted shoppers behind her, why does she wait until the cashier tells her the total and only then open up her immense purse and begin a desultory search through random detritus before finally happening upon her billfold? And then why does she peel off the bills as if in slow motion and dump all her change on the counter so she can count out dimes, nickels, and pennies to provide exact change?

Nothing against exact change--it's always a pleasure to get rid of the loose bits of currency clogging up purses and pockets. But if you're planning to hold up a whole line full of shoppers while you count out coins, then it might be a good idea to locate your money while the cashier is scanning your groceries. In fact, finding your money would be a great way to entertain yourself while waiting your turn in line. What else are you going to do--read soap-opera magazines? That way lies madness.

But madness also lies in trying to re-educate total strangers who have never learned how to shop in a busy store without making other shoppers so angry they're tempted to reach out and grab a soap-opera magazine so they can roll it up and batter the thoughtless shopper mercilessly about the head and shoulders. Bad shopper! Bad bad bad!

But we don't do that, do we? We stand there stoically gritting our teeth and biting our tongues and waiting patiently to pay for our purchases. We use our time well: we find our money and hold it tightly in our hands. Very tightly. Don't loosen your grip for a moment or that hand will reach for a magazine and start rolling it up.

Doomed to Dune

2011-10-25T12:54:00.002-04:00

Learning works both ways: I teach students and students teach me. Sometimes their papers remind me of pleasures I've long forgotten, like playing jacks at recess or watching Scooby-Doo on Saturday morning, and sometimes they inspire me to read something I've never read. A few years ago a capstone student wrote a paper on House of Leaves and I felt obliged to read it so I could offer appropriate guidance, an experience I've never regretted. One of my current capstone students introduced me to Poe's Journal of Julius Rodman, which I look forward to reading if only to see how Poe plays with the conventions of the travel narrative.

And then there's Dune.

Yes, one of my students is writing about the Frank Herbert novel full of sand and spice and great big worms. I've read it before, possibly during my adolescent science-fiction phase or as an assignment in the science fiction class I took in grad school. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with science fiction, but rereading Dune is pushing me closer to the hate end of the continuum.

There is no denying that Dune is ripe for an ecocritical reading and I have no doubt that my student will produce a brilliant essay, but I don't find it fun reading--and not just because you can't even get to the first chapter without first wading through a thick glossary of names and nouns and references to historical events.

I skipped the glossary. I just don't have the energy to learn a whole new language right now.

And I'm tired of The Chosen One. Why does every science-fiction universe have to feature a Chosen One whose coming has been foretold through countless eons? And why does he have to be a raw adolescent with understanding beyond his years? And why does he have to have a half-dozen different names? The Desert Mouse, the Duke of Earl, the Dumpster-Diving Dynamo of Doom--can't anyone just call a hero Eric?

What irks me most in Dune, though, is the constant ominous tone. Every idle conversation hides a hidden meaning that may spell doom--DOOM!--for poor old Eric and his ilk. (Er, make that Paul.) Every breath our hero breathes might mean The End of the World As We Know It. If there's never a dull moment, then all moments are equally charged with potential disaster, which gets tedious. I keep wanting to grab Our Hero by the shoulders and tell him to for heaven's sake lighten up a little. Kurt Vonnegut knew how to infuse playfulness and humor into the bleakest science-fiction scenario, but Frank Herbert seems to have suffered from a severe deficiency of fun.

Unless you consider worm-riding fun. I'll admit that the giant worms are a nice touch. I just wish one of them would come along and swallow up the book so I won't have to finish reading it. I wouldn't even mind paying the library fine.

Shades of gray

2011-10-24T07:53:00.000-04:00

I walked to the upper meadow yesterday to see some fall color before everything turns dull and brown, and there I saw deer tracks, a roly-poly groundhog scuttling off into the underbrush, and this bird. It's a juvenile woodpecker of some sort, about the size of a hairy woodpecker but fluffier and with just a hint of red on the forehead and chin. Its dull gray plumage blends right in with the gray tree bark, and every time I stepped closer, it would scoot around to the other side of the tree or fly to another branch. A pretty boring way to spend a lovely afternoon, but I've been struggling with a sinus infection and that's about all the excitement I could handle.

Missing the mark

2011-10-21T10:22:00.002-04:00

Every once in a while I like to show my students a draft of my dissertation all marked up with comments from readers. I repeatedly subjected individual chapters to rigorous proofreading, seeking and receiving substantive feedback from my committee chair and several friends who make their living writing and editing, and I revised extensively until I was certain that everything was perfect--but the penultimate draft still ended up with a word containing the letter L three times in a row.

If multiple careful readers equipped with advanced degrees can't catch an errant L, who can hope to produce error-free prose? Why do I keep encouraging students to aim for perfection if it's virtually impossible to hit the target?

Because if they can't hit the bullseye every time, I would like them to at least be allowed to stay in the contest.

Much as we'd like to deny it, much of academic life is contest: we compete for the approval of hiring committees, tenure committees, editors, grant institutions, and others with the power to make our lives wonderful or miserable. It's a bad idea to hand those readers easy reasons to reject our ideas, and if they're distracted by our inability to distinguish between its and it's, they're unlikely to be wowed by our brilliance.

Which is why I'm returning a set of sloppy papers without comments and offering students 24 hours to revise and resubmit. They probably won't see this opportunity as the gift it really is, but I'll achieve my goal if they move their writing a little closer to the target.

Safari day

2011-10-19T10:12:00.000-04:00

When bad winter weather causes schools to close, students know how to enjoy their snow day--but how will students around Zanesville, Ohio, spend their Lions-and-Tigers-and-Bears Day?

The hunt is on for exotic animals on the loose just 45 miles north of here after officers found a wild-animal collector dead and his animals set free last night (read about it here). Several school districts in the area cancelled classes and the sheriff urged people to stay indoors while officers search for more than 40 animals, including lions, tigers, wolves, black bears (which are native to Ohio), and grizzly bears (which are not).

Right now we have more questions than answers about this incident: How did the owner die? Who opened all the animals' cages? How many animals were released? Will the remaining animals be captured or will they all be destroyed? Which poses a greater danger: a fleeing cheetah or the armed men in hot pursuit?

The sheriff urged residents to stay home and leave the big-game hunting to the experts, and I sincerely hope all those idle schoolchildren will take that advice to heart--or if they can't resist the desire to go on safari, this would be a good day to explore the wonders of the imagination.

Accounts receivable

2011-10-18T12:55:00.000-04:00

This morning a student brought me a draft of a research proposal featuring an interesting and original thesis, well organized ideas, and a firm grasp of relevant theory, so it really doesn't matter that the draft was written on the back of a bundle of wrinkled receipts.

"I was at work," he explained. "I didn't have anything else to write on."

This morning my creative nonfiction students were chatting about what tools we need to work as writers: pens, pencils, and paper or computers, recorders, and iPads? Stacks of receipts didn't even enter the discussion, but I admire the dedication that inspires a student to lean on the counter at a retail store and scribble sophisticated ideas on whatever scraps of paper happen to be lying around.

"Of course I'll turn in the finished paper in the usual way," he said, but I'm not complaining. His unusual method reminded me that any hack with a word-processor can make vapid ideas look professional. Real writers, on the other hand, can transform mundane materials into writing that matters.

50/50 Update

2011-10-17T08:26:00.003-04:00

In the past two months I have thrown a paper airplane at a faculty meeting, stood in the cold rain listening to music that's not at all my style, played a Monty Python clip in a literature class, worn blue sparkly nail polish to the office, attended my first-ever college football game (which we won, suggesting that I ought to attend more often), and stolen an umbrella.

Borrowed. I borrowed the umbrella, and I am fully prepared to return it as soon as the person who left it behind at a Board of Trustees committee meeting steps forward and demands that I hand it over.

I have now reached number 20 on my 50/50 Challenge: 50 unusual, unexpected, or outrageous things to do the year I turn 50 (read about it here). I have broken no laws (unless someone gets really picky about that abandoned umbrella) and so far I haven't done anything that demands much preparation or funding, but a few of the more complicated items on my list are waiting for January, when my sabbatical begins.

Best of all, I have made some people really happy. Including me, which is sort of the point.

Autumn glow

2011-10-17T08:10:00.000-04:00

The setting sun provides backlighting for colorful autumn leaves, making them glow as if lit from within. Yellow dominates right now but splotches of red are beginning to appear on the hillsides. Soon the leaves will fall and merge into brown mush, but today the hills are aglow with the colors of autumn.

Lyrical list

2011-10-14T11:42:00.002-04:00

In Don Lee’snovel Wrack and Ruin, artist/welder/Brusselssprouts farmer Lyndon Song confesses to his masseuse that he stays awake nightsthinking about things.

What things?These things:

His life, money, weeds and aphids, sparks and puddlesand slag, sex, his aloneness, cormorants and least terns, reality TV, blueelderberries and flannel bush and cellulose and lamina and the transparency ofshed snakeskin, the fetch of wind swells, pecorino cheese, the cholo in the low-rider who had noddedand let him go through the intersection first, X-ray machines, globaldestruction. A few other things.

Last night I stayed awake far too long thinking not about these things but about the throbbing pain in my right foot caused by an unfortunate dishwasher-related incident. (Hint: don't dash across the kitchen with an armload of dishes without first ascertaining whether the door of the dishwasher is blocking your path.)

But at least I didn't have to think about pecorino cheese! It's amazing how a little pain can push all other worries right out of the bed.

Sink or swim

2011-10-13T10:02:00.000-04:00

When the chips are down and we're stuck between a rock and a hard place in a situation that separates the men from the boys, who will step up to the plate and take one for the team?

Scratch that. In some situations, cliches simply don't help. The question at hand is this: under what circumstances am I willing to make a significant sacrifice? I would give up my place in line at the grocery store to an exhausted mom shopping with three screaming brats and I would give up a kidney to save the life of someone I love, but what about situations that fall between the two extremes?

I am willing to make sacrifices

that benefit people I care about
to achieve goals I believe in
to follow leaders I trust
to work together with others toward a common goal.

The more of these conditions are present, the larger the sacrifice I'm willing to make; likewise, my willingness to sacrifice diminishes with each bullet-point that's missing. And if the sacrifice is not voluntary but forced--well, that just makes it feel like punishment.

Which is why no one celebrates a salary freeze.

But at least we're all in the same boat.

With the water rising and boulders in the way.

Heading straight for a waterfall.

Just call me Miss Quotation

2011-10-12T10:21:00.000-04:00

A few years ago a colleague got angry when the student newspaper published a fairly innocuous quotation in which my colleague, who has never committed a colloquialism since emerging from the womb, allegedly said that something "needs done."

"I would never say that," she insisted, and she was right but I didn't see the point in having hysterics about such a small thing--until a hack misquoted me as saying that a certain software system provides a convenient method of "distributing information out."

I would never say that! The phrase is so ugly it's polluting my page! It doesn't even sound like me! (I hope!)

But that raises the question: what do I sound like? This week I'll introduce my creative nonfiction students to voice, tone, and lyricism, elements of style that defy easy definition. We all have distinctive voices and sometimes like to play with other voices, but how do we pin down just what we mean by "voice"? We can speak with a high pitch or an angry tone or a playful mood, but how do we translate those voices to the written word without resorting to emoticons?

Word choice plays a part but it's not everything. Here is a word cloud formed from my recent blog posts. I see that I've been writing about my daughter and water and readers and the calming autumn colors suggest a peaceful walk through the woods, but the same word cloud could have been generated if I'd written a shrill rant about first wanting my daughter to drown readers in water and then going back to impact students with balloons.

But I wouldn't write that. The words are mine, but voice is made up of far more than just words. The question is, how do I communicate the concept of voice to people who think it would be perfectly normal for me to say "distribute information out"?

Breaking away

2011-10-10T11:00:00.000-04:00

Within the first five minutes after I arrived on campus this morning, three different people asked me what I'm doing here during four-day break (which really ought to be called "extra-long weekend"--but don't get me started). Here's what I did during the first half of my so-called four-day break:

Traveled across the state, chatted with my son, played Bananagrams (repeatedly), giggled at Galaxy Quest, rambled in the woods with my adorable daughter, photographed mushrooms and milkweed and purple asters, helped my daughter shop for an interview suit, watched my daughter and son-in-law cook, ate really good pancakes, washed dishes, enjoyed an exhilarating worship service, graded midterm exams, leaned back in a lawn chair admiring yellow leaves while composing haiku, finished reading a very long book that would have been just as tedious at half the length, allowed my daughter to paint my fingernails sparkly blue, watched some random guy photograph some random girl who was wearing a long white dress and buried in colorful leaves, drank my very first (and probably last) pumpkin spice latte, and traveled back home again.

That's enough excitement for one weekend. I need a break! Time to get back to work.

Duly noted

2011-10-07T11:08:00.001-04:00

Why should finding my name in an endnote give me so much pleasure? Few readers will ever notice me nestled amongst all that small print in the back of the book, and the reference to my work is so brief that it's unlikely to result in a flood of new readers. Nevertheless, seeing my name pop unexpectedly from the punultimate endnote produced a little frisson of delight, a reminder that an article I wrote eight years ago and published six years ago was actually read by a scholar and made an impact on his thinking, no matter how small.

A butcher, a baker, a museum curator

2011-10-06T13:40:00.001-04:00

What is a writer? Today my creative nonfiction students discussed essays suggesting that the writer is like a museum curator, a spelunker exploring an unknown cave, a prophet, or a healer, and we tried to develop our own brief metaphors for the writer's task: an explorer, a problem-solver, an advocate for social change. One student suggested that the writer is like a timepiece always reminding readers of the passage of time, ticking the moments from present to past as we hurry toward the future.

It wasn't an easy exercise. "Writers do too many things to fit into one sentence," said one student, while others struggled to find original ways to sum up the writer's task without resorting to cliches. I rejected my first attempt because it was too obviously stolen from a poem, and my two next efforts didn't quite satisfy me but when time was up I shared them anyway. Six writers sitting in a classroom struggling to write a single sentence crystallizing the role of the writer...this is who we are. This is what we do.

And you?

Just don't let an anvil fall on my head

2011-10-05T14:38:00.000-04:00

Imagine that you're walking down the road and someone tosses a red water balloon straight at your face. Pretty powerful: you would not fail to notice the impact of the balloon.

But then imagine that you are walking down the road and suddenly people start throwing all kinds of things all around you: cell phones and sofas, cream pies and basketballs, water balloons, watermelons, wisteria vines, and widgets. Suddenly, that red water balloon blends in with the chaos and becomes invisible.

This, I explain to my students, is why one really vivid metaphor can be more powerful than a dozen colorful images all vying for attention. Go ahead and smack readers in the face with an effective metaphor, but if the projectiles keep coming, don't be surprised when readers run away.

Wrack, hacks, and inky courage

2011-10-04T11:32:00.000-04:00

I griped about the quality of the AWP Writer's Chronicle last month, so it's only fair that I should applaud the current issue, which includes a bunch of interesting stuff:

1. An author interview that actually made me want to read something new. I've never read anything by Don Lee, but the interview inspired me to order his novel Wrack and Ruin. The main character raises brussels sprouts. I'm trying to remember the last time I encountered a brussels sprout farmer in a book and I'm drawing a blank.

2. A passionate essay by poet Martin Espada, who thinks poets should be less precious and more political. Commenting on Shelley's claim that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Espada writes,

Poets should have no trouble identifying with being 'unacknowledged.' They grouse about being ignored, about paltry attendance at readings and royalty statements that would cause most novelists to jump off a bridge. Yet poets also contribute to their marginalization by producing hermetic verse and living insular lives, confined to the academy or to circles of other poets, by mocking themselves as childish and unworldly, by refusing to embrace their role as unacknowledged legislators. The only antidote to irrelevancy is relevancy. The British poet Adrian Mitchell famously said: 'Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.'

3. A helpful article by Brenda Miller, "The Case Against Courage in Creative Nonfiction." She argues that the way to be courageous in creative nonfiction is not simply to let one's inner pain bleed all over the page but to focus on form. Caustic contents require sturdy containers; "For some writers," she says, "the conscious use of form can sometimes be the only way certain kinds of truths can be approached at all. Since these truths need to be contained more forcefully, form essentially becomes the writer's inky courage." She appreciates the "inadvertent revelations" that occur when "the essay now seems to be reveal information about the writer, rather than the writer revealing these tidbits directly to the reader." That's a fine line, but Miller provides some concrete examples and methods to help students achieve this kind of "inky courage."

Three good articles and a book full of brussels sprouts winging its way to my office. What's not to love?

The comma fairy would be appalled

2011-10-03T13:54:00.001-04:00

William Bartram never met a comma he didn't like. The eighteenth-century American botanist and explorer of Florida tosses commas in the air and wherever they land, there they lie. At first I found his prose annoying, but after a while it grows almost hypnotic, as here:

I had the good fortune to collect together a sufficiency of sticks, to keep up a light and smoke, which I laid by me, and then spread my skins and blankets upon the ground, kindled up a little fire and supped before it was quite dark. The evening was however, extremely pleasant, a brisk cool breeze sprang up, and the skies were perfectly serene, the stars twinkling with uncommon brilliancy. I stretched myself along before my fire; having the river, my little harbour and the stern of my vessel in view, and now through fatigue and weariness I fell asleep, but this happy temporary release from cares and troubles I enjoyed but a few moments, when I was awakened and greatly surprised, by the terrifying screams of Owls in the deep swamps around me, and what encreased my extreme misery was the difficulty of getting quite awake, and yet hearing at the same time such screaming and shouting, which increased and spread every way for miles around, in dreadful peals vibrating through the dark extensive forests, meadows and lakes, I could not after this surprise recover the former peaceable state and tranquility of mind and repose, during the long night, and I believe it was happy for me that I was awakened, for at that moment the crocodile was dashing my canoe against the roots of the tree, endeavouring to get into her for the fish, which I however prevented.

I could quibble about just about every comma in that passage but I won't. I find myself more and more eschewing commas where formerly I would have inserted them; future readers (if there are any left) will no doubt look over my prose and gasp over the commas I've omitted, but my defense is simple: I gave my share to William Bartram.

A dose of my own medicine

2011-10-03T13:13:00.002-04:00

When I observe a colleague's teaching in the classroom, I always give the same glib advice: "Just be yourself and pretend I'm not there."

Ha!

This morning four strangers observed my classroom teaching in order to judge my worthiness for a teaching prize, and I can tell you that (1) it is impossible to overlook the presence of four extra people and a video camera in an already crowded classroom and (2) the self I can be while being observed by strangers in charge of awarding a large prize is not exactly the same as my everyday self.

For one thing, my everyday self sleeps a little better, while my observed-by-strangers self suffers from nightmares--and not just the usual first-day nightmares about arriving in class late, unprepared, naked, and with my teeth falling out, but nightmares about (shudder!) chairs. Inadequate chairs, insufficient chairs, chairs with the backs falling off, trick chairs that tip as soon as someone tries to sit in them--such are the horrors of my visitation-eve nightmares.

I taught today's class a dozen times in my dreams, all of them disastrously, but the reality was, I guess, okay. Good enough. Maybe not my best work but probably the best I could do under the circumstances.

And best of all, no chairs were injured in the teaching of this class.

Quarterly report

2011-09-29T13:11:00.002-04:00

Last night poet James Harms explained why he wrote a series of third-person poems for his 2001 collection Quarters: "I had gotten too conversant with the first person and I was getting lazy," he said. "I thought I should learn something new about writing."

I learned something new about reading over the summer when I read four poetry collections searching for poems to use in my fall classes so my students would have some familiarity with the poems before the poet visited campus. I read quickly, seeking content appropriate for each class, and I had forged ahead five or six poems into Quarters before I noticed some spare change jangling around in each poem, and then I had to go back to the beginning to confirm my suspicion: yes, in a collection of 25 poems titled Quarters, each poem contains the 25-cent coin.

My obliviousness suggests that I ought to have been reading more carefully, but it also indicates how subtly Harms drops the quarters into the poems. Harms gave himself a very strict set of limits, from the number of poems (25) to the point of view (third person) to the number of words in the titles (one) to the necessity of including quarters in the poems, but none of the poems feel forced or artificial. The quarters appear in ordinary places--in a jukebox, on a sidewalk, under a girl's pillow after she loses a tooth--but the anticipation leads us to receive each quarter as a gift, a sparkling coin plinking down on the counter before our eyes.

My favorite Harms poems come from other collections, particularly Freeways and Aqueducts, in which "Elegy as Evening, as Exodus" reminds us that "The Pacific is nothing like its name. / For one thing, there are no silences, / despite the palm trees leaning into stillness." Halfway through that poem an ineffable silence utters itself in the blank space between stanzas when "I heard a name escape its word, // the wind between waves," a moment that takes my breath away to breathe the unspeakable silence.

But despite that, I find myself recommending Quarters to anyone seeking an introduction to Harms. All of his collections are good (and the cumulative effect is greater than the sum of its parts), but reading Quarters is like finding money on the street--no matter how smudged and battered the coin, it's impossible to resist bending over and picking it up.

Surprising the fibers

2011-09-28T15:46:00.001-04:00

"This little move will really sculpt your deltoids," says the exercise guru, and I can feel the chisel--right there.

"You'll feel this tomorrow," she says, but I feel it today--and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

"We're trying to surprise the fibers in your biceps," she explains, but my biceps do not experience that surprise alone. I am surprised to deepest fiber of my being every time I walk into the gym for my exercise class and even more surprised when the class is over.

"See you next time!" she calls out--and you know, I think she's right

Better or bitter?

2011-09-27T06:05:00.000-04:00

I have always believed that trial by fire refines character, that surviving adversity makes people better, but what if instead it makes us bitter and brittle? (Bittle? Britter?)

Since my brush with death two years ago I have watched myself becoming both more and less patient: more patient with struggling students, less patient with colleagues behaving badly; more willing to speak up compassionately when someone needs help, less willing to bite my tongue when nonsense gets bruited about in meetings.

Surviving the fire made me more open to new experiences (hey, let's take a bunch of students to California!) but less willing to waste time slogging through mediocre fiction or hollow scholarship. Life is too short to spend long hours in the company of Jude the Obscure.

Today I work harder and I demand more of myself than ever, but if I occasionally feel the need to watch an episode of The Office on my office computer, I make no excuses. I say No more often and stand up for my rights more firmly, and just today I demanded a well-deserved apology from someone who would have intimidated me into silence before.

I sort of like the new me but I wouldn't claim that I'm a better person. Bitter, yes: I struggle to keep the anger from bubbling over and poisoning my environment, but I'm always aware of the potent brew simmering away beneath the brittle surface. I may have survived my trial by fire, but deep inside the coals are still burning.