On (not) teaching in Texas

I'm probably not the only professor right now who's frantically finishing up spring semester syllabi while breathing a silent prayer of gratitude: I'm glad I'm not teaching in Texas. 

Let Texas stand for any state or system where legislators or governing boards are trying to force professors to comply with ideological constraints on curricula. Today everyone's talking about an article in Inside Higher Ed about Texas A&M University, where a philosophy professor has been told to remove Plato from his syllabus (?) and a History of Film class was deemed inappropriate for the core curriculum because it includes material on feminism and queer cinema. When students were informed that the course no longer counts toward their core requirements, enrollment started dropping--which may have been the point.

I'm most interested, of course, in how these strictures affect English professors. Here's the relevant portion of the article: 

English faculty members received an email Tuesday from senior executive associate dean of the college Cynthia Werner telling them that literature with major plot lines that concern gay, lesbian or transgender identities should not be taught in core-curriculum classes.

In a follow-up email Wednesday, Werner said, "If a course includes eight books and only one has a main character who has an LGBTQ identity and the plot lines are not overly focused on sexual orientation (i.e. that is THE main plot line), I personally think it would be OK to keep the book in the course." She also clarified that faculty may assign textbooks with chapters that cover transgender identity, so long as they do not talk about the material or include it on assignments or exam questions.

I'm trying to imagine the mental gymnastics an English professor would have to perform in order to comply with this, um, guidance. Okay, what if my course has seven books but two of them have minor characters or plot lines dealing with sexual orientation? What if none of the readings directly address sexuality but there's a whole lot of ambiguous subtext? How much ambiguous subtext is equal to one main plot? It's a word problem with too many variables and undefined terms, and even if my answer might satisfy the personal feelings of this one associate dean, who's to say that someone higher up might have a different interpretation of the rules?

And then what about literature that's not plot-driven? How many Walt Whitman poems vaguely referencing sexuality (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) would correspond to one book with a major plot dealing with sexual identity? Let's all play "Tiptoe Past the Subtext"! Would it even be possible to teach Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," or is some clever textbook publisher even now creating a bowdlerized version to remove anything that could be remotely perceived as offensive? (It would be a much shorter poem, which would certainly make some students very happy.)

I don't know how to teach Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Kate Chopin without directly addressing gender roles--or Susan Glaspell's Trifles, for that matter. Or Zora Neale Hurston's "Sweat." Or Ernest Hemingway's "Soldier's Home." Or Elizabeth Bishop or Jhumpa Lahiri or Toni Morrison or Alice Walker or Maxine Hong Kingston. Even when the "main plot" of a work of literature is not "overly focused" on gender or sexuality, those topics may still be relevant to class discussion and analysis. 

And as to the further guidance that it's acceptable to assign texts including the forbidden topics as long as we pretend those parts of the text don't exist--well good luck with that. Such a stricture is bound to backfire. The best way to get a group of students to read a text is to tell them that it's forbidden. So while I'm glad I'm not teaching in Texas, if I were, I'd be tempted to issue an anti-syllabus--a list of texts we're not permitted to read or talk about. That would be a fun couple weeks of teaching before I got fired.

Good thing I'm retiring at the end of the year, though, because someday we may all be teaching in the equivalent of Texas, and then what would I do? 

Signs and wonders

I looked at the dead bird at my feet and wondered whether it might be an omen.

I'd noticed the bird yesterday morning, a lively little house finch flitting around the feeders, its brilliant red head providing a flash of color on a bleak gray day. We get more purple finches here than house finches hereabouts and I was so excited to see this one that I took a (very bad) photo with my phone to send to my daughter. And then this morning I walked out to my car--reluctantly, because I did not at all relish heading back to work after winter break--and there on the driveway right next to my car door was a dead house finch. Frozen solid, with no sign of injury.

An omen!?

Ridiculous, of course, but there I was making my first visit back to campus in weeks (though it feels more like months) at the start of a new semester in a new year that also happens to be my final year of teaching before retirement, and I was looking for some reason to feel positive about all the annoying tasks I had to tackle today. Instead, nature delivered a dead bird. If I had one of the seers from Homer's Odyssey on hand maybe he could have told me what the bird portends, but those guys were mostly interested in interpreting auspicious actions of eagles. Would they even notice a tiny house finch dropping dead in my driveway?

As it happens, I saw eagles yesterday, a pair of them flying overhead near the Muskingum River. I had to crane my neck to see them and the only reason I could do that was that my son was driving my car, taking three of us to Columbus to meet up with five other members of the family for a Columbus Blue Jackets hockey game. This is the second year my son has treated us all to a hockey game as a Christmas gift, and this time he even took us all out to eat afterward--and did all the driving, two hours each way. I don't know if seeing eagles flying just overhead constitutes a sign of anything specific, but I'd say that having a son willing to provide such an excellent experience is a sign that he knows what makes a great family gift. (I was going to say it's a sign that he was raised right, but that feels just a tad self-serving.)

What a difference a day makes: hockey and eagles yesterday, work and a dead finch today. Work was hard but I did what I needed to do and I even got excited about meeting with a colleague to put together what promises to be a really fun presentation. I hope I'll have more eagle days coming up but I guess I can deal with the other kind as well. Maybe a dead bird in my driveway is just a dead bird in my driveway. 

Eagles overhead, though--that's another kind of wonder entirely.

Year in review, or why the world needs more doggerel

If I had a time machine today, I wouldn't go back decades to kill baby Hitler or tackle Lee Harvey Oswald before he pulled the trigger or demand that Dickens reveal the ending of Edwin Drood. No, I'd do something entirely selfish: go back to January 2025 and give myself a good sharp kick in the shin while delivering some pointed advice: Don't stop walking in the woods! Buy a new telephoto lens! And for heaven's sake write some poetry once in a while!

I've just spent a couple of hours reviewing the past year's blog posts and while I admit that it's been an odd year, a frustrating year, a year that taxed my annual quota of futile tasks, nevertheless I can see points where I could have made the year more bearable just by doing more of the things that bring me joy. I know why I cut down on long walks in the woods--knee injury plus broken telephoto lens plus enervating malaise--but I also know that walking in the woods with the camera provides an ideal palliative for futility and oddness and malaise, and it might have helped my knee recover more quickly too. 

And that's another thing I'd kick myself about: I injured my knee in early August but didn't seek medical help for two months, months of pain and misery and lack of sleep. What was I thinking? Granted, the cortisone shot took a while to work, but if I'd gotten it earlier I could have avoided two months of agony and perhaps even motivated myself to spend more time in the woods.

And what made me (mostly) stop writing poetry? I've never suffered the delusion that the weekly doggerel I used to compose was any good, but at least it provided an excuse to have fun with words while distracting from the surrounding chaos and, yes, futility. Maybe part of me thinks that doggerel is far too frivolous for times like these, but if I give up doggerel, the terrorists win. Or something like that.

I'm venting, but I'm mostly mad at myself. So many opportunities to connect with thinking people everywhere but mostly I've been griping about my aches and pains, my foundering career, and my impending retirement. Who wants to read all that? (Here's another kick! And another!)

Now that I've got that out of my system, let's take a look at some of the more memorable  moments of 2025 as recorded on this blog. 

My favorite blog post of the year happened in November after I drove home from my daughter's choir concert while pondering what happens When Wordsworth visits Wendy's. Another pair of holiday concerts inspired a post highlighting Angelic voices, eclectic spaces. 

Literature, like music, feeds my soul in more ways than I can measure, so it's a good thing that (Some) visiting writers rock! In November my soul gorged on visits with two visiting writers: Mary Roach, who taught us A little more than diddly, and Jonathan Johnson, whose homely poems made penultimate Friday fabulous.

It's no surprise that my classes inspired many blog posts in 2025, but I was surprised at how few of them deal directly with Artificial Intelligence. I may be obsessed with AI-induced paranoia and the awe of the Oracle, but I wrote more frequently about other teaching topics. I saw evidence of the continuing decline of intellectual curiosity in my first-year seminar class, where students got Pig-headed about Pygmalion while eluding illumination about "Illuminati." I applauded students willing to ask awkward questions, though some of them hit a bit too close to home.

In my upper-level writing classes, I pondered The tragedy of TL;DR and gave students Some practice in probing for the story as well as A step-by-step guide to writing a step-by-step guide. And my students taught me a thing or two, from the existence of a hybrid sport or elaborate prank to a novel suggestion for constructing a nap rubric.

But a whole host of posts dealt with frustrations endemic to higher education that go far beyond teaching. Some of these frustrations arise from this peculiar cultural moment, when higher education is being undermined and attacked from a variety of angles, requiring career academics to spend far too much time dealing with the Department of Aggravation, Obfuscation, and Angst (the AOA department). Federal Budget cuts hit home while cancelled grants undermine valuable projects.

Other stresses arise from my own peculiar situation: my skills are being underutilized so I'm Twiddling the time away, dealing with malfunctioning campus systems, tiptoeing around topics too sensitive to write about, and banging my head against the wall. My administrative role(s) often leave me Clambering through the claptrap and wondering why academics are often compelled to Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. On the one hand I'm agonizing over how far I should go to keep students comfortable, and on the other I'm devoting hours to trying to find sexier names for my courses so students might actually enroll--and all this leads me to echo a lament from a Douglas Adams character: Brain the size of a planet and they've got me pushing piddling paperwork.

And yet I found some things to celebrate in academe. I enjoyed Celebrating second chances while Turning up the sound on the symphony of learning. Students inspire me, which is Why I'd like to retire--but not today. As I enter my final year of teaching before retirement, I assure myself that I'm not just Mailing it in and I wonder what happens When the door swings back. There's no doubt that I'll need a new challenge, but where will I find it when my students are gone?

Maybe I'll be the type of old person who rambles on about my aches and pains, like the knee injury that cramped my style during fall break or the vertigo attack that helped me make the world a better place or the dreaded polyps that inspired a TMI alert.

Or maybe I'll charge full-bore into Grandma Mode, rambling on about my intelligent and talented grandkids ad nauseam or describing in great detail all the joys of Grandma and Grampa Camp: the wild times, the Things I had forgotten about having a house full of kids, the answers to questions no one asked, and the rare moments of Peace, quiet, and nothing to do.

Or maybe retirement will give me more time to focus on the joys of nature and travel: the Road trip back to winter, the bootless endeavor in the snow and the coming thaw, the encounters with Bird people, with Spring ephemerals, with Summer sunshine and sweet corn season and Pumpkins, peppers, pawpaws, pizzazz. At some point I need to get more closely acquainted with the chickens, who landed in the spring and eventually suffered a close encounter with life (and death) in the slow lane, and whose diminished numbers were enriched by the addition of Guineas in the mist.

Or maybe we'll find the funds for more home renovation projects, like the bathroom renovation that first required Excavating the family landfill. I wished for a self-demolishing bathroom, praised a project that's going well, and eventually found myself Flush with success, with a room that sparks a frisson of satisfaction every time I walk by.

The new bathroom provides tangible evidence of a job well done, but this was also the year that brought kudos for a writing job well done, when an academic journal editor's praise inspired me to beg readers to Stop me before I get "brilliant" tattooed on my forehead. It may not be as visible as a renovated bathroom, but that close and careful reading of my work reminds me that futility need not be the overarching theme of this past year, or of the next either. 

In fact, what this brief and perhaps agonizing plunge into my personal time machine tells me is that I don't have to settle for futility. I can carry on, fight the fight, grapple with boondoggles and conquer the claptrap--but to make it bearable I'll need to I buy a telephoto lens, go for walks in the woods, and make a regular date with doggerel.

Carrying the castle through stormy seas

"World's largest medieval cog found off Copenhagen" proclaimed the headline, but at first I couldn't make any sense of it because I was thinking of a cog as a tiny wheel essential to keeping machinery going, which doesn't sound like something happening in medieval times, but then I clicked and found out quickly that a cog is (or was, I guess) a type of ship, in this case a 90-foot-long cargo ship of a type known as the "draft horses of maritime trade in medieval northern Europe," carrying hundreds of tons of cargo from Point A to Point B and beyond.

So not a tiny but essential bit in a larger machine but a massive, strong, and sturdy bit of an even larger machine. Built around 1410, the shipwreck also features a brick galley well equipped to provide hot meals for the crew and "the first archeological evidence of a cog castle ever found," and before you get all excited about floating castles, in maritime terms a castle is a covered platform where the hard-working crew could shelter from the weather. (And where else am I going to flaunt my new vocabulary if not here?)

Just yesterday I was complaining (to a retired colleague and a couple of cashiers at the grocery store who got drawn into the conversation) about being nothing more than a cog in a machine, a tiny (but essential!) part that struggles to keep spinning silently even when gunk gums up the works, but now I wonder whether I ought to think of myself as a different kind of cog--a massive workhorse that carries a lot of weight to connect distant points, well equipped to weather storms while providing food, shelter, and comfort for my crew. 

Sure, maybe one day I'll flounder in one of those storms, but in the meantime I get to carry a castle. (No tiara, though. It's not that kind of castle.) 

Winter snooze-fest

As my prosthetic memory insists on reminding me, one year ago today I was on Tybee Island, Georgia, in the presence of egrets and skimmers and sunshine and seafood, and two years ago today I was doing about the same on Cedar Key, Florida. But winter break is not all sunshine and shorelines: 17 years ago today I'd just arrived in San Francisco for the MLA convention three time zones away from home, where my paper was scheduled so late in the day that I felt like I was sleep-walking through the whole presentation. Was it a brilliant paper? You'd have to ask the half-dozen listeners who bothered to show up. 

This year I'm at home for the holidays, being entertained by the photos sent daily by friends who are enjoying a cruise to Antarctica. Kayaking amongst whales and penguins and beautiful sunshine looks fabulous, but I am not the least bit envious of their good fortune because I know I could never take such a trip, thanks to a tendency toward severe seasickness. It's hard to watch whales through a constant scrim of vomit. (Trust me--I've tried!)

Yesterday I took my car out of the driveway for the first time since Sunday for a trip to the grocery store. That's about the extent of the excitement going on in my life right now. Not that I'm complaining: I received a pile of great books for Christmas plus a couple of beautiful jigsaw puzzles and I have some low-stakes administrative tasks I need to tackle, so I'm not going to say the days are just packed but I'll admit that they're not without incident. The incidents just don't make for interesting reading.

So I'm grateful for a gift my daughter gave me, a gift that shows how well she knows me. It never would have occurred to me to seek out a rack of Scrabble tiles spelling out THANKFUL, but when I unwrapped it on Christmas, it was exactly what I needed, a reminder of h0w much I have to be thankful for right here at home: word games, family, puzzles, chickens, so much more.

But still: would a little sunshine be too much to ask? 

Father and son working on a puzzle

Now who's going to help me eat all these cookies?

Two weeks ago I spent a Saturday morning baking two kinds of Christmas cookies and shooing the resident cookie-eaters away from the results: Don't touch! They're for a campus event! Finally I promised that I'd bake some more as we got closer to Christmas.

Both kinds of cookies earned praise at our campus cookie event, but I brought home a lot of the Russian Teacakes. They're well loved by many different names but no one ever asks for the recipe.

However, several people wanted the recipe for the other cookies I baked: Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cookies. I know exactly how long I've owned the recipe because it came inside a holiday recipe box we received as a wedding gift 43 years ago. Since then it's been a regular part of my holiday repertoire, along with Santa's Whiskers, Nick-0f-Time Cranberry White Chocolate Drops, cut-out cookies, and Jam Thumbprints. But I've never shared this recipe here--until now.

These cookies are rich and chocolatey, with a burst of yummy cherry in the middle. I always make a horrible mess assembling them, but you won't lack for volunteers to lick the spoon. 

Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cookies

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
10 oz. maraschino cherries, drained (but save the liquid)
6 oz. semisweet chocolate pieces
1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk

Stir together flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, and baking soda; set aside. In mixer bowl cream butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla; beat until well blended. Gradually add dry ingredients; beat until well blended. 

Shape dough into one-inch balls; place on ungreased cookie sheet. Press down center of each ball with thumb. Place a cherry in the center of each cookie.

In a small saucepan, combine chocolate pieces and sweetened condensed milk; heat, stirring, until chocolate is melted. Add 4 tsp. of reserved cherry juice. (If it's too thick to spread, add a little more.) Spoon frosting over each cookie, spreading to cover cherry. 

Bake at 350 degrees about 10 minutes or until done. Let cool before removing from pan.

 

Because that's how we roll

For our 43rd anniversary, my husband gave me a massive book on the history of Maori art, a gorgeous compendium I've been wish-listing for ages. I gave him a tomahawk steak the size of his head at the Bears Den restaurant in Cambridge, Ohio, part of our annual holiday trek to visit with the taxidermy, view the courthouse light show, and eat the best beef on the planet--or at least our part of the planet.

The book weighs 8.9 pounds. The steak weighed significantly less. A good time was had by all, except maybe the elk that appeared to be looking for the rest rooms.

Not photoshopped. That bone is at least a foot long.

Fingers to show scale. The pages are thick and glossy and covered with beautiful things.