Ephemeral beauty--blink and you'll miss it

Hiking conditions are treacherous today thanks to the massive rainstorms transforming our hillsides into mud. One year ago today the entire area was under flood waters, but this week's rains have been spaced out enough to keep creeks and rivers mostly within their banks. Campgrounds along the Muskingum are under water, but the roads are passable and our driveway hasn't been washed away, thankfully.

Spring ephemeral season is upon us and I can't miss the opportunity to see what's blooming, so this morning we took advantage of a brief break in the rain to trek up the wet and muddy hill behind our house and visit the spot where the earliest bloodroot blooms. I took my walking stick and my husband lent his arm on the slippery spots but still we couldn't get very close to some of the blooms on the steep, muddy slope, and then the moisture in the air kept fogging up my glasses and the camera's lens. 

But we still saw some beauties worth seeing: grape hyacinths livening up our lawn; trout lily leaves spreading over the forest floor but producing, so far, only one blossom; rue anemone brightening up the dark, rotted leaf cover; a blossoming pear tree my husband planted 20 years ago standing alongside the dying crabapple that probably dates to the earliest inhabitants of our property.

And bloodroot, of course. I don't know why I'm so enamored of this tiny white blossom poking up next to a solitary lobed leaf--a blossom so delicate it's easy to overlook, a leaf so unassuming that I can't quite believe it will grow nearly as big as my hand long after the blossoms are gone.

Yesterday my American Lit students encountered the word ephemeral and I found myself compelled to urge them to go out in the woods and look for lovely little spring flowers that bloom for a brief moment and then disappear. There's all over the place in April, I told them, but you'll miss them if you don't make an effort to look.

My students may be too young to be awed by the world's ephemeral beauties, but maybe one day one of them will step out into the woods with eyes wide open and gasp at the loveliness hiding in plain sight. At that point, my work here will be done. 

Grape hyacinths

Blossoming pear and crabapple

Buckeye leaves bursting forth

Trout lily

Rue anemone

Bloodroot

A patch of club moss I'd never noticed before

Some practice in probing for the story

How to give advanced writing students practice at conducting interviews? In my Life Writing class, we've worked on asking good questions and following up to clarify details, and we've spent some time practicing interview skills on each other and then writing up mini-profiles that integrate quotations in interesting ways. But my students know each other too well already--they need to practice interviewing strangers.

So I invited a retired colleague to visit my class. (Let's call her Dr. M.) I told my students very little in advance aside from her name and the fact that she's led an interesting life, and we devoted part of Monday's class to writing questions designed to probe for information that the interview subject might not volunteer all at once.

When Dr. M visited class on Wednesday, each student was required to ask at least two questions; for the first round I drew students' names randomly, and we got started off on the right foot when the first student asked our guest how to spell her name--which she did, slowly and clearly. Dr. M walked around the room engaging students individually and told some great stories about her 42 years as a professor, but she followed my instructions to the letter: if a student asked a vague question, she gave a vague answer. If Dr. M mentioned or even hinted at an interesting story, it was up to the students to follow up and tease out the details. Sometimes they did, but they let some great opportunities slip right by.

And then they had 20 minutes to write a mini-profile, one or two paragraphs based on what they'd learned. Considering the time constraints, some of these profiles were quite good--setting the scene, describing the subject's bright smile and abundant energy, selecting and incorporating quotes that revealed her voice and personality. One student started her mini-profile by stating that Dr. M "may carry the name of her mother and her mother before her, but she has made a legacy of her own." Nice work on such a short deadline!

But about half of my Life Writing students chose to use no quotations at all. Dr. M spoke slowly and clearly (as one would expect from a longtime professor of Communication) and my students were scribbling notes or typing on their keyboards throughout the interview, but somehow many of them had trouble turning their notes into quotes or accurate information. I saw Dr. M's name spelled five different ways and her hometown spelled incorrectly or connected to the wrong state. And then there was the gaffe about her favorite childhood book. I doubt that today's students are at all familiar with The Bobbsey Twins, but how could a student have misinterpreted that as The Bootie Twins?

Today we'll take a look at some of the great examples and I'll try to get some insight on their reluctance to use quotations. I've seen something similar in my American Lit Survey class--in-class essays for which students had full access to their textbooks, but about half of them didn't use any quotations at all. How do you analyze literature without attending to words? And how do you interview a bubbly, dynamic person for thirty minutes without capturing a single phrase worth quoting?

They can learn from this, I'm certain--and so is Dr. M. "You give me hope," she told my students, and those students able to recognize a great quote made certain to write that down.  

The tragedy of TL;DR

I swear I'm going to SCREAM the next time a student tells me she didn't like a reading assignment because it's too long. If the server put an extra scoop of ice cream on your sundae, would you complain about getting too much of a good thing? If a visit to a national park overloaded your senses, would you gripe about being intoxicated by too much beauty? Why, then, complain if a really lively, informative, thought-provoking article provides more good stuff than you can squeeze into a life crowded with so much doomscrolling and video gaming?

It's not even a difficult text--"Stone Skipping is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It," an excellent piece from Outside magazine by Sean Williams (click here for a fun read, and don't neglect the jaw-dropping videos of stones flying across vast lengths of water in apparent defiance of the laws of physics). Several students in my Life Writing class told me this article was their favorite assigned reading so far this semester, but those who didn't like it said it was just too long to read.

I pointed out that the author and editors could have chosen to cut any number of passages, such as the bit about the history of stone-skipping and its various monikers in other parts of the world. ("Czechs throw froggies, while Swedes say they're tossing sandwiches.") They could have cut details about Kurt Steiner's hermetic cabin, mental health struggles, and failed marriage, or they could have deleted the lovely passage about the search for the Platonic ideal of skipping stones. In fact, why didn't the editors demand that the author transform the whole amazing article into a simple series of bullet points? So much easier to read!

 

But so much emptier. Like many other aspects of life, stone-skipping is inherently futile--I mean, in the end all you've achieved is tossing a bunch of stones into a lake. How, then, can the subject of the article, Kurt Steiner, claim that stone-skipping is "a means for the redemption of mankind"?

 

Well you'll have to read the article to find out, and when you do, you'll note that the first five paragraphs provide a master class in introducing readers to a complex subject. The author starts from the outside and draws us deeper into the topic until we're well and truly hooked. 

 

First paragraph: Description of physical surroundings and Kurt Steiner's appearance, including the word "Rasputinesque," which we had to look up in class.

 

Second paragraph: Description of the man at work, relying on such vivid comparisons that it's worth quoting in full: 

Steiner stared across the creek and raised his right arm into an L, clasping a coaster-size sliver of shale the way a guitarist might hold a plectrum during a showstopping solo. But rather than fold his torso horizontally, as you might expect somebody skipping a rock to do, he stretched his five-foot-nine-inch body vertically, and then squeezed down like an accordion and planted his left leg to crack his throwing arm, placing the rock under so much gyroscopic force that it sputtered loudly as it left his hand, like a playing card in a bicycle wheel.

Third paragraph: The stone acting as the subject of one sparkly verb after another.

 

Fourth paragraph: Steiner's reaction to the toss, a passage that begins unveiling the subject's personality.

 

Fifth paragraph: Statement of purpose. "Kurt Steiner is the world's greatest stone skipper" plus a clear indication of why stone-skipping matters. I don't know about you, but if the Rasputinesque dude with the accordion body insists that stone-skipping will save the world, I want to know how.

True, it takes a while to get to the answer, and it's not so much an answer as a series of questions about how damaged people find meaning despite--or perhaps because of--the inherent futility of their actions. The article ends at a moment of indecision and uncertainty, but also a point of possibility, when just about anything could happen but there's only one certainty: any time is the right time to throw.

 

And any time is the right time to read a sparkling article about stone-skipping, as long as we don't reject it as TL;DR.

April's got game

What did April ever do to T.S. Eliot? Maybe he had a schoolboy crush on a girl named April who teased him and pleased him and then flounced off to leave him meditating on death and despair--why else would he describe April as "the cruellest month," a month "mixing / memory and desire" and "stirring / Dull roots with spring rain"? Eliot slaps cruel April across the face in The Wasteland, but Chaucer had other ideas.

In the Prologue to Canterbury Tales, April bring sweet showers and devotes itself to piercing, bathing, engendering, and pricking Nature in the whatsit. Chaucer's April inspires fertility and growth, awakening "smale foweles maken melodye" and quickening Nature's spirit, but April also inspires folk of all classes to go on pilgrimages, ostensibly to seek spiritual growth but also to indulge in a whole lot of eating and drinking and making merry with sundry tales both demure and bawdy. For Chaucer, April's got game!

For my students as well. Everyone engaged in academe knows that April is indeed the cruellest month, showering students and faculty alike with projects and deadlines, pricking the conscience with regret for every prior moment of procrastination, engendering songs of despair among students who see their gpas plummeting and profs who see their grading-piles growing. 

Everyone's a fool on April first, but my English majors and Writing Center tutors have come up with a clever way to ease into April's craziness: they're hosting a word-game party featuring Scrabble and Boggle and Poetry for Neanderthals. 

I suspect that T.S. Eliot would have spoken more kindly of poor April if he'd welcomed the month with a raucous round of Poetry for Neanderthals, and Chaucer would have killed at Scrabble--if only the other players could be made to accept his spellings. 

I've lived so long with Eliot's cruel April that now I'd like to cheer on Chaucer's. "So priketh hem Nature in hir corages"--Autocorrect wants to change "corages" to "corsages," but Chaucer wasn't talking about prom dates. He was talking about the heart, the temperament, the center of emotion. Take courage, April! It's you and me, maken melodye! 

Batter up!

This afternoon at 4:10 when my Cleveland Guardians start their Opening Day game against the Kansas City Royals, I'll be sitting in a classroom listening to a presentation about college issues that are, granted, Very Important, but the whole time I'll feel in my bones the passing radio waves carrying the voice of Tom Hamilton, the voice of the Guardians and 2025 recipient of the Ford C. Frick award from the Baseball Hall of Fame, the man who has the best home-run call in baseball (and if you don't believe me, listen here), the man whose voice provides the soundtrack of my summer, and I'll be wondering what kind of idiot schedules a meeting at 4 p.m. on baseball's opening day?

That would be me. I am that idiot. 

At least I'll be able to listen to the rest of the game on the radio on the drive home, I tell myself, but it's not the same. And if I need to hear Tom Hamilton's home-run call at any time, I can just press the button on the Tom Hamilton bobblehead my adorable children got us for our anniversary in December, a bobblehead equipped to play recordings of several of Hamilton's trademark calls.

A few weeks ago I attended Marietta College's home opener, but bad weather and schedule issues have prevented me from attending any other games. I probably won't get to a Guardians game until midsummer. Rumor has it that my department chair, now on sabbatical, will be attending the Guardians home opener, unless one of us tackles him first and steals his tickets. Today, though, we should all be glued to the radio awaiting the first pitch--except for those of us stuck in late-afternoon meetings.  

Reason number 4,722 why I should retire right now.

Marietta College home opener

 

Chernobyl, engineering, and imagining the unimaginable

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away--scratch that. Back in the 1980s, a time my students consider concurrent with the Jurassic Era, my father was a safety and reliability consultant doing work for NASA and several U.S. government agencies. He couldn't tell us much about his work, but I do recall that he analyzed the safety hazards inherent in training firefighters to fight fires within airplanes and nuclear submarines. He was an expert at predicting every possible source of catastrophe and failure and uncovering all the ways whatever you were doing could damage, maim, or kill you. He was good at what he did, and many people valued his expertise.

But when Russia--then the USSR--came calling, he always said no. I don't know what he told his potential clients when he turned them down, but I distinctly recall what he told his family. First, because of some family history, he was afraid that if he went to the USSR they wouldn't let him come home. (Paranoid, maybe, but those were the times we were living in.) And second, he was dedicated to upholding strict standards of safety, but he had no confidence that the Soviets were similarly committed. "Look at Chernobyl," he said. "That's just the tip of the iceberg."

I thought of his words this morning when I read an article in the New York Times about the recent drone strike that cut a hole in the protective shell over the failed Chernobyl nuclear power plant. "For people of a certain age," says the article, "the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, after years of heightened fears of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, was the stuff of nightmares."

Indeed it was--and, for some of us, still is. But what struck me most about the article is this paragraph:

"We did a lot of safety analysis, considering a lot of bad things that could happen," said Mr. Schmieman, 78, a retired civil engineer from Washington state who was a senior technical adviser on the project. "We considered earthquakes, tornadoes, heavy winds, 100-year snowfalls, all kinds of things. We didn't consider acts of war."

And there, in a nutshell, we see the problem inherent in the pursuit of safety. Even if you put the best minds in the world behind the task of predicting every imaginable problem, they're not going to be able to protect against the unimaginable ones.

Who imagines that any good can come from attacking a defunct and decaying nuclear plant? Where are the safety and reliability experts who could warn against such a rash act? Dad could drive me crazy sometimes with his detailed explanations about how every choice I made was bound to end in disaster, but if we don't have people like him taking the time to analyze potential hazards, who can we count on to keep the rest of us safe?

This, too, is the stuff of nightmares.  

Swinging out over the ravine

"Is there an artist in the class?" I asked, and fortunately there was, which is a good thing because when I try to draw anything on the whiteboard, no one can tell what it's supposed to be. This is true: On a handout I use regularly in composition classes I drew a picture of a cow, but students always ask what it's supposed to be and one of them guessed it might be an olive floating over a pool table. 

But today before class a student complied with my request and drew on the whiteboard a nervous-looking boy swinging on a grape vine over a dark ravine. Would the vine hold? Would he go flying into the unknown or land on solid ground? The boy is Sarty Snopes, the story is "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner, and the references to liminal space get more extreme as the plot progresses: the boy is suspended between blood and justice, swinging on a vine over a dark ravine, torn in two by teams of horses, and finally stepping alone into a dark wood with no idea where he's going.

I love teaching "Barn Burning" even though Faulkner poses problems for most of my students. "It's just confusing," they tell me, but I ask them why Faulkner didn't work a little harder to clarify the situation. Why not employ an omniscient narrator to explain exactly what's happening at any given moment? Why reveal the story through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy who often hasn't a clue? That's where we start the discussion. We follow a meandering path through the story but always end up lost, facing that dark wood, alone but together.

But as much as I love teaching "Barn Burning," this morning I made the difficult decision to cut Faulkner out of my American Novel class in the fall. The class focuses on narrative innovations so I've always included The Sound and the Fury, but I fear that even my English majors lack the patience and reading skills to tackle the Benjy chapter. I needed to cut the reading list down from seven books to six just to accommodate the kinds of reading and oral communication skills I'm supposed to emphasize under the new Communication Proficiency designation, and after much consideration, Faulkner seemed like the right book to cut.

And the thing is, I made that decision without even knowing whether that course will earn the Communication Proficiency designation. I hope those decisions will come down before students start registering for fall courses, but meanwhile, I have to submit my book orders, which means I had to make decisions about the reading list based on incomplete information. Which seems, at the moment, to be the way we do things around here. 

I'd like someone to draw a diagram of how our campus systems are functioning right now with so many changes and so many offices remaining unstaffed, but I fear we don't have an artist skilled enough to produce something legible. Instead, I hold tightly to the grapevine as it swings out over the dark ravine and hope it doesn't drop me into the great unknown.