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.

Spring Break souvenirs

I saw a student this morning with arms so sunburned that if she stood outside on a dark night people might mistake her for the Blood Moon. She brought back a memorable souvenir of Spring Break, but I don't want to be around when the sunburn starts to peel.

A student in my American Lit class brought back an impressive record--ten straight wins in softball! What a way to start the season. I watched the baseball home opener last week before I left for my Spring Break road trip and while our baseball team isn't winning ten straight anything, they played a gem of a game, pulling a victory out of nowhere. It was a gorgeous sunny day and I could have ended up with sunburn if I hadn't sat in the shade. 

What souvenirs did I bring home from Spring Break? Three boxes of Girl Scout cookies and some photos of my granddaughter competing in the regional spelling bee and my grandson in the Pinewood Derby. And photos of herons. Lots of herons.

Mostly my Spring Break souvenirs are intangible--feelings and memories and random wishes. I feel happy about how we've managed to maintain a satisfying relationship with our adult kids, and I cherish the memory of the youngest imp reading me the story she wrote and illustrated in which three friends pursue a quest for adventure and bring back treasure--but only after asking their parents' permission. I loved to see her trying to read a book and practice the piano at the same time, although I know that's not the textbook way to develop piano skills.

And I wish I'd done a little more work last week so I wouldn't be rushing around trying to print out documents and prepare for meetings this morning. I wish I had answers to questions people keep asking--not just the big questions about the future of the College but the niggling little ones like am I allowed to talk to a coach about a student's academic performance if the coach is also the student's parent? 

And I truly wish I did not have to stand up in front of the faculty meeting this afternoon and tell them that the magic wand they're asking for doesn't exist--the software that will reliably identify Artificial Intelligence with 100 percent accuracy so that we don't have to rely on our own instincts and reasoning skills.

More than anything, what I wish for after Spring Break is more Spring Break, but I would probably feel differently if I'd brought back the kind of sunburn I saw on students this morning. Some of us have clearly had enough leisure. Time to get back to work! 

Bird people are my people

Stand beside a road with a camera in hand aiming at the great blue heron rookery across the way and someone is bound to stop and chat, and if that someone is a camouflage-wearing dude in a pickup truck full of fishing gear, he's likely to bear news about the location of bald eagles and buffleheads, and if you're having a lively chat about beautiful birds while herons flap overhead carrying nesting materials to a nearby nest, then you'll know you've found your people.