Always more to teach (but not today)

And....it's a wrap! I'm done with the teaching but not with the grading, the pleading, the meetings meetings meetings, the proctoring and assessing and filing of reports. And in fact I'm not entirely done with teaching for the semester; I'm just done with the standing-in-front-of-the-class part of teaching. I'll still be engaging in informal instruction as I respond to students' questions and offer comments on their projects and do my best to push them across the finish line in one piece.

My American Lit Survey students started the semester discussing Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser, " a poem that rejects the call for poetry proclaiming the glory of war and instead draws attention to the nation's woundedness. We talked about the relationship between literature and history and what role literature can play in healing a nation's wounds, a topic we returned to  repeatedly throughout the semester. 

Today we closed the loop by ending with Natasha Trethewey's "Native Guard," a poem inviting us to see history as a messy palimpsest of crosshatched stories, sometimes written in ink on paper and sometimes in blood on the backs of powerless people. Students may have thought we'd finished with the Civil War back in February, but here's Natasha Trethewey directing our attention to previously disregarded voices, reminding us that there's always another story to unearth, always something more to learn.

Is there always more to teach? Yes, but not today. Today I'm DONE. (But ask me again tomorrow.)    

Salman Rushdie's "Knife": Conjoined contradictions

For decades, Salman Rushdie has resisted allowing enemies to define him. The Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa declaring that Rushdie should be assassinated after publishing The Satanic Verses sent the author into hiding, but for more than 20 years Rushdie has lived openly and peacefully in New York, aware of the lingering threat but not constrained by it--until August 2022, when a would-be assassin stabbed Rushdie fifteen times with a knife before an auditorium full of onlookers in Chautauqua, New York. 

If his life is a book, writes Rushdie, "The attack felt like a large red ink blot spilled over an earlier page. It was ugly, but it didn't ruin the book. One could turn the page, and go on." 

Going on is exactly what Rushdie is trying to do in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. He had hoped to return to writing fiction, but he found that he could not write anything else until he wrote about the attack: "To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art."

Knife is divided into two sections, The Angel of Death and The Angel of Life, and the book immerses readers in both the horrors of violence and the healing power of love, along with other linked contradictions exposed by Rushdie's experience. For instance, Rushdie praises the onlookers who rushed to his aid after the attack:

I didn't see their faces and I don't know their names, but they were the first people to save my life. And so that Chautauqua morning I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason...and we also contain the antidote to that disease--courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

This horde of people devoted to his safety multiplies as he enters first a hospital and then a rehab facility, where he endures the humiliations of losing autonomy and agency over his privacy, his career, and, of course, his body:

In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won't sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body--to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness--so that you can live.

But even as he is dependent upon a hovering host of health-care workers, he finds that "When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness."

That loneliness leaves time for the author to mull over his peculiar relationship with his attacker, whom Rushdie never names but instead refers to as The A. In the twenty-seven seconds it took The A to stab Rushdie (in his eye, neck, chest, and hand), attacker and victim existed within what Rushdie calls "a profound conjoining." In an imaginary interview, Rushdie tells his attacker, "You put on the mantle of Death itself, and I was Life." Rushdie thinks of his attacker as a failure, a nothing, a hapless clown, but this haplessness is an advantage; one of Rushdie's doctors tells him, "You're lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife."

But there are many types of knives. The A's knife may have severed the author from his world, but Rushdie refuses the role of victimhood, instead wielding his own weapons:

Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, to make it mine.

He does this best while describing the attack and his long journey toward recovery as well as the role of his family and friends in carrying him through this journey. Despite the inciting act of senseless violence, Rushdie considers his story one in which "hatred--the knife as a metaphor for hate--is answered, and finally overcome, by love." In the end he travels back to the scene of the attack to convey an important message to his absent attacker--and anyone who might sympathize with the attempt to use violence to silence stories: "We're back, and after our encounter with hatred, we're celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life."

A handful of happiness

As I walked toward the front door one day after work, I was startled by the scent of lilacs. I looked to the left, toward the lilac bush we planted 20 years ago and gave up for dead a dozen times since then, and there they were: lilac blossoms, festoons of them blooming on a tall bush near the corner of the house. I could have cut a handful of stems to put in a vase and fill my house with the lovely aroma, but I'm happy to leave them growing where the pollinators can benefit from their long-awaited blossoms.

I could have cut a handful of stems but I can't comprehend a handful of scientists. Lately I've been listening to an audiobook in which the author uses the word handful over and over to refer to small groups of people or things, which is fairly normal I suppose, but hearing the phrase a handful of scientists produced in my mind a bizarre visual image of a bunch of lab-coated guys with Einstein hair squeezed inside a giant fist. Since that time, I've been experiencing cognitive dissonance every time I hear handful used to refer to things that cannot be easily held in the hand, like oak trees or elephants or Seventh-Day Adventists. 

This morning, though, I was happy to have my camera in my hands again. Nasty weather and a many-meeting marathon have conspired to keep me out of the woods, but this morning the sun was shining and I was determined to go out and see what I could see--and hear, starting with the brown thrasher running through its vast repertoire of songs high in a tree next to the driveway. Any day that includes a kingfisher sighting is a good day, but this one also included red-bellied woodpeckers, cardinals, towhees, all manner of sparrows, and a Louisiana waterthrush.

I thought I'd entirely missed bloodroot and twinleaf season this spring, but I found one tiny twinleaf blossom poking up out of the leaf litter in the woods. Elsewhere I saw mayapples budding and pawpaws blooming and all manner of blossoms: Dutchman's breeches, squirrel corn, trilliums, wild geranium, phlox, blue-eyed Mary, perfoliate bellwort, Solomon's seal, purple loosestrife, rue anemone, redbud, dogwood, mitrewort, wild columbine, purple violets and white violets--oh, and plenty of dandelions, of course. My daughter makes dandelion jelly that tastes like honeyed sunshine, so I refuse to see these cheerful blossoms as worthless weeds. 

Yesterday we watched a white-crowned sparrow gathering bits of dandelion fluff, presumably to line a nest. If the dandelions in my front yard can keep a sparrow happy, then who am I to complain? Especially when the whole place smells of lilac.

The clouds look quilted.

Restructuring a life's sentence

I had trouble this morning introducing my American Lit Survey students to some poems that can be counted on to choke me up--Yusef Komunyakaa's "Slam, Dunk, and Hook," with its young men seeking moments of freedom and beauty on a neighborhood basketball court while Trouble stands on the sidelines "slapping a blackjack / Against an open palm"; and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," featuring the poet's fruitless attempt to convince herself that the "art of losing isn't hard to master"; and Denise Levertov's "Making Peace," which argues that writing peace into the world is a responsibility we all share:

a line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses . . .

                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

 

In class we focus on analyzing elements of form and meaning, but in the end I want poems like these to spark reflection and action. I want to ask students so many questions: Where do you cultivate beauty? How will you cope with loss? What sentence is your life making? What word is each act bringing into the world--and how do are you linking your words with others'?

 

I have reached the point in my life when I'm not satisfied by academic discussions of literature. Sure, I get excited about examining interesting metaphors and stylistic choices, but I also want to make it personal--or at least point out to students how they can take literature personally. My next essay is coming out in Pedagogy soon, and far from an academic exercise in name-checking all the trendy scholars and theories, it's an impassioned plea for the importance of continuing to teach what some call "divisive concepts."

 

Writing that essay gave me great joy, a quality often missing from academic writing. In an article in Inside Higher Ed today, Deborah J. Cohen and Barbara J. Risman ask how faculty members can "Cultivate joy in their writing." They argue that the pressure to publish or perish "discourages joy in writing--beyond focusing on a utilitarian means to an end, it creates fear, loathing and pressure. We're told that if we do it enough, our careers will survive."

Well, I've done it enough, but it's not clear that my academic writing has accomplished much more than to keep me employed. I'm happy when I see that others have cited my articles, but if I'm part of what we call the scholarly conversation, it's an infuriatingly slow-paced and unrewarding mode of communication.

 

Cohen and Risman ask us to discard the utilitarian approach and pursue writing as an art that we practice for a variety of reasons, both personal and professional:

 

The painter makes art to thrive, to share the meaning they find in the world with others. So, too, if a writer recognizes their work as their art, they sit down to do it to share their gifts with other people and society in general. And the process of writing itself becomes a way to thrive, to contribute to the world.

And that's what I want to do with my writing about literature--and also my teaching. As I near retirement, I've been toying with the idea of teaching a class I'm calling Lit4Life, focusing on literature that can help us create a meaningful life. But why not write about it too? 

 

All this to introduce my summer writing project: a series of reflections on literary works that challenge us to live meaningful lives. I'm calling it Life Lines at the moment, but that will change. Who is my audience? What readership shall I appeal to? Where do I imagine publishing? Not even thinking about those questions right now. I want to immerse myself in writing for the joy of it and postpone academic questions until I see the words on the page.

 

I'm tired of squeezing myself into the constricting mold of academic writing; instead, I want to take a risk, to follow Denise Levertov's plea, to restructure the sentence my life is making just to see if I can recover some joy, make some peace, and find a place to thrive in the long summer pause.

And that's why teaching poetry choked me up this morning: because the questions I wanted to aim at my students' hearts circled back and hit mine instead.

Don't let the birds build a nest in your brainpan

Here I am tackling piles of work two weeks before the end of the semester--the wrong time to be required to learn something new, but nevertheless men with tools are removing all our office phone lines so we can switch to team Teams. 

I suppose I ought to read all the information our IT people sent to prepare us for the shift to VOIP calling, but I don't wanna. Too many other things to do: teaching and grading and departmental assessment and hiring adjuncts (still) and dealing with issues before the Professional Review Committee (again) and planning the big end-of-semester pedagogy workshop. I don't want to learn a whole new method of phone-calling. Maybe Teams is wonderful; maybe it's the most excellent calling method ever invented; but I'm tired and my brain is full. 

But at least birds haven't built a nest in my brainpan. Yesterday I went out back to fetch the weed-whacker and found an elaborate bird's nest in the battery compartment. I had to clean it out before I could even start on the weed-whacking and mowing, and then of course the mower decided that it was tired too: it's self-propelled, but it wasn't self-propelling very well, especially on the uphill parts. Its get up and and go has got up and gone, with the result that every muscle in my body is now sore.

What kind of winter workout would prepare me for the first yard work of the season? I probably ought to just take the mower out and push it around the yard a couple times a week all winter long, though it wouldn't care for the snow. Getting out the weed-whacker and waving it around a few times a week might deter the birds. Then again, why not hire a landscaping company and spread the pain around?

This week everyone in my building will be sharing the pain of learning the new phone system, or non-phone system since it doesn't involve actual phones. So now I can make calls on my laptop, kind of like a Zoom call? And I can set up Teams to automatically transcribe all my voice mails into something resembling human language? And all I need to do is to click on this and configure that and check to make sure the audio is turned on? And this means I'll be able to respond to work-related calls everywhere I go?

I'll think about it tomorrow. Too much real work to do today. 

Dispatches from the staffing wars

I was talking to a prof from a different department who presented a dilemma: faculty positions have been vacated for various reasons but new searches are not being approved, so the department is scrambling to fill in the blank spots with overloads and adjuncts. If they do too good a job demonstrating that they can meet students' needs without filling vacant full-time positions, then the Powers That Be may decide that those full-time positions are surplus to requirements--but if the department does a lousy job covering essential courses, students will suffer.

I suspect that many departments across campus are in the same position. We can move heaven and earth to make sure our majors get the courses they need, but then it looks like we don't need to refill vacant positions; or we can make no extra effort to cover required classes and our students will be short-changed.

Somehow we need to straddle the fine line between too much and not enough. We need to provide the courses our students need, but in a way that shows how desperately we need to fill some empty positions. We don't want students to lose confidence in the program, but allowing them to feel a little discomfort would prove a point--except we don't want to use students as political pawns in the staffing wars.

We're all working hard to manage a difficult situation, but you know what they say: Accomplish the impossible and they'll add it to your job description. Maybe we need to be just a little less competent, a little less eager to pick up the slack--but not so much that we appear expendable. 

'E clips it

My grandkids had warned me that we might observe some unusual animal behavior yesterday afternoon, but the only unusual behavior I observedwas a group of small people running around in the dark shouting "The totality! The totality!"

Earlier in the day the little adorables were figuring out how old they'll be in 2044 when the next total solar eclipse comes our way. The smallest will be 26 and the oldest over 30, which seems impossible, but I didn't want to mention how old I'll be in 20 years because who knows if I'll be in any condition by then to don silly glasses and look at a sliver of sun?

So I'm glad I took a day off to observe the totality with my grandkids. We sat on a grassy hill near their house, a steady breeze blowing their kites high into the sky and producing festoons of bubbles from their bubble wands. We started off in t-shirts but donned sweaters and blankets as the sky drew darker, the wind cooler. Periodically my son-in-law made videos of the kids serving as amateur reporters, describing the sun as looking like a Pac-Man or a fingernail, predicting what would happen next, telling a topical joke: "How does the moon give the sun a haircut? 'E clips it!"

When the disc of the moon slid over the sun, the kids whooped and danced with abandon in the shadowless dark while I soaked in their infectious excitement. This week on campus I have quite a lot on my plate, including some stressful meetings and tasks demanding patience, insight, and self control, so just for a moment it felt good to be in the presence of unfettered glee. I'll be drawing on that reserve of energy for a while, but I doubt it'll last until the next eclipse arrives. 

Are we having sun yet?

 

Heavy lifting in the flood zone

Sure, we had an unexpected day off this week, but that doesn't mean people weren't working. Students, staff, and faculty volunteers helped downtown businesses move merchandise into storage, furniture out of basement dorm rooms, and tarps onto playing fields prone to flooding. I didn't do any heavy lifting except to move assignments around on my syllabi to compensate for the cancelled classes.

Our students are too young to remember the last time campus flooded this badly and some didn't quite believe it when they were warned to move their cars out of low-lying parking lots, but fortunately we had plenty of advance warning this time. The Ohio River peaked last night, so the waters ought to recede to more manageable levels by Monday. Meanwhile, the clean-up continues.

Our creek didn't rise high enough to cover the driveway but it left behind plenty of wood below our bridge. Flooding was worse on the Muskingum River, which backed up into our creek and covered our road and a few stretches of the state highway. I couldn't get home Wednesday night and so stayed with a friend, but by Thursday afternoon the water had receded from the roads on our end of the county. But that didn't mean the danger was over--all that water was moving downstream toward the Ohio.

My social media is crowded with photos of water covering roads, parking lots, parks, and playing fields in Marietta. We were sitting high and dry on Friday when the announcement came through that classes had been cancelled due to flooding, but while water lapped at the steps of the Fine Arts building, our property was dry enough to allow a wildflower walk, though the ground is still too mushy for mowing. Not that Im' complaining. After days of sudden violent downpours, high winds, and hail, we're ready to enjoy some spring sunshine. 

Where my road meets the highway.

The river should not be visible here, but it's all over the place.

Now blooming: trilliums and Dutchmen's breeches.

My creek looks pretty harmless after all that fuss.

 

Raymond Carver delivers, even when UPS doesn't

I love the point in Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" when the blind man explains what little he knows about cathedrals: "I know they took hundreds of workers fifty or a hundred years to build....The men who began their life's work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that sense, bub, they're no different from the rest of us, right?"

But in this case he's not right, because the "bub" he's addressing devotes his life to--well, nothing much. He hates his job, he avoids his wife, he has no friends, and his chief pastimes are drinking and smoking weed. He's involved in nothing that arouses any sense of passion or purpose, and he appears to be building nothing that will outlive him--which is why it's amazing when, at the end of the story, he and the blind man join forces to "build" a cathedral. It's a small step--a minuscule moment of connection and epiphany--but it's the only point in the story when our nameless narrator seems anything other than irrelevant.

I thought of this guy this morning as I devoted an absurd amount of time trying to connect with someone--anyone--at UPS. I knew before I started that this would be a frustrating quest  resulting only in vague promises to do better next time, but somehow I felt driven to dedicate a chunk of my life to this exercise in futility.

Here's what happened: All day yesterday our area was assaulted by severe weather, with a dire forecast calling for high winds, rain, hail, flooding, and even possible tornadoes. What kind of idiot leaves a small cardboard box with a book in it on the grass next to the driveway in those conditions? Our UPS driver, that's who. 

None of us saw the box when we drove up the driveway yesterday (because that's not a place where a box belongs), but my husband found it early this morning when he walked down the driveway to see whether our bridge was under water. (It wasn't--yet. But the river is still rising and backing up into our creek, so who knows whether I'll be able to get home later?)

The soggy box was crawling with pillbugs but the book was mostly undamaged. Still, when I spend my hard-earned cash on a hardback book of poetry, I don't expect curly, rain-damaged pages or pillbugs, so I resolved to file a complaint with UPS.

We used to have a really great UPS driver who could be relied on to drive the truck all the way up the driveway, leave packages safely on the front porch, and even toss our dog a treat. But he retired. Our current UPS driver (or drivers? Who knows?) sometimes leaves packages on the porch but sometimes leaves them in the drainage ditch next to the mailbox, in a bag tied to our bridge, on the ground next to the garage, or, one time, on a mound of plant matter next to the bridge on a day when snow was falling, covering the package so that we didn't find it for three weeks.

I explained all this to the Customer Service rep I finally connected with at UPS this morning, and he said yes, he could see from his records that we've had problems with packages being delivered to inappropriate places, but he promised to notify the local UPS people and encourage them to behave themselves. He must have made an impact because the local supervisor called and tried to find an excuse for the driver's unwillingness to put the package on the porch: "Do you have any mean dogs that might have scared him? How about low-hanging branches?" If I tell them about the angry dragon living in the garage, will they stop delivering packages there?

I feel for the UPS driver who has to make an unceasing round of deliveries without ever unwrapping the wonders contained within those boxes. Is he building something that will outlast him? He may never know. What I know is that the time I spent on the phone this morning accomplished nothing but made me feel as if I'd taken a stand for doing good work and making it matter. Maybe I'm not building any cathedrals today, but at least I'm trying to leave a mark.

When Percival Everett meets Mark Twain

After reading Percival Everett's new novel, James, I can't decide whether Mark Twain is too busy rolling over in his grave to be envious of Everett's clever reimagining of Huckleberry Finn.

Percival Everett is having a moment. His 2001 novel Erasure inspired the 2023 film American Fiction, which won Cord Jefferson a bunch of awards, including the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. While the reclusive Everett struggled to avoid the Hollywood limelight, his new novel James arrived on the scene, sparking the kind of attention rarely lavished upon an author of clever literary fictions that generally appeal to a niche audience.

Erasure dealt with racial passing and so does James, but this time the passing occurs on multiple levels too complicated to unravel without spoilers. Every review I've read discusses how Everett plays with slave dialect. In Huck Finn, Twain uses dialect to mark Jim as part of a subservient, ignorant, infantilized class while allowing his basic human decency to shine through; in James, enslaved characters speak standard English amongst themselves but assume typical slave dialect in the presence of white people, who are happy only when they feel superior. This disparity creates amusing moments, such as when Jim tutors his children in proper pronunciation and deference. At the end of the lesson, the children recite, "The better they feel, the safer we are," which one child translates thus: "Da mo' betta dey feels, da mo' safer we be."

Intelligent people passing as ignorant to ensure their own safety: these passages are wryly comic until it becomes clear that such safety is ephemeral. At one point James gets separated from Huck and sold into servitude with a group of white men who perform minstrel shows in blackface; to appear on the stage, James must be disguised as a white man wearing blackface, which works well enough until an audience member insists on touching his hair. Here, his mastery of slave dialect can't save him and in fact only makes the danger more dire.

As the novel goes on, James encounters very un-funny dangers of the sort that Twain mostly elided: whippings, lynchings, rape, child rape, murder. James emerges at the end with his own name, family, pencil, notebook, and story, but each gain comes at great cost in pain and suffering.

What would Mark Twain think of this book? On the one hand, Everett has fleshed out Jim's story in a way that feels true and convincing, providing some laugh-out-loud moments and insightful critique of aspects of the era that Twain didn't feel comfortable including. On the other hand, he introduces some plot twists that may permanently alter the way we read Huck Finn. 

Everett's characters take a very different kind of journey from the one Twain provided them, but in the end I believe Twain would appreciate the way Everett shines a new light on the world Twain illuminated. Everett ends the acknowledgments with this line: "Heaven for the climate, hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain." After reading James, I'd love to be a fly on the wall to hear that conversation.

Different tools for different messes

This morning I squeezed a week's quota of tact into one email message, but it got the job done. If a boulder is already teetering on the edge of a cliff, sometimes all it takes is a gentle nudge to send it over the edge. I nudged, the boulder toppled, and now I can get on with the massive cleanup effort. And that's all I'm planning to say about that delicate situation.

It's amazing, though, how much of adult life amounts to cleaning up various types of messes. I started the day trying to fix a mess of my own creation--I forgot to click on a certain box in our course management system, which then refused to allow my students to upload their drafts--but a zillion students helpfully emailed about the problem so I could repair the dropbox in my pajamas. Meaning I was in pajamas. Why would a dropbox need pajamas?

Next I need to respond to all those drafts, offering students specific suggestions on cleaning up their prose and reasoning. Since I'm all out of tact, I'm being blunt. "You need a comma here" is easy enough to fix, but at this point in the semester I'm stymied on what to do with students who don't understand the difference between stories and poems or between summary and analysis. A few marginal comments aren't going to fix that kind of mess.

Now I have to fix the scheduling problem arising from the fact that no one wants to take an exam on April 8, Eclipse Day. We're about an hour's drive from the Zone of Totality, but my students will miss it if they're stuck in my classroom taking an exam. I had already planned to be out of town (because my grandkids live in the Zone of Totality, and how many more times will I be able to experience a total eclipse with my grandkids?), but by making one small adjustment to the course schedule, I can eliminate the need for an exam proctor and allow my students to gape at the eclipse as well. 

With proper eye protection, of course. I do not want to be responsible for blinding the entire population of my American Lit Survey class. That's not the kind of mess I'm equipped to clean up.

Winds of change, both literal and metaphorical

I wasn't driving when this happened, which is a good thing because big trucks make me nervous, and when we're approaching an eight-mile-long steep uphill grade featuring blinking signs warning "High wind alert--Truck blow-over danger," I'm much more comfortable with a colleague at the wheel--especially if it's the colleague whose legendary calm would make her the ideal driver for a trip to the ends of the earth through an apocalyptic nightmare. 

So I'm sitting pretty in the passenger seat while my colleague struggles to keep us in our lane through wind gusts roaring down the mountain and pushing us toward the guardrail. Suddenly we see flashing lights. We join a line of cars and trucks crawling carefully past the wreck of a semi that has blown over on its side next to a cliff edge. Emergency vehicles have attached heavy cables to the truck, but with every new gust of wind the cables quiver and the truck scoots a little closer to the edge. In the battle between cables and wind, who wins? We're not staying around to find out.

Is this a metaphor for the current state of higher education? If so, are we the truck being blown off the cliff, the cables trying to hold the truck steady, or the drivers gawking as they try to move on and survive the storm? Who or what is producing the wind? Is it the FAFSA breakdown, the bleak enrollment forecast, the budget crisis, or the larger cultural disdain for higher education?

Judging by my conversations with colleagues from other campuses last week, we'd prefer to be among the line of cars crawling past the disaster than in the truck going over the cliff--but even then, I'm really glad I'm not the one driving the car.     

Sound and silence at an academic conference

From my room on the 21st floor of a conference hotel in Atlanta, I can hear a distant hum of passing traffic, the occasional whine of a siren, a buzzing light and a rush of air from a vent--but no people. Not a human voice to be heard.

Nothing against people, but I've exceeded my quota for today. I'm with a small team from my campus attending the CIC NetVUE conference, where sessions ask us to listen and think and talk and talk and talk some more, which I have been dutifully doing all day long, both in and out of sessions--talking about the challenges of inculcating in students a sense of vocation, about renewing faculty members' commitment to the mission of the college, about deep listening and close reading and community-engaged learning, but mostly about the traumas small colleges everywhere are enduring.

At many moments throughout the day I've felt the presence of a supportive community. Unlike many academic conferences, this one is characterized not by arrogant posturing but by collaborative exploration of our common struggles and goals. At lunch I sat with faculty members from various disciplines and types of institutions who started spontaneously sharing the most ridiculous comments students have written on course evaluations, and every single one of them felt familiar. 

So many ideas! One session encouraged struggling campuses to develop methods of lamentation--to allow people to grieve the loss of colleagues and majors and programs. Someone told about how in 2020 her campus invited faculty distressed by the demands of pandemic teaching to gather beside a river and release all their fear and anger in a primal scream.

Interesting ideas but by the end of the day all that talk turned into a screaming headache. My colleagues went out to dinner together but I suspect that every restaurant in walking distance is crammed full of conference attendees still talking talking talking, and I've had enough.

So I've retreated to my quiet room. The fan clicks on and I hear a hum; far below on the highway a horn blasts and a siren blares, but here in my room I'm happy to sit still and listen to the silence.   

Not quite the morning news

If I had to write a news story covering the events of the past seven days in my life, I'd be hard pressed to know what to put in the headline--the shrieks in the night, the sweets in my mouth, the boys in the sun, the boy with the gun...it felt like a lot but it really adds up to not much. But I'll start with the gun because it was by far the most bizarre thing to happen all week, even if I was an uninvolved bystander.

We were enjoying a potluck lunch in the church fellowship hall (coconut cake--yum!) when a sweet church lady heard a knocking on the door. She opened the door to find a local urchin, maybe 12 years old, whose first words were enigmatic: "Tell God I said hello." The church lady asked him if he wanted to come in and get some lunch but he said no, his mom didn't know where he was. As the kid turned to leave, the church lady saw the gun in a holster hanging at his waist.

What was a 12-year-old kid doing carrying a gun? Was it a real gun? What did he mean by "Tell God I said hello"? A good journalist would have sought answers to these questions and more, but the kid was gone before I even knew he'd been there and no answers were forthcoming.

The presence of a gun tends to overshadow other events, so probably no one is interested in hearing about the community production of Death of a Salesman, which made me cry, or the student production of Medea, which made me wonder how the main character could do all that shrieking without seriously damaging her vocal cords. Both productions were very well done but I got annoyed every time someone blamed Willy Loman's failures on his old age. I kept wanting to jump up and yell "63 isn't that old!"

In between all that gallivanting, I graded exams, prepped classes, interviewed three candidates for adjunct positions, served as a judge at a cookie-baking contest, chatted with artsy folks at a reception for a visiting artist, and attended a baseball game in the bright spring sunshine.

That warmth seems to have gone on hiatus, however, as tonight's forecast calls for snow. This morning as I drove to campus near 7 a.m., I was surprised to see a crew shell skimming along the surface of the river. Twenty-eight degrees outside with the sun barely glancing above the horizon and there were my students putting their muscles to work on the cold, dark river.

It's dark and cold and we're barely awake but still young people are pulling their weight to move the boat forward--that's the story I prefer to tell, but it's hard to put that in a headline when there's a mysterious gun drawing attention just outside the door.

Wobbling on a shifty surface while trying to serve my students

Lately I keep thinking about the time close to 20 years ago when I attended a college event on a docked sternwheeler. I don't recall the topic of discussion, but the boat bobbed on the water and attendees enjoyed an open bar, so when an administrator got up to spread his arms wide and admonish us all to consider the needs of The students! The students!, he wobbled a bit. Looked like he might fall over at any moment, in fact. People sitting near the front braced themselves to catch him if he fell or at least avoid the carnage.

Today I feel like that dude--wobbly, trying to remain upright on a shifty and uncertain surface, but still devoted to serving the needs of my students even though I could fall flat on my face at any moment.

Yesterday there were many such moments. First day after Spring Break and the time change and I arrived in my office to find no heat in the building. Outside temps in the mid-twenties; inside, colleagues sitting in their offices in full winter coats, hats, and gloves. I put up with it as long as I could and finally turned on my space heater--just for five minutes, just to take the chill off--and promptly blew a fuse, shutting off power to all the offices in my corner of the building.

We lowly academics are not permitted to reset a circuit breaker, so I reported the outage to the building coordinator, who reported it to the Physical Plant, who sent someone over to restore electricity--four hours later. I guess they were busy. And so was I--trying to find a way to do my job without heat or electricity.

But I survived that. And I survived teaching in unheated rooms and sitting through a long, unnecessary meeting on a profoundly uncomfortable chair that made my bad hip so stiff that I could barely walk when it was finally over. And I survived three-quarters of the department chairs' meeting without any more than the usual amount of anguish. 

But then the Powers That Be unleashed the new departmental budgeting process (surprise!), which exposed my areas of greatest anxiety and incompetence: working with spreadsheets. At first I thought okay, give me some time to figure this process out and I can get it done, but then they announced the deadline. 

The ground shifted. My heart started racing, my brain spinning, my head wobbling. No way I can complete this complex task in that amount of time, I told myself, but then the tiny Puritans who live in my brain starting huffing and puffing about the necessity of meeting the deadline, but then my deep-seated anxieties about money started screaming that the deadline is impossible, and then those prim little Puritans reminded me that it would be unseemly and untidy to allow my head to explode in front of all those people whom I respect, and then I started silently drafting a letter of resignation.

An over-reaction? Maybe, but it was nothing compared to the way I reacted when I finally arrived home to discover that one of the ravening beasts who shares my household had eaten up all but a tiny sliver of the pineapple-upside-down cake I'd been saving for myself. After the day I'd experienced, the absence of cake felt unforgivable.

After a good night's sleep I'm still feeling wobbly and I'm waiting for the next shift in the uncertain surface I'm standing on while I try to appease the tiny Puritans and the anxiety monsters and the ravening beasts, but I haven't written that letter of resignation just yet, mostly because I'm devoted to meeting the needs of my students. 

The students! The students! I cry, hoping that someone catches me when I finally fall on my face.

Swanning about

After being away four days and ignoring a million emails and piles of work, I really didn't want to come home. As a delaying tactic, I took a scenic route that added nearly an hour to my journey but rewarded me with views of swans--and not just once but in several places. The stretch of Killbuck Creek below Millersburg widens out into wetlands where I saw herons, geese, ducks, and swans, which from a distance looked like white lights hovering above the dark water.

I need to get out on that water, I told myself, but it was too cold and I lacked essential equipment. Still, visiting Killbuck Creek gave me ideas, made me long for my canoe and some sunshine and a picnic lunch. Along the drive I saw forsythia blooming and then when I pulled into my driveway I was greeted by a host of golden daffodils bobbing in the breeze.

Spring is coming--I can feel it--and today, just for a while, I saw it all around me. It was an extra-long journey home, but I don't regret a single minute.

 

 

Great weather if you're a duck

After two days of t-shirt weather, we bundled up yesterday to stand in persistent drizzle and cold wind at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, where my adorable daughter and I observed great blue herons building nests and courting, and then we took a quick jaunt alongside an old canal to see a beaver pond where ducks and geese dabbled contentedly. Poor lighting means bad pictures, but it was worth seeing the birds at work, unbothered by the weather.

How does he carry a stick that big?

Every black blob is a nest at the heron rookery.

I love the elegant pattern on the female mallard's back

Wood duck!

Evidence of beaver activity

 

Sometimes it's hard to break away

My primary purpose this Spring Break is to distract myself from the ongoing situation at my beloved place of employment, and I use situation because I'm trying to avoid more descriptive phrases that require unwieldy words like apocalyptic and abandonment and thumbscrew-inspired decisions-making. 

But it's hard to avoid thinking about the situation when my inbox contains yet another email from a valued colleague announcing a move to a job in the private sector after 25 years of teaching, plus an outstanding student's request for a letter of recommendation so he can transfer his skills, intelligence, and passion to a different institution. Even at church I couldn't escape the situation. A congregant asked me questions about opportunities for a young relative to study in a particular program, and I had to work very hard to tactfully avoid speculation about whether that program will be fully staffed in the near future.

So I had to get away. My all-over-Ohio excursion was nearly thwarted 90 minutes into the trip when my tax person texted to let me know she needed a particular form signed by me and my husband right away. I sat in a Wal-Mart parking lot in nowheresville, Ohio, texting with a tax person who at first could not understand why I wasn't willing to drive back home to print the forms, find my husband, get his signature, scan the form, and send it back, and then after she agreed to send a version that could be signed online, she couldn't understand why I couldn't get my husband to sign it electronically immediately. (Because Monday is his day off and the weather was gorgeous and there's no wi-fi connection out on the tractor.)

But we worked that out without disrupting my trip too long, and then I spent a lovely day visiting an old friend, looking at overpriced hardwood desks at Amish furniture stores, visiting my  former favorite mall only to discover that many of the stores were empty, and spending a relaxing night far from home and campus and tax persons. 

Along the way I took a wrong turn and stumbled upon a boardwalk out into a wetland, and I made a note of its location so that I could head out there to see the sun rise over the wetland this morning. Except the parking area was blocked off and the boardwalk entrance was boarded up--"closed for repairs." Thwarted once again! But the weather was gorgeous (40s and sunny early, 70s and sunny later), so I found another park and took a hike through woods that will no doubt be stunning in a few weeks when the spring ephemerals start popping up. This morning it was just me and trees and woodland birds and some turkeys gobbling in the distance.

But I can't think about the situation while attending to turkeys or watching woodpeckers disassemble a tree, so the excursion was successful so far. The next leg of the journey will take me to the grandkids, and if their youthful hijinks can't distract me from the grim facts back home, nothing will.      

    

Time flies when you're having whatever you call this thing we're having

It's the kind of day when people burst into the building shaking out their umbrellas and smoothing down their hair. High winds blew me all over the road this morning and I saw signs that tree limbs had already been removed from the road. The briefest foray out-of-doors results in rambunctious hair, so staying inside and grading seems like a good plan.

Students have papers due in the American Lit Survey this morning so naturally I'm fielding requests for extensions. I'm happy to give students until the end of the day if they think it will help, but I can't give longer extensions without a persuasive excuse because I need to grade these papers before midterm grades are due, which raises the question: how did we get to midterm so quickly?

They say time seems to speed up as we age and I can attest that it's true. Has it really been 20 years since we bought our house, 15 since our daughter got married, 10 since the birth of our first grandchild? Impossible! Two more years feels like a long time but when I look at how swiftly this semester is passing and how much I want to squeeze into the next four semesters of teaching, I fear that retirement will arrive before I'm ready.

And of course the recent campus cuts have resulted in frantic revisions to the General Education curriculum and the English major, which will affect what I'm able to do in these next two years. The Gen Ed revision means I'll never again teach two courses I took great care to design, losses that don't exactly break my heart. But I'm only slowly coming to learn what the changes to the English major will mean, and I wonder how many of my beloved courses I've taught for the last time without realizing it.

Next fall looks good, though, and my approaching retirement gives me an excuse to opt out of some heavy lifting. Yes, we'll need to appoint a task force to do a full overhaul of our General Education curriculum, but I don't intend to help design a curriculum that I won't be present to teach. Besides, I've already reached my career quota of new General Education curricula, and anyway, in ten years all our students will be Online Influencing majors taking courses taught by Artificial Intelligence, areas in which my expertise is hardly relevant.

And so I plod on, shaking out my umbrella and smoothing down my hair and responding to student emails demanding extensions. I'd like to request an extension on life, please, and make it ASAP. There's no time like the present to grapple with a diminishing future.

Peddling influence

I've been haunted by a disturbing article in the New York Times about parents who post their children's photos online and then attract sexual predators, which is appalling enough, but the detail I can't get out of my head is the claim that one-third of preteen girls want to pursue careers as online influencers.

I have questions! Most of them, though, place me firmly in the Old Fuddy-Duddy category, like "How do preteen girls even know what an online influencer is? Aren't their parents monitoring their internet usage?" But no, the article points out that at least some parents encourage their children's online presence, seeking to open doors to careers in modeling or acting or influencing.

But how can so many kids think online influencer is a viable career goal? It's like a pyramid scheme: the more influencers, the fewer people available to be influenced. And why don't the children aspire to be astronauts or doctors or writers or scientists or teachers?

All those careers can lead to immense influence. I mean, how many of us can point to a particular book that changed the way we think about the world, or a particular teacher who encouraged us to pursue a field of study? How many people my age watched the moon landing and were inspired to pursue careers in math or science? Maybe they didn't all become astronauts, but they may have learned a thing or two along the way and developed the skills to contribute something meaningful to society.

What will a child learn by pursuing a dream of being an online influencer? Maybe some marketing skills or effective camera angles? Help me out here! Is there really a crying need in our culture for even more young people excelling at the fine art of self-promotion?

I confess that I would like to have more influence than I do. If I could encourage more students to care deeply about the power of storytelling or the cultural value of poetry or even the effective use of the semicolon, I would feel that I've contributed something that might bear fruit long after I'm gone. But if online influencers keep influencing young girls to pursue careers as online influencers, we'll soon be so up to our eyeballs in influencers that we'll have no one left to be astronauts or doctors or writers or scientists or teachers.

But then I am an Old Fuddy-Duddy. Maybe someone can explain to me how to solve this problem, because I don't think I'm the right person to influence the influencers.

Leaving my ducks in the dust

So I'm sitting on the sofa in my pajamas, drinking a leisurely cup of tea and reading the morning news, when my husband says, "It's almost 7. Don't you need to be on the road?"

"No problem," I say. "I can go in a little later this morning because I'm staying late this afternoon and my first meeting isn't until 10."

Then, just to be sure, I check the calendar on my phone. Friends, my first meeting of the day was at 8. 

This morning I proved that if I put my mind to it, I can get from pajamas-on-the-sofa to fully-clothed-in-the-classroom in under an hour, as long as no one looks at me too closely. No makeup, no earrings, no frost to scrape off my windshield, no slow-moving school buses stopping to pick up students every 30 feet--made it in the nick of time, but one tiny delay would have been a disaster.

As it is, I feel as if I've been running to catch up with myself all morning long, cramming in my caffeine quota while rushing into meetings clutching handouts still warm from the printer. This is not the way I prefer to operate. I'm a planner, the first one to show up for a meeting with all my ducks in a row. This morning all my ducks are scattered in my wake in a chaotic cluster of panic.

Now my morning meetings are over so I can relax a bit. I have some papers to grade, emails to send, classes to prep, and two more meetings this afternoon, but for the first time since 7 a.m., I can sit and breathe for a few minutes and wait for the ducks to catch up.

On driving and surviving

Nearly two weeks after getting pulled over and ridiculed by a police officer who didn't like my car's headlights, I still tense up every time I drive through that little river town, which is right smack in the middle of my shortest route to campus. I have adjusted my schedule so I can leave the house after the sun comes up, which means I encounter more traffic and more school buses loading and unloading, but I still get nervous every time I get close to the tiny town where the police officer promised that he'd be watching me. 

This morning I saw a police car taking radar at the edge of town, where the speed limit switches from 55 to 35. Just seeing the police car made me tense up--even though I've always been careful about slowing down there. I'll bet the impatient pickup-truck drivers who ride my bumper itching for a passing zone don't get tense when they drive through that dinky little town. Will I ever again drive through there without fear?

If the aftereffects of a minor chewing-out can linger so stubbornly, you can just imagine the lingering impacts of our recent campus bloodletting. Here we are in Inside Higher Ed, where our campus cuts are placed in the context of a bunch of other colleges facing similar problems. We're in pretty good company, but that doesn't do much to diminish the local impacts. Departments are scrambling to construct fall course schedules, proposing changes to majors to reduce dependence on classes we can no longer offer, and searching for adjuncts to teach courses formerly taught by full-time faculty members whose positions were cut.

This kind of struggle makes me even more tense than my encounter with a condescending traffic cop. It feels unjust to cut a position and then try to replace the instructor with a contingent faculty member who will be paid poorly, won't have access to benefits, and is unlikely to be invested in the future of the College or the education of students beyond the classroom.

In addition, it's not easy to find adjunct instructors qualified to teach in certain fields in the Appalachian part of the state. A few hours away in Columbus or Cleveland we could find a deeper talent pool, but who's going to drive two or three hours to teach here for the piddly amount we pay for adjunct labor? All we can offer is a decent office--because so many positions have been cut that we'll have empty offices on every floor of my building.

Emotions are raw and anger bubbles up everywhere. Worst of all, though, is the fear: If that position can be cut, why can't mine? Faculty members have confided that they are afraid their actions are being monitored, that some malign force is watching their every move in search of some excuse to pounce.

I've adjusted my daily commute in response to paranoia about one solitary traffic cop who promises he's watching me, but what happens when that kind of paranoia infests an entire campus? Trust is a fragile vessel and easily broken; how can those of us who remain put the pieces back together when so many have been lost?

Caught on the trailcam

How many photos of my coffee table do I really need? The answer is none, but this morning I had to delete a bunch of them while downloading photos from the trailcam we got for Christmas. No, my coffee table has not been hitting the trail; it just happened to be in the frame while we were trying out different settings on the trailcam and getting it ready to go out to the woods. Apparently we hadn't yet figured out how to delete.

After a month in the woods, the trailcam this morning offered up many many photos of the same plot of ground from which a woodland creature had just departed, or maybe the motion sensor was set off by a gust of wind. It got plenty of photos of squirrels, which is not surprising given the abundant nut trees in that part of the woods. It also caught raccoons, a possum, several deer, and a mystery critter that looks like the back end of a beaver, except it's in a spot where beavers generally aren't.

Also lots of photos of the resident woodsman carrying a ladder or chainsaw up the hill to prune fruit trees or pulling fallen trees down the hill with the tractor. Probably we ought to move the trail-cam to a less tractor-friendly location. I'd like to put it down by the creek to see what critters visit, but it would probably take a shot of every passing car as well.

Photo quality is uneven, which is not surprising since the trailcam has no sense of composition. Night photos look like something out of a horror movie, with glowing eyes atop blurry shapes that could be mistaken for space aliens or hoofed fiends though they're probably just raccoons.

We've been hearing a lot of coyotes in the night but apparently they're not visiting the vicinity of the trailcam. No sign of foxes or turkeys either. I keep hearing that bobcats are getting more common in Ohio and I'd really love to see one, but dream on. In 20 years living in these woods, we've seen a bobcat exactly once, and it had disappeared before we could get the word "bobcat!" out of our mouths.

But still we hope. Whatever passes by, the trailcam will be ready.