Minor obstacles in a major project

Show of hands, please: who wants to spend a morning fuming over inconsistencies in file-naming conventions?

I remember a time years ago when I had to insist that students follow a strict pattern for naming files submitted for grading so I wouldn't end up with an online folder full of Word documents all named something like Essay 1. These days a student submits the document through Canvas so it stays firmly attached to the student's name and the actual file name doesn't much matter. I no longer have to give instructions about file names or even warn students not to insert rude or obscene suggestions within the file name. (Apparently some of my students share the juvenile sense of humor demonstrated by the prior owner of my first campus computer, who applied a very special name to each drive in the directory: testicle, scrotum, penis....)

But today's file-naming mess has nothing to do with student work. My current administrative role requires me to read, edit, and bring into one consistent voice a bunch of Very Important Documents, and I say "a bunch" because so far I can't figure out exactly how many there are. It ought to be easy to locate the drafts amongst the shared folders devoted to the project, but because of inconsistency in naming files, I have to hunt amongst hundreds of documents to locate one that might be called 3A Draft or Draft 3A or Final Draft 3A or Final 3A Draft or any of an infinite number of possible permutations, each located in a different spot in the alphabetical flood of files. And then I see two files right next to each other, one named 2B draft final  and the next named 2B final draft. Which is the real final draft? I don't want to read and edit the wrong one!

The deadline for this project is tight and inviolable, but so far I've spent most of my time simply trying to locate the proper documents without any confidence that I've found them all or found the right version of each one, a situation that makes my brain hurt. Trust me--you really don't want me editing Very Important Documents when my brain hurts. Which is as good a reason as any to stare out the window until I can see straight again.     

Jammin'

My husband got home around dusk yesterday and said You've got to see this so I went out and had a look. It was definitely worth seeing: thick fog hanging above a creek so choked with ice that it bulged on the upstream side of our neighbor's low bridge,. The icejam caused ice chunks to pile up more than a quarter mile upstream past our bridge and sent water over the banks into the low parts of our meadow. The creek looked solid, but if you tried to walk on the jammed-in ice chunks you'd soon fall victim to gaps and instabilities. The ice chunks looked spooky in the fog but far scarier was the prospect of further flooding. If the ice and water can't move past the jam, there's nowhere for it to go except where it can do the most damage.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere but it's too hot to touch right now--or too cold to handle. 

 

 

Digressions toward upliftitudination

I'm standing at the gas station fueling up my salt-encrusted car, relieved that a sudden outbreak of warmth is melting the ice that keeps covering every stinking surface in the county, even the river, which was absolutely gorgeous this morning with that silvery sheen of icemelt shimmering over the frozen expanse--now where was I going with this?

Oh yes: pumping gas, grabbing a paper towel to wipe off the rear backing-up camera that keeps getting so thoroughly coated with layers of road salt and, now that the ice is melting off my driveway, mud, so filthy that when I back up the camera shows me only vague blotches where the road ought to be, when suddenly I see a big green truck. Meaning I see the truck in the gas station parking lot, not in my mud-covered driveway, which it (the truck) could never reach because even if a semi loaded with soda could cross my bridge without causing a collapse it would probably jackknife on the sharp turn just past the bridge and never make it up the mud-covered hill, which is a good thing because there's no room up there for a semi to turn around so it would be stuck there forever, in my driveway, a big green semi advertising 7UP--and again, I've lost my train of thought.  

I blame the weather, which started the week in single digits, made a brief visit into the low 60s, and now hovers in the 30s, leading to a freeze-melt-refreeze cycle that's driving us all just a little bit crazy, not to mention that the weather inside my building is so miserable that on Monday I had to sit in my office with my coat on even while wearing long-johns and two layers of sweaters.

But I digress. (So does the weather. Repeatedly.) I'm pumping gas when I see this truck, this huge green semi sporting a massive ad for 7UP, a beverage I literally never drink unless I'm at a baby shower or some such celebration where someone makes that super-sweet punch involving 7UP poured over sherbet, and I'm not sure why else 7UP exists except to make that punch, when suddenly (back at the gas station, pumping gas) I notice the words on the side of the big green truck: Be UPtimistic.

And this makes me smile.

Yes: despite the weather, despite the ice that keeps trying to kill me and the mud that makes my car slide all over the driveway, despite all the ways my department and my discipline and, yes, even my entire career are being marginalized and misunderstood and muddled, despite the lack of answers about health problems plaguing my loved ones and lack of certainty about funding for just about everything and the difficulty of getting that one annoying student to understand that the stairwell works both ways and therefore walking straight up the middle disrupts the flow--I mean, despite abundant reasons to be grumpy on a cold wet miserable morning, those two words on the side of a truck make me smile.

Later I look up UPtimistic and discover than in addition to being associated with a Danish electronic band called Laid Back (which ought to be the name of the garage band I'll start in my retirement if I ever get around to learning to play an instrument), the Be UPtimistic ad campaign dates back to 2024, which lets you know just how out of touch I am re: carbonated beverage advertising, and when I look at the rationale for the ad campaign I see that I've missed many opportunities to experience what some no doubt highly paid advertising copywriter chose to call "UPliftment." 

I confess that I felt uplifted when I saw the ad on the side of that big green truck this morning, which accords with 7UP's stated mission to "offer light relief from the mundanities of daily life by bringing moments of UPliftment, positivity and surprise." A little tautological there with the reference to the dailiness of daily life or the mundanities of the mundane, but what do you expect from a company that asserts that this ad campaign "signifies a refreshed strategic and creative north star for the brand that will inform all international programs moving forward"? Frankly, I was not aware that the north star needed refreshing or that it was capable of informing programs, forward-moving or otherwise, but then I'm not raking in the big bucks writing ad copy so what right have I to be critical?

No, today I'm choosing to put my critical tendencies aside and focus on abundant reasons to be UPtimistic, even if I don't drink 7UP and don't intend to start and even if the ice keeps making life treacherous and the mud makes me slide and the atmosphere in academe is as murky as it's ever been. Tomorrow we'll celebrate the College's birthday but today I'll warm up by celebrating a great class discussion in American Lit Survey this morning, a pair of colleagues wearing cheery pink outfits, a couple of writing buddies keeping my fingers on the keyboard, a semi-disastrous attempt to make a pumpkin dump cake that nevertheless resulted in deliciousness (not deliciousment), a warm coat, a good night's sleep, and the opportunity to do it all again tomorrow, only with cupcakes.

So life is rough but I'm UPtimistic. (But I draw the line at UPliftment.) 

Dusting off fusty old Modernism

Here I am taking my final lap around the American Lit Survey syllabus before I head off to Emeritusville, which means it's my last chance to make something stick in students' brains. If I get it wrong this time, I won't get another chance. 

Which is why I'm a little nervous about introducing my students to modernism. 

When I ask my survey students what they think modernism might mean, they guess it refers to stuff that's, like, really modern, fresh and new and up-to-date. How disappointing, then, to discover that we'll have to start out by stretching our minds back more than 100 years to touch base with Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson, two midwestern men who believed they were forging a brand-new path for American literature.

Today that path looks worn and ragged, hardly suggesting modernity. Years ago I sometimes had students familiar with Masters because in high school they'd read or even acted in a version of Spoon River Anthology, but I can't remember the last time a student expressed any familiarity with either author, even though Anderson, like most of my students, was an Ohio guy. The litany of modernist authors sounds like it belongs in a graveyard: Eliot, Sandburg, cummings, Frost. Williams, Stevens, Hurston, Hughes. Hemingway, Faulkner, Glaspell, O'Neill. They all thought they were doing something really new and different and earth-shaking, and they were! But this is my last chance to make students believe that modernism mattered--and still matters.

On Wednesday I'll get all excited and scribble a bunch of vocab up on the whiteboard--Alienation! Fragmentation! Experimentation! Grotesques!--which my students probably won't dutifully write down, despite my urging. Maybe they'll come up after class and take a picture of the whiteboard mess to file away with all the other pictures of words that belong to a past so distant it seems to be speaking a different language. 

When we tackle Wallace Stevens I'll ask them why we need thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, why we can't look just once and get the whole picture, why a poem wants us to engage in looking instead of memorizing, but I'll be lucky if one student scribbles something about the poem as the act of the mind finding what will suffice. The poem as the act! Of the mind! Finding! 

Last chance to make it matter! 

As I look down the months before I get put on the shelf, I'm taking refuge in William Carlos Williams's poem "A Sort of a Song":

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
--through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks. 

Let my teaching lodge the poems in students' minds like the snake waiting under his weed; let me plant a seed that sends roots deep into their rocky minds. Let the snake wait, the seed grow, the words finally strike with a bite that feels like rock splitting. Then they'll know why modernism matters. Then my job here will be done.

Friday poetry challenge: Scarfing up the rhymes

I walked out the door this morning to find my face being pelted by invisible precipitation, sharp little pellets that looked like nothing and sounded like dry rice being poured into a saucepan. What do you call this stuff? Not quite sleet, not quite snow, not quite freezing rain, just one more manifestation of this never-ending winter. When I was halfway to campus it turned to snow, and by the time I'd parked the campus sidewalks, which had only recently been cleared of ice and snow, were once again covered in white.

At least it's not windy, I told myself. At least the temperature is in double digits for a change. At least I'm well bundled up. But now, thanks to the New York Times, I have to think about yet another winter-weather hazard: looking old. Yes: a prominent headline asks "Does Your Winter Scarf Make You Look Old?" Apparently people with way too much time on their hands are out there in the blizzard obsessing over what sorts of scarves people wear and how those scarves are tied. One fashion expert avers that scarves that look "buttoned-up" make people look old while those tied more casually make wearers appear youthful; further, the Scarf Mafia asserts that "it's impossible to make an infinity scarf look relaxed and chill."

Do you know what what else does not look "relaxed and chill"? A person who has slipped on a pile of snow and landed SPLAT on the sidewalk. It happened this morning--not to me, for a change--and the victim, though well buttoned-up, looked neither youthful nor decrepit but simply embarrassed. Good thing the Scarf Mafia wasn't here to offer helpful suggestions: "Here, let me fix your scarf so you'll look more youthful while lying on the ground--or better yet, take advantage of this little hiatus to knit yourself a triangular scarf. So much less stodgy!"

I love my current winter scarf, a soft red wool with white and gold accents, but I wear it not to appear chill but to stay warm, or at least warmer than I would be without it. I have colleagues who strap spikes onto their shoes to walk to campus and others so bundled up that they I can't tell who they are when they greet me, but I'm not making any judgments about their winter-weather attire. I'm just hoping they remain upright in the middle of whatever you want to call this slippery mess. 

We've had snow and sleet and freezing rain,
and then we've had them all again,
along with wind and winter chill
and ice and slush. It's quite a thrill
to drive or walk to get to class
in this persistent Arctic blast.
But I can't ponder, in this cold,
whether my scarf makes me look old.
As long as I stay on my feet,
who cares if scarves don't look so neat
the way I tie them. I confess:
my winter garb appears a mess;
I may look old and tired too-- 
at least my lips aren't turning blue.
But if my scarf offends, I'll turn
the other cheek. (It's got windburn.)

 

Now your turn: let the weather do its worse--and put your efforts into verse. 

 

My cozy red scarf

 

But why can't you smile more?

I'd just finished doing a joint presentation with a wonderful colleague when another colleague offered praise: "It was good to see the two of you looking happy." Well, we looked happy because we were happy. We were presenting interesting information about terrific authors to illustrate fascinating ideas about the way history and literature illuminate each other, a topic on which we are both very passionate, so of course we were happy.

But I heard the unspoken part of my colleague's praise: "It was good to see the two of you looking happy for a change." Ouch. Maybe if we had a chance to celebrate our research and share ideas amongst interested listeners every day, we would constantly parade all over campus in great big clown smiles, but there's a lot more to campus life than a once-in-a-career presentation.

The problem is that the two of us have been around higher education for a long time. We've both served as Faculty Chair during particularly trying times, and we've chaired departments and committees and worked on projects that exposed us to the most irritating aspects of campus culture. We've been through the wars and we try to carry our scars with dignity, but sometimes we get weighed down by past struggles, current challenges, and the stark forecast for the future of academe.

So we have been known to complain about injustices on campus, but what of it? If tenured senior professors don't use their voices to address problems, who will? 

And of course our experience reflects the ongoing epidemic of men telling women to smile more, as if the only value we bring into a situation is aesthetic. We're happy to smile when smiling is appropriate, but if the situation requires a stern mien, a pointed critique, or even a raised voice, we'll step up.

So I'll accept my colleague's praise: we did good work, and we were very happy while doing it. But don't expect us to smile through every situation, especially when the context requires critique.  

A new Olympic sport?

I thought I'd gathered a good number of eggs from the chicken coop yesterday until I realized that two of the eggs were actually golf balls. "Don't fry them," texted the resident chicken fancier, whose temporary non-residence resulted in my being tasked with gathering yesterday's eggs, an easy task in balmy weather but downright treacherous when the intervening landscape would be most suitably traversed via luge.

After what feels like years but is probably just weeks trapped in a repeated snow/slush/freeze cycle, the slopes on our property are now covered with a thick layer of snow topped with ice that sometimes holds firm and sometimes allows the feet to break through. I wore stout shoes and carried a walking stick and stayed near the path beaten by my husband's boots, but I still found it difficult walking down the hill and then back up again without losing my footing or losing my cool or losing the delicate eggs (or the golf balls). 

As everyone except me obviously knows, putting golf balls in the nesting box encourages the chickens to lay eggs there rather than, for instance, under the coop or on the ground or in the feed trough. I would have noticed that two of the eggs I'd gathered looked different from the others if I'd been wearing my glasses, but I knew the trek would be a bit of a slog and I can't wear glasses when I'm sweating because they slide down my face, and what with the walking stick and gloves and egg basket, I certainly wouldn't have been capable of pushing my glasses back up again once they'd started sliding.

In this kind of weather, egg-gathering ought to be considered an Olympic sport: it requires special equipment, physical strength, and manual dexterity, and it would benefit by the addition of a luge and ski lift. Who will call the International Olympic Committee? I would do it myself but I've got to clean up the fried-golf-ball mess.    

Friday poetry challenge: Replaceable You

I’m trying to replace myself but it isn’t easy.

The Powers That Be like to insist that I’m irreplaceable—usually when they want to sweet-talk me into taking on some extra bit of work—but nevertheless they want to quickly identify someone to replace me as Director of our Center for Teaching Excellence so I can train my replacement over the course of the fall and make a smooth transition that will maintain our momentum. They’ve asked me to write a job description so they can seek and sort applicants, which is a nice switch from the previous selection process, which ran something like this: "We need a Director. You’ve done it before. Do it again."

So I’ve spent some time trying to succinctly describe my duties and the characteristics needed to fulfill them, because I have to write something more specific than "Wear yourself out trying to meet everyone’s needs without adequate resources or support." I have crafted a bunch of bullet points using HR jargon to describe skills, tasks, and dispositions, but I haven't shared the other list, the secret list that can’t be put into words in an official document. Things like "The successful candidate will possess the ability to say yes in a way that clearly means no, a willingness to allow others to take credit for one's own work, and eternal patience with people seeking the magic wand that will make all their classroom problems disappear."

It could be worse--it could be verse!

There once was a Center Director
whose seat was equipped with ejector,
but before she took flight
the boss asked her to write
a description to help them select her

Replacement, an ideal mixture
of cheerleader, scholar, and fixer;
whose magical skills
could cure all teaching ills
and multiply budgets--neat trick! Sure, 

We're seeking a teacher who's stellar
with students, and then we'll compel her
to trade classroom chores
for admin meetings (bores!)
and "unspecified duties." (Don't tell her!)

So the Center Director is trying 
to describe her own job (without lying)
because she must replace
herself--in some haste--
or else she'll be here 'til she's dying.

 

Your turn--put your replacement's job description into verse. 

Because it was there

I walk alone across the snow-covered campus, my shoes crunch-crunching over snowy walkways stained blue from ice-melt salt that doesn't do much good in single-digit temperatures. At one point I'm forced to guess the path along an unplowed walkway, but I finally make it to the safety of the library. From my office window the campus looks deserted except for the occasional figure bundled up as if prepared to trudge across the icy expanse of Hoth. 

Why am I here? I don't teach on Tuesdays so I could have stayed home, but instead I braved the treacherous roads to spend a day catching up on scut-work and meeting with students. Is it really worth risking my life just to get to campus?

Fortunately, the worst of the Snowpocalypse missed our area; we had no power outages or falling trees and our pipes didn't freeze. But we had plenty of snow, ice, and cold, and the cold is just getting colder. I broke out the long-johns and bundled up thoroughly, but in the short distance I walked from car to building, my face started to hurt.

I suppose I wanted to prove that I could do it. Living with people who scoff at bad weather is a challenge. If I'm hunkering under a blanket with a cup of hot tea and a good book when the resident lumberjack says it looks like a good time to go out and cut down some trees--well, I can't help feeling like a bit of a wimp. It's pretty lame to beg out of driving in snow because I learned to drive in Florida, where snow never entered the picture. I mean, it's true, but that was more than 40 years ago and I've developed some snow-driving skills in that time. The fact is that I just don't wanna.

But I wasn't getting any work done at home and I do have some appointments today, so here I am in my office wondering whether anyone will actually show up. I'm filling the time with meaningful work: peer-reviewing an article for a literary journal (meh), rescheduling all my Monday meetings that were cancelled because of weather, preparing for a campus presentation  that promises to be the highlight of my week, looking out the window at something other than yard birds--which are lovely, of course, but the birds don't pay my salary. 

Campus feels eerily quiet today and I doubt that I'll stay much beyond lunchtime. I'll meet with my students, congratulate myself for making the effort, and then trudge back along the frozen expanse of Hoth to my warm, cozy home. It's a luxury, of course, to go home to a warm house when so many others are left out in the cold, and so I contribute to local charities that serve the homeless and pray for a world in which no one has to stay outside on a day like today.

The view from my window

Snowpocalypse staredown

What else is there to say?

Birding the Snowpocalypse

Years ago a friend from California visited our house and her young daughter was jumping up and down about these beautiful red birds at the feeders.

Cardinals. She'd never seen a cardinal before. 

Around here, they're common as dirt--especially on a day like today, with snow all over everything and an easy source of seeds at our feeders. It's not unusual to look outside and see a dozen or more cardinals vying for position. Later during mating season the males get all territorial, but right now they're content to hang out all together in the trees surrounding our feeders, along with woodpeckers, titmice, chickadees, finches, juncos, and a solitary towhee. It's unusual to have juncos and towhees at the same time, but there they are.

So far, Snowpocalypse has been pretty, with just a few inches of snow covering the roads last night and more big, fluffy flakes coming down this morning. But now the snow has changed to sleet. Who knows what's coming next? No plows have come down my road yet but I don't have to go anywhere today so I think I'll stay home and watch the birds. I can worry about the roads tomorrow.

The view from my bedroom window.

First towhee of the season. 

Friday poetry challenge: Toddlers at the top

Someone said that working in academe right now is like desperately holding on to an abusive relationship: just when you think things are getting better, a fist comes flying at you out of nowhere. 

It was nothing, really--just a little love-tap. Probably entirely accidental. Taking this latest blow personally would be just as petty and childish as taking bad weather personally. I mean, the storm hits everyone--it's not particularly intent upon ruining my weekend. But it would be nice to be able to do the work I love without wondering when I'll be floored by another arbitrary slap in the face.

While I play the toddler pouting in the corner, I wonder what it would be like if toddlers ruled the College. A previous administration taught us what Leadership by Tantrum looks like, and we've seen any number of bright shiny programs and plans get tossed aside the moment a new toy gets plopped down in the playroom. We've seen otherwise rational people hoarding goodies so no one else can touch them, and we've seen the hand of discipline being applied to exactly the wrong backside. Most of all, we've learned that it does no good to stomp our feet and cry that It's not fair! The kid who cries the loudest may occasionally get rewarded, but he's more often sent to the time-out box. So I'll sit over in my corner and sulk for a bit, but by next week this will all be forgotten and I'll be back in the playroom hoping for the best. (And--wham!) 

These toys are mine,
and that one, too! 
I don't want you,
or you, or you

to touch my things.
So here's the line:
on this side, every-
thing is mine.

On your side, play 
with broken toys.
Not fair? Who cares!
These bring me joy! 

Hey, give it back!
Don't make me mad!
Don't kick or I'll
be calling Dad!

I'll scream and cry
and raise a fuss!
He's here! Oh dear--
now all of us

are fleeing from
his angry spanks.
He missed! I'm safe!
He got you! Thanks

For soaking up
his angry blows.
Next time he'll get me.
(So it goes.)

Now your turn: what would happen if toddlers ruled your workplace? 

Where have all the students gone?

There was a time, not so long ago, when I started every semester hoping to scare a few students away. On the first day of class, after all the syllabus-related preliminaries, I would give students a poem they'd never seen before and require them to write about it, just to show me what they could do in 20 minutes, and I didn't complain if a few students went right over to the Records Office to drop the class. After all, my courses were generally full and a few drops meant good news for students on the waitlist.

Well, times have changed. I can't remember the last time I had a full class, much less a waitlist, and I've had multiple classes cancelled due to low (or nonexistent) enrollment. This semester I'm teaching American Lit Survey for the 25th and final time, but instead of 20 or 25 students including a swath of English majors, I started with 11 students. One student dropped yesterday, so I'm down to 10--with the drop deadline a full 10 days away.

And English majors? I may have one, unless someone has not yet declared. It looks like most of the students on the roster are majoring in finance or accounting, plus a couple of Education majors and a history buff. I can't afford to scare any of them away or I'll end up with no one to teach this semester, so I'm treading lightly. 

Further, one student made a comment on the first day of class that set off alarm bells. I won't reveal the content, but the comment and attitude put me on alert: if ever anyone was prepared to secretly record my class and post snippets out of context online, this is the one. I have never worried about the Powers That Be trying to constrain or control the content of my courses, but these days nothing scares me more than a student who knows how to record on a smartphone. We're all just one wacky ad-lib away from the wrong kind of notoriety.

But what can they do--fire me? I'm retiring in December. I can't afford to scare my small cadre of students, and I refuse to waste much time letting them scare me. If students can find a way to put up with me for a few more months, I can ride off into the sunset with my wacky ad-libs waving in the breeze. 

On a day like today, who needs a poet?

On a day celebrating the contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr., I'm thinking of Walt Whitman, which seems an odd choice. Whitman died decades before King's birth and his ideas belonged to a different century; nevertheless, I told my American Lit Survey students that since we're discussing Whitman in class on Wednesday, they should spend a little time on MLK day to sit and read Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser."  

What can a poem about Whitman's Civil War experience possibly say about the ongoing struggle for civil rights?

Whitman didn't fight in the Civil War--too old--but his brother fought and was wounded at Fredericksburg. Whitman traveled to a field hospital to tend to his brother's wounds, but then he accompanied a trainload of soldiers to a hospital in Washington, D.C., where he spent the next three years volunteering as a nurse.

Given the state of medical science at the time, it was a messy and unpleasant business, one that seems profoundly out of place in a war poem. Early in "The Wound-Dresser," Whitman describes the young people clamoring for war stories, asking him to "be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth," to describe the "hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous" that led to Union victory. We've certainly had plenty of poetry extolling the glories of war, right on back to The Iliad, but Whitman had little experience of glory. 

Instead, he takes readers alongside as he moves through a hospital full of broken bodies, providing what small comfort he can. "Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, / Straight and swift to my wounded I go," he writes:

To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill'd with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill'd again.

No glory here--only blood and gore, wounds and refuse. In a poem full of pain, he won't allow readers to look away:

From the stump of the arm, the amputated,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,
And has not yet look'd on it.

But the poet has looked on it, and not just the bloody stump but "the fractur'd thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen"--how many wounds over three years of battles? And what kind of help could a poet possibly offer?

"The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand, / I sit by the restless all the dark night," he writes, and sometimes, when nothing can be done, he wishes for the wounded the sweet succour of death.

He evokes the stench and mess of gangrenous flesh, the futility of so many promising lives lost, the human cost of fighting for a worthwhile principle. I tell my students that the image of the poet spreading comfort among the hospital beds provides an emblem for American authors after the Civil War. Who will mend the great bloody gash in the American psyche? Who will help suture the gaping divisions that continue to tear the nation apart? Whitman reminds us that equality does not arrive easily but often requires blood and sacrifice, and if we're not fit to fight, then the least we can do is tend wounds and bear witness.

Which is why, on a day like today, we still need nurses and wound-dressers, and we'll always need poets.

Twenty years of Excelsior, already?

It's a ridiculous situation from the start: a youth runs up a steep mountain in deep winter while carrying a banner inscribed with one word in Latin--Excelsior!--a very nice thought for those who read Latin, but others might find it incomprehensible. Why is he running up the mountain? With whom is he trying to communicate? Why won't he accept his neighbors' advice and trade his futile quest for a nice mug of hot cocoa? Longfellow doesn't tell us, so nobody knows.

These days blogging feels like an equally futile quest, especially when humanity seems determined to outsource all its reading and writing needs to robots. Have I been pouring my heart and soul into words in this space for twenty long years only to provide fodder for training mindless conglomerations of code?

Twenty years! It seems like a long time, but if this blog were a person, it wouldn't be old enough to drink. Just over four thousand posts and 1.5 million visits, though I place no confidence in the numbers because who knows how many visitors possess a mind rather than a circuit board?

I started blogging on January 18, 2006, with a post setting forth a sort of purpose, though it's couched no more clearly than the message on Longfellow's "banner with the strange device." Though that explanatory post is linked on my home page, it is only the second-most-visited post I've produced. The most-visited post, for reasons I can't fathom, is called "Meeting the OMBD Candidate." It describes academic job candidates who make members of the search committee declare, "Over my dead body!" It's not the greatest thing I've ever written but it must have struck a chord, with over 9000 visits since 2007.

"Teaching" is the most common label affixed to these posts at 1117, with "The perils of being me" and "Life in the Slow Lane" coming in a distant second and third at 835 and 831. Apparently I've written quite a lot about family, birds, books, and writing, but I also scribbled 166 posts labeled Coronavirus Chronicles and 136 labeled The New Normal, which seems odd because I feel as if cancer dominated a larger stretch of my life than did Covid-19.

Amidst all the posts about Serious Academic Matters as well as rampant silliness, I was surprised to find five posts from 2015 labeled The End of the World as We Know It, There we find George Washington seeking the name of Margaret Thatcher's wigmaker, John Muir providing inspiration for tinkerers and wanderers everywhere, academics becoming zombies at a conference, students learning novel ways to plagiarize, and teachers coping with the challenges of the Listicle Generation. I don't quite see the connection, nor do I recall why I abandoned the label not long after introducing it.

But I'm never quite sure what I'm doing here besides playing with words in a way that may provide some pleasure and insight to others. Longfellow's ridiculous youth engaged in a futile quest could be the mascot for any English professor's career, but I also quite enjoy another meaning of Excelsior: wood wool, the shavings used as packing material before the advent of styrofoam peanuts. Twenty years ago I concluded my first-ever blog post with a promise to share the "curly little shavings from the wood block of my mind," which expresses, as clearly as anything, what I'm trying to do here.

And I'm still trying to do it despite everything. Not long ago I resolved to restore three habits that I'd thoughtlessly abandoned last year: taking long walks, snapping frequent photos, and writing silly poetry. In the new year I've done some walking in the woods (ouch ouch ouch) and I've finally bought a new zoom lens, but thus far I've somehow avoided writing any doggerel. Time to fulfill my vow! What better way to celebrate a blogiversary?

Onward and Upward with Excelsior

I blogged about life in the slow lane and cancer;
I blogged my confusions and questions (and answers!).
I blogged about books, about teaching and writing,
I wrote on how tech breaks my neck--not indicting
its use but admitting my weakness. I posted
some pix of my grandkids, and sometimes I boasted
of tenure, promotion, awards--how I coasted!

I wrote about Covid and struggles with Zooming.
I wrote about birds, bees, and flowers a-blooming.
I wrote of The End of the World (hypothetical),
of Zombies and tinkerers, texts theoretical,
of life in the woods, on the road, on some beaches,
of sweet corn and pawpaws and pies full of peaches.

I blogged and I blogged and I wondered, "Who's reading?"
In what way is my goal (so bizarre!) still succeeding?
Though the bots boost my numbers, I can't see the point
of my yammering on in a vast, empty joint.

I think about quitting or splitting for Substackl
I wonder how long I'll have something to say.
What would happen, I ask, if one blog were to subtract
itself from the burgeoning media fray?

I think of the Longfellow poem, that poor youth
who sacrificed all for a hard, painful truth:
you can carry your message up Alps, ever higher,
you can trot, sprint, or sashay, but if you aspire
to communicate urgent commandments on satin, 
it's best, perhaps, not to proclaim them in Latin.

But this blog is a box full of thoughts and impressions,
all packed in with wood wool (excelsior!). I press on
and up with my strange banner waving, and even
if no one is reading, I can't help believing
that writing still matters, so I'll sing to the choir:
"Excelsior!" Sing with me! (It simply means "higher.")

I wouldn't call it a bribe, exactly

And so it has come to this: in my final year of teaching, I am offering extra credit just to convince literature students that I'm not scary.

Apparently they think we're scary. Students, that is. An expert at one of our teaching workshops earlier this week said studies show that today's students are terrified of visiting faculty offices, something I really didn't need an expert to tell me. I can go weeks at a time without having a student in my office, except when I require them to schedule one-on-one conferences for writing feedback or for advising.

I have done everything I can to make my office hospitable: Comfy chairs! Toys! Interesting books! A Jane Austen action figure! (Though the only actions she can take are to hold the writing desk and pen, which makes her seem pretty poorly armed in the world of action figures until you realize that the pen is mightier than the sword. You go, Jane!)

So while my colleague across the hall enjoys a constant parade of students coming by to talk about their classes and projects and life goals, and while another colleague upstairs attracts an army of students by providing, outside his office door, a basket of free snacks (Rice Krispies Treats! Granola bars! Twinkies!), I sit here twiddling my thumbs. Not that I'm complaining--thumb-twiddling fuels a plethora of idle thoughts, some of which may actually lead to worthwhile results. But if experts insist and studies show that getting students to visit my office will make them more comfortable contributing to class discussions, then by golly I'll get them there.

So for the first time, I am offering five extra-credit points to any student who visits my office before February 6 and spends a mere ten minutes casually chatting about books and reading. How do they feel about books? What do they like to read? What don't they like to read? Why? I have promised a judgment-free zone and invited them to give Mr. Potato Head a makeover. Ideally, this will make them more comfortable opening their mouths in class while helping me to understand their complicated (maybe?) feelings about books and reading.

If it works, five points is a small price to pay. If it doesn't? Let them eat Twinkies. 

 

Welcome to my office!

  

 

I've met my quota of meaningless meetings

I neglected to take a Buzzword Bingo card to the four million hours of required campus meetings this morning, so of course I sat quietly in my seat and paid careful attention to boatloads of highly engaging material about, for instance, new College policies for purchasing and budgeting. 

Not. 

I may be exaggerating just a little, but what do you expect from someone who's spent half a day squeezed into an auditorium while being bombarded with more information than any one person could possibly absorb in a lifetime--with no coffee? Yes: someone thought it was a great idea to pen up the entire faculty in four hours of meetings with not a single drop of caffeine in sight. That would be someone who has no understanding of human nature, or who hasn't yet mastered the new purchasing policies and therefore can't order coffee for a room full of busy people who would rather be writing their syllabi. 

At one point I looked around and noted the number of colleagues doing stuff on their phones--at least half of the attendees in one row. But these are mature professional people so I'm sure they were completing Important College Business and not, for instance, today's Wordle. (Which I solved in two tries! And frankly I ought to get a round of applause for not jumping up and down and screaming YES in the middle of the meeting!)

A person gets sleepy, you know? Especially an aging academic on the verge of retirement who has already fulfilled her lifetime quota of meetings that should have been emails. So I kept myself alert by finding interesting anagrams of colleagues' names. Somehow it's easier to keep smiling when I think of my longsuffering colleagues as Tickle Sieve, Sick Mirth, Macabre Magic, Chantal Roadkill, or, especially, Clamoring Ahem. 

I could have attended another two hours of meetings this afternoon but no. Why? Because I have a few last-minute preparations for yet another series of meetings tomorrow--teaching workshops I've organized--but these meetings are entirely voluntary AND plenty of caffeine will be available, not to mention lunch and door prizes. Also, I don't need to spend an hour learning about how I can be involved in an exciting new program that will barely get off the ground by the time I retire in December. And aside from that, this morning's many-meeting marathon left me so slap-happy that I'm afraid I won't be able to keep a straight face while listening to the earnest pleas of Sacra Hokum.

So instead, I think I'll just skedaddle. (Shh, don't tell!)

Don't look now, but Eve Bough has left the building. 

On (not) teaching in Texas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs and wonders

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

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

An omen!?

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

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

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

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