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.