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.")

Year in review, or why the world needs more doggerel

If I had a time machine today, I wouldn't go back decades to kill baby Hitler or tackle Lee Harvey Oswald before he pulled the trigger or demand that Dickens reveal the ending of Edwin Drood. No, I'd do something entirely selfish: go back to January 2025 and give myself a good sharp kick in the shin while delivering some pointed advice: Don't stop walking in the woods! Buy a new telephoto lens! And for heaven's sake write some poetry once in a while!

I've just spent a couple of hours reviewing the past year's blog posts and while I admit that it's been an odd year, a frustrating year, a year that taxed my annual quota of futile tasks, nevertheless I can see points where I could have made the year more bearable just by doing more of the things that bring me joy. I know why I cut down on long walks in the woods--knee injury plus broken telephoto lens plus enervating malaise--but I also know that walking in the woods with the camera provides an ideal palliative for futility and oddness and malaise, and it might have helped my knee recover more quickly too. 

And that's another thing I'd kick myself about: I injured my knee in early August but didn't seek medical help for two months, months of pain and misery and lack of sleep. What was I thinking? Granted, the cortisone shot took a while to work, but if I'd gotten it earlier I could have avoided two months of agony and perhaps even motivated myself to spend more time in the woods.

And what made me (mostly) stop writing poetry? I've never suffered the delusion that the weekly doggerel I used to compose was any good, but at least it provided an excuse to have fun with words while distracting from the surrounding chaos and, yes, futility. Maybe part of me thinks that doggerel is far too frivolous for times like these, but if I give up doggerel, the terrorists win. Or something like that.

I'm venting, but I'm mostly mad at myself. So many opportunities to connect with thinking people everywhere but mostly I've been griping about my aches and pains, my foundering career, and my impending retirement. Who wants to read all that? (Here's another kick! And another!)

Now that I've got that out of my system, let's take a look at some of the more memorable  moments of 2025 as recorded on this blog. 

My favorite blog post of the year happened in November after I drove home from my daughter's choir concert while pondering what happens When Wordsworth visits Wendy's. Another pair of holiday concerts inspired a post highlighting Angelic voices, eclectic spaces. 

Literature, like music, feeds my soul in more ways than I can measure, so it's a good thing that (Some) visiting writers rock! In November my soul gorged on visits with two visiting writers: Mary Roach, who taught us A little more than diddly, and Jonathan Johnson, whose homely poems made penultimate Friday fabulous.

It's no surprise that my classes inspired many blog posts in 2025, but I was surprised at how few of them deal directly with Artificial Intelligence. I may be obsessed with AI-induced paranoia and the awe of the Oracle, but I wrote more frequently about other teaching topics. I saw evidence of the continuing decline of intellectual curiosity in my first-year seminar class, where students got Pig-headed about Pygmalion while eluding illumination about "Illuminati." I applauded students willing to ask awkward questions, though some of them hit a bit too close to home.

In my upper-level writing classes, I pondered The tragedy of TL;DR and gave students Some practice in probing for the story as well as A step-by-step guide to writing a step-by-step guide. And my students taught me a thing or two, from the existence of a hybrid sport or elaborate prank to a novel suggestion for constructing a nap rubric.

But a whole host of posts dealt with frustrations endemic to higher education that go far beyond teaching. Some of these frustrations arise from this peculiar cultural moment, when higher education is being undermined and attacked from a variety of angles, requiring career academics to spend far too much time dealing with the Department of Aggravation, Obfuscation, and Angst (the AOA department). Federal Budget cuts hit home while cancelled grants undermine valuable projects.

Other stresses arise from my own peculiar situation: my skills are being underutilized so I'm Twiddling the time away, dealing with malfunctioning campus systems, tiptoeing around topics too sensitive to write about, and banging my head against the wall. My administrative role(s) often leave me Clambering through the claptrap and wondering why academics are often compelled to Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. On the one hand I'm agonizing over how far I should go to keep students comfortable, and on the other I'm devoting hours to trying to find sexier names for my courses so students might actually enroll--and all this leads me to echo a lament from a Douglas Adams character: Brain the size of a planet and they've got me pushing piddling paperwork.

And yet I found some things to celebrate in academe. I enjoyed Celebrating second chances while Turning up the sound on the symphony of learning. Students inspire me, which is Why I'd like to retire--but not today. As I enter my final year of teaching before retirement, I assure myself that I'm not just Mailing it in and I wonder what happens When the door swings back. There's no doubt that I'll need a new challenge, but where will I find it when my students are gone?

Maybe I'll be the type of old person who rambles on about my aches and pains, like the knee injury that cramped my style during fall break or the vertigo attack that helped me make the world a better place or the dreaded polyps that inspired a TMI alert.

Or maybe I'll charge full-bore into Grandma Mode, rambling on about my intelligent and talented grandkids ad nauseam or describing in great detail all the joys of Grandma and Grampa Camp: the wild times, the Things I had forgotten about having a house full of kids, the answers to questions no one asked, and the rare moments of Peace, quiet, and nothing to do.

Or maybe retirement will give me more time to focus on the joys of nature and travel: the Road trip back to winter, the bootless endeavor in the snow and the coming thaw, the encounters with Bird people, with Spring ephemerals, with Summer sunshine and sweet corn season and Pumpkins, peppers, pawpaws, pizzazz. At some point I need to get more closely acquainted with the chickens, who landed in the spring and eventually suffered a close encounter with life (and death) in the slow lane, and whose diminished numbers were enriched by the addition of Guineas in the mist.

Or maybe we'll find the funds for more home renovation projects, like the bathroom renovation that first required Excavating the family landfill. I wished for a self-demolishing bathroom, praised a project that's going well, and eventually found myself Flush with success, with a room that sparks a frisson of satisfaction every time I walk by.

The new bathroom provides tangible evidence of a job well done, but this was also the year that brought kudos for a writing job well done, when an academic journal editor's praise inspired me to beg readers to Stop me before I get "brilliant" tattooed on my forehead. It may not be as visible as a renovated bathroom, but that close and careful reading of my work reminds me that futility need not be the overarching theme of this past year, or of the next either. 

In fact, what this brief and perhaps agonizing plunge into my personal time machine tells me is that I don't have to settle for futility. I can carry on, fight the fight, grapple with boondoggles and conquer the claptrap--but to make it bearable I'll need to I buy a telephoto lens, go for walks in the woods, and make a regular date with doggerel.

Weighing the crowbars against the wildflowers: 2022 in review

As I look back over a year's worth of blog posts, the biggest surprise is not how little I wrote in 2022 (104 posts!) or how rarely I wrote about books in any depth (maybe twice?). No: I'm most surprised by the number of times I threatened to bash on something with a crowbar--or, once, with a space heater.

I am not a violent person! I can't remember the last time I hit any person or thing--intentionally, that is. I have a gift for unintentionally smashing things, from my own knee to my own noggin to a cup of vanilla latte to a stranger's car. But in 2022 the prospect of wielding a crowbar against various objects kept coming up in my blog posts, and I think I know why: in a year full of difficult events I couldn't fully write about in public, my pent-up frustrations manifested as imaginary crowbars ready to do some smashing.

The year had its wonderful moments, often involving birds, butterflies, beaches, wildflowers, grandkids, or some combination of these things. But even some of the most delightful moments featured unpleasant intrusions--like the time a stray dog tried to put its herding skills to work on my grandkids.

My students sometimes surprised me with delightful writing and discussions, their willingness to sample pawpaws or their ability to create art inspired by literature. In the spring I enjoyed my Tuesday afternoon discussion and laughs with the retirees who signed on to learn about the history of comedy in my Learning in Retirement class, which I was reluctant to teach until I saw how much fun and perspective my students brought to the table.

And my colleagues continued to provide enlightenment and encouragement, proving, as I wrote in one post, that even in the face of disaster, we can "grit our teeth and carry on" if we work together.

But let me tell you: we've really needed that skill this year. Early in the year, we all thought that the biggest controversy we would face on campus would be whether to move to a mask-optional policy, but then in February we learned that the campus was facing a serious financial crisis that would lead to unprecedented cuts in positions, budgets, and benefits. One sudden personnel change made me wonder whether we'd entered the kind of universe in which anvils can suddenly fall from the sky to crush whole careers. 

All this uncertainty led to discord between various campus constituencies and a multiplication of long, anguished meetings in which we flailed away at Gordian knots without finding the proper tools to slice through them. As a member of Faculty Council, I developed survival strategies for three-hour meetings and often found myself privy to all kinds of information that I couldn't share in public, and often I just couldn't find the words to deal with the difficult issues.

As the long-term impact of this crisis became apparent, I struggled with a lot of angst about concluding my career "not with a bang, but a whimper." Not only is it unlikely that I'll ever get another raise, I also see enrollments declining in courses I care deeply about alongside an insistence that tenured faculty are too expensive and ought to be replaced by adjuncts or technology. I fear that if we can't quantify our intangible qualities in a spreadsheet, we will sacrifice the essence of a Liberal Arts education.  

But despite all this extracurricular angst, I still keep teaching--and writing about it. Early in the year I faced some rough academic weather, and I soon found myself facing some unexpected challenges--students secretly recording classes or relying on spinbots--alongside the usual failures to understand basic instructions. I struggled to say yes to students, convey bad news effectively, and avoid the hazards of Grading Brain, and sometimes technical difficulties were an albatross around my neck, from malfunctioning Zoom links to faulty hybrid teaching for snowbound students to an intransigent internet connection that led me to make a nuisance of myself.

Covid still had an impact, both in and out of the classroom. My students sometimes cheered me in the dark times as the virus kept rearing its ugly head even in times that should have been joyous. I've been sick with nasty sinus infections or colds several times this year but still have never tested positive for Covid, despite frequent exposure. 

The worst time, of course, occurred around my father's death. I'd endured a desperate road trip to try to reach him before he died, followed by the task of helping to clear up his effects and settle his estate, followed by cataract surgery, followed by another road trip to Florida for the funeral, all suffused with my attempt to understand his life and death, so I guess it's no surprise that I was sick and glum for most of July.

But thanks to Dad's estate, we've managed to take care of some deferred maintenance projects this year, from a new bed to a massive painting project to new flooring in several rooms--and let's not forget the septic-tank cleaning! Not exactly the highlight of my year but definitely a task that needed to be checked off the list. Sometimes household disasters provided needed distraction from knottier problems.

Other distractions arrived in the form of pleasant surprises: an unexpected tax refund, an encounter with fond memories at a reunion, an opportunity to revisit a checkered work history. Although my work on editing the collection of essays on teaching comedy pushed my stamina to the limits during the copyediting process, I found great pleasure in moving the work ever closer toward publication. In a year when helping a colleague jump a dead car battery counts as a major success, I'm giving myself a gold star just for showing up--because sometimes mediocrity is the thing for me.

All told, it's been the kind of year that inspires the desire to bash things in with crowbars--but I'm pleased to report that I haven't hit or kicked or walloped anyone or anything intentionally. In fact, in 2022 I wrote about flowers and birds and butterflies far more than bashing things with crowbars, so as I look toward 2023, I'll take inspiration from a post I wrote about recharging my own depleted batteries with a hike among the wildflowers at Lake Katharine, during which I found a rare and droopy but still surviving blossom: "Today I'm that showy orchis, battered by the elements and exhausted by the demands of this train-wreck semester but still standing in front of my classes and pointing toward beauty and growth." 

That's a goal I can get behind--but I'll never accomplish it unless I drop the crowbar.

2020 Hindsight

If I'd had any inkling back in January how 2020 would unfold, would I have done anything differently?

Well, I certainly wouldn't have wasted so much time trying to plan a student trip to Manhattan, a plan that went out the window in early March. I suppose I could have stocked up on toilet paper or placed bets on the results of the Presidential election, but I'm not a hoarder or a gambler so I'd probably just do exactly what I did: scramble to adjust to circumstances as they arose. 

Looking back on a year of blog posts, it's clear that 2020 was a time for struggling in front of a computer screen and running away to the woods. The two activities are linked, of course: getting out into nature was my primary method of coping with the craziness caused by the Coronavirus, so it's little wonder that posts record a remarkable number of trips to Lake Katharine plus occasional forays further afield.

In 2020 I've written 159 posts--plus this one, for an even 160. That's fewer than some previous years but I'm doing my best. My blog attracted 48,000 views this year, with three posts attracting the most hits:

When the virus hits close to home (264 views)

Some (rejected) options for teaching this fall (176) 

I've taught online before--why is this time different? (152) 

Clearly, the 'rona played a big part in my blogging this year, crowding out other concerns. I wrote very few book reviews this year, my favorite being the review of Amit Majmudar's What He Did in Solitary, and my love for writing doggerel came to the forefront very rarely. (There's a good New Year's Resolution: less whining, more doggerel.)

I tried a few new things this year: editing a volume of essays on teaching comedy (submitted to the editorial board; awaiting reply); attending a local Black Lives Matter protest; attending drive-up church services in my car; feeding birds right out of my hand. In July I spent 24 hours in the hospital, suffering from a bad case of probably nothing wrong but let's run some tests anyway, and in October we relocated our Jackson residence from a parsonage to a lovely rental house in the woods, where we did a whole lot of painting and got accustomed to going to the laundromat.

And of course I learned to Zoom--with my classes, of course, but also with family, celebrating my grandkids' birthdays remotely before we widened our bubble in May. Considering that I'd never Zoomed before March, I had to get my skills up to speed really quickly when our spring classes moved online--and there followed a whole host of posts dealing with the demands of pandemic pedagogy: obsessing over annoying questions; setting up a workable home office; preparing multiple versions of classes; needing help when everyone else needs help too; figuring out social distancing in the classroom; missing the social interactions that make work wonderful; trying to prevent dangerous behavior; getting probed by the pandemic; and dealing with dreams that unmasked my anxieties.

But wait--there's more! It's kind of alarming how much I wrote about teaching under pandemic conditions this year, but sometimes writing was my only way to exert some control over an overwhelming situation. Writing and hiking and birding and canoeing: ways to find peace away from screens and anxieties.

I posted a lot of photos this year, very few dealing with teaching or coronavirus concerns. I seem to have spent some happy time sitting outside by the butterfly garden, helping my grandkids bake cookies or go sledding, and looking at birds and wildflowers and woods. Someday I hope those happy times will loom larger in my memory than all the angst of 2020, which is why I'm spending the last day of the year lingering over photos of places I've been and looking forward to the time when I can go there again.

Of traffic spikes, detours, and dead ends

I was sitting at my little house in the woods one evening last week when I noticed a steady stream of traffic wending its way down my road. Seeing two cars at a time on my stretch of country road is pretty unusual, but this caravan of cars and trucks continued all evening. I assumed that traffic was being re-routed from the state highway, and sure enough that was the case: a fatal car wreck had closed the highway and sent rush-hour traffic down a road so rural that our neighbor's dog can safely sleep on the pavement.

That's life in the slow lane: a sudden spike in traffic is a sign that something, somewhere is out of whack.

And that's life in the slow lane on this blog, too. Page visits are up and so are comments, but the vast majority of those page visits are from faceless bots and the vast majority of comments are quickly identified as spam and deleted. If I subtract the bot-driven spikes, readership is practically nothing, and comments have dried up.

Where did everyone go? I know many of my fellow academic bloggers have headed off to the Twitterverse, but I'm not going there for several good reasons, not the least being that I still have no cell reception at my house. I generally prefer the slow lane, but at the moment it feels a little too slow. And quiet. And lonely.

What's the answer? I wish I knew. I'm not one for courting controversy or making emotional appeals for attention, but at the same time I don't want to be the last one in the room who's unaware that the party is over. 

So I'm sitting quietly and watching traffic and wondering what to do when the traffic finally stops. It's quiet over here. Anybody have a suggestion? 

Will someone please help me dig out of this mess?

Guy shows up to class in shorts and I want to tell him, "Dude, it's 6 degrees outside! Put on some clothes!" But then I remind myself that he's dressed appropriately for the classroom, which is so beastly hot that I've been teaching with the windows open.

Am I going to complain about the weather again? Seems like all I ever talk about lately is the weather or local road conditions. Fun fact: two of the city's snowplows are out of commission just when they're most needed, making the brick streets even more treacherous than usual. 

And here's an even more fun fact: before Christmas, the state started a resurfacing project on a stretch of highway that I drive every day; they got as far as scraping off the surface of the road before the snow fell and the salt-trucks spread salt all over that rough subsurface, and then we had a brief thaw and a ton of rain and a sudden freeze, and now that 15-mile stretch of highway is pretty much Pothole City. Every day I face a challenge: drive on the slushy, icy spots or barrel right through the potholes? Making a frequently traveled highway virtually undriveable: my tax dollars at work!

But on the plus side, the snow drives birds to seek a more steady source of seeds, so they're all over our feeders all day long--tons of juncos plus one solitary towhee that doesn't get along well with the juncos, and then we'll sometimes have a dozen or more cardinals out there all at once, providing frequent bursts of scarlet against the white winter landscape. 

The even better news is that I don't have to go to campus today, so I'm working from home, where the temperature regulator on the wood burner is on the fritz so the house is holding a pretty steady temperature of 62 degrees. So it looks like I just can't get away from complaining about the weather.

But seriously, folks: I ought to celebrate my 12-year blogiversary by writing about something more interesting than the weather, but I'm going to need a little help. Put a topic in the comments--any topic, large or small--and I promise to write something about it before the end of the month. I can't guarantee that I'll say something profound or life-changing, but at least we'll distract ourselves from the massive pile of winter that's burying us alive.

 

Excelsior! (All over again)

Ten years ago today I committed myself publicly to packing this space with "curly little shavings from the wood block of my mind," determined to "venture ever onward and upward until the St. Bernards come to save us" (read it here). It's been a fun ten years, but what kind of fool would keep running up a frozen mountain waving a little sign that says Excelsior when so many others have laid down their banners and taken to tweeting? Or, to put the question more bluntly, why do I keep doing this? And when do I plan to quit?

Today would be a great day to quit, to wrap this all up with a neat little bow after a good solid ten years, but I find that I can't. Call me addicted, obsessive, compulsive, or bewitched, bothered, and bewildered, but I keep coming up with just one more thing to write and I can't quit until I send that one last bit of excelsior to fluttering into the ether, and then the next one, and then the next. And so herewith I present (not than anyone asked) an abecedary of reasons I can't stop blogging, with links!

Anger arrests creativity, but writing transmutes anger into something more manageable.

Birds flutter overhead and disappear, but not before leaving marks of peace all over this space.

Conference sessions become much more enjoyable when I'm puzzling over ways to transmute their leaden language into gold. 


Daisies keep pushing their way through the thin, rocky soil of my front garden, and if they insist on arriving utterly unbidden, the least I can do is share their loveliness with others.

Excuses to avoid writing arrive with regularity, but this space demands words, nags until I can't say no.

Found poetry pops out of student papers, slithers through academic essays, or creeps into correspondence, but disappears if not shared.

Grading big piles of student papers can make my brain as functional as dryer lint, but taking a little blogging break turns that fluff into fun.

Humor lubricates life's harsh realities, so I'm happy when I can make bitter medicine a little easier to swallow.

If you don't want to read cute grandbaby stories, go read something that delves deeply into politics or economic injustice or literary theory; I'll just sit here on the floor with a toddler and a tub of Play-Doh and share the joy of grandparenting. (Care to join us? Plenty of room for us all!)

Juicy figs, tender eggplants, red ripe tomatoes emerge from my garden, bringing deep colors and delicious flavors into my otherwise dull existence, and it's nice to share!

Kicking cancer's butt is a task best undertaken alongside a dedicated posse, such as the community I've encountered through this site, whose encouragement I will always treasure.

Life in the slow lane can be duller than watching a muskrat carcass rot, but wrapping words around the mundane dullness ameliorates its stink. 

Metaphors make the unspeakable more manageable, but when I wrote a post about the helpful air-conditioning repairdude who made my house bearable by replacing a capacitor, I had no idea that a few months later he'd be permanently incapacitated due to a drug overdose. (Where's the repairperson for that problem?)


Nonsense surrounds me, piling higher and deeper until I have to shove some into this space just to get it out from underfoot.

Onward implies steady progress, but I tend to travel in fits and starts, punctuating long periods of immobility with sudden swoopings into unknown terrain--and when my travels bring me face-to-face with limpkins or Russians or invisible chickens, something compels me to write it down.

Poetry pleases me in ways I can't quite put into words, whether I'm reading great poetry or scribbling derivative doggerel, but since I have trouble getting anyone in ordinary life to join in all my language games, I'll happily play with my imaginary friends.

Questions dog my days, yapping at me at inopportune times and even demanding attention in the middle of the night. Kenneling the questions here quiets them down.

Reading books is a solitary pleasure, but writing about books multiplies the joy.


Students! They make me laugh, they make me cry, they make me want to tear out my hair, but the time I spend with them is such a gift that I would feel selfish if I didn't share.  

Technology may sometimes serve as a barrier to effective communication, but blogging has opened a door to interesting people I might never have encountered outside this space.

Useful advice for academic writers is worth sharing, even if I wouldn't expect many professors to follow my circuitous path.

Venting strong emotion here provides a safety valve so it doesn't bubble over and make a big burned-on mess all over the place.

Words flutter like butterflies inside my head, demanding that I let them out to fly and play freely.

X marks the spot where a car flipped into our creek, disturbing our peace for more than just one night, but when disaster hits, crafting a blog post helps sequester the pain. 

Yes, I'm a very busy person who probably ought to be doing something more important with my limited time, but everyone has to relax somehow and I prefer blogging to bowling.

Zucchini: a blessing and a burden, but having friends with whom to share the excess makes the world a little more delicious.

And that's my goal here: gather together the random bits of stuff scattered around on the ground and share it with anyone interested to help sustain us on our trip up the big, steep, icy mountain. Excelsior! 

(And if the zucchinis run out, we can hold hands and wait for the St. Bernards to bound up carrying zucchinis strapped under their shaggy chins.) 



 

  
  

A few minor corrections

In response to my previous post, a person in a position to know informs me that camels do not, in fact, store water in their humps. I might argue that metaphorical camels do, in fact, store water in their humps, but mixing literal and metaphorical camels does nasty things to the gene pool, so forget I ever mentioned it.

While we're issuing corrections, I should point out that there's no such thing as the Comma Fairy (don't tell my students!) and that my extensive entourage is entirely imaginary (which suggests that someone needs to explain these outrageous expense reports--how many mink toilet seat covers does an entourage need?).

And if we're being entirely literal, I've never climbed an Alp or waited for a Saint Bernard to rescue me or posted photos of nude exhibitionists (well, except for that one time). But I could! Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Mega-meta-blogging-blocker

You're not writing about that, are you?

Sure I am. Why not? It's a great story.

But you're angry. 

For a good reason!

You know it's a mistake to write while you're angry. 

Shut up. Go away.

You'll regret it later! And what if you have to apologize?

So? I've apologized before and it didn't kill me.

But you wouldn't have had to apologize if you'd listened to me!

Now you're really making me angry. 

Why do you have to complain all the time anyway? Don't you have something a little happier to write about?

What, like how I just totally smashed my students' love affair with Robert Frost? Hurray for me, turning bright-eyed optimists into bitter cynics!

What about the weather? You could write about the weather!

Warm air, sunshine, blah blah blah, but down here in my dungeon office I'm wrapped in a blanket and wishing I had a great big dog to keep my feet warm. 

Such a whiner. I'm sure you could find a bright side if you tried hard enough!

Sure, but writing about the bright side would reveal the outlines of the dark side as well. Casting sunshine on the matter would only draw attention to the shadows.

Stay away from the shadows! You can't write about the shadows!

Sure I can. Just watch--!!

Stop! You might embarrass someone!

Maybe they deserve to be embarrassed.

What, now you're handing out bad-behavior tickets? What are you, the self-appointed Chief of the Collegiality Police?

Go away and leave me alone!

Keep handing out those tickets and you'll know what it means to be alone--for good.

Shut up and let me write!

But not about that! 

A spoonful of kindness makes the snarkiness go down

I love College Misery, the dysfunctional group blog that allows--yea, encourages whining and griping about every little thing that's wrong with academe, but today I'm enjoying its opposite: Academic Kindness, which offers contributors an opportunity to provide a "record of unsolicited kindness, unexpected goodwill, and excessive generosity in academia."

Excessive generosity? In ACADEMIA? What are they smoking?

But wait: I've seen plenty of generosity in academia, and I've been on the receiving end of generosity that at the time may have seemed ordinary but that others might view as excessive--and not just when I was in the throes of cancer treatment. Just this week I received a surprisingly laudatory note from a colleague, edited photos I took with a lens that was a gift from a class of students, and was offered an unexpected opportunity to contribute an essay to a collection. If there are other motivations besides kindness lurking behind these boons, I don't want to know about it.

I won't give up College Misery because sometimes I need that little dose of snark, but today I'm grateful to be reminded of the unexpected acts of kindness that make my job possible. If I read both blogs, will they cancel each other out or will they react like matter and antimatter? There's only one way to find out.     

First lines of abandoned posts

It was the best of cabbages, it was the worst of cabbages.

When I linger over the luscious lines of Clarice Lispector, I don't know how to finish the sentence.

Any morning that starts off with a roach crawling across my toes can only get better.

Here's my idea for a literary reality show based on Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: whoever can live three days in the Compson household without committing suicide or going crazy wins a grand prize of $3000 and an all-expenses-paid trip down a tree.

Students!!!! GAAAAH!!!! Stop me before I rant again!

 

Time for a reboot

I have a pile of papers to grade so naturally I've been fiddling with the template of my blog to try to make commenting work more consistently. I really like the dynamic templates, but if people can't comment, what's the point? This is supposed to be a conversation within a community, but one-way conversations simply aren't any fun. So give it a try and tell me how you like it.

Also, I'm working on updating my links. In the past I've been a little stingy with links, mostly because it's a pain to keep them updated. However, I'm ready for a reboot. Want to be linked? Send me a note and if you're not a money-grubbing robot, I'll add you.

I've been writing this blog since January 2006 for a total of 2194 posts and sometimes I wonder whether I ought to be doing something more important, like, maybe, grading papers, writing assessment reports, or even mowing the lawn. However, this blog serves as a sanity-preserver (for me--and I hope for you too!) and sanity is a rare enough commodity in academe that it's worth preserving. 

So I carry on. Another day, another template. Let's hope this one works!

Blog prob dogs prof

Here's the dilemma: for reasons too complicated to explain, I'm considering moving my blog to another platform so I would love to ask bloggers to send recommendations, either privately or in the comments....but how will readers leave comments if I can't get the comment function to work properly? (And there you have just one of the reasons too complicated to explain.)

Season's questions

Why is it so much easier to un-decorate a Christmas tree than to decorate it?

How am I supposed to write reference letters to eight different graduate programs when all I've been given is the name of the school and the deadline? And what is it with the number eight anyway? Why have two different students requested letters for eight schools this season?

Is there any end to the holiday sweets? What kind of miracle is taking place in my refrigerator to make that wonderful fudge keep multiplying?

Why am I suddenly receiving requests from people who want to pay me money if I'll insert a little text and a few links into my blog posts? Haven't they read the post in which I explain that I once quit a brief stint as a newspaper reporter because the advertisers were allowed to dictate news content? Or haven't I written that story?

Are there bloggers out there who are accepting $50 payments for inserting text that doesn't even fit the intent of the post? What kind of person expects me to sell my soul for a measly $50?

What am I supposed to do with all these pretty Christmas cards? It seems wasteful to throw them away, but who has room to store them all? Fifty to 100 cards each year for going on 30 years...who has a closet that big? And what if the mice get into 'em?

Why does it feel so satisfying to delete items from my Amazon wish list after the holidays?

Why does my dog feel the need to keep track of every bone she's ever hauled home from the woods? Why can't she delete a few items from her bone list? Is it really necessary to make our lawn a boneyard?

Why can't I think of anything interesting to write about? Will the new year bring a new bag of ideas or will I keep kicking around the same old tired detritus?

What will be the final question of the year? Will it be this one?

Or perhaps this?

Nothing about anything

"You can write about anything," she said, but really? Anything? There's an awful lot of anything in the world. How could anyone possibly write about that?

Take hedgehogs--please. I'm sure someone can write about hedgehogs, but that someone can't be me. I don't know diddly about hedgehogs, so how can I write about them? (Unless asserting my inability to write about hedgehogs qualifies as writing about them.)

The list of things I can't write about would have to include abacus, ailerons, anaconda, Antietam, Asperger's Syndrome, Angelina Jolie, and the Alps--and those are just the As. I can't write about Belgium, carborundum, deltoids, or (to skip a whole bunch of letters) shimmy-dampers. My son the pilot could tell you all about shimmy-dampers, but once I've told you that, I've told you everything I know about the topic.

"Go on," she said. "Just write. About anything."

But I can't! Writing about something is hard enough--now you want me to write about anything too? Harrumph to that. No one can write about anything. Someone can write about something--and at the moment, this someone can write about nothing.

"Anything," she said.

There: I've written about it. Satisfied?

A new view

Here I am teaching a group of colleagues (faculty, staff, even a few random librarians) how to set up a blog, and they're coming up with such wonderful designs for their blogs that mine looks pathetic by comparison. Time for a change! How about a window on a world that's not covered with snow? Here we go!

What I'm not blogging about today

No time to blog! But if I had time, this is what I'd blog about:

Reading: what's so great about Nicole Krauss, why Bill Bryson rocks even when he's not being very funny, what to do with my extra copy of The Finkler Question, which books didn't quite perform as promised.

Writing: how little progress I'm making on the conference paper I'm presenting next month, why I haven't gotten around to revising three different essays I ought to be sending out again, and how great it feels to finally hold in my hand a journal containing an article I wrote nearly three years ago.

Teaching: what a relief it is to have all three syllabi done, how much fun I'm having preparing for the California Literature class and trip, what neat new writing assignment I'm trying in that class, how annoyed my American Literature Survey students will be when I make them read just the three opening chapters of Dan Chaon's suspenseful novel Await Your Reply in preparation for his visit.

Everything else: why it's so much easier to un-decorate a Christmas tree, which last-minute details for tomorrow's pedagogy workshop are consuming my life, how exhausting search committees can be, why I'm not attending MLA this year, where I intend to spend the first part of my sabbatical next year.

It's a good thing I don't have time to write about all that. Writing about not writing about it has just about worn me out.

House of voices

A colleague was explaining why he's not interested in blogging: "I could never put all my private thoughts out there for everyone to read," he said. "It's too personal."

So I explained that what he sees on my blog is a public persona that may not be exactly identical to my private self.

"I wouldn't want to have a public self and a private self," he said, "because one of them would have to be fake."

Fake? Maybe "partial" is a better word. The essence of me sits ensconced in layers of personae--the teacher who wanders around the classroom waving her arms, the scholar who hunts down obscure references to forgotten authors, the mom who checks to see if her son's car got fixed and commends her daughter on her custard pies, the blogger who tries to twist the chaos of daily life into coherent and entertaining prose. They're all me, or pieces of me, but some of these personae eagerly come out in public and play while others prefer to hide under the bed and whimper.

I'm reminded of the Billy Collins poem "The Night House" (read it here), which imagines the body sleeping soundly in the bedroom while its restless heart goes to the kitchen for some warm milk, the mind grabs a cigarette and studies engineering, the conscience "awakens / and roams from room to room in the dark, / darting away from every mirror like a strange fish" while the soul "is up on the roof / in her nightdress, straddling the ridge, / singing a song about the wildness of the sea." Daylight brings all the parts back to the sleeping body, "that house of voices," which sometimes pauses "to listen to all its names being called / before bending again to its labor."

In this space my public personae can hear their names being called and put their restless energy to creative use, allowing my private personae a few moments of peace so I can bend again to my labor.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Excelsior

Of course I wouldn't want to imply that anyone reading this blog is an idiot--in fact, one could argue that reading this blog is proof of genius. Nevertheless, recent publicity has resulted in a flood of new visitors who don't know the password or the secret handshake and are likely to stumble about bumping into furniture and stumbling into oubliettes unless they get some guidance.

Thus, this:

If you want to know why it's called Excelsior, click here. If you want to know why and when I abandoned the cloak of anonymity and put my name on the blog, click here and here.

If you want to read about cancer, go to the labels list over on the lower right and click on The New Normal. It's all there. If you really really want to read the very long post about a day in the life of a chemotherapy patient trying to teach a humor class while hooked up to an IV drip, click here.

If you're interested in the very dull life I lead out in the woods with the birds and the dog and the turnips, click on the label Life in the Slow Lane. If you're interested in seeing me fumbling for the lightswitch and trying to find my way around in the dark, click on The Perils of Being Me. If you want to see pictures of birds or trees or garden vegetables, click on Birds or Nature or Garden. (Pay attention! All this will be on the test!)

And if you want to see what happens when I'm involved in a whole lot of stuff I can't discuss in public so I press it down and hush it up and squeeze it into the inaccessible oubliette of state secrets where it ferments and combines with other unspeakable stories to create an utterly new and unrecognizable version of actual events, click here. If nothing else, this post provides evidence of the direct correlation between repression and humor.

Time bandits

In my younger days when I could see well enough to thread a needle, I used to spend a lot of time doing cross-stitch. When you visit my house, you will note a number of my cross-stitch pieces gracing the walls, each one testifying to many hours of painstaking labor.

No one ever asked me, "Why do you waste so much time doing cross-stitch when you could be doing something more important?" Similarly, it would never occur to me to ask my colleagues on the faculty bowling team, "Why do you waste so much time bowling when you could be doing something more important?" Or to ask my colleague with the impressive collection of antique bottles, "Why do you waste so much time scouring flea markets and sales when you could be doing something more important?"

So it always startles me when someone asks, "Why do you waste so much time blogging when you could be doing something more important?" I get defensive. I splutter: "It's not that much time! Thirty minutes a day, tops!" But they shake their heads and gripe, "But that's thirty minutes you could spend grading papers or preparing classes."

Which is true, but it's also thirty minutes I'm not spending bowling or collecting bottles or kayaking or golfing or playing Farmville or trying to organize a faculty paintball team. I don't play sports and I don't collect stuff and I don't play games on Facebook and my eyes won't let me cross stitch anymore, but I like to play with words. It makes me happy. What other reason do I need?