Sic transit summertime

I've just finished reading The Octopus by Frank Norris, which may well be the perfect summer novel: like a beach on a hot day it's long but shallow, it's crowded with chatty people, and it proceeds at a leisurely pace. It can be put down for hours or days or weeks at a time and resumed again later without much loss of momentum. The perfect summer novel.

Which is not to say it's the perfect novel. Some of Norris's prose is clunky, and the whole Vanamee sub-plot seems to have wandered in from another book while Norris nodded. Every time I read it I am newly impressed by the charming intrusion of modern technology into stock Western scenery, as if Hoss Cartwright were to suddenly pull a cellphone from his gunbelt and say, "Hold your horses, Pa, I've got to take this call."

Norris's lyricism is justly lauded and the section juxtaposing a lavish dinner with the starvation death of Mrs. Hooven is stunning, but I still can't decide whether Norris intended the ending to be read ironically. Last time I read the novel, probably ten years ago, I was certain the ending must be read ironically, given Presley's tendency to view the world through lenses provided by art or literature; however, this time I'm not so sure. Is it possible for a novel in which the primary survivors are the mystic Vanamee and the poetic Presley to end on an entirely cynical note? I have a feeling Norris's wide-ranging vision encompassed a bit too much, leaving him at a loss to provide real resolution.

But the perfect summer novel doesn't need resolution. Like summer itself, the novel ends with everyone in transit to somewhere else, leaving little piles of unfinished business scattered in the most unexpected places. Reaching the end, of course, is the worst part of reading the perfect summer novel: closing the book for the last time means I'm that much closer to closing the book on summer itself.

Rise and fall

Yesterday afternoon the temperature fell more than 20 degrees in 10 minutes, and the price of a gallon of gas rose more than 20 cents. Coincidence or conspiracy?

The silence of the alvar

Just breezed in from a quick trip to an exotic island paradise. Okay, that's an exaggeration; it's not terribly exotic and it's by no means a paradise. It is, however, an island. Kelley's Island, to be specific, a smallish spot of land in Lake Erie, where we spent a lot of time sitting in the shade soaking in the breeze off the lake. Soaking in the sun was not an option as there was no escape from the eyeball-melting heat. But we had fun sitting and reading and looking at the lake.

And hiking. At one point we hiked through a swampy muddy mosquito-infested wood to gaze rapturously at an alvar. Hawaii may have cornered the market on lava, but Kelley's Island offers the finest alvar I've ever seen. An alvar, as I learned, is an endangered ecosystem characterized by "sparsely vegetated rock barrens." If I had to describe it succinctly, I would call it limestone with stuff growing on it. Small stuff, mostly. The brilliant orange lichens glowing underfoot were especially impressive.

And glacial grooves! Does Hawaii have glacial grooves? I think not! The glacial grooves on Kelley's Island are about the grooviest glacial grooves I've ever seen. If glacial grooves are your thing, Kelley's Island is the place to be.

Right now the place to be is back in my office, where urgent phone messages and e-mails are buzzing around my ears like mosquitoes. Now I need a vacation to recover from my vacation. Ah, for the silence of the alvar!

Reader challenge: postcards from the edge

The sound you are about to hear is among the loveliest in the universe, but if you're not paying attention you'll miss it:



There. Did you hear it? You'd better get used to it because it's all you'll hear from me for the next few days.

Yes, we are going away. Some of us, anyway. My summer class is done and I have a week to relax before I need to work on fall classes, so the he-man and I are easing on down the road and not taking the laptop with us. Or the children. Let us not forget to forget the children.

Any loyal fans suffering from withdrawal are invited to engage in a vacation-related reader challenge: imagine that your travel agent has accicentally sent you on the Vacation from Hell; your challenge is to write a postcard message designed to make your friends and family envy your amazing luck. Use no more than 50 words, please, and you get extra credit if the message is in verse.

Riveting questions

"Middle East fighting rivits attention locally" screams the headline on the front page of the local paper. After suffering a brief bout of confusion in which I envisioned a football team called the Middle East Fighting Rivits, I came up with just a few questions for the editor:

1. Is the copyeditor on vacation or does someone down there actually think there's a verb spelled "rivits"?

2. Disregarding the spelling error, did anyone over there attempt to mentally envision the action described in "fighting rivets attention"? Does anyone down there actually know what a rivet is?

3. Is this news? Yes, I know that the fighting in the Middle East is news, but when you ask a random group of non-expert local residents what they think of the news, what you get is at best meta-news and at worst drivel.

4. Why is this on the front page? The article eschews facts in favor of opinion and commentary; surely such a piece belongs on an opinion page rather than on page one.

Maybe I'm just being picky. I ought to focus on what the article does well and ignore the rest--but unfortunately, it's hard to do that when my attention is riveted to "rivits."

Magoo and me

So we were watching this very lame episode of Monk when my daughter asked, "Who's Mr. Magoo?" I fumbled and stumbled around for an answer, wandering up blind alleys and banging into hidden obstacles until I finally realized: I am Mr. Magoo. When it comes to trying to produce for my daughter an image of that iconic character, all I can do is take a wild shot in the dark and trust blindly that it will reach its mark.

The other side of clock-watching

There was a time and a lovely time it was when the rules were very clear: students sitting in class awaiting the arrival of a professor waited 15 minutes for a Ph.D. and 10 for someone with a Master's degree. Other types of credentials did not enter into the scheme.

Now I'm on the other end of the equation and I don't know what the rules are. How long am I supposed to wait for a student to show up for an important appointment? Should I distinguish between reliable students and the habitually tardy? Should I tolerate a longer wait on a dull day and a shorter waiting on a busy day? Does it matter how badly I'm itching to get out of the office? What about the weather?

If I establish a policy on waiting, will I just be enabling the irresponsible to remain that way? But if I don't establish a policy on waiting, how do I know when to quit?

I'm waiting for answers...but I don't know how long.

The Next Big Thing

I've just been putting the finishing touches on a scholarly article and I realized that when this is done, I'll be at the end of all my current writing projects. For the first time since grad school, I don't have half a dozen undone essays and articles awaiting my attention. In the past 12 months I've published two articles and a pile of reviews, presented three conference papers, and written the article I'll send off at the end of the week. This burst of activity represents the culmination of years of research, reading, and writing, so it feels like the end of something big, but the question remains: what next? What is the Next Big Thing in my writing life? I have a few options:

1. These last two scholarly articles opened up an area of inquiry I find stimulating and challenging. I could pursue some of those ideas in greater depth in some other essays and eventually cobble them together into a book proposal.

2. What about a textbook? I've been sharing pedagogical ideas and materials with colleagues for years and it's possible that there's a market for more. I find the possibility of writing a textbook proposal rather intimidating, but others have done it so why can't I?

3. I've been fiddling with a fiction project for a few years and one of these days I'll have to finish it. So far, though, I've had no success in publishing the pieces that are complete, which suggests that this ought to be a secondary project rather than the Next Big Thing.

The resident he-man, who has always had more confidence in my writing ability than I have, keeps asking me, "Why don't you just write a best-seller?" To which I always want to respond, "Okay, and why don't you just go out and save the world?" It's not easy to know what to write when there are so many possibilities, all of them both fascinating and daunting. After I send off the current article, I suppose I ought to just sit back and breathe deeply for a few days, but then it'll be time to take the plunge. If I end up floundering around, I just hope someone on shore will toss me a rope.

Shopping Challenged

With the men of the house spending the week at band camp (lucky guys!), we women have been planning to do some girl stuff, but we're running into difficulties. We'd like to shop til we drop, for instance, but there are obstacles.

First, we need to shop for birthday gifts for the young man who will turn 17 next week, but he's not cooperating. For weeks now I've been asking him what he wants for his birthday, but he keeps saying, "I don't know." When I push and hint and try to finagle an answer out of him, all he'll say is "I'm content." How do you wrap that up and put a bow on it?

I've also been trying to shop for a new briefcase, but I'm not sure I'm ready for that kind of commitment. I'm moving fairly smoothly through the five stages of grief, from denial through anger, bargaining, and depression, but I'm not quite ready for acceptance yet. I thought shopping for a new briefcase would help me cope with the loss of the old one, but it just introduced new difficulties: I fell in love with a gorgeous leather briefcase that does everything I want a briefcase to do....except it costs $370. I am already thinking of it as "my" briefcase even though all I'm entitled to at the moment are periodic visitations at the leather store in town.

So for the moment we are Shopping Challenged, but I don't expect that situation to last long. Tomorrow we'll head for the mall and try to get inspired. There must be something there that can satisfy an overly contented adolescent, and maybe I'll prove fickle and fall in love with a more affordable briefcase.

The story and everything that sticks to it

It was back in February, I think, that I finished the first volume of Javier Marias's three-volume work Your Face Tomorrow and immediately went to Amazon to order the second volume. Since then I've had five months to wonder who was waiting at the narrator's door on that rainy night, and at one point my Marias withdrawal was so severe that I couldn't stop myself from reading the first volume again.

Now, finally, the second volume has arrived and I am once again suffering from Marias withdrawal. I had intended to read slowly and let the experience last a bit longer, but no: I devoured the whole thing over the weekend, and now I'm eagerly awaiting Volume Three, which isn't even listed on Amazon yet. If I can't read Marias right now, at least I can write about him.

So far the books evince a certain symmetry: Volume One opens with a warning against speaking and Volume Two with a warning against listening; Volume One ends with the narrator in his apartment looking out the window toward the person waiting in the street, while Volume Two ends with the narrator in the street looking up at the window of his apartment. I'm not certain what Marias is suggesting with these structural symmetries or where he will take them in Volume Three.

Marias's prose has been described as Proustian in that any mundane moment may open out into complex webs of interconnected ideas. "[E]verything immediately grows longer or becomes tangled or adhesive, as if every action carries within itself its own prolongation and every phrase leaves a thread of glue hanging in the air, a thread that can never be cut without something else becoming sticky too," he writes in the first part of Volume Two. This stickiness of storytelling extends even to the multiplication of synonyms, as Marias's narrator, a translator, constantly tries out a range of words for each action or idea, as if unwilling to settle on a single word or as if even the entire Thesaurus would be inadequate to express the nuances of meaning he struggles to convey:

Tupra did not tend to talk much about his private life, at least not directly or in narrative form (he very rarely told stories, or even anecdotes; on the other hand, he was more than ready to listen to them), he did so only through vague remarks and hints and occasional comments, which, apparently unintentionally, alluded to past experiences from which he liked to extract laws and deductions, or, rather, inductions and possible rules of behavior and character, or, rather, cast-iron, set-in-stone rules, according to his absorbent and appreciative eyes which could take in at a single glance a whole area or a place packed with people, a restaurant, a disco, a casino, a pool hall, an elegant reception room, the foyer of a grand hotel, a royal function, an opera, a pub, a boxing match, a racetrack and, were it not a flagrant exaggeration, I would even say a football stadium, Chelsea's Stamford Bridge.

If sometimes it feels as if Marias is trying to feed readers the dictionary, it at least it makes a delicious meal.

What all this multiplication of stories within stories covers up is a silence, an absence, something untold but essential hiding behind all the words. In a novel about the dangers of speaking and listening, Marias requires many words even to describe silence:

But the blank page is the best of all, the most eternally believable and the most revealing, precisely because it is never finished, on it there is eternally room for everything, even for denials; and, therefore, what the page might or might not say (because in a world of infinite talk--simultaneous, superimposed, contradictory, constant, exhausting, and inexhaustible--even when a page says nothing, it is saying something) could be believed at any time, not just during its one time to be believed, which, sometimes, lasts no time at all, a day or only a few fatal hours, and at others for a very long time indeed, a century, even several, and then it is not fatal at all because there is no one to check if the belief is true or false, and, besides, no one cares when everything is balanced out.

This passage, in fact, may hold the key to Volume Three. Given Marias's demonstrated desire to put on the page both the story and everything that sticks to it, and given his statement here that only the blank page has room for everything, perhaps Volume Three will consist entirely of blank pages.

Another alternative

I've just thought of another scenario that could explain the disappearance of my briefcase: perhaps it suffers, like its owner, from Impostor Syndrome. The evidence is obvious: as long as I was a lowly adjunct and then a mere untenured assistant professor, it never attempted to leave me, but no sooner do I get tenure and a new title and the Big Office in the Corner and business cards (!) with the word "Chair" on them than the briefcase slinks off in shame, fearing that it can never belong in such an exalted milieu. That's what I would do if I were my briefcase. I suppose it's a good thing I'm not.

The distressed look

Just the other day I was griping that my briefcase looks out of place in my shiny new office, and apparently someone agreed because now it's gone. The briefcase, not the office.

I hesitate to use the word "stolen" because it's entirely possible that it was taken accidentally. After all, it did look rather distressed, and I did leave it sitting not far from my trash can; someone could easily have mistaken it for a piece of trash. But it isn't. That briefcase was a graduation gift from me to myself: I bought it to celebrate finally completing the Ph.D. It didn't look new even when it was new, but that was fine with me--I like the distressed look. You might even say I embody the distressed look.

But now I'm even more distressed because it's gone. I notified campus police and a friendly officer paid a prompt visit to my office and asked a lot of questions, including questions about my height and weight (!) and eye color, which made me want to point out that I am the victim here. How will knowing my weight help them finger the perp? I told my daughter about this and she informed me that she had to answer the same questions recently when she reported that her car had been clobbered in a college parking lot, but they also asked for her father's hair color. Apparently "father's hair color" is considered important data in a hit-and-run but not in a missing briefcase incident.

I suppose I should be grateful there was nothing of any value in the briefcase: a legal pad, some makeup, maybe a few pens, nothing I can't live without. I do, however, need a briefcase. Should I go ahead and shop for a new one or wait and see whether that vital information about my weight leads inexorably to the apprehension of the guilty party? For now, I'll just practice being distressed.

Dr. Larynx

Donald Hall on reading Henry James aloud:

The voice that reads late James aloud may not be monotone. To read parenthesis within parenthesis, the reader must drop pitches and build them up again, and a sentence by Henry James becomes an exercise for voice-athletes to train by, pitches and pauses in particular. Representing James by your mouth, lips, tongue, contracted throat, and vocal cords, you accomplish literary analysis by means of your vocal equipment. Your larynx could write a doctoral thesis on the Jamesian parenthesis.

...from the essay "On Moving One's Lips, While Reading," in Principal Products of Portugal.

Unreadable

The chief drawback to being a compulsive communicator is that I feel compelled to read just about anything that ends up in front of my face--cereal boxes, cell phone instructions, incomprehensible e-mail messages written by spelling-impaired whiners--but even I have to draw the line somewhere. Here are a few things I wouldn't read unless my life depended on them:

1. Anything titled "random thoughts" (or, even worse, "random thots"). They're not really random, and they rarely involve thought.

2. The contract bridge column in the local paper. I'd rather eat the entire classified ad section with a side order of stock listings than read about contract bridge.

3. The small print on the back of a video or DVD case, although it's more inability than unwillingness that prevents me from reading. I have occasionally resorted to asking passing students to read small print on videos, but only if I'm desperate.

4. Mattress tags. I know what it says already, so why waste the time?

5. The instructions that come with my federal income tax form. My tax man earns his keep partly by rescuing me from having to read federally approved tax prose.

6. Matchboxes. In fact I rarely ever hold a matchbox, but even if I did, what could it tell me that I don't already know? "Strike here"?

I'm sure there are many other things; for instance, I've never read the little words printed on lightbulbs or the laundry instructions on a new set of towels. (People who don't know how to wash towels should not be allowed in the laundry room.) Now that I look back at what I've written today, I have a new item to add to my list of things I'd rather not read:

7. Lists of things I'd rather not read.

Much ado about fussing

The whole time I was driving home last night I was fussing over verbs and adverbs--specifically, whether I used the correct forms in two sentences in yesterday's blog entry. Which is just silly, because the whole point of yesterday's blog entry was to write something in a very limited amount of time so that I wouldn't be able to fuss over it, and there I was fussing over it during what should have been a relaxing drive. Here are the sentences that bothered and continue to bother me:

What can I say in 10 minutes--or slightly less?
Isn't 185,000 enough?

The common problem is the use of numbers. Am I talking about 10 individual minutes or a 10-minute span? Do I refer to 185,000 individual miles or a unit of mileage? It makes a difference. If I'm talking about individual, countable minutes, then I ought to write "fewer" instead of less, but clearly my mind at the time was thinking of 10 minutes as one unit of time and not ten of them.

That sentence doesn't bother me, though, as much as the second, which went through uncounted permutations in my mind during the drive home:

Isn't 185,000 a large enough pile of miles?
Aren't 185,000 miles enough?
185,000 miles is far enough, isn't it?
185,000 miles are enough, aren't they?

It's useless: no matter how many times I try, I can't make it sound right. This is where a really insightful editor would be helpful. Someone asked me recently how I can justify criticizing writing in, for instance, the New Yorker when my own prose is far from perfect. "Simple," I said. "Their prose has a horde of fact-checkers and editors fussing over it; mine doesn't." But, as yesterday's experience demosntrates, that doesn't mean my prose doesn't get fussed over.

Now I've got another entry to worry about. How much should I fuss over my overuse of the verb "fuss"?

Countdown

I'm writing this during the 10-minute break in the middle of my evening class, my first opportunity to sit still and breathe all day long. What can I say in 10 minutes--or slightly less?

I can say that it's too hot to think straight, that every child over the age of four ought to know better than to play the drums in a house full of sleeping people at midnight, and that quinoa makes a terrific cold salad, particularly if you have some cilantro and lemon juice to add to the crunchy bits.

I can say that I'm enjoying my class tonight but that I'm really looking forward to next week, when we begin Invisible Man.

I can say that while it may be reassuring to be told that my van can be expected to run for another hundred thousand miles, it's not necessarily what I wanted to hear. Isn't 185,000 enough? I'll never get to buy a new car if the old one won't wear out!

I can say that if I don't hit "publish" and run down the steps, the class will think I've gotten lost somewhere--which is more or less the truth.

That's about all I can say.

Exhibitionists--totally nude!

Small milestone: my blog recently received its 3000th visit. Three thousand seems like a lot, but roughly one-sixth of those visits resulted from Google's mistaken impression that my blog could provide meaningful information about the word "debunkify." Many people wander onto my blog while looking for something else; for instance, in the short time since I wrote about a student's concern about porn on the reading list, I've already had readers stray onto my site looking for actual porn. So as not to disappoint them, I've copied here a photo of butterflies copulating--in public, no less! They're such exhibitionists. If the third butterfly in the photo, the voyeur, couldn't get his fix au naturel, would he be compelled to go to Google? If so, my site can expect an onslaught of winged visitors.

Nature's mysteries

This evening the kingfishers were swooping up and down the creek and chattering their fool heads off. When they perch they look as if someone at the bird factory made a big mistake: those big spiky heads are patently wrong for those sleek bodies. But there is no flight more elegant than theirs, the way they fling themselves effortlessly through the air toward some target known only to themselves.

We saw a red-tailed hawk and heard at least one other hawk shrieking from a tree near the neighbor's hay field. Lots of black cohosh growing on the hillside and a handful of pawpaws dangling from branches like fuzzy green lightbulbs. Last year the raccoons and deer devastated our pawpaw patch, leaving only three of the sweet, sticky fruits for us. Maybe this year we'll rescue a few more.

The mystery of the week is the big brown woody fungus growing in the yard. Last year we had a bear's head fungus that looked charmingly like a person's face poking out of a tree, but this year's mega-fungus looks, how shall we say this, just icky. If the rain stops long enough for the sun to dry things out a bit maybe it'll just go away. Meanwhile, we'll guard our pawpaws and listen to the kingfishers.

Visions of Blindness

I was surprised when a former student complained about being forced to read porn. Porn? In my class? Porn is not my field. I have no memory of assigning porn in any class ever. What could she be thinking?

"That Saramago book, Blindness" she explained. "That one part."

Ah yes, that one part. It's graphic all right, but is it porn?

First, some background: Blindness by Jose Saramago takes place in a large European city suffering from a sudden plague of contagious blindness. The first people so stricken are quarantined in a vacant hospital, their needs tended by those who still have sight--until everyone in the city is struck blind except one woman who sees and remembers what happens, first inside the hospital and then out in the city. The blind people in the hospital quickly develop ways of coping with problems both mundane and unusual: How will they eat? How will they know whether scant resources are distributed fairly? Where will they sleep? Where will they defecate? What will they do with the inevitable dead bodies?

It's a novel both gentle and gruesome, lyrical and brutal. The most intense section explores the inevitable power struggle between those who are willing to mistreat fellow human beings and those who are not. The ruthless ones control the food supply, and they will kill, maim, and rape to maintain their power. The weak must choose: submit or starve. They do a little bit of both before finding another way out.

"That one part" occurs during the submission phase, when the men in power raise the price of food until the cost of a Happy Meal is brutal rape. Women's bodies become legal tender in a nightmarish scene of violence and degradation.

But is it porn? In its gruesomeness the scene is the opposite of sensuous, the antithesis of desire. It could arouse carnal lust only among those who lust after degradation, decay, and death. Are those people out there? In my class?

"That one part" of Blindness may be the most sexually graphic scene I have ever taught, but if I had to label it I'd call it anti-porn. Porn portrays people as bodies without minds, fragmenting human beings into pieces and parts designed for the titillation of others; Blindness, on the other hand, cries out for human beings to see beyond the body and treat each other as whole people. The pandemic failure of vision prompts the characters to become either more human or less human, but it is always clear which option Saramago prefers.

I don't see porn when I read Saramago, but my student sees something different. Is one of us blind, or are both visions valid? Whose vision of Blindness should prevail?

Plague of pink

Since we moved out here I've grown familiar with the local flora and fauna, so I was a bit befuddled by the pecular blossoms I saw along the roadside today: kind of pink, kind of fluffy, kind of like what insulation might look like if it grew like a weed. Which is exactly what it was: little wads of pink insulation stuck on roadside weeds like a crop of building supplies. That remote stretch of road tends to sprout strange crops: McDonald's bags, beer bottles, and once a plague of plastic knives. Who throws this stuff there? Why? And what can we do to make them stop?

Literary lions of Lorain

In the middle of a class discussion of Toni Morrison's Sula this evening I was reminded of a family visit to an aunt of a certain age, a native of Lorain, Ohio. At one point during our visit she squared her shoulders with pride and asked me, "Do you know what great author was born and raised in Lorain, Ohio?"

"Toni Morrison," I said.

"Who's he?"

She was referring, of course, to Lorain's other literary lion, Helen Steiner Rice, prolific author of inspirational rhyming verse. I would wager that upwards of 90 percent of Ohio's elderly aunts carry in their handbags yellowed newspaper clippings featuring poems of Helen Steiner Rice. Some years ago (this is true), I was asked to give a talk to a church women's group in which every meeting included at some point the reading of a sentimental poem by Helen Steiner Rice. I was determined to break the mold: I would present a program that would challenge these women toward deeper insight into contemporary issues. On the evening in question I made it all the way through my talk without any mention of Helen Steiner Rice, but no sooner had I mentally congratulated myself on my accomplishment than one of the indomitable old aunts snapped open her immense handbag, whipped out a yellowed newspaper clipping, and announced, "I have a poem I want to share."

It would be difficult to find two authors more unlike than Toni Morrison and Helen Steiner Rice. Their works share common references to the bonds of friendship and motherhood, but none of Helen Steiner Rice's poems deal with the dilemma faced by the mother who, to rescue her adult son from a life of heroin addiction, burns him alive. If Helen had considered such a scenario, the result might have looked something like this:

A Mother's love is something
that no one can explain,
It is made of deep devotion
and of kerosene and flame.
It is endless and unselfish
and enduring come what may
And if the kid gets constipated
A little lard'll save the day.

No, Helen never wrote that poem, nor did she write about the kind of friendship shared by Sula and Nel:

Life is like a garden
with a river runnin' by
where we whirl and twirl a little boy
to see if he can fly.
Where we plant our dreams so carefully
and weed and wait and water--
until the day you take away
my man. Then you're non grata.

It has a certain ring to it, but I doubt the elderly aunts would carry these poems in their purses. They're jingly enough to fit in a Hallmark card--but Helen Toni Steiner Morrison Rice would never win the Nobel Prize.

TV or not TV

We're thinking seriously about getting rid of the TV--or not the TV exactly but the dinky satellite dish that serves it. The husband would be happy to get rid of the dish since it no longer offers Cleveland Indians games, and the college kid would also be happy to get rid of it since she rarely watches TV--but she also rarely lives at home, so her vote doesn't count. The young man is addicted to ESPN and vociferously votes for keeping the dish. I am on the fence.

Reasons to keep the dish:
1. Iron Chef.
2. The Closer.
3. Monk.
4. There's no TV reception here and cable can't come out this far without a major infusion of cash.
5. The ESPN addict works pretty hard and deserves a break.
6. The cost comes out to just over $10 a week, which is about what I waste on Diet Coke with Lime.
7. We lived without TV for eight years back in the 80s and I got truly tired of the bizarre responses I encountered whenever I happened to mention that we didn't have TV. You'd have thought we were unAmerican child-abusing anti-education ignorami instead of just very busy grad students who couldn't afford cable. Do I really want to go through that again?

Reasons to delete the dish:
1. $45 a month and rising for basic service.
2. No more Cleveland Indians games.
3. No local news.
4. Divide the $45 cost between the two of us who actually watch TV and that comes out to $22.50 for ESPN and $22.50 for the three shows I watch regularly. I love The Closer, but I catch maybe six episodes each season. Wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy the whole season on DVD?
5. That would be $45 a month I could spend on my Amazon wish list or lunches with colleagues or a single size 14 men's shoe for the ESPN addict.

So far we're still in the talking stage but I feel myself being pulled toward the darken-the-TV side. I'd really like to buy some books...and the ESPN addict's feet are still growing. But I know better than to make a decision like this on the spur of the moment, so instead I'm thinking and seeking advice. Have I overlooked any important pros or cons? What will happen after the screen goes dark? Will I be able to admit that we don't have TV or will I have to take up a life of deceit? Stay tuned for the stirring conclusion on the next episode of "TV or Not TV."

Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That not all Independent Studies are created equal.

The problem with teaching Independent Studies is that too few students are able or willing to work independently. What, though, is the solution?

I am doing Independent Studies with two students this summer, and they represent the extremes of the species. They have one thing in common: both students need to pass this course in order to graduate, so they ought to be equally motivated. They're not.

Student A does the reading assignments on time, does the writing assignments on time, and shows up at my office on time for every session. I may preface our discussions with some background material, but then I ask her to talk about the book and she leads us on a delightful tour of discovery through some pretty wonderful literature. By the end of the session, she has independently raised just about every point I had intended to cover, so I just tie her ideas together with with the theme of the course and talk about the next stage in our journey and we're on our merry way.

Student B showed up once and turned in one writing assignment; since then he has not appeared or responded to e-mails. His writing is good and he has interesting ideas about the literature, but as long as his ideas remain wrapped up within his head, they're not doing anyone any good. If experience is any indication, I expect him to come rushing in just before summer grades are due and beg for an Incomplete, promising to make up all the work before the fall semester starts. Maybe he will. Either way, I'm not motivated to put much effort into this situation.

Student B and others like him make me want to give up on teaching Independent Studies entirely, but if I had more like Student A, I'd teach them every semester. Certain idiosyncrasies in our scheduling system make it difficult to avoid Independent Studies entirely, but perhaps there's a way to cut down on demand for Independent Studies while also encouraging those who must take them to truly work independently. I'm thinking of adopting something like the British tutorial system: for each weekly session, the student will have to write a paper and present it for discussion. When word gets around that my Independent Studies actually require students to work independently, perhaps students will find other ways to meet their requirements.

I'll try this system out the next time a student comes to my office begging for an Independent Study. Meanwhile, I'll spend my summer eagerly looking forward to each meeting with Student A while awaiting the onslaught of pleading e-mails from Student B, who has apparently declared independence from the study of literature.

Red, white, and blue

Today's obits list a woman with the middle name Independence. Died July 5, 2006, born 85 years ago on July 4. Good thing she wasn't born on Feb. 2 or Dec. 7--although, come to think of it, Pearl Harbor Day didn't exist 85 years ago. On Sept. 11, 2001, one of my colleagues had planned a birthday party for his small child, and then of course he had to hold the party anyway because otherwise the terrorists would have won, but he pulled the blinds shut so the neighbors would not be appalled by the clear signs of childlike revelry. If hosting a child's birthday party on Sept. 11 seems shocking, imagine having something like "World Trade Center Attack" or "War on Terror" worked into your name.

Aside from my birth, nothing of any importance happened on my birthday, and that's not a bad thing. While a name like Independence might make an interesting conversation starter, it would have to get tiresome explaining it to people. Then again, while the name Independence might get old, the concept never wears out. So three cheers for Independence!

Do you suppose they'll have fireworks at the funeral?

Shelves full of voices

Henry James, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie: what do they have in common?

They are the names that appear most frequently on spines of books in my office.

I discovered this today while sorting books into shelves in my new office. James alone covers half a shelf, with Morrison and Rushdie covering slightly less shelvage. It would be difficult to trace the complex combination of circumstances that drew these three authors together on my shelves, but I know I'd love to put the three of them into a room for a few hours while I just sit in the corner and listen.

But then other authors might demand equal time. Derek Walcott and James Joyce, whose books cover similar amounts of real estate, might want to rub shoulders with the relatively equal Raymond Carver and Kate Chopin. There would have to be a room just for the authors represented by only one book: Olaudah Equiano and Hart Crane, William Gass and Henry Adams and Amos Tutuola and Gertrude Stein.

If authors were ranked based on the linear inches of library shelves they covered, then Thackeray would be a minor deity whose sandals John Kennedy Toole would not be worthy to untie. Today I placed a complete set if Thackeray's works in the giveaway pile simply because mold had set in. I'm allergic to mold or I'm allergic to Thackeray or possibly both.

I have closed the door on Thackeray but the other authors that fill my shelves keep demanding attention. I ought to be able to finish the sorting tomorrow if I can concentrate over the din of all those interesting voices.

Saying "Ack" for Salmiak

The German kid has been gone for a week but he left us a few things to remember him by: some T-shirts and sweats and a pair of worn-out running shoes, a thick Stephen King novel dog-eared halfway through, and a package of peculiar licorice candies containing Salmiak. I don't know what Salmiak is and I'm struggling for the proper word to describe its flavor: Salty? Fishlike? Medicinal? The first bite made me wonder whether I'd accidentally chomped down on that old running shoe.

I love licorice, but this stuff is odd. Really odd. If you were sitting in a darkened theater watching a movie while dipping into a bag of mixed licorice candies and you unsuspectingly popped one of these things into your mouth, your first thought would not be, "My, what an unusual flavor in a piece of candy!" No, your first thought would be, "How did this cockroach get into my candy?"--that is, provided you had any time to think while spitting and gagging and attempting to claw every vestige of flavor off your tongue.

I've studied this flavor closely and I can understand, sort of, how people might consider it interesting. After all, there are people out there somewhere who consider liver and onions a special treat, who regularly put anchovies on a perfectly good pizza, who would be delighted to receive a can of sardines in their Christmas stockings (you know who you are!). But I've given this candy several opportunities to woo me and it has failed utterly. In fact, I am prepared to declare my mouth a Salmiak-free zone. So all you little Salmiaks out there, whatever and wherever you might be, take note: stay away from my tastebuds! I've had it with you and your ilk. (What ilk might a Salmiak possess? That's just frightening.)

Fun with fungi!

I knew it was time for the hike to be over when I finally identified an unusual red and yellow fungus at the side of the trail. We had seen odd fungi all day, tiny yellow ones and great big scarlet ones and middle-sized greenish ones and a few that were spotted, but this was really unusual: a long, narrow, stemlike object looking like a cigar rolled from colorful spongy stuff. Only when I stooped for a better look did I realize it wasn't a fungus at all. It was a Fruit Roll-Up.

I'm sure I wouldn't have made that mistake if I'd been wearing my glasses, but they kept fogging up, first from sweat and then from humidity and then from rain, so I gave up and put them in my pocket. Still, I saw a lot--spider webs and waterfalls and Indian pipes and mud, lots of mud, and tall trees standing, falling, and rotting, and caves and rocks and more rocks and slippery rocks and mud-covered rocks and rocks worn into smooth shapes by moving water. I saw people wearing flip-flops on muddy trails and others all decked out in hiking gear and rain ponchos and some Amish-looking people wearing hats and long skirts. I walked through woods and caves and over bridges and up steps, lots of steps, lots of wet, muddy, slippery steps. My knees won't let me forget those steps.

After four hours of hiking and slogging and slipping and climbing, we had a picnic lunch while soaking wet and tried to determine which of us smelled the worst. The problem was finding a judge; we briefly considered accosting passing strangers to ask, "Would you smell me?" But that approach just begs for some sort of lawsuit, so instead we headed home for hot showers. We left behind the fungi, the Fruit Roll-Up, and the cell phone (oops), but we brought back a pile of memories, a sense of satisfaction, some really smelly shoes.

Wrapped in words

In the short story "Radioman," an inarticulate little girl whose mother makes dressmaking patterns out of newspapers finds a way to wrap herself in words:

I would carefully pin the two sides of the paper dress together until I had a whole newspaper dress. Carefully, watching for pins, I would slip it over my head while Mother began pinning together the real dress. I loved to put on the newspaper dress and go stare at myself in the mirror in Mother and Father's dressing room. I would be covered in words--the war news on my left arm, the baseball game on my right. The Red Cross volunteer appeal would go down my front while a story about Christmas shoppers would run around my neck. All down my back was a story about a lost dog that came home three years later. I would read to myself all the words I could see, backwards in the mirror.

Such vividly realized moments make "Radioman" charming and memorable. The story appears in the collection A Fish Full of River by the very creative Janet Bland, from whose pen I expect to see many more reasons to wrap myself in words.

Frittilarying around

The milkweed is abundantly blooming in the upper meadow so it's no surprise that the spangled frittilaries have returned. Frittilaries are not my favorite butterflies--I prefer the understated elegance of the zebra swallowtail--but I just love to say the name. "Spangled frittilaries" sounds like sequins falling from the sky, and they look that way too. They flutter above the milkweed blossoms and get so drunk on the nectar that I could walk right up to them and snap their picture if I needed any more frittilary pictures. When the butterfly weed is blooming, I've seen as many as six frittilaries attacking one cluster of flowers at the same time. Milkweed is a weed--it's right there in the name--but as long as it earns its keep by attracting butterflies, you won't see me pulling it up.

Not too suave a sentence

"If there had been a bachelor in this place, in the intervening decades, he seemed not to have been too suave of one."

If there were a contest for the Worst Prose to Appear in the New Yorker, the sentence above would surely be a contender. It appeared in a short Talk piece by Nick Paumgarten, who packs a mess of infelicities into a mere 23 words. The first comma is intrusive and the phrase "seemed not to have been" is wimpy and wordy, and then that "too suave of one" at the end sounds as graceful as a Tonka truck falling down a flight of stairs.

Who would say "too suave of one"? Begin with the sentence "He is not too suave a bachelor" and then replace "bachelor" with "one" and you get "He is not too suave a one," which sounds perfectly wretched, making me wonder why Paumgarten or his editor didn't simply recast the sentence in one of a number of ways:

Any bachelor who might have inhabited this place in the intervening decades was not too suave.
If a bachelor had inhabited this place in the intervening decades, he was not too suave.
If, in the intervening decades, someone had inhabited this place, he was not too suave a bachelor.

These sentences don't exactly thrill me but at least they don't fizzle out at the end. The next time one of my students insists on ending a sentence with the least significant word, I'll accuse him of pulling a Paumgarten.

Return to sender

The weather we've been experiencing lately seems to have been incorrectly addressed. These cool, damp days were clearly intended for the Pacific Northwest, where residents have been experiencing the clear skies and scorching heat clearly intended for Ohio. Perhaps we should set up some sort of Weather Exchange Program: meet in the middle and hand over the prisoners. With our luck, there would be a mix-up at the exchange point and we'd end up with Louisiana's weather. Ideally, our weather should mix with Oregon's and produce warmish temperatures and just enough rain to keep gardens happy in both locales.

If it rains again today, I'll be outside scribbling notes on all the raindrops: Return to Sender. If someone out in Oregon will do the same for all that excessive sunshine, maybe we'll get this mess straightened out.

Spammin' in Sticksville

I find it almost impossible to tell the story of my involvement in the radio Spam bake-off. For one thing, it all happened nearly 15 years ago and many of the finer details have faded into the dim and distant recesses of memory; for another, we were living in a wretched little town I'd rather not name because people there may still remember me, and while some of those people were pretty wonderful, others were not.

It was the kind of town--let's call it "Sticksville"--where nosy neighbors complained about "all those horrible weeds" growing beside our house, unaware that they were maligning a carefully tended bumper crop of horseradish and rhubarb; the town's most notable citizen (this is true) was the guy who invented the special blade used to transform potatoes into curly fries, and the highlight of my week might be taking the kids out to watch the highway department spread new asphalt.

The primary obstacle to proper storytelling, however, is the notable absence of all the elements that make a story interesting. Here it is in a nutshell: sometime in the early 1990's I appeared on a radio talk show in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as a panelist for a Spam bake-off, during which I uttered the memorable words, "Whatsa matta, Flash, cantcha cut it?" The story thus told is distinctly lacking in suspense, local color, and character development, but nevertheless the incident has earned a place of honor in our family's repertoire of oral narrative, along with the infamous teenaged Twinkie episode and the encounter with the pink toilet Buddha.

I suppose the best plan would be to begin at the beginning, but I'm not really sure exactly how I got involved in the radio Spam bake-off. I had called the radio station and made some sort of comment about a giant glowing lawn statue shaped like a can of Spam (don't ask me why) and it happened that the producers of the station's morning talk show were busily planning the Spam bake-off and needed participants. I was an unlikely choice because I cook with Spam about as often as I cook with styrofoam. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that Spam is food. Animal, vegetable, or mineral? No clue.

But I eagerly accepted the opportunity to appear at the station with a Spam dish hand, and I did it for one reason: payback. Specifically, I wanted to make a guy named Jeff laugh.

Let's admit right up front here that I never really knew much about Jeff besides the persona he projected on the radio, but one thing I knew was that Jeff could make me laugh any day of the week, and at the time I desperately needed to laugh. I was living, remember, in Sticksville, a small town Theodore Dreiser had lauded in his 1913 travel book A Hoosier Holiday. Dreiser liked the town's plentiful bars and convivial residents, but he didn't have to live there--and if he had lived there, he would have spent too much time in the bars to worry about putting rhubarb and horseradish in the ground.

I, on the other hand, was just a small-town housewife trying to make a name as a free-lance writer while caring for two small children and a parade of foster kids with various special needs, with no television reception or Internet connection and not a penny in my pocket. Most of the time I needed a laugh, and the radio was my lifeline to laughter, and Jeff was the radio host who threw me that lifeline.

Jeff picked me up out of the doldrums so many times that I was determined to repay him for his generosity: someday, I told myself, I will make Jeff laugh. But how? Enter the Spam show.

So I found a recipe involving Spam, chicken breasts, cream of mushroom soup, and sour cream, thus conveying the maximum of salt and fat with the minimum of nutrition in a no-fuss dish I would not make again even if someone promised me a lifetime supply of Spam, which really would not be all that much Spam anyway because one can is more than enough for my lifetime. Now a few days before I took my less-than-delicious dish down to the radio station, Jeff told a story on the air about an adolescent experience working at a grocery store where the nasal-voiced manager kept berating him with the words, "Whatsa matta, Flash, cantcha cut it?" I kept these words in the back of my mind as I made my way to the radio station, Spam dish in hand, and I waited patiently for the right moment. Five or six of us were gathered around a table in the recording studio nibbling on bits of Spam dishes and commenting on their salient qualities ("Tastes like insulation") when Jeff had a little difficulty finding the words to express his feelings for a particular dish. My moment had arrived: I leaned toward the microphone, assumed an obnoxious nasal voice, and said, "Whatsa matta, Flash, cantcha cut it?"

The only thing that could have made the results more gratifying would be if Jeff had actually managed to spew Spam from his nostrils. Payback: he made me laugh, I made him laugh. Account balanced.

If this were a better story there would be some moment of transcendence here, a bit of character development in which I discover a profound understanding of my responsibility toward the Spam workers of the world, but this story doesn't work that way. I went on the show, I made Jeff laugh, and I went home. I think I took the leftover Spam dish home but I don't remember whether anyone ate it. A few months later, Jeff was killed in a car crash and he never made me laugh again except in retrospect. Every once in a while I'll utter that magical phrase "Whatsa matta, Flash, cantcha cut it?" No one ever knows what I'm talking about, but deep inside I'm thinking of Jeff and the Spam show--and you'd better believe I'm laughing.

Neither here nor there

As the process of moving from one office to another has come to a sudden shrieking halt, I find myself stuck between a rock and a hard place, or perhaps a stink and a soft, sticky place. Here is the situation:

Last week the Powers That Be sent minions over to clear everything out of the Big Office in the Corner in preparation for painting and carpet replacement. I was told that I would be able to move into the Big Office this week just as soon as the carpet was done, so I dutifully started packing my things in cardboard boxes.

Now the painting is done and new ceiling tiles have been installed and the carpet is done...well, almost. Phase One (laying the carpet on the floor) is done; Phase Two, which involves attaching carpet strips partially up the walls in place of baseboards, will be done "soon." Maybe a week, maybe two. Anything we move back into the Big Office will have to be moved again when they come to finish the carpet, and of course I can't move any of the things from my office into the Big Office until it's all done.

So I have a choice: work in the Big Office, where there's basically nothing but a computer and the overwhelming odor of carpet glue, or work in the Old Office, where I'm surrounded by boxes which, thanks to the high moisture level throughout the building, smell like wet cardboard. The potted plant in the Old Office has sprouted a crop of mushrooms (!) but the glue smell in the Big Office makes the entire contents of my head come running out my nose.

I'm excited about moving into the Big Office, but it's not easy lingering in limbo. I'm working hard to prepare for my summer class and make the transition to my new position, but everything I need seems to be neither here nor there--which, for the immediate future, is where I can be reached.

Speechless

This morning I discovered just how much respect my new position is worth on the open market when a student ended our brief phone conversation with the words "Bye, bitch."

It wasn't even a particularly angry conversation, just the usual blather about a departmental policy. I had even suggested two different legitimate ways for the student to bypass that policy, but that would have required a little bit of work on the student's part, so instead he opted for insult. Does he think I won't remember his name?

I work very hard to accomodate the needs of our students and in some respects I'm a bit of a pushover, but occasionally I have to draw a line in the sand and say "thus far and no further--unless you want to take the long way around and by the way, here's a handy map of the route." If this makes me a bitch, then I guess I just don't understand the meaning of the word.

The worst thing about it was that I couldn't think of anything to say in response--I was so stunned that I just sat there with my mouth open until the phone line went dead. In fact, I'm still stunned. Is this the price I have to pay for moving to the Big Office in the Corner? Or is this the new default mode for telephone conversation? Either way, I'm speechless.

Cliches to the rescue!

Since about 7:30 this morning the phrase "nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians" has been threatening to force its way out of my mouth, but so far I am resisting temptation. I am resolved to avoid using "nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians" to describe where I was this morning, no matter how appropriate the phrase may be. Nothing I encountered this morning will make me say it: not the winding country roads, not the gently rolling hills dotted with ramshackle farmhouses, not the sun shining pinkly on the mirror-like surface of the creek. Not even the road sign advertising "corn roast and computer repair" will induce me to utter the words "nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians," so if those words need to be said, someone else will have to say them.

I was driving through the aforementioned area at the crack of dawn in order to deliver the German kid to the bus that will take him home. Okay, the bus isn't taking him all the way to Germany; that would be a feat defying cliche. I took him to the bus that is taking him to the plane that is taking him home, and this required leaving the house at 5:30 a.m. (yes, another early Sunday wake-up call) and driving him two hours to a vocational school nestled in the you-know-what where we waited for the bus while contemplating the wisdom of a sign advertising "School of Cosmetology Restaurant." What do they do, style your hair while serving dessert? What if they mix up the hair mousse with the other kind? "Two eggs over easy and could you take just a little more off the back?"

Closer inspection revealed that the arrows following the words "School of Cosmetology" and "Restaurant" were pointing in two different directions, suggesting that they might not refer to the same establishment. This was disappointing as I was rather looking forward to seeing a wait staff handle hot rolls and hot rollers at the same time.

But it gave me something to think about besides the sorts of cliches that come to mind while saying goodbye to someone whose socks I've been washing for the past nine months. Everything I could say sounds as if it's been said a million times before: Thanks for the memories. We'll always have Paris. So long and thanks for all the fish. When words fail, I reach into the bag of cliches and pull out whatever comes to hand.

But then who listens to words when heartfelt hugs are on the agenda? In the end I was left standing in an empty parking lot with not so much as a sous chef to curl my mane. But that's what happens when you're nestled in the--Oh never mind.

Fighting against the current

I've just finished reading Anthony Doerr's novel About Grace, in which David Winkler performs an extreme about-face for fear he will harm his daughter and then years later performs another to find out about Grace. A hydrologist obsessed with the way the water cycle connects every part of the planet, Winkler excels in fighting against the current, taking the hardest route straight through obstacles and mostly uphill, but the final section is a thrilling joy-ride downhill all the way. It takes a bit of a slog to get to that section, however; a more focused middle would make the novel more compelling. Doerr's chief strengths are his lyrical prose style and his ability to infuse ordinary substances with extraordinary significance. In his short story "The Shell Collector," simple shells provide an opportunity for a reimagined incarnation; in About Grace, there's water,water, everywhere:

What were dreams? A ladle dipped, a bucket lowered. The deep, cool water beneath the bright surface; the shadow at the base of every tree.....

He would reach across the tablecloth; she might even let him take her hand. They'd talk about the malleability of time, about relativeity, about premonition. He'd tell her that he believed events could be foreseen, that a thousand choices were implicit in a single moment, that he had always loved her, even when he couldn't bear to, and that this, too, was prefigured and inevitable, burned into him, the way the six sides of a snow crystal were honecombed into its very atoms.

The luminous short stories collected in The Shell Collector hinted at Doerr's talent for seeing things slant, for making something brilliant and unexpected out of mundane material. About Grace has its memorably sparkling moments, but the intensity that suffused the story "The Shell Collector" is unsustained in this longer work. Still, About Grace invites readers to plunge into a weird watery world where floods threaten and snow falls and in the end the waves keep rolling in.

Take me home, country roads

People keep asking me how I can STAND that horrible commute, and I don't know how to answer. The only thing horrible about my commute is the opportunity it provides for people to nominalize the verb "commute."

I love my commute. As far as I'm concerned, it's just about perfect: short enough to avoid tedium and long enough to allow me to relax between work and home, to think up solutions to sticky problems, or to mentally compose blog entries. Before we moved into our little house in the not-so-big-woods, my commute was about 40 minutes each way, which felt onerous; now I drive 20 minutes when conditions are just right or maybe 30 if the traffic is thick (rarely) or the weather is bad. Even during the Big Flood, when half the roads between home and office were under water, the long way around took me about an hour, which I wouldn't want to do every day but it was better than sleeping in my office.

Traffic gets bad during fall color season, when my route is crawling with elderly drivers weaving all over the road while gazing fondly at the red and orange leaves. I drive through two school zones between home and work but I leave early enough to avoid the buses; the only other holdup occurs when there's an accident or road construction, and then I'm stuck. My route follows the river pretty closely, so the only way around obstacles is under water.

The river, of course, is the best part of my commute. Sometimes in the evening I'll be so preoccupied with the detritus of the day that I don't even notice the river, but there's a certain point a little over halfway home where the road swings around this long, sweeping turn to reveal an uninterrupted stretch of river surrounded by trees, meadows, and often a stunning sunset. (I've been told that the striking orange shade is a result of pollution from the power plant upstream, but I refuse to allow that fact to destroy my pleasure.) The river washes away my worries.

Unless, of course, the weather is really bad. I learned to drive in Florida and I still get nervous on snow and ice, and my van is virtually undriveable when the road is the least bit slick--the back end is always trying to swing up to the front to say Hello. So in winter I drive my husband's car, a 1991 Honda CRX that vibrates enough to shake the fillings out of my teeth and has a lousy radio to boot. That's the one time I'm not really fond of my commute, but in those conditions I wouldn't be fond of any commute. Snow and ice are reminders of mortality, and the right place to ponder mortality is at home in front of a roaring fire.

On a day like today, though, put me behind the wheel and let me drive.

Uneasy chair

As I plunge headlong into a new adventure--taking up the reins of power in my new position as department chair--I find myself asking questions I never dreamed of in my prior existence as a peon: "Where are all my pens? And who emptied this drawer? And hey, where is my faculty directory? I need to make some calls!"

Yes, I'm still in the process of moving, but the juggernaut of progress is stuck in neutral right now while myriad worker bees apply paint to the walls and carpet to the floors of the chair's office. Since I'm busy teaching, my daughter has been cleaning out my desk and packing up my books in preparation for the big move, which I appreciate very much except for the fact that now I don't know where my pens are, or my phone book, or any number of other things I haven't thought of yet, and even if I knew I couldn't get to them because my desk is surrounded by boxes. So far, being chair means not having a place to sit.

It also means answering a lot of questions, or actually the same questions over and over: "Why does my son have to take developmental English? He's a good writer! He just doesn't test well!" I have already developed a regular schtick for this one, a well-formed paragraph that pours fluidly out of my mouth as if I've been saying it all my life: "College writing is different from high school writing blah blah blah experience suggests that students with blah scores on the blah blah may required extra blah in order to succeed in blah...."

But the really annoying thing about being chair is that when I accomplish something really interesting, when I tackle a problem and bring it to its knees in submission, I can't talk about it. Yesterday and today, for instance, I worked diligently to find a creative solution to a pressing issue, but I can't write about it without violating people's privacy, so I have to keep it to myself. Can't even put it on my vita. You'll just have to take my word for it: today I rocked. I'd sign my name to that if I could find a pen.

Life lessons

Things I have learned this week:

1. There is a limit to the number of habanero peppers I can chop without feeling as if I'm inhaling fire, and the number is well below the seven I chopped yesterday.

2. To persuade a wood tick to disengage its mouthparts from one's limb, nothing works better than Vicks Vapo-Rub.

3. One way to end up at the top of the list on Google is to use the word "Defunkify" in a blog posting. Debunkify debunkify debunkify.

4. It is possible to buy comfortable, attractive shoes in a ladies' size 10 wide, but not here. I recently drove 100 miles to buy such a pair of shoes because the local stores kept telling me, "We don't stock 10 wides. There's no demand for them." I kept saying, "If you want demand, I'm perfectly willing to be demanding." Apparently that's not the kind of demand they're looking for.

5. After all these years, I still don't know what to tell the haircutterperson. Yesterday I said, "Just a trim," and this new haircutterperson said, "Do you want anything off the length?" I was stymied: how does one trim hair without taking anything off the length? We had a brief and not very enlightening conversation and I ended up with a haircut that appears to be okay, although it's hard to tell just yet.

Catastrophic

From A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes:

How do you turn catastrophe into art?

Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assassinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or the booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for.

This would make more sense if that final line said "that's what art is for," but I'm not sure exactly why. I'd rather try to answer the question "What is art for?" than "What is catastrophe for?" And even then it would depend on whether we're talking about man-made catastrophes (murders, terrorist acts) or natural catastrophes. "What is an earthquake for" raises questions about the existence of God and the problem of pain, but "What is mass murder for?" seems a ridiculous question, suggesting that terrorism fulfills some natural purpose on the planet; how could both questions possibly have identical answers? I'm scratching my head over this one.

Wake-up calls

Today's infestations: ants, cows. The ants were winged, and I found them swarming all over the patio at 5:15 a.m. when I returned from dropping one of the young men off for a youth group bus trip to Myrtle Beach. The patio looked alive with untold numbers of ants scrambling over everything in their path, including my hiking boots, which I often leave out on the patio to dry off after a hike. The boots looked as if they'd suddenly sprouted glossy black wriggling tresses, not something I particularly feel like putting on my feet. The only way to get back into the house was to walk directly through the swarm, and a few of the ants followed me inside, where the resident dad was awakened very early to an urgent request for his pest eradication skills.

The cow infestation waited until after breakfast, when I was washing up the Father's Day breakfast dishes and noticed a cow standing where no cow had any right to stand. Then there was another cow and another--six or eight total; they were too busy gambolling about to submit to an accurate count. The resident dad put through a wake-up call to the neighbors, who averred that these couldn't be THEIR their cows but that they would go take a look and see whose cows they might be. We left for church to the sound of a four-wheeler zipping up the road to deal with the bovine infestation.

I suspect that few dads want to wake up on Father's Day to face an infestation of pests, but for a tough job, a little Dad'll do ya.

Deconfusify me, please!

We were driving out in the middle of nowhere when we saw a big orange billboard plastered with giant letters spelling out "Debunkify." That's all it said. I have no idea what this means, and now I'm wondering whether it's a reference to some new pop-cultural trend that I've somehow entirely overlooked. Did some world leader utter this word on a day when I was too busy to read the paper, or is it a reference to a film that will never show out here in the sticks? Maybe "Debunkify" is the next Macarena!

We expect to see peculiar things while driving across our little corner of the world: a sign in front of a grocery store proclaiming "We've Gone Fruity!" and another advertising a fish hatchery and llama farm. (Do they feed the dead fish to the llamas or vice versa?) We saw signs marking No-Name Road and Vista View Drive, and at a campground we saw a set of gigantic hippie dumpsters painted with immense psychedelic flowers on a hot pink background, as if a garbage truck had mated with the Partridge Family's bus and produced offspring.

All those things I can understand, but I'm befuddled by "Debunkify." I think it's time to phone a friend, but after spending most of the last two days in the car, I'm exhausted. My debunkification skills went wandering down No-Name Road and I'm still waiting for them to catch up. Meanwhile, I'll believe any fool thing anyone tells me. Try me and see.

One for the reject pile

I was trying to read a resume featuring more funky fonts than a circus poster and I felt kind of sorry for the guy. Someone ought to tell him that his typographic experimentation makes him look silly. If I'm trying to whittle 70 applications down to three promising finalists, I'm looking for reasons to reject applications, and while those reasons are usually fairly substantive, I'm unlikely to struggle through a resume that's almost impossible to read. Somewhere out there is a guy who's not getting jobs and he doesn't have a clue why, and someone ought to tell him: forget the funky fonts. You're a professional, not a circus act.

Guilty as charged

"With a few words she can incite an epiphany."

This sentence appeared among the comments on my student evaluations for the spring semester. I'd like to hang it up where I can read it every day as a sort of antidote to the despair that follows more common comments like "Too much reading in this class" (It's a literature class! Reading is what we do!) or "She didn't give me an outline for my paper" (That's because it's your paper and not mine!).

I like to think of myself as an inciter of epiphanies. If someone ever hauls me in front of a judge to plead to the charge of Inciting Epiphanies, I will happily proclaim, "Guilty, guilty, guilty!"--yes, even if the punishment requires teaching literature to students who would not recognize an epiphany if it jumped up and bit them, which, when you think about it, is pretty much what epiphanies do. I would be happy to have the phrase "Inciter of Epiphanies" engraved on my tombstone, although not right away if that's okay--I need to spend a few more years inciting epiphanies before facing that Final Epiphany. From now on, when a student complains that it's just not FAIR to be penalized for missing 12 classes or that her life is so busy there's no WAY she can ignore her cell phone long enough to pay attention to my class, I'll just sigh deeply and flex my epiphany-inciting muscles. When epiphanies start busting out all over, I'll know my work here is done.

Princess of the pelmets

I see in the papers that the late Princess Margaret's valuables are being auctioned off in London, including her "diamond-studded wedding tiara" and "the neo-classical pelmets from her bedroom." I don't know what a pelmet is or how to distinguish a neo-classical pelmet from a spotted or herbaceous pelmet, but I do wonder at the decision to sell the diamond tiara. A report on NPR stated that the late Princess's heirs do not need tiaras, but clearly these people are not thinking clearly. Every woman needs a tiara, if not diamond-studded then certainly rhinestone-bejemmed or sequin-bedazzled. The tiara may spend most of its life stashed in a dark closet, but the knowledge that it's available is what matters most. A tiara is like a tire jack or a shrimp deveiner: most of the time you're not even aware it exists--but when you need it, nothing else will do.

My tiara is fairly flimsy, a sparkly sequinned confection designed for someone with a much smaller head. I occasionally wear it with a Barbie-pink feather boa and matching magic wand in my role as the Semicolon Fairy. I don't wear them for long because the tiara hurts and the boa sheds little pink feathers everywhere, but nothing else in my wardrobe creates the same impression. Last Halloween I wore the ensemble in an early morning class, inspiring one my students to shake his head and say, "That's just frightening."

I've been tempted to wear the tiara and boa at graduation--it can't possibly be any more uncomfortable than full regalia--but so far I lack the courage. If I had Princess Margaret's diamond-studded tiara, though, I might be more willing--and if I could add some neo-classical pelmets to the ensemble, now that would be a graduation to remember.

Summertime and the teaching is easy

"You always seem so relaxed after your evening class," my daughter said, and she has a point: I come home from that class so mellow I could ooze under the door. Why?

Last time I taught an evening class, one of my students wrote on the evaluation form that the class made him seriously consider suicide, and I could not agree with him more. I suppose my students learned a few things in that class, but I learned only that I should never teach evening classes. Of course there were a few differences: that was a three-hour class that met at the end of a day on which I started teaching at 9 a.m. and finished at 10 p.m., so by the time that class started, I was already pooped. This summer class, on the other hand, meets for two and a half hours two evenings a week on days I have spent lounging on the deck with a good book, watching birds, or fiddling around in my office. When I start the class relaxed, it's not so difficult to remain that way.

And then there's the size of the class. My previous evening class was so big it was easy for students to hide in the back, and I never managed to learn all their names. This class has nine students enrolled but three of them rarely show up, so the rest of us sit around a table in a dim, cavelike seminar room and talk about great literature. What's not to love?

The subject matter makes a big difference too. My previous evening class focused on film, which is not my primary area of specialization.Film is fun, but when I teach literature, I draw from a much deeper well of knowledge and insight. Besides, I taught the film class in a room equipped with a high-tech projection system designed by someone with Play-Doh for brains: in order to show a video (this is true), I had to get on my hands and knees and crawl under the desk, and once I got down there I couldn't read the labels on the little VCR buttons. Any class that regularly forces me into such an undignified position in front of my students is going to be the antithesis of relaxing.

At the end of that semester, I vowed never to teach an evening class again--and yet here I am, spending two evenings a week grappling with great literature and loving it. I think my students are enjoying it too. Are they learning anything? We'll find out next week when the first papers are due; meanwhile, I'll just relax.

Three-alarm lunch

Big mistake: onion rings for lunch today. They were yummy, but I went straight from lunch to assisting incoming freshman with registration, and then straight from there to getting ready to teach my evening class. My mouth now tastes like I've been chewing on dirty sweatsocks. This is a job for Altoids! Hope I don't make my class faint dead away just by opening my mouth. Maybe I'll just sit up front smiling and nodding while the students do the talking. If nothing else, it'll be a quick class.

Highway harmonics

My son and I have been making beautiful music together this afternoon, which is unusual since neither one of of can carry a tune. We can, however, carry an extension ladder, and that's how we discovered our new musical talent. We bought the ladder as a top-secret Father's Day surprise (so don't whisper a word to anyone!) and brought it home strapped tightly to the top of the van. The music didn't start until we hit about 45 mph, but as we went faster, the sound got more intense. By "intense" I mean unbearable. Acting like a giant harmonica, the ladder made a piercing whine in several incompatible pitches that at one point drove me to put both hands over my ears. Fortunately, I was not driving at the time.

I suppose the obvious solution would be to drive slowly, but it's difficult to drive under 45 on the interstate so we decided to make the best of it. I wanted to apologize to the people in the cars zipping past, but then again I've never received any kind of apology from people who drive cars with no mufflers or with subwoofers turned loud enough to peel the asphalt off the road.

What if everyone drove around with shrieking ladders on top of their cars? It might make residential areas uninhabitable, but perhaps large parks or preserves could be set aside where the multitudes could practice their automotive harmonics. Take a few dozen cars with ladders of various sizes strapped on top and let them loose in the middle of the desert--and then let the beautiful music to begin.

Spammed!

I knew I'd been spammed when I received a series of simultaneous comments at around 3 a.m. all saying something like "Great site! Lots of usefull information!" Useful information? What kind of demented, spelling-challenged person is trolling my blog at 3 a.m. in hopes of finding useful information? What kind of useful information do they think they're finding? I can't even tell them how to get a skunk out from under the sanctuary.

Then I noticed that the comments came with links to online gambling sites. My first comment spam! I suppose I should be pleased that my blog has finally attracted enough readers to be worthy of spam, but I don't want gambling links on my blog any more than I want a casino in my back yard. So off it goes and on goes Word Verification. No more comment spam! Which leaves more room to talk about the other kind. Someday the world will be ready for the story of the infamous Radio Spam Bake-Off and "What's the matter, Flash, can'tcha cut it?" That sort of useless information is my bread and butter; those who prefer useful information will just have to find it elsewhere.

Day tripper

I've been trying to recreate the unusual series of events that led to my spending nearly two hours traveling roughly 15 miles (parts of it more than once) before 10:30 this morning. As far as I can recall, my thought processes ran something like this:

I'm traveling down a busy state highway in my van when suddenly there's a sound like the end of the world and steering gets difficult. Flat tire? Better pull over, but where? The shoulder is narrow and beyond the shoulder is the river. I limp around a curve and see just ahead beside the highway a chiropractor's office. I've never stopped to think why a chiropractor might have located his office roughly midway between two blink-or-you'll-miss-'em little towns, but right now I'm grateful for his parking lot. Sure enough, the left front tire is defunct, but fortunately I'm only about 8 miles from home. Now all I need is a phone.

Why would a chiropractor's office be closed on Fridays? Does back pain get a three-day weekend? No answer at the door nor at any of the houses in easy walking distance. Is everyone at work or are they just afraid to open their doors to a stranger who looks frighteningly like an English professor? Are they afraid I'll correct their grammar? I could wait here for hours before anyone wonders where I've gone, so I'd better start hoofing it--but which way?

If I go downriver, I know there's a gas station within maybe two miles--but a big chunk of the trip is straight up a steep hill. If I go back upriver, the nearest little hamlet is a good five miles, but it's all level ground--and maybe I'll find someone at home at one of the few houses along the highway. Upriver it is, then.

You know, it was just two days ago, as I was driving some young people to the Big City for serious shopping, that I commented on how common flat tires were in my childhood and how rarely I encounter them today.Now here I am hiking along a busy state highway in the summer heat because I would rather not change my own flat. I suspect that even WonderWoman could not loosen a lug nut that has been tightened by the resident lug-nut-tightener, and besides, the spare tire is located in some mysterious rust-intensive area under the car and I'm not dressed for lying supine on dirty asphalt. Kind of a bad time to be wearing white pants.

Plenty of traffic on the road. Walking along the edge of a busy highway is not nearly so restful as strolling along our meandering country road. I hear a woodpecker nearby but I can't take my eyes off the road long enough to ask it if it has a cell phone. No luck at any of the houses. Where is everyone? Probably safely ensconced in cars whizzing past at 55 mph. Three Chrysler minivans driving in tight formation: is that an omen? Of what? A few drivers wave in a friendly manner, but if they're so friendly, why am I still walking?

I reckon I've walked about a mile and a half (and later I confirm this estimation) when finally I see a sign of life: a man with a hoe working in the healthiest looking garden I've seen this season. Surely someone capable of producing cabbages that big this early in the year would be acquainted with modern technology. I'm just about to cross the highway to accost him when a woman in biker shorts goes zipping past on a touring bike. "Want a lift?" she calls out, jokingly. Immediately I lift my hand to my ear in the universal gesture signifying "telephone." She stops and pulls out a cell phone. Rescued at last!

My knight in shining armor is just stepping out of the shower when I call, so it takes him a little while to get to the van, time I spend walking aerobically back downstream. The next phase in my whole-body workout involves cranking up the jack (quarter turn, quarter turn, switch, quarter turn, quarter turn, switch, repeat) and loosening and then tightening lugnuts. Tools are inexplicably missing and the bracket that holds the spare tire is a bit cranky, but eventually I'm on the road again, ready to start the day just a few hours later than expected--and with the dirtiest hands I've ever seen. Where is the nearest rest room? Time to head downriver again, but this time I'm not making the trip on foot.

Bulletin board break-up

Today I took the first tiny step toward moving out of my office: I cleared my bulletin board and put away all the cartoons, weird news items, and bits of poetry. The board itself, rarely noticed beneath the welter of stuff stuck to it, looks like a giant Shredded Wheat biscuit nailed to the wall. "Cover me!" it cries out, but I won't do it. It's time to ignore its pleas and move on.

My new office (aka The Big Office) won't have a bulletin board right outside the door, and this worries me. My current office (soon to be my old office) is small and cosy and welcoming, and students and colleagues seem to enjoy stopping by to chat. The Big Office is like a cave complete with a guard stationed just outside the door: the English department secretary. She's not a particularly scary secretary, but still, no one will get to my door without walking past her desk. I'm not sure this is entirely a good thing.

And then there is the bulletin board issue. My bulletin board is like an external blog, except I post new things up there only once a week on Friday mornings. It has developed a loyal following; if it's 10 a.m. Friday and I haven't taken down the old stuff and replaced it with new, students start hovering outside my door like starving hounds waiting to be tossed chunks of raw meat. The bolder ones ask whether I need some help changing the board, and sometimes I do.

I'm trying not to envision what will happen next fall when a newly hired prof will take over my office. He's a wonderful guy and we're happy to have him but I don't know his policy re: bulletin boards. Will he be hounded every Friday by a horde of salivating students? Or will they hunt me down instead? How disappointed will they be when they see that my office is set back into a corner, protected by a secretary, and suffering from a lack of bulletin boards? There is a great big bulletin board out in the hall, but it's for official departmental notices and not for frivolous New Yorker cartoons or news stories about stupid criminals or poems about professors who fall on their faces. What will happen to my adoring fans?

Meanwhile, my naked bulletin board seems to be looking at me reproachfully. "Take me with you," it pleads, and I'd like to comply but it's just not possible. When a relationship is over, it's best to just turn and walk away; long break-ups just prolong the pain. Someday I'll walk by and see my bulletin board covered with someone else's scraps of paper and then I'll know that the healing has begun. Until then, I avert my eyes and cover my ears and move on.

These shoes are made for running

Today I watched a young mom try to coax two little girls into the middle of a fountain, the kind with water jets that spray playfully up from the ground in changing patterns. The tiny girls in pink swimsuits hovered on the edge chattering with delight but wouldn't set foot in the fountain despite Mom's pleas: "Run! Go on! You can do it! I'll be waiting right here!" Finally, Mom took them by the hand and ran through the water with them. That was all it took: soon they were running wild, splashing and stomping and squealing with glee, but always running back to Mom.

Instantly I saw an image of my daughter running down the center line of our road, her long hair swinging back and forth as she disappeared around the next long curve. We had gone for a long walk and since my pace was a little slow on the uphills, we agreed that she would run on ahead and double back to me. It seemed a sensible enough plan, but as she disappeared around the corner, I was suddenly struck with a sense of our aloneness. That section of road runs through thickly wooded hillsides suffused with the scent of honeysuckle and with no houses in sight; evening was falling and the birds were making jungly sounds in the trees. I started to think of the stray dogs that wander our road and the stray rednecks who roar by in rusted pickup trucks. Don't go, I wanted to call out to her. Come back!

But I didn't. She's a smart chick, I reminded myself, and a tough one too--and besides, she's carrying two five-pound weights with which, if necessary, she could fight off strays of the canine or human variety. She's really quite safe, I told myself. Really. But I picked up the pace until I rounded the curve and saw her triumphant, hands held high, dancing for joy in the middle of the road. She had reached her goal and was on her way back to me, for a while anyway.

Next time the goal might be farther away, the risks greater, but I'll still watch her run, hair swinging behind her, as she makes her way around the next long curve. Run, I want to say. Go on! You can do it!

I'll be waiting right here.

News nixes worry with flurry of factoids

You know you live in the sticks when not worrying about the date qualifies as front-page news.

"Many not worried over hexing date 6-6-6," screams the bold black headline on the front page of today's local paper. Good to know that something I have spent much of my life doing--namely, not worrying about the date--is important enough to merit front-page coverage. After reading the article, though, I wonder whether I'm working hard enough at not worrying about the date. Apparently, there's an awful lot to not worry about.

For instance, this: "The 06-06-06 date that has Hollywood and all those who pay attention to it buzzing around, has stirred questions over whether the world will experience some apocalyptic event or if the religious significance of the date will come clear this week." This sentence offers plenty of things to worry about; for instance, what is the "it" that "all those" are paying attention to? Hollywood? The date? Who or what is "buzzing around"? Hollywood? The date? "It"? I worry about these things.

The article goes on to inform me that "Web sites are taking bets with 10 to 1 odds that something will happen." This fact, if true, is deeply worrying. I've never bought a lottery ticket in my life but even I would be willing to lay down my savings on the chance that "something" will happen tomorrow. For instance, I have it on good authority that the sun'll come up tomorrow--bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there'll be sun. That's "something."

Next, the article lists several (precisely two) ominous factoids suggesting that whatever that "something" is, we'd better be worried: 1) the impending release of the remake of the movie The Omen, which makes me worry once again about Hollywood's alarming willingness to recycle mediocrity; and 2) the statement that "Books about God and society are hitting shelves." Now that's worrying. You just know that when books about "God and society" start multiplying, all heck is about to break loose.

Surely the clergy should be up in arms about this alarming trend, but no. According to the article, local clergy are "smirking at what many of them say is the next Y2K silliness." The clergypersons in my circle aim for that avuncular look combining compassion, concern, and gentle optimism; they must get the smirks beaten out of them in seminary, which raises the question: where did the news reporter find all those smirking clergypersons? Perhaps they're not real clergypersons at all but impostors infiltrating the local churches as part of some vast worldwide conspiracy--yes, and smirking is the secret sign marking membership in their nefarious brotherhood! If this is true, we'll never know unless Dan Brown writes a book about it; until then, there's no point in worrying about it.

The article reports that one local priest "said he hadn't even heard anything about the lurking date," which makes me worry about how, exactly, a date might be said to "lurk." It's not as if it can put on a trenchcoat, pull a hat low over its eyes, and loiter in darkened alleyways awaiting the chance to jump out at unsuspecting passersby. I mean, tomorrow's date is right there on the calendar in broad daylight, making no attempt to sneak up on anyone. When that sort of behavior constitutes "lurking," I'll start to worry.

Another local pastor, says the article, "pays little mind to things that he interprets as mere symbolism and philosophy," which covers an immense range of stuff not to worry about, but I'm so grateful that the pastor didn't adopt Dan Brown's "religious symbology" that I refuse to worry about the extent of this pastor's trouble-free philosophy.

Later, though, this same pastor's views are paraphrased thus: "his advice to people who fear the end is near should focus more on their life." I'm worried about the absence of any noun suitable to serve as the subject for "should focus" in this sentence. His advice should focus? People should focus? My advice to people who write front-page newspaper articles is that they should focus more on avoiding faulty predication and less on writing incoherent articles full of idle speculation. Let Hollywood and "all those who pay attention to it" worry about the date; I'll worry about the prevalence of bad journalism. It's a tough job but someone's got to do it--and clearly it won't be the local newspaper. It's too busy not worrying about the date.

Open wide and say Aaaaaaaahh

This morning as I walked to my car I saw, not ten feet in front of my face, an adult downy woodpecker feeding its young. The young bird, fat and fluffy and entirely trusting, sat on the bar of the birdfeeder with its mouth hanging open for more while my mouth was hanging open for awe, if awe can properly describe what one feels while watching a wild creature regurgitate into another wild creature's gullet.

I felt a bit like regurgitating myself, as I always do when a medical professional promises "You won't feel a thing. Just a little discomfort. Maybe just a slight pinch and some burning afterward. Trust me." This morning I trusted my dentist to remove an annoying redundant flap of flesh from my upper lip. I've lived with this thing all my life without ever once being told it should be removed, but my dentist finally persuaded me to get rid of it. "It's probably harmless," he said, "But every time you smile it looks like a nipple hanging from your upper lip." I couldn't get this image out of my mind and so away it went, the fibroid thing with the impressive Latin name I can't seem to recall right now, whisked away with the aid of a laser that felt like hundreds of tiny birds pecking hungrily at my lip. I'd like to take my new smile for a test drive but it's a bit tender at the moment. Just a little discomfort. A slight pinch with some burning afterward. Nothing to worry about. Trust me.

The scent of holiness

There's a frequent visitor to our church and everyone agrees that he stinks. Or she, as the case may be--so far no one has managed to get close enough to determine the visitor's gender. It's kind of difficult to properly welcome a visitor who adds a certain distinct tang to the service but insists on hiding under the sanctuary during daylight hours .

A skunk is what we have, or perhaps skunks. Apparently the crawl-space under the sanctuary is an ideal nesting place for a mother skunk nurturing young 'uns; this morning the chair of the church board kindly invited me to crawl in there and find out for myself, but since my experience with skunks has been limited to road kill, I deferred that pleasure to someone more, um, qualified.

Unlike many other problems facing today's churches, a skunk under the sanctuary cannot be ignored, nor would it do any good to appoint a committee to study the matter and come up with five bullet points and a new creed. I'm not aware of any clear Biblical guidelines regarding skunks--there's no "suffer the little vermin to come under the sanctuary and forbid them not," so it's difficult to answer the question What Would Jesus Do? The Wesleyan quadrilateral is no more helpful, and the Methodist Social Principles wisely steer clear of the controversial topic of poison vs. traps. Suppose we kill the skunk; then we're left with a dead skunk under the sanctuary, and I doubt that a dead skunk would smell any less pungent than a live one. But then suppose we trap it: we will then have a trap full of angry skunk, not something you'd want to deal with while dressed in your church clothes.

I suppose the Christian thing to do is to turn the other cheek, to live and let live, to peacefully coexist with all God's creatures. If you sincerely believe that, send me your address--I'd be glad to send you a skunk by parcel post. Be careful opening the package, though; by the time he gets there he'll be very, very angry.

Up with the yeast

I was trying to explain why our alarm clock typically rings before 5:00 on Saturday mornings and I found myself saying, "My husband gets up with the cows to get ready for the Farmers' Market." This is not, however, strictly true. For one thing, we don't have cows. Our neighbors have cows and our creek sometimes smells vaguely cow-intensive, but cows are not our thing. Clearly, I need a new metaphor to describe exactly what the resident farmer is doing at 5 a.m. on a Saturday--and sometimes earlier.

This morning, for instance, he was up at 3 a.m. to murder yeast organisms. Millions of squeaky little yeast voices could be heard begging for their lives: "No! Not the oven! Anything but the oven!" But a man with the strength of character to get up at 3 a.m. on a Saturday to bake a dozen loaves of bread is unlikely to be swayed by the heartfelt pleas of a host of microscopic organisms.

Later in the season it might be corn, squash, or okra that gets him up so early in the morning, but right now while the garden is still snoozing it's just bread. Next time someone asks about our bizarre schedule I'll say, "You have to get up with the cows to murder the yeast." They'll smile brightly and move away briskly, nodding all the while.

I can see clearly now

"He put in a window today."

The words appeared in the middle of a muddle of mundane accomplishments--mulching the berry patch, mowing the meadow, and by the way, he put in a window today--but to me they sounded like magic.

"He" is our new contractor, who replaces our old contractor, who became our old contractor due to circumstances which will form the centerpiece of impending legal action involving, among other things, the lengthy non-appearance of windows. Since last July windows have frequently been promised "soon" or "next week" or "first thing in the morning," but until today no windows ever appeared, and indeed for the past six months our old contractor has neither appeared nor responded to our phone calls to explain the lack of windows, which lack has allowed a variety of woodland creatures to inhabit a structure not intended for their use.

It was a relief, really, to dump the old contractor and hire a new one, but even the new contractor led us to believe that he wouldn't have much time to devote to the project for another month or two. Instead, he put in a window today. Just one out of several, but he expects to put in the second set tomorrow, a lovely big picture window with a sash window on each side. The windows look out on nothing but woods and sky and meadow but they offer the promise that one day the room will be finished, a year later than expected and way over budget. At last we can see an end to the project and the beginning of a new stage of life that will include windows, storage space, a guest room, and, finally, a garage.

He put in a window today, and through it I can see the future.

Boundless blah-ugh

Yesterday a Renowned Writing Expert told me he would be more interested in blogs if they had a different name. "Blog" sounds like a collision between "blah" and "ugh," words that accurately describe some blogs (not this one, I hope, but I'm not the best judge of that):

"blah" = endless pompous blathering intended to reveal to readers how Terribly Clever I am
"ugh" = endless intimate details intended to reveal to readers what a Fun Party Person I am

"blah" + "ugh" = all the blogs I hate to read

What are the alternatives? "Online journal" would inevitably be abbreviated as "onjo," which sounds jaunty and foreign and banjo-intensive and not at all like a forum for profound thought. Then there's "electronic diary," which would become "e-di," which is clearly the name of a deadly bacillus used in chemical warfare. "Computer-Assisted Space for Compulsive Communicators" leads to CASCC, which suggests a fruitless search for Amontillado followed by eternal imprisonment in a cobwebby sub-basement where cries for help only bounce off the walls.

I hate to tell my Renowned Writing Expert friend, but no matter how it sounds, we're stuck with "blog" so we'd better get over it. On the other hand, perhaps the best way to inspire a more euphonious name is to produce a blog that moves beyond blah-ugh.