Six Degrees of Sherwood Anderson

This week as I've been writing the paper I'll deliver at the ASLE conference in South Carolina next week (goal #2 in my summer academic task list), I've been repeatedly distracted by a network of relationships linking the authors whose works I'm analyzing. Someone ought to invent a version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, only instead of movie stars, it would link literary figures--call it Six Degrees of Sherwood Anderson because the author's four marriages link him to other American authors whose numerous liaisons make for plenty of connections.

Here's an example: Sherwood Anderson's second wife was Tennessee Mitchell, the former mistress of Edgar Lee Masters (yes: that makes her Masters's mistress), whose first wife was distantly related to the Revolutionary War hero for whom the street outside my office was named. Masters's Spoon River Anthology features an epitaph for Ann Rutledge, a sweetheart of the young Abraham Lincoln, whose campaign biography was written by William Dean Howells, who was born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, where the poet James Wright was later born, who studied under Theodore Roethke, who wrote "The Waking," my favorite villanelle about a guy with a hangover. Further, Edgar Lee Masters had a very brief and unsatisfying fling with Edna St. Vincent Millay, who also had an affair with Edmund Wilson, who was a good friend (or possibly a lover) of Dawn Powell, whose novel Dance Night is set in roughly the same part of Ohio as Winesburg, Ohio, written by Sherwood Anderson--and so we come full circle.

This could go on all night--but don't let me have all the fun. You try some.

Backing up is hard to do

You know that obnoxious beeping sound a big truck makes when it's backing up? I need that. Granted, I'm not exactly moving about in a way that might endanger innocent bystanders, but I am doing a lot of backing up, and if nothing else, the beeps would let bystanders know that I'm working really hard even though it looks as if I'm just sitting here staring at my computer screen.

Backing up is hard to do, even with an IT person pitching in. I need to back up all the important files on my office computer because (drum roll, please) I'm getting a brand-new computer! A laptop!! Supplied by the college!!!! Fully loaded with spiffy new programs and lots of space! This is good news.

The bad news is that my old computer just isn't in the mood for backing up files, so it has to be encouraged, gently nudged along toward completion. Anyone passing by would think I'm just sitting and staring, but really I'm doing some essential hand-holding for a tired, cranky computer allergic to backing up. If all this backing up were accompanied by warning beeps, then instead of a slacker I'd look like a woman at work--and the effect would be even more dramatic if I were wearing a yellow hardhat. Wouldn't the hallowed halls of academe be a different kind of place if professors walked around wearing hard hats and beeping?

Then again, maybe it's just as well that we don't.

A bluriole in a pear tree

Early this morning the old guy and I went out to do the Adam-and-Eve-in-the-garden thing, except we kept our clothes on. It would be foolish to work naked in a place as poison-ivy intensive as our upper meadow. For decades that meadow was a cow pasture, but in the years since the cows went away, the neglected meadow has been aggressively colonized by scrub hawthorn, milkweed, teasels, ironweed, and poison ivy. Our Poison Ivy Eradication Plan (PIRP) has made some progress, but we have to proceed with caution because we don't want to wipe out the wildflowers that attract so many butterflies and bees. So each year we kill a little poison ivy and learn to live with the rest.

There wasn't much ivy in the area where we planted the two pear trees this morning. Each year the resident gardener has planted a few more trees in that meadow--apples, cherries, peaches, almonds, I don't know what else. We won't see any fruit for years, but it's encouraging to see an incipient orchard emerging from the scrub. This morning while digging, I discovered yet another career that is cut off to me: in case the academic thing doesn't work out, I'll never survive as a ditch-digger, or any other kind of digger for that matter. It's hard to hop up on a shovel and dig when you have no sense of balance, particularly when you're digging on the side of a hill.

But we got the pear trees planted and also spent some time naming some passing creatures, except I didn't have my glasses on so most of them looked like blurs. I'm fairly certain I saw an indigo blur, a pileated blur, and a bluriole. That's enough gardening for one morning. There's nothing like a little manual labor to make the life of the mind look even more appealing.

Rogue hedgehog alert!

"The unsettling case of the nude English doctors suggests to me that something akin to the South Uist rogue hedgehog scenario is happening with English stag parties in Ireland."

This line occurs on page 230 of Pete McCarthy's book McCarthy's Bar, and the remarkable thing is that in context, it makes perfect sense. If you want to know what the South Uist rogue hedgehog scenario is and how it might be akin to the scourge of nude English doctors, you'll have to read the book yourself. Therein you will encounter not just rogue hedgehogs but a menacing cow, a mouse that roars, a 21st-century Tweedledum, and a woman with "a voice that could bone herring at twenty fathoms." Very funny guy, Pete McCarthy. Very funny book.

My Official Interruptor

When I finally get around to hiring my entourage (Q: does one hire an entourage or do they just sort of appear, like groupies with skills?), I'll need to include one person whose sole duty is to drag me away from irksome duties.

Say I'm on the phone and I urgently need to get off the phone for a reason I don't really wish to share with the other party (use your imagination) and I can't think of a legitimate reason to cut off the conversation, or perhaps the other party is someone I can't afford to offend (the provost, for instance, or a mother-in-law). I'll simply press a button and my Official Interruptor will come on the line and insist that I take a call from the Nobel Prize committee, which is seeking my advice on the next recipient of the Literature prize. This would require having more than one phone line, but I'd have my entourage take care of that.

Or suppose I'm in a meeting with a committee that thrives on hashing out the same old tired issues without ever doing anything about them. I could press a button on my cell phone (which would require having a cell phone....I'd have my entourage take care of that too) and my Official Interruptor would burst into the room and say, "Can't keep Mr. Spielberg waiting. The helicopter's just outside."

Or suppose I'm teaching a class in students refuse to read or write or talk about reading or writing or do exercises designed to improve their reading or writing and I just can't bear to drag them through another lesson on the comma splice; at just a glance from me, my Official Interruptor would burst into the room and inform the students that the Health Department is investigating an outbreak of a mysterious virus that attacks only those under the age of 30, so everyone over 30 will be permitted to leave the room while the rest will have to remain under quarantine until further notice.

How long would that stay in there before someone tells them they can leave? That's a job for somebody else's entourage.

The real groundbreaking

I arrived this morning to find the center of campus being disassembled in preparation for the new library. Not much ground was actually broken at the ceremonial groundbreaking, but today the sound of ground being broken is echoing all over campus. It's a sound we'll have to get accustomed to because construction is expected to take about 18 months. Some trees have been removed to make way for the library, but smaller plantings in front of the old library are being moved to other places on campus. The process is loud and dirty and not very attractive, but it's the price we have to pay for a new library and I can live with that.

Poetry candy

In a big pile of articles I've been meaning to read I found "American Poetry in an Age of Constriction" by Anis Shivani, published in the Cambridge Quarterly late last year. Not a tremendous fan of American poetry is Anis Shivani. His polemic savages Jorie Graham, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, Philip Levine, and Billy Collins, and their ilk, if so unsavory a word as "ilk" can be applied to so august a group. His lively argument is amply supported by evidence from texts, but I prefer his sentences to his sentiments. Look, for instance, at the article's second sentence:

The contemporary American poet inhabits a perpetual comfort zone, choosing to restrict him or herself to articulating private sorrows and occasional joys in language that does not inspire, in metaphors that do not invigorate the life beyond the page, and in rhetoric that suggests a closing in, a shutting down of means and ends, rather than an opening up to the excitements and thrills that might be beyond the immediate ken of the hemmed-in poet.

Or consider this, from his discussion of Jorie Graham:

The irrepressible poetics, impossible to conceive of as trespassing against any rules, suggest a pervasive unaccountability, of the poet towards history, of history towards the poet, of all towards all.

Okay, so the guy knows how to employ parallel structure, but what about vivid, memorable images? Decrying the dearth of humor in contemporary poetry, Shivani writes, "Satire, the stooped uncle with welts on his back, has been utterly homeless for some time." Or see how he excoriates Sharon Olds: "The poet's persona is now that of a woman leery of confession even as all she does is confess." Or Billy Collins: "He is like a happy adult solving the Sunday paper's crossword puzzle, having skipped the front-page headlines, the mayhem and chaos on the planet." He goes on to characterize Collins as a purveyor of "poetry candy": "Although he appears to have departed from the self's nervous tics, he hasn't replaced this with anything more serious than cute intellectual puzzles."

Shivani's critique may be a bit reductive, but I have to applaud his ability to produce such a charming and civilized polemic. Most of all, though, I applaud poetry itself. Any genre that can inspire 25 pages of such articulate prose cannot be entirely moribund.

Knees needed

Today I have been coveting my daughter's knees. I realize that this puts me in violation of the tenth commandment, but since it's unlikely that my coveting will move me to action, I may dodge divine retribution.

I need her knees because mine are old and cranky and not accustomed to all the stooping and squatting required for gardening. Today I planted nicotiana, salvia, and two kinds of basil, but I didn't get around to putting in the rosemary because my knees were begging for mercy. Oh for a younger pair of knees, some limber knees undaunted by gardening!

Maybe if I'd spent more time in the garden for the past decade or so, I wouldn't be so sore today. The truth is that I don't really enjoy gardening. I don't much care for creepy crawly bugs or dirt or sweat, but I do appreciate a flower garden and fresh tomatoes and basil and rosemary, not to mention sweet corn, peppers, okra, beets, beans, carrots, parsnips, peas, and let's not forget the strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, rhubarb, and even the lowly rutabaga.

Normally I rely on the rest of the family to plant it all and weed and water and harvest while I focus on processing the produce, but my Gardening Angel has been gallivanting all over Italy with her college choir and will soon be heading for a summer job in another state while my son the reluctant gardener will be working at a real job this summer and so will have an excellent excuse to stay out of the garden. That leaves my husband--a lean, green gardening machine, but even he needs help sometime.

And so I stoop and squat and try not to covet my daughter's knees. Come to think of it, those knees are heading home this weekend. Think we can do a quick trade?

Please don't feed the reptiles

My little nephew was befuddled by an ad he heard. "Hey Mom," he said. "What's a reptile dysfunction?"

And no, he wasn't talking about the Geico gecko.

H&H Inc.

Yesterday my son's valedictory speech focused on of the vital link between hard work and happiness, so this morning I went out to the strawberry patch to test out his theory. I'm normally not the one who tends the strawberry patch; in fact, for years the entire family has experienced strawberry-flavored happiness as a result of my daughter's hard work in the garden. She's in Italy right now performing with her college choir, though, so the strawberry patch has been rather neglected. (Come back, little girl! The strawberries need you!)

My task this summer will be to determine whether my love for fresh strawberries can overcome my hatred for slugs. This morning the strawberries won, but it took some hard work: I had to pull some weeds first, and all that squatting and bending sharply reminded me of a few neglected muscle groups. The result, though, was instant happiness. About three quarts' worth, I would estimate.

Now I can report to my son that his speech was correct: there is a connection between hard work and happiness. I'd be happy to go and tell him so right now, but he's out in the garden planting tomatoes, a form of hard work he does not particularly relish. Keep up the hard work, son! Happiness is a fresh tomato!

A new kind of scholarship

My son the valedictorian will graduate from high school this afternoon, and the event has been shrouded by a lively controversy: should students who did not pass all sections of the state graduation test be allowed to march in graduation even if they can't receive a diploma? Most schools do not allow students to march in graduation unless they've passed the test, but my son's school decided to be different this year and let 'em march. Of 52 seniors, three did not pass the test, but they will still be allowed to participate in graduation.

The local paper has been printing abundant articles and editorials and letters, some coherent and some less so, but I have a hard time getting worked up about the topic. I graduated from a high school where students who did not pass the state test received a Certificate of Attendance instead of a diploma, but there were more than 700 people in my graduating class so it's unlikely anyone was aware of the contents of those diploma cases--except for the students themselves. My son goes to a small school in a small, close-knit community, and the absence of three students out of 52 would be quite obvious. I agree that students who don't earn diplomas shouldn't get diplomas, but I don't really care whether they walk in graduation or not. It's just a ceremony. The real rewards will come later on.

But there's one thing I find quite amusing: last night my son went to the annual alumni banquet, where the alumni association awarded three $500 scholarships to students selected on the basis of criteria known only to the elect, although they do seem to favor athletes and students related to members of the alumni board. The result was that one of those three scholarships went to a student who did not pass the state graduation test.

Kind of gives a whole new meaning to the word "scholar," don't you think?

The toothless spud

Overheard at a candidate dinner: "That committee was a political hot potato, and it had to be defanged."

Many thanks to Andrea for creating Spudzilla!

How I'll spend my summer vacation

Bardiac got the ball rolling by listing summer goals; now it's my turn to follow suit. What academic projects do I plan to tackle in the next three months?

1. Hire someone (or several someones) to cover four classes in my department in the fall.

2. Write a paper to deliver at a conference in South Carolina in June.

3. Revise and submit the Atlanta essay.

4. Finish research and begin writing the follow-up to last year's big publication.

5. Revise and resubmit the recently rejected article.

6. Write syllabus for fall capstone class.

7. Revise syllabi for composition and postcolonial lit classes.

8. Write departmental assessment report.

9. Attend conference in Washington in July.

10. Write preliminary notes for book proposal with my colleague.

It's a daunting list but I'm excited about getting started. Will I still be able to blog? Only time will tell.

The sob is the story

Interesting article about Abe Lincoln's death and famous quotes and history in the May 28 New Yorker. Adam Gopnik's "Angels and Ages" ends in a particularly poignant paragraph describing his visit to the tiny room in which Lincoln died:

In the brief moment given to each visitor to look inside, I wished for a machine that would be able to re-create every breath of air, every vibration that ever took place in a room. And then I knew that we probably would not have understood any better had we been standing there than we do now. Stanton was weeping, Lincoln had just died, the room was overwhelmed, whatever he said was broken by a sob--the sob, in a sense, is the story. History is not an agreed-on fiction but what gets made in a crowded room; what is said isn't what's heard, and what is heard isn't what gets repeated. Civilization is an agreement to keep people from shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre; and then we all try to remember afterward when we heard it, and if we ever really smelled smoke, and who went first, and what they said. The indeterminacy is built into the emotion of the moment. The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

The birds & the boys

I was washing dishes last night when I looked out the window and saw a red-bellied woodpecker pecking on my picnic table. It's an old picnic table and I'm not too concerned about damage, but I have to wonder what joy a woodpecker can get out of pecking on furniture. Perhaps the woodpecker sees my picnic table as a buffet of juicy little bugs, which is bad news either for the bird or for the table. Perhaps the bird is trying to hollow out a nest in the leg of the picnic table--a foolhardy pursuit--or perhaps the bird is drumming to attract a mate.

The woodpecker won't explain its motives any more than my 17-year-old son will explain why he regularly drums on furniture. It started when he was about six years old and started using his chopsticks to drum on the dinner table. "We have a percussionist in the family!" I said, but he contradicted me. "I'm not a percussionist," he said. "I'm a drummer."

Millions of paradiddles later, he admits to being a percussionist but he still drums on everything: sofas, chairs, steering wheels, shoes, dinner plates, picnic tables. I doubt that my son is looking for bugs or building a nest--and if he's drumming to attract a mate, I hope he plans to continue drumming for a few more years. But his motives may be more elemental than that: perhaps he drums because that's what drummers do, just as woodpeckers peck because that's what woodpeckers do.

I can live with that. I'm not so sure about the picnic table.

Once upon a workshop

This morning I sat down with an accountant and a physics professor to write a little fiction--not a particularly normal way to spend the day but rewarding all the same. Our annual teaching workshop featured a session designed to help professors across the curriculum understand the power of narrative in teaching and learning, and one of the sessions required small interdisciplinary groups of professors to write small chunks of short stories: set the scene and introduce the character, then pass it on to the next group; develop the character and introduce the conflict, then pass it on to the next group, and so on. The results were collaborate stories each bearing the stamp of a dozen different professors.

My colleague who led the session said that when she does this exercise with her students, their stories generally include space travel, car chases, gun fights, or hordes of armed ninjas, but we seasoned professors wrote about our own particular horrors: committee meetings, campus security, sexual harassment, and accounting. My group's story featured a student named Alex who makes a heroic decision to respond to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by doing his accounting homework--because "Someone would have to fill the shoes of all those accountants killed in the blast, and it might as well be Alex."

Okay, our group is probably not going to win a Pulitzer, but the exercise forced us all to write clearly, read carefully, and think about the kinds of choices authors have to make to produce a work of fiction. Best of all, though, we got to spend time being creative with colleagues from across campus whom we generally see only in committee meetings. We laughed, we learned, we ate some bagels, and best of all, no ninjas were harmed in the writing of these stories.

High-flying fiction

If you moved Robertson Davies's Deptford Trilogy to Afghanistan, the result would be something like The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. In both works, childhood cruelty plants a seed of guilt and shame that grows silently for years before bearing fruit. One shameful childhood act binds together disparate characters for life--or death.

This idea is not terribly original, and neither is the subplot of a son's desperately seeking his father's favor; what makes Kite Runner different is the setting. In my first high school journalism class, I was warned of the dangers of what journalists used to call Afghanistanism: the tendency to focus on news from places so out-of-the-way that readers are unlikely to have heard of them. Hosseini relies on his readers' familiarity with Afghanistan as well as the air of the exotic that surrounds front-page news stories, but his descriptions of place rarely move beyond mere adequacy. For instance, the title of the novel suggests the importance of competitive kite-flying, and in fact the first kite-flying scene leads into the pivotal event in the novel, so it ought to be richly realized and dense with visceral details; instead, it feels very much like the scenery in a low-budget video game: the streets define an arena for the main character's exploits but they don't hold up to careful scrutiny, nor do the side streets lead to a real world pulsing with life.

I realize that I'm the only one in the known world who failed to read Kite Runner when it was published four years ago, but I've read it now and this is what I have to say: not bad for a first novel, but now that he's moved past all that, maybe Khaled Hosseini's next novel will be a little more original and less reliant on a video-game aesthetic.

The invisible library

Just got home from a major campus shindig and I'm trying to decide which part of it I liked best. The sushi bar was great, but then my motto has always been "Never refuse free sushi." The little packets of M&M's imprinted with the name of the college were quite adorable, although I have to wonder who had the tedious job of fitting all those little candies into the typewriter. The little shovel-shaped lapel pins were also a nice touch. The deejay played some pretty good classic rock from the 60s and 70s in honor of the major donors who made the event possible, and the donors kept their speeches mercifully short and sweet. The governor demonstrated his ability to connect to the crowd, and the college president and provost managed to remain elegant and dignified despite the fact that their high heels were sinking into the wet ground while they wielded their shovels with aplomb.

Today about a dozen dignitaries took symbolic stabs at breaking the ground for a building that will be under construction for the next 18 months: the new college library! Soon the real construction workers will arrive, and they won't be wearing high heels or packing sushi in their lunchboxes, but they will do the important work of transforming the invisible library into a real one. That was my favorite part of today's event: the new library. Can't see it just yet, but I know it's coming, and that's better than sushi.

Outragges spelling

Recently I've noted an outbreak of outrageous spelling: nouns that would normally form adjectives in -ous being spelled -es instead, as in "outragges" and "couragges." It hurts my eyes just to look at them. What's interesting about this is not the fact that students don't know how to spell these specific words, but that they seem blissfully unaware of the pattern that allows certain nouns to becomes adjectives by the addition of some variation of -ous. How does a native speaker of English grow to adulthood without noticing this pattern?

Bittersweet

This week Rate Your Students has been publishing diatribes from angry professors explaining why they're quitting teaching. It's depressing reading, although it's not necessarily a bad thing when someone who bitterly hates teaching quits. The last thing we need is another bitter professor running around loose.

But then I look around and try to locate a professor who is not bitter and I come up empty. Throughout academe, this is the bitter time of year: we've given our best time and energy and expertise to the students and the institution and what do we have to show for it? Whining e-mails full of complaints, excuses, lies, and requests that add up to additional work and stress just at the moment when the gas tank is fading toward E.

If the entire school year were like this week, there would be no professors left. But that's what summer is for: time to refuel. We'll start today at the departmental picnic, where the menu includes grilled bratwurst served with a side dish of hearty laughter, and we'll watch the bitterness blow away in the sweet spring breeze. Let the summer come. There will be no resignations in my department this week.

Fiction: faulty or fabulous

Often after reading allegedly excellent literature, I wonder whether I've lost the ability to immerse myself in a good book. For instance, recently I read A Student of Living Things by Susan Richards Shreve, a novel that earned blurbs of praise from authors I respect and that was favorably compared to Ian McEwan's Saturday. I found Shreve's novel turgid, vapid, and amateurish, but when I looked at all that lavish praise, I wondered whether the fault was mine.

"This is it, then," I thought. "Gone are the days when a great work of fiction could grab me by the eyeballs, ream out my innards, and fill me with molten gold, when a good book could take such total possession of my mind that turning over the final page was physically painful. It's all academic now. Fiction is a closed book."

Then I read something really wonderful like Ian McEwan's Saturday and I realize that the fault lies not in me but in the mediocrity that makes its way into print these days. I understand why readers would compare Saturday with A Student of Living Things: both novels explore the evolution of particular families in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, and both are concerned with the challenges of survival and reproduction in the midst of daily danger. Place the books side-by-side, though, and the Shreve book suffers: it is peopled with paper dolls manipulated in support of an overworked metaphor, while McEwan's novel explores depths undreamed of by Shreve.

Like a skilled surgeon, McEwan exposes the human condition in all its complexity, laying out for readers' inspection the secrets of human dignity in the midst of struggle. The pace is slow and many of the events are mundane and unexceptional, but the characters live and breathe and love and think in a manner entirely believable and worthy of attention. At the most intense point I could not wait to turn the pages, hoping for a swift end to the characters' suffering, but turning the last page left me with a sense of loss, a sadness over leaving the world of the book.

But it's not the end after all. Reading a book like this restores my faith in fiction. I haven't lost it! Fiction is not a closed book but an open door! Now if only I could get someone to paint a big bold M on the doors opening only to Mediocrity, I would be a happy reader.

Assessment the easy way

Classes are over and grades have been submitted, so why am I sitting in my office tapping on the keyboard for hours on end? The answer, of course, is the A-word: Assessment.

The college is committed to assessment at every level, but this commitment takes various forms. The English Department recently instituted an online portfolio system to assist us in assessing whether the English major is achieving its objectives, and we assess the freshman writing program through in-class writing assignments evaluated according to a common rubric. I don't mind doing either of those types of assessment because our methods produce meaningful results that help us improve as a department and as individual teachers.

When it comes to general education assessment, though, I get a little cynical. Okay, maybe that's an understatement. Everyone who teaches any course that fulfills a general education requirement must assess how well that course achieves an objective--just one objective--from a master list of general education course objectives. We are given total freedom in selecting which objective to assess and how to assess it; as long as we turn in the assessment report to the assessment committee, there's no reward for choosing meaningful methods and no punishment for taking the easy way out. Is it any wonder that some of us choose the easiest method possible?

Here's an example: every student is required to take two courses identified as Writing Intensive. These courses appear in many departments, but the highest concentration of W courses appears in the English department. Now, really meaningful assessment of our Writing Intensive requirement should involve some long-term evidence of improvements to students' writing skills, such as a portfolio system or a timed essay written at the beginning and end of a student's college experience. However, no one is interested in doing this kind of assessment across the curriculum, so assessment is left in the hands of individual professors in W classes. I teach one or two W courses each semester, with 25 to 30 students in each course, and I struggled for a long time to create an assessment system that produced meaningful numbers. Then I had an epiphany: if the committee in charge of assessing general education courses doesn't care about meaningful numbers, why should I toil and sweat to produce them?

So I took another look at the objectives for W courses, and I found one stating that students will "learn to write as a process that follows a series of steps." Perfect: I already require this kind of writing in my W courses. These days all the assessment reports for my W courses look about the same: I set a goal that one hundred percent of students in the course will participate in all stages of a multi-stage writing project, and at the end of the semester I discover that 99 or 100 percent of students in the course have indeed done so. The fact that failure to participate in every step of the writing process will have a dramatic negative impact on the grade assures compliance among all but the most apathetic students.

What does this method of assessment tell me? Nothing much. What does it tell the assessment committee? Only that I am able to fill out an assessment report form and turn it in on time. What use with anyone make of this information? None that I'm aware of. But until the college as a whole adopts a meaningful method to assess writing proficiency across the curriculum, I'll stick to assessment the easy way.

Purge and plant

I celebrated Mother's Day weekend by purging my garden of Creeping Charlie and my briefcase of final exams. Weeding hurt my muscles and grading hurt my brain, but I appreciate the results: moving all those final exams out of the way left room to fill my mind with excellent fiction (Ian McEwan's Saturday), and pulling out all that Creeping Charlie left plenty of space to plant columbines, foxglove, and salvia. Now I'll just sit back and watch it all grow.

Baffled and baffling

Recent experiences with birdfeeders have left us both baffling and baffled, and I'm not sure what the answer is but at least we're getting a little entertainment out of the deal.

For four years we've had two feeder stations in the front yard: a small forked pole holding two finch feeders and a large pole holding a complicated array of feeders, including a suet feeder, nut feeder, tray feeder, and a large hanging feeder usually full of sunflower or safflower seeds. The smaller pole with the two finch feeders is of no interest to squirrels because the holes in the feeder are too small to allow them access, but lately chipmunks have been climbing up the pole and just stuffing their little cheeks full of seeds before scampering off to hide them. Yesterday I sprayed cooking oil on the pole, though, and since then we've been watching chipmunks jump up onto the pole and then slide right back down again. Around here, watching chipmunks slide down a pole passes for cheap entertainment.

The other feeder station is posing a more mysterious problem. A squirrel baffle keeps squirrels from climbing up the pole and the tray is too high for squirrels to jump up; however, a really determined squirrel can jump down to the feeder from a nearby tree, but they often miss the tray entirely and end up falling farther than they had intended. I have not seen any squirrels on or near that feeder this spring, but something is getting up there, and whatever it is must be large and heavy enough to snap the weld on one of the bars, remove the screened bottom of the tray feeder, and totally dismantle the large sunflower seed feeder, sending it tumbling to the ground. This has happened twice so far and we are tired of it.

What is it? So far, all we've been able to determine is that it comes by night. A raccoon would be big enough to do that kind of damage, but I can't imagine how a raccoon could climb up the pole, and I don't know whether a raccoon would make that difficult leap from the tree.

How do you baffle a creature big and smart enough to take apart a birdfeeder station that has proudly baffled squirrels and chipmunks for four years? Frankly, I'm baffled.

The secret of invisibility

I have learned the secret of invisibility: rain. If I go out the front door, the grosbeaks fly away and refuse to return until I go back inside, no matter how quietly and patiently I wait; but if I go out the front door during a light drizzle, the grosbeaks stay where they are and let me take their picture.

A great place to sit quietly and patiently is the new deck on the back of the garage apartment. It's cozy and secluded, and if you lean your head back in one of those chairs, your vision is filled with trees and sky. Look a little to the side, though, and you see clumps of fire pinks and other wildflowers, which are thriving this year.

Had to be there

So we're having dinner with a candidate and I need to get the waiter's attention, but since I am generally invisible to waiters, I ask a colleague, "Are you any good at gesturing meaningfully at waiters?"

"I used to be," he says, "but then I found someone."

The well-oiled dynamo

Dear Student,
Let's face it: your writing is not perfect. Your love affair with adjectives and adverbs sometimes results in sentences weighed down by excess baggage, and your lighter flights of fancy can be a bit rococo. Paragraphs grow like Barthelme's balloon, expanding to fill the room and bulge well out into the hallway, leaving me gasping for air in the corner.

And yet: I'd rather read your papers than most others. Here's why:

1. You take risks. Those flights of fancy? Always original, always meaningful, always interesting, even when they're outrageous. Especially when they're outrageous.

2. You love words. Your extensive vocabulary grows not from a desire to impress readers with your erudition but from sheer delight in the wonders of language.

3. You live literature. No mere water-strider skating over the surface, you plunge in and inhabit the text, developing gills if necessary to keep breathing in the depths.

4. You respond to advice. Rough passage? I make a broad suggestion and you run with it until your prose hums like a dynamo. So what if it sputters now and again? It runs with energy and rhythm and precision and power, and it makes me want to keep reading.

So keep writing. And while you're at it, if you can infect your classmates with some of these characteristics, you will make your English professors very very happy.

Sum search!

Say you're assembling a search committee and you need to make sure the committee has the right balance of innocence and experience, knowledge and power, gravitas and charm--not to mention the whole gender balance issue and the need to avoid stocking the committee entirely with cranks and bores. Wouldn't it make your life easier if each faculty member were assigned certain numbers expressing those nameless qualities so important to the makeup of a search committee?

Schmoozability, for instance. You need a certain schmooze factor on a search committee, but there's a fine line between just enough schmoozing and too much. Suppose we assign each faculty member a Schmoozability Quotient, or SQ, and anyone whose SQ fell outside a certain range would be banned from search committees.

Then of course you'd want to quantify other characteristics as well: the Charm Factor (CF) might be helpful, as well as the ratio of Expertise to Experience (E:E). It would be necessary to know each faculty member's TAEQMOS score (Tendency to Ask Embarrassing Questions or Make Offensive Statements) as well as the strength of his or her Ability to Suffer Fools Silently (ASFS).

There must be more, but for the sake of illustration, let's stop here. Now suppose I have all these numbers at my disposal and I want to know which faculty member is the perfect pick to fill that last spot on the search committee; the sum might look something like this:

E:E + ((SQ + CF) - (TAEQMOS + ASFS))

There now. Doesn't that simplify the whole process?

From oriole to Inferno

Orioles are back! I heard them singing high up in the sycamores while I was out on the deck grading papers, and I would still be out there listening to them if I hadn't needed to babysit my geriatric printer while it labors to spit out proof of plagiarism on two papers. I loathe plagiarism in any circumstances, but plagiarism that drags me away from newly arrived orioles--well, these students are about to experience a circle of Hell Dante never dreamed of.

Continental divide

"Today there are many global issues all across the world." It must be true because I read it at the beginning of a student paper. Unfortunately, that paper fails to consider the global issue that currently has me a bit befuddled: global ignorance, or possibly ignorance that is merely hemispheric or continental.

I was alerted to the problem when I stumbled upon the following sentence in a student paper: "According to Regina Saskatchewan who works for the Leader-Post,...."

A yes, Regina; I know her well. Simply capital, even if she tends toward the cool side.

I was willing to grant the student the benefit of the doubt and entertain the possibility that there might be an actual journalist named Regina Saskatchwan working for the Leader-Post, but no. It took me maybe 30 seconds to confirm that the student was referring to an unsigned article in a newspaper published in Regina, Saskatchewan. Why didn't the student realize this?

1. Time crunch. Thirty seconds? Too much!
2. Apathy. Looks like a person's name, sounds like a person's name, must be a person's name, and if it isn't who cares?
3. Ignorance. Saskatchewan? Isn't that some Eskimo word for "Gesundheit"?

This is just one of several students whose Works Cited pages were stuffed with articles from Canadian newspapers despite the fact that they were writing about topics that had nothing to do with Canada. I noticed this trend on the drafts and I mentioned it in class, along with a stern warning about relying heavily on secondary or tertiary sources. Why rely on a Canadian newspaper's account of a speech given by an American government figure when you can easily find the full text of the speech itself online? This little warning did not make much of an impact, however, and now I understand why: I assumed that students would recognize a foreign source when they found one. A student who thinks Regina Saskatchewan is the name of a reporter may not be equipped to make informed decisions about the provenance of his sources.

The other day I had to explain to a student that conspiracy-theory websites ranting about the Illuminati and their ilk might not be the most reliable sources of information for his research paper, but then he wanted me to explain to him who the Illuminati are and how one becomes one of them. I already have my hands full trying to teach thesis statements and keep the Semicolon Fairy off my back, and now I'm supposed to also teach conspiracy theory AND geography? I need a vacation someplace where my students will never find me. But where?

I'll ask Regina. She'll know.

Friday night lights

We've got some real Friday night excitement going on here: the young man is upstairs ironing shirts and the old guy is in the kitchen baking bread. I'm just goofing off. Technically, I'm supervising the ironing process, but the kid seems to have picked up the technique pretty quickly, so I'm supervising from a distance. Is there any better way to spend a Friday night?

I am ashamed to admit that this is the first time my 17-year-old son has taken iron in hand. I've mentoned it a few times in the past only to encounter a solid wall of resistance, and I already spend enough time banging my head against various walls so I didn't push it. This week, though, it came to light that the young man had forgotten to return his prom tux to the rental shop last weekend despite being reminded repeatedly to do so, and he was facing a largeish extra charge if it didn't get returned by noon Tuesday. I agreed to return the tux on my lunch hour provided that he compensate for the inconvenience by doing something nice for me. Hence, he irons.

For the old guy, bread-baking is just a normal part of his Friday-night routine. He mixes dough long into the night, leaves it to rise for a few hours, and gets up at 4 or 5 a.m. to put the loaves in the oven in time to get them to the Farmer's Market by 8. I understand that there are other possible ways to spend a Friday night and perhaps one day we'll experience them, but for now, the old guy bakes, the young guy irons, and I supervise.

Celebration, anyone?

Just taught my last class of the semester! I'm done!

Granted, there's a huge pile of freshman papers and a less huge pile of literaure papers on my desk, not to mention a pile of material related to an upcoming teaching workshop and another pile related to a paper I'm supposed to give in June and another pile related to the A-word (Assessment), and I'm giving two exams next week and interviewing two job candidates, but so what? For now, I'm done!

Woo-hoo! I survived!

Do you C what I C?

Candidate: gone.

Committees: meeting.

Columbines: blooming.

Calm: fleeting.

A glut of excellence

We have a candidate on campus today for a position in our department and two more coming next week, and I'm reminded of my most and least favorite things about serving on a search committee: I love spending time with intelligent, interesting, articulate people--but I wish we could hire them all! Granted, there are the occasional pompous bores, like the candidate several years ago who emitted deadly tedium rays reaching from here to Poughkeepsie (note to candidates: no one wants to hear you recite your dissertation abstract over dinner), but this year I'm delighted with all three of the finalists and I don't want to send any of them away. Can't we just hire all three?

Neither here nor there

Interesting article on Inside Higher Ed about the problem of absenteeism (read it here), including some data and a great deal of speculation about the reasons students skip class. For instance, a study at the University of California at Santa Cruz found three common reasons students miss a class: " a) they are sleeping, b) they are preparing for other classes or c) they feel like the class is 'useless.'" Some blame professors for relying too heavily on technology, while others blame professors for avoiding technology or relying too heavily on lecture; others place all the blame on students for being lazy, overcommitted, or irresponsible.

One of the students in my 8:00 class confessed that sleep was to blame for two weeks' worth of absences: she just can't get up that early in the morning. "When I make it to your class," she explained, "It's because I've stayed up all night the night before." A few weeks ago we worked out an arrangement that would allow her to pass the class, and since then she has made it to every class and skillfully completed every assignment. Because of her willingness to work on the problem, I have no doubt that she will pass the class.

Another student missed a month of class because of involvement with a sport. The student has turned in assignments late or not at all, and he has taken no initiative to meet with me or visit the Writing Center for one-on-one attention. Further, he does not even bother to pick up his drafts before revising them, and he has missed so many classes that he would not even know what some of my comments meant even if he read them. Will he pass the class? Unlikely.

Rampant absenteeism is a problem, but it's always the same problem, and therefore it will not respond to the same solution every time. I am happy to bend a little for students willing to take responsibility and work toward a solution, and for the rest--well, that's why we have the letter F.

Nobody's scared of the Pillsbury Doughboy

An article about my research appears in the new issue of the college magazine and ever since it came out colleagues have been congratulating me. "Great photo," they say. "It looks just like you." If this is true, then I must look an awful lot like the Pillsbury Doughboy wearing glasses. But then the only photo of myself I've ever liked is the one above, and it's a bit outdated. Most other photos of me look like Jabba the Hutt in drag.

Lately I've been obsessing a little more than usual about my appearance. In fact, every spring when the weather turns warm I wrestle daily with the same question: short sleeves or long? I often opt for a short-sleeved shirt topped with a jacket or sweater, but then when I get into a warm classroom, I face another question: jacket on or off? My students would prefer that I leave the jacket on. I know this because they say so on my teaching evaluations. "She should be required to wear long sleeves in the classroom," they say. "She has a big ugly hairy mole on her arm that distracts me from learning."

It's helpful to be reminded that I have a big ugly hairy mole on my arm because I've lived with it so long that I sometimes forget. Take yesterday, for instance: we went to see The Miracle Worker performed by a local theater troupe, and after the show we stopped to do some shopping and saw some of the performers in the store--two young boys still in their costumes. I was planning to congratulate them on their performance, but then they started pointing and whispering and giggling about the big ugly hairy mole on my arm. Oh yeah, that. I had forgotten. Thanks for pointing it out! Thanks so much!

The mole doesn't show in my new photo, but I doubt that's the reason colleagues are congratulating me. I asked a friend what's so good about this new photo and she said, "It reveals something about you that people like." Okay, I'll admit that I don't look scary in the new photo. I've been told that some folks find me a tad frightening, but nobody's scared of the Pillsbury Doughboy.

"No, that's not it," she said.

"Then what?"

"You look warm and witty and intelligent, like you're about to say something really smart," she said.

I couldn't think of anything smart to say in response except "thanks." A warm, witty, intelligent, non-scary Pillsbury Doughboy with no visible mole--that's a self-image I can live with.

Spring growth

Fog on the meadow this morning, making the spider-webs shine like beacons. The grosbeaks are still hanging around, so maybe they're here to stay. No sign of orioles yet, although last year's nest is still visible at the top of one of the tall sycamores by the creek. The woods are full of trilliums and mayapples--I've never seen so many mayapples, many growing in places where we've never seen them before. This afternoon I'll hunt for trout lilies. Growing conditions are excellent.

Which is not entirely a good thing. The grass, for instance, is growing entirely too quickly, and all this wet weather is making mowing impossible. My front lawn looks like an experiment in neglect: How tall will the grass grow if we just leave it alone? How far will the dandelions and creeping charlie spread? How much muscle will it take to push a reel mower through all that growth? Give me some sunshine and we'll find out.

Rosy

I arrived home today feeling grumpy and frumpy and angry and mean, only to find several rose-breasted grosbeaks visiting the feeders. It is impossible to remain angry in the presence of these lovely little birds. They make me smile. For now, that's enough.

Prophylactic thinking

I've done it to myself again: required all my students to turn in papers in the same week. Next week at this time I'll be inundated with student writing, and not just any student writing but the kind of writing that occurs at the time in the semester when many students are on the verge of becoming gibbering idiots--and inspiring their professors to do likewise.

To prepare for the onslaught, I intend to spend this weekend doing some prophylactic thinking: filling my mind so full of good stuff that drivel won't be able to find a foothold but will instead bounce off the surface of my jam-packed mind like a gymnast off a trampoline. All I need to do is find a whole lot of witty, intelligent, thought-provoking writing to pack in there and top it off with a generous measure of clever conversation, rollicking laughter, and appreciation of nature.

But if I'm going to fill my mind with good stuff, first I need to find the good stuff with which to fill it. What kind of reading will best serve to steel my mind against an impending onslaught of mediocrity? I welcome suggestions.

Visions and revisions

It's easy to gripe about the futility of writing comments on student drafts: we spend hours on end working through wretched papers and writing helpful suggestions for improvement, but students ignore our careful comments and just turn in the same old mediocre mess. What's the point of all that work if students are just going to toss the paper in the trash? It's time to transform this monologue into a conversation.

I took the first step this morning in my composition class when I returned their mostly horrible drafts accompanied by a handout headed "My Revision Plan." The handout listed the most common problems on these drafts organized from most serious (inadequate evidence, no clear thesis) to least serious (spelling, format errors). Each student had to read the comments on the draft, put a check mark next to all the relevant problems on the Revision Plan handout, and then write a brief but specific plan for addressing each of those problems.

Here's the key: students were not allowed to leave class until they showed me their completed Revision Plans. Some students had few check-marks and came up with plans fairly quickly; they were allowed to leave early and get to work on revising their papers. Others had many check-marks and had to think of many ways to address the issues, and then they had to show me their plans so I could offer additional information or encouragement.

Whether they left class early or late, all my students had to pay attention to my comments on the draft, come up with specific methods to address those comments, and convince me that they knew what was needed to improve the paper. Will they act on their Revision Plans? Perhaps; the revised papers will tell the tale. But even if they don't take the next step, at least I've done my part to turn this monologue into a conversation.

What we talk about when we talk about poetry

My American Lit Survey class is ending the semester with two solid weeks of twentieth-century poetry, so students' written comments ask the same questions over and over:

1. Why is this a poem? It doesn't rhyme.

2. That poem is too long. I got bored just reading the title.

3. Why would anyone write a poem about _____? (Fill in the blank: garbage, food, sex, desire, murder, suicide, madness, ordinary life.)

4. That poem is so random!

5. I don't understand the poem. Please explain the hidden meaning.

Here is my response:

I am not an oracle.
The meaning is in the words.
The words are not random,
even when they don't rhyme.
It is what it is,
and if it bores you,
maybe you should write your own poem.

Time bandits

"As our American society develops, we are trying to better ourselves by making our children and predecessors achieve higher standards then us."

I recommend a time machine--one that moves both ways.

Traffic report

The good news is that the school bus driver is walking around with no apparent injuries except to his pride. The bad news is that the school bus ended up on its side, dangling precariously on the edge of a bluff next to the most dangerous curve on my road.

I didn't see the accident but I was the first person on the scene, and I have never felt so helpless. I pass that bus at about the same spot nearly every morning and I wave to the bus driver as he prepares to start his route. Today I rounded the curve and saw the bus sliding down the bluff on its side, with wheels spinning and some sort of fluid gushing from beneath. The sight was disconcerting, to say the least.

I stopped, of course, parking my van with the flashers on to alert oncoming traffic (unlikely at that time of day), and then I scurried around toward the front of the bus to see what I could do. The bus driver was standing up and calling for help on the radio, but I didn't see a way to get down there to help him out of the bus, nor did I see a way out. The driver stood there like a bug under glass, not 15 feet from where I was standing but totally inaccessible. "I'm okay," he mouthed, waving me off. What could I do? A klutz in a wimpy car--with no cell phone!--isn't much help at a time like that.

It wasn't long before help arrived; by the time my husband reached the scene, the driver had been removed from the bus, another bus had been despatched to cover the route, and the wreckers had arrived. Everything is fine, he told me. Nobody was injured. The road will be closed for a while until the bus gets removed, but other than that, life goes on as if nothing unusual had happened.

So why are my palms so sweaty, and why do I feel as if I've been kicked in the stomach?

A card for every purpose

I went to the campus bookstore to buy a greeting card--just an ordinary friendly mother-to-daughter card in which to insert a check--but I was disappointed to find that the bookstore has drastically reduced its selection of greeting cards (has electronic communication made greeting cards obsolete?) so that I found nothing even remotely appropriate for the occasion. I did, however, find a birthday card featuring the following charming message: "Happy Birthday. See you in Hell."

Who sends such a card? "Students love that card," said one of the store clerks. "We can't keep it in stock."

I realize that I am hopelessly out of touch, but I really don't understand this at all. Anyone care to explain?

Non-trivial persuasion

We've all played Trivial Pursuit, but what is Trivial Persuade? I picture a game in which players earn wedges by persuading others to perform utterly pointless or mundane actions: for a green wedge, persuade someone to seal an envelope; for a pink wedge, persuade another player to say "the" three times fast. Who would want to play such a game?

Someone must want to because the phrase "trivial persuade" was used in a search string that led to this site. If you looked only at the search strings leading here, you might conclude that I write primarily about food, rodents and other pests, and people dressed inappropriately for the office. Recent searchers wanted to find out about "cooking tomato sauce good or bad" or the "temperment of groundhogs" or "braless office," three topics on which I am about as good an authority as Mr. Ed.

There are occasional questions about literature, mostly from lazy readers seeking an easy way out of an assignment; some are looking for an "in depth analysis of the yellow wallpaper" or insight on "innocence in A White Heron", while others seek enlightenment about "lie lay laid dead" or "sentence with suave." Now even more seekers possessed by an urgent need to use "suave" in a sentence will be led to this site, which uses "suave" in a sentence not just once but several times without any clear indication of what "suave" might mean.

The most frustrating thing about these bizarre search strings, though, is that I never get a chance to follow up and find out what motivates people to seek the peculiar things they seek. What is "aromatherapy chipmunks birdseed" and why would anyone be looking for it? Who needs a "strawberry powerpoint presentation" and what does he or she have in common with the person seeking a "handkerchief stuffed sleeve"? Will the person suffering from "cinnamon buns with caramelization" please send some my way instead of just making my mouth water?

Finally, how can I persuade readers that my blog is not quite as trivial as these search strings makes it appear? And if I succeed, do I get a wedge?

What I'm not griping about

Griping is inappropriate when the weather is this good, but if I were inclined to gripe this weekend, here is what I'd be griping about:

1. Ants in my telephone. I know that living in the woods requires a certain willingness to share one's living space with various wee beasties, but I need that phone more than the ants do. Don't ants use chemicals to communicate? Or do they tap-dance with antennae? Whatever: if they want to make a phone call, let 'em get their own darn phone.

2. Experimental fiction so fascinated by its own experimentation that it forgets the elements of good fiction. Case in point: Foe by J.M. Coetzee. I appreciate the attempt to explore the troubled relationship between the author and his creation, but if I wanted two-dimensional characters, I'd read a comic book.

3. Student papers that try to pass off as thesis statements sentences such as the following:

"The Open Boat," "The Road Not Taken," and The America Play all rely heavily on the use of the word "the" in their titles.

I need to get a rubber stamp that says "So what?" --except I"d wear it out by midterm.

Improving Updike?

The aristocratic social set into which she was born expected its women to be ornamental, well-sheltered, intellectually idle agents of their interwoven clans, whereas Edith was an awkward, red-haired bookworm and dreamer, teased by her two older brothers about her big hands and feet and out of sympathy with her intensely conventional mother, nee Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander--a mother-daughter disharmony that rankled in Edith's fiction to the end.

This remarkable sentence, from John Updike's review of a new biography of Edith Wharton in the April 16 New Yorker, reminds me of what my husband's grandma would say when he tried to carry a few too many feed sacks at once: "That's a lazy man's load." Updike's sentence, like a lazy man's load, packs in a little too much information and suffers from a bit of slippage around the edges.

The sentence works pretty well until we encounter the phrase "out of sympathy." Who is out of sympathy? The first time I read the sentence, I interpreted it this way:

[Edith was] teased by her two older brothers
1. about her big hands and feet, and
2. out of sympathy for her mother.

But this implies that the brothers are teasing her because they sympathize with her mother, which is not, I think, what Updike intends. But if "out of sympathy" does not follow from "teased," where does it belong? If it describes Edith, we have to look way back to the "whereas" clause, where Edith is already described as an "awkward, red-haired bookworm and dreamer." Both "teased by her brothers" and "out of sympathy," then, could modify "dreamer," which makes sense, but why did I have to work so hard to figure that out?

Perhaps I'm a poor reader, or perhaps the sentence is trying to say too much. Sometimes the only way to carry all the feed sacks without slippage is to put a few down and come back for them later--or break the unwieldy sentence into two. On the other hand, if we pack up the feed sacks neatly enough, maybe we can make it in one trip. So far, I haven't found a way to pack all this meaning into one sentence without confusion, but perhaps my faithful readers can meet the challenge. Anyone want to try to improve on Updike?

The end is near

While standing in front of my 8:00 composition class this morning, I had an evil thought: four more classes and we're through.

Only four more class periods in which to look at your faces and watch as you try to keep your eyelids from falling shut.

Only four more chances to watch in wonder as you stand up and walk out of the room in the middle of class and then wander back in 20 minutes later without explanation.

Only four more times to drag you kicking and screaming through exercises designed to make you better writers, and only four more chances to read the uneven results.

Only four more opportunities for you to ask questions that have been asked and answered in great detail over and over since the first day of class, and only four more opportunities for me to bite my tongue and control my sarcasm.

Only four more classes and we're through. I don't know about you, but I intend to celebrate.

On competence and fluency

Recently while reading freshman essays I had an epiphany about a certain cluster of problems I'm seeing often in student papers: mangled idioms, incorrect verb forms, sudden shifts in point of view or tense in the middle of paragraphs, sentences that wander off into bizarrely ungrammatical forms, and so on. I see these problems all the time in papers written by my Chinese students, but this semester I'm seeing the same kinds of issues in papers written by lower-performing American students. Suddenly I understand the problem: these students may be native speakers of English, but they lack fluency in their native tongue.

I sat down recently to work through a draft with a student, and when I carefully pointed out the subject/verb agreement problems and predication errors, he was able to make corrections, just as a student studying English as a Second Language is able to learn and apply abstract rules of grammar without necessarily internalizing those rules. I have several of these students this semester: their grasp of written English is limited and inconsistent, and their struggles to produce the simplest written statements result in prose that appears to have been written by a non-native speaker.

How does a young person grow up surrounded by English without ever developing fluency in his or her own language? It's possible that learning disabilities are involved, although none of these particular students have identified themselves as learning disabled or asked for accommodations. My knee-jerk reaction is to suspect that these students rely heavily on electronic communication and just don't expose themselves to enough competent writing to absorb its conventions. I wouldn't want to speculate any further than that, but I wonder how to deal with the challenge of teaching these students. How do I teach English as a second language to students for whom it is their first?

Seeing beyond Point B

We've been doing telephone interviews with candidates for a job in the English Department, and several of them have asked a question I don't know how to answer: "What is your vision for the future of the English department?"

I probably shouldn't admit this out loud, but I'm not sure I have a vision for the future of the English department. In fact, I'm not really a visionary kind of person. I'm pretty good at doing what it takes to get from Point A to Point B, provided that Point B is a clearly defined and reachable goal; however, seeing beyond Point B has always been a challenge.

If I try to envision the department's future, I picture happy faculty members passionately pursuing their research interests while mentoring a growing crop of intelligent and creative English majors. It's difficult to get more specific than that. I suppose I could say that I envision a group of majors disinclined to murder their classmates, but that's a goal every department shares, if not every rational human being. My vision statement could be summed up like this: Let's all just learn some stuff, okay?

If I were a real administrator, I would devote a lot of time to coming up with visions and missions and goals and objectives and plans to assess all these things, and I would have a clear and reasonable response when candidates asked for my vision for the future of the department. Instead, I'm focusing on getting from Point A to Point B, and if we can all just learn some stuff along the way, I'll be content.

Struggling for speech

After yesterday's tragedy it seems somehow callous to talk to students about commas, but that's what I'm doing today. I harbor no hope that correct use of commas will reduce the level of senseless violence in our world, nor do I believe that mastering the rules of comma usage will dissuade a deranged student from murdering his classmates. But what else can I tell them? "Thou shalt not kill" has already been said a few times, and those seriously considering mass murder tend to be unresponsive to the message.

If I could say one thing to all my students today it would be this: phone home. Call your mom, dad, sibs, friends, and love each other up. And ask for help when you need it; use words, not weapons.

It's not much, but at this point it's the best I can do.

What went wrong?

I spent my lunch hour at a local restaurant laughing and joking with colleagues and speculating about controversial issues on the agenda at this afternoon's faculty meeting, but then we came back to campus and saw the news from Virginia. No one is laughing now. Those faculty meeting agenda items that were so fascinating at lunch suddenly seem irrelevant.

Education ought to equip students to rely on reason rather than reaching for a gun. What went wrong?

Puffins at play

I had a little trouble getting up this morning because I was enjoying such a lovely dream about traveling to North Dakota in the dead of winter to watch puffins at play. My waking mind knows that there are no puffins in North Dakota, but the dreaming me says, "Shhhh! You'll scare them away!"

Obvious Alarm fails to function

Today's prize for stating the obvious goes to our local newspaper, which features a headline declaring "Abuse an inappropriate behavior for caregivers." This headline raises some important questions that the article fails to answer:

1. If abuse is inappropriate for caregivers, for whom is it appropriate?

2. Why use the wimpy word "inappropriate" when clearer terms would be more, um, appropriate? If the babysitter invites her boyfriend over and makes out with him on the sofa and then eats up all the food in the fridge, that's inappropriate; if she wraps the little kiddies in duct tape and beats 'em with an electrical cord, that's worse than inappropriate--it's illegal.

3. Doesn't anyone on the newspaper staff have a brain equipped with a properly funcitoning Obvious Alarm? Next we'll see headlines proclaiming embezzlement an inappropriate behavior for school treasurers and murder an inappropriate behavior for 12-year-olds.

Unfortunately, we'll probably never see the headline this newspaper needs: "Stating the obvious an inappropriate behavior for headline writers."

Mouser-in-law

The in-laws arrive today so I was swiffing the wood floor in the living room, reaching far back under the sofa to sweep out the dust mice, when suddenly I swept out something even less welcome than dust mice. At first I thought it was a cat toy, but no, it was not a toy. I swept a dead mouse out from under my sofa.

It couldn't have been under there long because it wasn't gooey or swollen or smelly, but still--if there's one thing worse than dust mice under the sofa, it's dead mice. I wanted to use it as an object lesson for the cat: "See, Whiskers? This is the enemy. When you see one of these, kill!" But she just turned up her nose and waddled away.

The carcass was whisked away before the in-laws arrived, but it was a close call. If there's one thing worse than dead mice under a sofa, it's dead mice under a sofa on which a mother-in-law is sitting. Not even the cat could save such a situation.

Notes from summer camp

As I was judging our college's senior speech competition yesterday, I was reminded of a comment one of my colleagues made about the redesign of the college website: "It makes us look like summer camp." He has a point: the website's text talks about academic rigor and intellectual growth and opportunities for in-depth study, but the photos emphasize sports, silliness, and fun in the sun, while the life of the mind is represented by a few photos of professors teaching and exterior shots of academic buildings.

Yesterday's senior speeches presented a similarly skewed picture. I listened to seven speeches given by the best and the brightest of our graduating seniors competing to give an address at commencement, all of them competent and some sparkling, but a listener unfamiliar with our campus might conclude that college life consists of four years of Spring Break occasionally punctuated by floods and service projects. One student spoke movingly about lessons learned outside the classroom and another spoke passionately about specific classes that had left a mark on him, but the rest made only the vaguest references to academics.

I enjoyed the speeches and I love our new website, and apparently students do too because enrollment keeps rising. But I just wish someone would figure out a way to put academics in the spotlight. I realize that it's difficult to catch learning on film, but we ought to at least make an effort.

Tromping for trilliums

It's a good year for Dutchman's Breeches and for trilliums too. I've never seen so many growing in one place. I had to tromp up a muddy slope to get these photos and it was difficult to avoid stepping on the flowers, but it was worth it.

The Vonnegut Effect

My composition classes are focusing on semicolons today, an appropriate way to honor the memory of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut famously and frequently denigrated the semicolon as a worthless and pretentious punctuation mark, useful only to suggest that one has been to college. Vonnegut found this sufficient reason to avoid semicolons entirely, but I see the issue differently: if semicolon use is a sign of one's college experience, and if going to college is a key to success, then students who graduate from college without knowing how to use semicolons will be forever hampered in their race toward achievement. How will anyone know my students have been to college if they can't use semicolons? I consider it my solemn duty to make sure my students have a firm grasp of the correct use of semicolons; in fact, if it were up to me, at graduation we would hand every graduating student not a diploma but a lifetime supply of semicolons. "Semicolons are your friends," I tell them. "Use them wisely and they will reward you richly."

I realize that my argument contains a serious flaw, which can be summed up in the deathless words spoken by Billy Boy at the end of the Eudora Welty story "Petrified Man": "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" I have made a lifelong habit of using semicolons correctly, but how have they rewarded me? This question is relevant right now in another area of my life in which Kurt Vonnegut also figures prominently: my garage.

Bear with me while I work through this: the garage is done, and now the drainage system is done and the deck and walkway on the back are nearly done, but a slight landslip on the slope led to the need for a retaining wall, and walls don't come cheaply--you can't just pile up a bunch of semicolons and hope they hold--so this stage of the project has resulted in certain cost overruns. Actually, every stage of the project resulted in certain cost overruns, resulting in a serious cash-flow problem, resulting in our being just a tad short of making the final payment the project, which is being completed even as we speak, or whatever it is we're doing here.

I cannot go to the contractor and say, "I am rich in semicolons! Here, take a handful!" For one thing, the exchange rate for semicolons is way down right now because of the glut on the market caused by what linguists have labelled "The Vonnegut Effect." So I'm looking for other ways to pay the bill short of selling excess organs on e-Bay, and this morning I came up with a dandy idea involving Kurt Vonnegut (who else?) and a lemon meringue pie.

I don't make pies often because, frankly, I stink at pie crust, but I can make a lemon meringue pie to die for, and I did so for Easter dinner. (Meaning I made the pie, not that I died for it. As far as I know, no lives were lost in the baking of that pie.) Meringue can be tricky, but this one was perfect: light and fluffy with a melt-in-your-mouth texture and a lovely pattern of caramelization on top. It looked almost like a face, and that's where Kurt Vonnegut comes in: it would be easy to manipulate the meringue to make it look even more like a face, and if people are willing to travel thousands of miles to gaze at cinnamon buns that look like the Virgin Mary or spend thousands of dollars to purchase a grilled-cheese sandwich bearing her image, wouldn't they do the same if a lemon meringue pie came out bearing the image of Kurt Vonnegut? Visitors would come from as far away as Indiana to gaze rapturously at the pie; I could charge for parking and sell souvenirs, little plastic pies and keyrings shaped like semicolons and postcards and bumper stickers and Tralfamadorian gewgaws. Eventually I would bow to public pressure and sell the pie on e-Bay, and I'd hand over a big chunk of the proceeds to my wonderful contractor, with thanks for a job well done.

With my luck, the highest bidder would be one of my students, who would pay me entirely in semicolons.

Acknowledge this!

I generally find it interesting to skim through the acknowledgments in a new book and see to whom the author feels indebted, but even I have my limits. Five pages of small type thanking no fewer than 91 people including scholars, librarians, and the author's mother-in-law--well, there's such a thing as too much gratitude. If this were an Academy Award speech, the author would be hauled off the stage halfway through the second page, leaving untold numbers of helpful people tragically unthanked.

With a crowd that big standing between me and the meat of the book, I am reluctant to go on, and if the author requires that much help to write the book, maybe he ought to choose a less challenging career, like writing greeting cards. Or, better yet, he could send a bunch of greeting cards--91, to be exact. What better way to thank a horde of people whose vital contributions made possible a book about greeting cards in American culture?

Like the idea? Don't mention it. Really. No, please, don't thank me. You've already done enough.

Carom + rumba = carumba

The title at the top of the student's draft was "I Carumba," and for a moment I wondered who this Carumba person might be--or is carumba a verb for a new dance step? "I Carumba" could conceivably refer to a production of "I, Claudius" produced by a spelling-challenge drama troupe in Corumba, Brazil, or "I Carumba" could be an appropriate title for a paper on the hazards of cross-cultural communication or the need for attention to detail in transcribing foreign words and phrases into English. This title, though, appeared on a paper about the problem of obesity, which, as far as I know, has no relationship to spelling, Spanish or otherwise.

I'm reminded of the elderly relative who started using closed-captioning after suffering hearing loss and suddenly discovered the proper spelling of words he had been using all his life; he'd been saying "wallah" for more than 70 years before he finally saw the word scrolling across the television screen, and then he could not contain his excitement: "Did you know voila starts with a v?"

I hope my student has a voila moment this week while revising his paper; otherwise, I'll be the one shouting, "Ay, caramba!"

Trillium triumph

At long last, trilliums! They're blooming in abundance on the slope across the road, along with dozens of dutchman's breeches and a healthy (or unhealthy, I suppose) crop of beer bottles and MacDonald's bags. I've never understood the thought process that leads drivers to equate remote country roads with landfills, but the results are plain to see along our roadside. Next time I walk I'll carry a bag and pick things up, although I don't believe I'll be able to reach far enough out in the creek to get the huge bottle that once held Bloody Mary mix. If I knew who was responsible for dumping all that junk, I'd know where to deposit it, and soon we'd have a trash war raging all across the county. Lacking that essential piece of information, I think I'll just pick up the trash and enjoy the trilliums.

Ranting with the classics

Yesterday's bad-book rant made me wish I could savage a book the way Mark Twain did in "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (read it here). Twain goes after Cooper with every weapon in the arsenal, from the subtle stiletto to the Sherman tank. Sometimes he damns with faint praise:

Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go.

And sometimes his comments are more blunt: "There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now." Twain proceeds to bury any remaining Cooper fans under a mound of infelicitous passages from The Deerslayer.

Best of all, Twain includes his own 18 rules for the writing of fiction, including my favorite, #14: "Eschew surplusage." If the author of the book I complained about yesterday had seriously considered the immense number of mediocre books already in print, perhaps she would have refrained from adding to the surplus and saved us all a lot of trouble.

A reviewer's nightmare: the not-quite-bad-enough book

If I could write a one-sentence review of the book I've just finished reading, it would say, "This book is just too bad to review." Instead I'm supposed to produce 800 words of polished prose presenting a balanced evaluation of a book that does not merit 800 words or the time and effort I will have to put into writing 800 words or the time I've already spent reading the book. I'd be happier if the book were bad enough to be amusing, if it were studded with bizarrely inept prose and hilariously mixed metaphors. But no: it's written competently enough to resist jeering. It's not even bad enough to be interesting; it's just bad.

The characters are sketchy; we're told more or less what the main character looks like, but everyone else is just a name on a page. The children talk like adults and the adults act like children, none of them the least bit believably; they converse in stilted speeches, never interrupt, never stumble or stutter. The pages are studded with names of places and streets and buildings, but the places exist merely as points on a map, without weather or color or light or air. The metaphors are overworked; one poor unfortunate dead kitten earns enough Frequent Metaphor Miles to travel first-class through the collected works of Dickens and half of Thackeray.

And what can I say about the plot? There's a mystery at the center of it, a mystery that is supposed to serve as a metaphor for What's Wrong With America Today and provide closure and healing to the open wounds of our post-911 world. Except it doesn't. I figured out the deep dark secret within the first two chapters, but I kept thinking I must be wrong. "It can't be this obvious," I thought. "Surely these clues are just typical red herrings cleverly placed to distract me from the real story." But no: any reasonably sentient reader could figure out the purported mystery so quickly that there would be no reason to keep reading beyond page 20 except to confirm what is already so abundantly clear: that the only healing the book will provide is a nice colorful band-aid and a hearty "Cheer up!"

The only thing in the whole book that made me want to cheer up was finally closing it, but now I have to open it up again and write a review. The whole situation makes me want to kick something. I think I'll drop-kick that dead kitten clear back to Beowulf.

Partly sunny with chance of salami

All week we've been enjoying some yummy treats left behind by our German houseguests, who showered us with chocolates, marzipan, salami, and tiny dense loaves of rye and pumpernickel. We've been nibbling on the sweets all week, so today we decided to work the savory items into our Easter dinner. I topped some rounds of pumpernickel bread with mustard, havarti cheese, and hard salami to make darling little canapes. We are not normally canape people, so it was a delicious treat.

Here's my issue, though: working with the salami left my hands slick with fat, and heating the canapes resulted in little pools of fat all over the plate. It was the best salami I've ever eaten, but I could feel my arteries clogging up with every bite. If we ate like this every day, we'd never fit out the front door. I suppose it's a good thing we don't get showered with salami every week.

Call of the wild

Snow again this morning and the goldfinches are out in force. Twelve or 14 of them were flitting around the feeders this morning, about half of them bright yellow males. I guess it's a good year for goldfinches. I saw the first kingfisher of the season yesterday but we've been hearing them for a week or so. The towhees are back and very vocal, but I'm still waiting for the orioles. This year there wasn't much of a gap between the departure of the juncoes and the arrival of the towhees, assuring a sort of color balance in the yard: one group of little black birds leaves and another arrives to take its place. The towhees are singing "Drink your tea!" Who could resist such a charming command?

Avoiding crucifixion, for now

It ought to be illegal to schedule meetings on Friday afternoons in spring, and to schedule three meetings in a row is just inhumane. The lunch meeting was not bad, but then I went to a two-hour faculty council meeting where it's a good thing it was my turn to take minutes because otherwise I would have had to put my head down on the table and start snoring.

Last came the Planning Committee meeting, where a colleague and I represented the English department for our quadrennial program review. Yes, every four years each department has to go before a committee to present a lengthy report justifying its continued existence, and this time it was our turn. I've been obsessing over this meeting since I turned in the report in January; I've even spent some time responding to potential questions in my sleep, just as I used to do while preparing for my dissertation defense. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but on a scale from 1 (a hearty pat on the back) to 10 (crucifixion), I would say we came out at about a 2. But we won't really know until the commitee releases its official report. Meanwhile, I intend to avoid all meetings for a good long while--at least until Monday. Then it starts all over again.

Non-ominously speaking

I told my visitor that I've been making students angry all week, but she pooh-poohed the possibility: "You are the most benign person I know," she said. Somehow, I did not find this comforting.

Benign is the word we want to hear if we're talking about tumors, but even a benign tumor is still a tumor, and who wants to be a tumor?

I don't often see the word benign applied to people, and the examples in my dictionary are not helpful: "a benign smile" belongs on a clueless bumbler like Mr. Magoo, while "a benign king" doles out largess to his doting subjects, which I would be happy to do if I had any largess left to dole out--or any doting subjects, for that matter.

Benign describes weather that promotes health or omens that are favorable, so perhaps my visitor considers me the opposite of ominous. My dictionary wants me to apply benign to any kind, compassionate, or gracious person, but to my mind benign suggests a harmlessness that borders on the ineffectual, like a tumor that doesn't hurt but doesn't help either: it just sits there harmlessly taking up space.

But at least it's a happy tumor, grinning like an idiot in a non-ominous manner. Don't be alarmed, I'll tell my angry students. I'm totally benign.

Snow business

It's snowing this morning and it may be my fault: I took my winter coat to by dry-cleaned. Sorry. I should have known that taking my coat to the cleaner's was just asking for more cold weather. Next time I'll wait until July.

Where to park your apostrophe

A long time ago in a school district far, far away, a bunch of high school students flunked a particular section of the high school competency test--the test they needed to pass in order to receive a high school diploma rather than a Certificate of Attendance. In fact, so many students flunked this particular section of the test that the entire student body (more than 2000 students) endured periodic remediation sessions on the subject--in every class. At a certain time every week, every class would stop what it was doing and every teacher would present a short and simple lesson on the correct way to form possessives of plural nouns. A visitor to the building might have been surprised to see the same lesson being presented in French classes, driver's ed classes, art classes, and shop classes: "To form the possessive of a plural noun, first write down the plural form of the noun; if it ends in s, add an apostrophe, and if it does not end in s, and 's."

It seems so simple! And yet today I have on my desk a pile of papers dealing with the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and so far I have seen the following spellings: Parks, Park's, Parks', Parks's, Parkses, and Parkses'. Some of those are correct in certain contexts, but they are being used in these papers almost interchangeably. So I did a little remediation at the beginning of class today, drawing on the valuable lesson I learned in every high school class I ever took: to make a noun plural, add s or es (no apostrophe). To make it possessive, add 's. To make a plural noun possessive, see the paragraph above. So if we are studying a play by Suzan-Lori Parks, it is Parks's play, but she might be related to a bunch of other Parkses who all live in the Parkses' house. See? Easy as pie.

So I guess I should be grateful to my driver's education teacher: I may have flunked parallel parking, but at least I know where to park an apostrophe.

Wild America

Over the weekend we were out for a drive with the visiting Germans when suddenly a roly-poly critter scurried across the road. The German dad slammed on the brakes and said, "What's that?"

"That's a groundhog," I said. There followed a rapid flurry of German as the dad described this wondrous creature to his enthralled family members. I didn't understand a word of it, but he spoke with the kind of excitement I might use to describe a close encounter with a unicorn. Finally he turned to me and said, "What do they do?"

I had to think about this for a moment. "They get into the garden and eat up your vegetables," I said. "People shoot them."

"For meat?"

"No," I said, "for vengeance."

I was rescued from further explanation by the sudden appearance in the road of another roly-poly critter that excited similar excitement: a VW bug. That I can explain. Groundhogs, on the other hand, defy explanation.

I thought about suggesting that our visitors take some groundhogs back to Germany with them, but they'd never make it through security.

Only you can stop prevention! (Slowly)

The prevention of this change is slowly becoming harder to stop.

I had to look at that sentence several times to figure out what's wrong with it: is it difficult to prevent change or to stop the prevention of change (slowly)?

Don't know. Don't care. Don't want to think about it.

Is it too early to go home?

That's my story and I'm sticking with it

May I please be excused from writing today? We had these weekend houseguests, see, our former exchange student and his family from Germany, five people with various levels of English language skills, so I spent a good part of last week preparing the house--cooking and cleaning and shifting some furniture--which went pretty well until I decided to get caught up on the ironing and twisted my back (Is that a sign from God or what?), and if it's difficult to tell people "I wrenched my back ironing" it is doubly difficult to sleep with an intensely throbbing back so I ended up catching a few Z's on the floor between vigorous bouts of cooking food for the 30 teens who came over Saturday for a cookout followed by the 15 older folks who came over for lunch after church Sunday in the pouring rain and so had to be accommodated inside the house, and although it is acceptable to ask 17-year-olds to sit on the floor, I hesitate to do the same with an 88-year-old woman who walks with a cane, so we had to set up a table in the living room and surround it with a mismatched assemblage of chairs including an antique piano stool, two rolling desk chairs in clashing colors, and a blue recliner, which worked fairly well until it was time for everyone to get up and go and then we realized there was no way out.

But we survived all that. The Germans left this morning just as I was leaving for work, so my leave-taking was punctuated by a hearty round of handshakes and hugs and a great deal of fumbling about with various pieces of luggage and cameras and maps and sunglasses, so I was halfway to campus before I realized that I didn't have my briefcase or anything in it, including the pile of freshman papers I need to finish grading today as well as everything I needed for this morning's 11:00 a.m. American Lit class. The right thing to do would have been to turn around and go back for the briefcase, but turning around always feels like defeat to me so I kept going and then spent the entire morning coming up with Plan B, which involved finding a copy of the film version of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, which was available only at a video store that is going out of business and is therefore renting nothing and selling everything, so the only way I could show clips from the film in this morning's class was to drive out there and buy the DVD, which is fine because I'll surely use it again in the future because my students love the play, love love love it, much more than they love The America Play, which we will discuss on Wednesday, by which time I ought to have recovered from the thrilling events of the past week.

That's my excuse for not writing today. Thanks for understanding.