Keep your eyes on the pumpkin

I don't know what compelled me to volunteer to harvest the Swiss chard Saturday morning. I got up early and saw the resident bread-baker frantically trying to get all his bread baked, packaged, and labeled in time for the 8:00 start of the Farmers' Market, and I knew he hadn't had more than three hours of sleep two nights in a row, and I also knew that last week a customer had requested two big grocery bags full of Swiss chard. So I gathered up my sleepy daughter and down we went to the garden while it was still dark out.

Now Swiss chard, for those who are not familiar with it, is the Energizer Bunny of greens: it keeps growing and growing and growing. Cut it down today and tomorrow you'll have a whole new crop of tender young leaves. We serve it like spinach but the taste is stronger, and the stalks get as thick as celery when it grows too long.

Harvesting is a fairly simple process: bend, chop, dump the bundle in a pile to be washed. We had a bucket of water and a bunch of large plastic garbage bags and we took turns chopping and washing until we had the two bags ready for the special order, and then we kept on chopping and washing because it needed to be harvested.

"Who's smoking a pipe?" asked my daughter while washing the leaves. It's true: working with chard produces a strong scent very much like pipe tobacco. I don't know if chard is related to tobacco, but the labor involved in processing it is just about as back-breaking as cutting tobacco.

Two hours it took us to harvest all that Swiss chard, and we ended up with not two bags but twelve. Sold half of 'em at the Farmers' Market and I've been busily processing the rest for the freezer. One big grocery bag full of Swiss chard cooks down enough to fill two quart-size freezer bags. It's labor intensive, but we'll appreciate it come winter when the garden is a barren brown waste.

While stooping over a long, dense row of chard that needs to be harvested, though, it's difficult to find motivation to go on. That little quart-size bag of frozen chard just doesn't seem worth the work, and the crop doesn't bring in much at the Farmers' Market either. I suppose it makes people happy--some people, anyway. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who like strong greens and those who don't, and a big bag of Swiss chard is never going to make the second kind happy.

I like chard well enough, but not enough to make me want to stoop over stalks of it at 6:30 on a Saturday morning. I did it because I said I would do it, no other reason, and when I wanted to stop, I just looked to the end of the row, where a big orange pumpkin sat like a beacon drawing me onward. "The pumpkin is the goal," I told myself. "Keep your eyes on the pumpkin."

This morning that part of the garden looks as if Sherman's Army swept through, but the devastation won't last. The chard shall return and someone will have to harvest it. Good thing I'm leaving for Texas tomorrow. Maybe the chard will harvest itself before I get back!

If not, I'll remember: the pumpkin is the goal. Keep your eyes on the pumpkin.

How bare?

Yesterday everyone in my building received an e-mail message from the head of building services informing us that the air conditioning will be off for a few days so the system can be upgraded. Meanwhile, he said, "We ask you to bare with us."

Um, if you insist. You first!

Looking for loopholes

I have worked through the mound of picky, piddly, petty little tasks piled on my desk and now there's no reason I can't start working on my third and final syllabus for the fall semester, except that I don't want to. I spent most of yesterday restoring the syllabus that had been eaten by my computer, and now I'm just tired of the whole process. Deadlines? Blech. Plagiarism policy? Yuck. Page numbers for reading assignments? Phooey.

The thing that annoys me most about writing syllabi is the need to anticipate every possible problem. I have to include statements about cell phones and plagiarism and rampant absenteeism and respect for differing opinions, when what I'd really like to say is something like this: "You are an adult. Please act like one: come to class, do your own work, respect your classmates, take responsibility for your actions." But no: that kind of statement has too many loopholes, and if there's one thing at which our students excel, it is locating loopholes and climbing through them--dragging their entire fraternity and the baseball team behind them.

My goal is to write an entirely loophole-free syllabus for my freshman composition class, and I keep telling myself that I can't go home until it's done...but I'd rather do it tomorrow. Can somebody find me a loophole?

Explosions of various types

This morning on the radio I heard a report about a "kudzu-like explosion" of books by political figures, which gave me a wonderful image of invasive green vines bursting into flame, followed by a steady rain of leaves of books.

Then I arrived and experienced another kind of explosion: the postcolonial syllabus I completed yesterday (and saved over and over again) came up pretty much blank. The introductory material is still there, but all the assignments and all the page numbers for the readings had vanished. Fortunately, no one was in the office to hear the explosions that then occurred.

Back in the swing

Today everything seems to be happening in twos: I've attended two meetings, shown two new faculty members around campus, been called "Deb" twice (by the same person), and completed two syllabi (and put one of them online). Tomorrow I'll try to put all that doubleness behind me and focus on finishing one big thing: the departmental assessment report. Yes, it looks like we're back in the swing.

Pursuing the Perseids

We started pursuing the Perseids about 15 years ago when we lived among the cornfields in the flat part of the state. The first year we put up a tent in our big front yard and invited some friends to come and watch the shooting stars. About a dozen of us lay on blankets on the ground, the smaller kids squirming and tossing popcorn while the conversation gradually subsided into a steady chorus of "There's one! Didja see it?"

"Look," I said, "that one looks close enough to tough," and I reached out and touched--a firefly.

After we relocated to the hills, we woke up in the wee hours on the appointed morning to find our entire valley socked in with fog, so we bundled the pajama-clad kids into the van and hauled 'em up to the second-highest point in the county, where our little country church sits on top of a hill surrounded by farm fields. We spread out the blankets in the cemetery and watched the meteors, hundreds of 'em, crying out "There's one!" so frequently that we woke up the dogs in the farmhouse across the road. I half expected a visit from the county sheriff.

Two years ago the best night for viewing the Perseids fell while we were taking our daughter to move into her college dorm for the first time. Our German exchange student had just arrived and was struggling mightily with the language and with jet lag, but none of us knew the German for "meteor shower" so we tried to explain it with helpful gestures. We set an alarm clock for 1 a.m. and then lay on our backs on the grounds of historic Shakertown and watched shooting stars while thousands of cicadas kept up their chainsaw buzz in the trees. "What's that noise?" asked the German, but none of us knew the word for "cicadas."

This morning at 1:00 we found ourselves in the cemetery again on a clear, dark night, with bats flitting and frogs croaking nearby. At first there was the usual discussion of the best part of the sky to watch for shooting stars, but soon all we could say was "There's one! Didja see it?" They came in bursts, sometimes three at a time, with long sleepy lulls in between. The ground was cool and the air damp but we had blankets and pillows and nowhere to go.

"Where do you think we'll be next year at this time?" I asked, but nobody knew. The kids leave for college next week and who knows what they'll be doing next summer? They're shooting across the firmament, shining for a moment, leaving a vapor trail behind them.

There's one. Didja see it?

Tai chi with zucchini

A correspondent offers a simple and elegant suggestion for dealing with the various immense influxes entering my life right now. On the one hand, we have another huge group of freshpersons arriving in a week, and on the other, we have the continuing overwhelming flood of fresh zucchini from the garden. My correspondent suggests bringing those two streams together: "everyone entering college should indeed be issued with a protective zucchini and several hours' instruction in how to use it. I imagine in some open space, possibly near the college's emerging library, a Tai-Chi-like gathering of people, all slowly moving their zucchinis as the sun rises, learning discipline, self defense and the importance of green vegetables all at the same time."

Sounds great to me. Think we could get a grant?

A cow by any other name

I see in the papers that the Hawaiian Islands are currently being threatened by a hurricane named "Flossie. "

Okay, that's just wrong. "Flossie" is an appropriate name for (1) elderly aunts and (2) cows, two species not generally known for their tendencies to menace Pacific archipelagoes. Hurled at a tropical island, Aunt Flossie would totter up the beach offering her cardigan to bikini-clad sunbathers. "You'd better cover up a bit, dearie," she'd say, "or you'll catch your death of cold!"

What would Flossie the cow do? Moo and look bored is my guess. It is difficult to imagine an animal less hurricanesque than a cow, an animal that would fail to menace even among the amazing menagerie of overgrown animals inhabiting the Godzilla film genre. Picture a scientific experiment gone amuck producing an an immense bovine capable of stomping Honolulu: would actors beset with poor lip-sync abilities run screaming through the streets while the President debated whether to call out the National Guard?

I doubt it. For one thing, it's difficult to persuade a cow to go on a violent rampage. The day Flossie stomps Honolulu, I expect to hear that Borden has fired Elsie the cow after a three-day Vegas bender involving drugs, gambling, and a brutal attack on a doorman unwilling to allow a cow in an exclusive dance club.

And what if Flossie did attempt to menace the island? A sunbather might do double-take--"Look, Fred, a cow on the beach!"--before turning over to toast the other side. No one runs screaming from Flossie. She's just a cow, for heaven's sake. The kind of people who are afraid of cows are also afraid of flying and rip tides and catching their death of cold, so they're unlikely to end up on a beach in Hawaii when Flossie comes stomping in from the sea.

The people in charge of naming hurricanes have clearly made a serious blunder. Who will take seriously the warning, "Run for your life--Flossie's on the way!"? If they really want people in the path of the storm to take heed, they should add some meat to the warning: "Mad cow! Mad cow! Run for your lives!"

That'll send 'em packing--until they realize who the cow is. "Never mind," they'll say, "It's only Flossie."

Walking downhill

Walking downhill to the lower meadow is much more mundane than walking uphill or upstream, because a walk to the lower meadow generally means work. All downhill paths lead eventually to the gardens, which constantly call out to be watered, weeded, harvested.

It's astounding but true: each one of the three garden plots is bigger than the lot on which our previous house sat. One garden features permanent plantings (asparagus, raspberries, strawberries, garlic, horseradish) and rows of peppers as pretty as Christmas ornaments. The two other gardens right now are a riot of overgrown everything: tomatoes, zucchini, okra, melons, cucumbers, broccoli, summer squash, and more (except for the corn, which is scrawny and sad). Neglect the zucchini patch for a few days and suddenly we have zucchini the size of baseball bats, but sometimes the best thing to do is look away and walk on.

As big and unruly as they are, the gardens cover only a fraction of the lower meadow. Vaguely kidney-shaped (with the creek defining the longer curve of the kidney), the meadow is surrounded by a fringe of woods, mostly sycamore, buckeye, oak, and chestnut. Pawpaw trees grow in the steep woods next to the driveway, producing velvety red-brown blossoms in the spring, long donkey-ear leaves all summer, and fuzzy green lightbulbs of fruit in the fall. The fruit tastes tropical, like a tart banana with a hint of mango--not the sort of thing you expect to find growing in Ohio. The pawpaw trees are short and droopy, so the deer and raccoons tend to finish off the fruit as soon as it's ripe. In four years here, we've eaten, at most, four pawpaws.

At the end of the meadow farthest from the gardens, a huge spreading maple tree overhangs the lowest spot, providing shade for anyone interested in watching the bluebirds or kingfishers that play around the creek. Sycamores stand tall all along the creek, their white limbs and mottled bark lovely to look at all year long. Orioles nest here and sometimes red-tailed hawks, and sometimes visiting waterbirds visit the meadow: ducks, geese, and great blue herons.

In the spring the edges of the woods are studded with delicate wildflowers, including Dutchman's breeches and the elusive trout lily, but this time of year the understory is overgrown with bee balm, Joe Pye weed, and tiger lilies. In the fall the leaves provide a burst of primary colors, and in the winter the red and blue stalks of wild berry bushes make abstract patterns against the snow.

About halfway around the long curve of the meadow, the woods open up to provide a clear path down to the creek. Today the water is so low that it's possible to stand right in the middle of the creek bed on dry ground and look up 15 feet overhead to a tree limb that still holds debris from the big flood three years ago. With the water reduced to a mere trickle, it's difficult to imagine the volume of water that rages through this channel after storms: at it highest point, the water sounds like a train rushing through a tunnel.

Today, though, it's still and silent, the surface unruffled except by a few water striders. Walk back up into the meadow and there's the garden again, begging for attention. Zucchinis can wait. I'd rather walk on.

Someone has to send the Tupperware

I've just finished reading Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett's fascinating account of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, the author of Autobiography of a Face who committed suicide in 2002. It's an amazingly honest book about a problematic and possibly dysfunctional friendship. Patchett keeps referring to herself as the ant who works hard to achieve her own goals and also keep Grealy's life running relatively smoothly, while Grealy is the grasshopper dancing the night away and allowing Patchett to pick up the pieces (or clean up the vomit or pay the bills).

For instance, toward the end of Lucy's life when everything is pretty much falling apart (failed surgeries, eviction, drug addiction), Patchett tries to fix things: "I ordered Tupperware. It was my own special brand of insanity that made me think the trials of Lucy's life could somehow be eased by the order of Tupperware."

On a scale from "ant" to "grasshopper," I'm with Patchett, firmly clinging to the ant end of the continuum and ordering the Tupperware. I'm not sure how long I would put up with a friend who expected me to clean her closets; I suppose it would depend on the quality of the friendship. I confess that I lost patience with the brilliant Lucy Grealy more than once, but I also lost patience with Patchett for accepting her role. It was like a horror movie: I kept wanting to call out, "Don't go in the closet! It'll eat you alive!"

In a book full of pain, probably the most painful part for me was Patchett's willingness to allow this friendship to eat her alive. It makes a great story, but what a life! It makes me want to send Patchett a huge order of Tupperware.

Syntax silences the little red horn

Yesterday I was reading a new and very interesting work of literary scholarship when I noticed a really annoying sentence--and after I saw it once, I kept seeing it again and again on page after page. It's a small thing but it suggests a certain lack of precision.

Imagine that Smith and Jones are both authors of literary works; the sentence I kept seeing looked like this:

Like Smith's work, Jones writes about stuff.

or

Like Jones, Smith's novel explores other stuff.

Let's look at what is being compared in these sentences:

Jones is like Smith's work.
Smith's novel is like Jones.

This is just clumsy. Smith may be like Jones and Smith's work may be like Jones's work, but I am at a loss to understand how an actual human being can be compared to a work of literature. Other readers apparently have no problem with this sentence pattern, because it appears with some regularity in a book published by a reputable academic press. Nevertheless, I find it annoying, and so does Mrs. Miller, the high-school English teacher who lives inside my head. These sentences would make her shake her head and give a little lecture on faulty comparisons; if I failed to listen, she might get the little red bicycle horn out of her desk drawer, stand up on her chair, and toot until she had my full attention.

How would I fix the sentences? Like this:

Like Smith's work, Jones's fiction is full of stuff.

or

Like Jones, Smith explores other stuff in her novel.

It's a small change, but these sentences would silence the little red bicycle horn and make Mrs. Miller happy, and sometimes that's all that matters.

Man shall not live by words alone

Yesterday I got so caught up in writing that I forgot to eat. This is good news because it means the synapses are snapping, the words are flowing, the ideas are coming together, but it's also bad news because by the time I noticed how hungry I was, I felt faint. A tuna sandwich satisfied my body and the pile of finished pages satisfied my spirit.

It used to be that I didn't like the actual process of writing. I looked forward to the finished product, but putting words on the page was just an obstacle I had to get over to reach the desired goal. These days, though, I get a buzz out of writing. Of course it's a tremendous luxury to be able to write all morning long without worrying about class preps or grading or committee meetings, but it all ends next week when my campus responsibilities start revving up again. But I'm teaching only three classes this semester and I'm no longer on Faculty Council: will I be able to keep some momentum going on my writing projects?

I hope so, because I think I'm addicted.

Aging rapidly

Last night when the Bearded Wonder and I went out to dinner, the waitress asked if we were eligible for the senior discount. That's never happened before.

The thing is, given the high cost of dining out, we should have accepted the offer instead of laughing bitterly. Note to self: next time someone asks whether you're over 55, don't laugh.

Trying not to be tedious

Rate Your Students posted an interesting comment on academic blogs from a reader who insists that "most academic blogs are tedious" because they're written by "the people you purposely avoid in the hallway." (I don't know if I can comment on "most academic blogs" because I haven't read that many of 'em, but the ones I read regularly feature writers I'd be happy to see in the office up the hall. I will note, however, that I hate to see "purposely" used when "intentionally" sounds so much better.) Then the commenter tears into the content of academic blogs:

"I know, let's burn five minutes catching up on how you sipped boxed wine and tweaked your PowerPoint presentation over the weekend or how the proles in duplicating reversed pages three and four on your course syllabus. 'Oh, lookie here! I found my favorite pen, maybe I can get back to work on that darn dissertation ... maybe I'll just post another picture of my 18-year-old cat, Mr. Scabies.' "

I don't sip boxed wine or use PowerPoint or rely on proles to do my duplicating and I'm not planning to do another dissertation anytime soon, so I guess the only way I can fulfill my function as an academic blogger is to obtain an 18-year-old cat named Mr. Scabies. Where do I begin?

Things that go pounce in the night

Early this morning I heard the cat scurrying and pouncing around the kitchen and I thought she had finally decided to take some interest in the mouse problem. I found her sitting proudly in the kitchen like a lioness guarding a fresh kill and I was just getting ready to shower her with praise until I saw what she was guarding.

It was a plant.

To be specific, she had stalked and destroyed a few leaves of Wandering Jew. Now we have Wandering Jew growing in pots in every room in the house except the kitchen, but that whole "wandering" thing is a myth. I have never known the plant to be independently ambulatory.

So now we have a cat who turns up her nose at pesky little mice but is quite happy to bat a piece of a plant all over the house. She earns no praise from me!

(And let me just mention that it's difficult to write about this topic without unintentionally evoking offensive ethnic stereotypes. Surely the plant must have another name! After all, there's a plant we call "Mother-in-Law's Tongue," but whenever I use that name outside the family, no one knows what I'm talking about.)

Maudlin alert!

The first thing the obstetrician said when my son was born was, "We have a scrawny boy!" Today the no-longer-scrawny boy turned 18 and I promised myself I wouldn't get all maudlin about it or wail that "all my babies have grown up!" So I won't mention it. Instead, I'll share a little anecdote that has taken on special importance in our household:

Last winter one of my son's classmates turned 18 and about a week later her mother noticed that she was getting significantly darker. When pressed for an explanation, the daughter admitted that she'd been visiting the local tanning booth.

"How many times have you gone?"

"Every day," said the daughter.

"But you know you're not allowed to go to the tanning booth!"

"I can do whatever I want now," said the daughter with a big grin. "I'm 18!"

I don't know where the conversation went from there, but I imagine that it started with "Listen here, missy, as long as you live in this house" and touched on "if all your friends jumped off a cliff" and "do you have any idea what I went through to bring you into this world?"

This morning at breakfast I asked my newly-minted 18-year-old whether he plans to hit the tanning booth today but he just grunted and said, "I've got to go to work." Later he and his sister will go out to dinner with some friends and then go to the new Bourne movie. There will be no party and no birthday cake and no little hats or balloons. That's what happens when all your babies grow up.

Hey, since I don't have to bake a birthday cake, maybe I'll go to the tanning booth! After all, now that both of my kids are adults, I can do whatever I want!

Good news

My very favorite part of being department chair is that sometimes I get to deliver really good news to one of my colleagues. Today was one of those days. I think I'll just sit back and bask in the moment before moving on to that annoying assessment report.

Time flies when you're having whatever

And in other news:

1. July is OVER! Classes start this month! How did that happen?

2. The wandering college chick comes home today after spending much of the summer as a counselor at a music camp in North Carolina. Can't wait to see her!

3. Her teeny-tiny baby brother turns 18 this Friday! When did we all get so old?

4. I lost so much time recovering from my recent bout with nasty infections (two for the price of one!) that I'm now pretty much resigned to the fact that I won't be able to complete the writing on the big research project before classes start. I've done the introductory section, but I still have a pile of research to finish before I can move on. But I have my working thesis and my controlling metaphor (and a wonderful metaphor it is if I do say so myself), so I'm well on the way.

5. Funny numbers came up on some recent blood tests and in combination with a previous round of funny numbers, the verdict is that I need to get my blood-sugar count down significantly in the next three months or start taking oral insulin. "Cut down on bread," suggested my doctor, "although that may be difficult in your house." She is a faithful customer of my husband's bread booth at the Farmers' Market.

6. I still haven't finished those other two syllabi or written the English department assessment report. I guess that's what I'll be doing for the next few weeks.

7. July is OVER! Where does the time go?

Going up?

All I wanted to do was to find a quote, but I soon found myself stuck on an imaginary elevator going up and down through a world of ideas.

I was looking for the passage in The Geography of the Imagination in which Guy Davenport deconstructs Grant Wood's American Gothic, a remarkable tour de force of in-depth analysis. I hadn't looked at that book for a few years, but no sooner did I open it and dip into a few passages than I was hooked--I had to read the whole thing. Again. I don't know what it is about Davenport: I don't care for his fiction and I don't even like some of the authors he writes about (Louis Zukovsky, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson), but his analyses are so original and his prose so interesting that I just can't stop reading.

He's dead now, of course, but I spent some time in elevators with Guy Davenport when I was a Master's student at the University of Kentucky. The English department there and the teaching assistants' cubicles are way up around the 15th floor of an office tower, so we spent a lot of time stuck in elevators with our professors. Now there were two types of professors at UK back then: those who treated graduate students like human beings and those who refused to acknowledge their existence. Guy Davenport was the first kind. I learned so much during those brief moments in elevators that I should have been required to pay tuition.

I never managed to have a class with Guy Davenport and after I finished the M.A. I spent some time on the Earth Mother track (growing cabbages, having babies, reading a lot of things I should have read in grad school), and then seven years later when I began my Ph.D. program at a different university in a different state, the very first textbook on the syllabus was The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport. It felt like a homecoming--when I opened the book, the elevator doors opened and I stepped in.

Truth be told, it's a peculiar book: a collection of essays on topics as disparate as Joyce Kilmer's "Trees," table manners, and Tolkien. "You don't read Ulysses," writes Davenport. "You watch the words." It's always enlightening to watch the words in Guy Davenport's essays. Here, for instance, is a bit on Whitman:

And at the center of Whitman's poetry there is movement. His age walked with a sprier step than ours; it bounced in buckboard and carriage; a man on a horse has his blood shaken and his muscles pulled. A man in an automobile is as active as a sloth; an airplane ride offers no activity more strenuous than turning the pages of a magazine. Dullness, constant numbing dullness, was the last thing Whitman would have thought of America, but that is what has happened.

Davenport himself did not drive, but he managed to know every author worth knowing during his lifetime, from Tolkien to Pound to Jonathan Williams. In the essay "Seeing Shelley Plain," he recalls when he and a friend "assisted in extinguishing Jean-Paul Sartre when he was on fire" in a Paris restaurant:

Pete is a more forward person than I, and it was he who went over, begged the pardon of Sartre, and told him that his jacket pocket was on fire. Nothing happened. The conversation raged on, arms flailing, Existentialism as thick in the air as the smoke from Sartre's confection. Sartre did not deign to notice Pete, though Pete ventured a polite tug at his sleeve. Nor did Monsieur Camus or Monsieur Richard Wright give the least heed. Whereupon I offered Pete our carafe of water, and this he poured into the philosopher's pocket, which hissed.

Davenport's other encounters with literary greatness are perhaps more interesting to the serious scholar of literature. Several essays approach Ezra Pound and James Joyce from different directions, each strikingly original and thought-provoking. "Joyce's Forest of Symbols," for instance, makes a fascinating connection between the 18 chapters in Ulysses and the 18 letters of the Irish alphabet, each corresponding in antiquity to a particular tree with magical properties.

My favorite essay, though (aside from the title essay with its remarkable analysis of American Gothic) is more personal: "Finding" is an evocative memoir of Davenport's childhood excursions to search for Indian arrowheads: "I know that my sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons," he writes. "It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer."

This was precisely Guy Davenport's strength as an author: he surveyed a wide landscape of literature and culture, searched surfaces and depths for details and correspondences, and mapped them out in a delightful and sophisticated manner. I close the book, the elevator doors open, and I enter the world of ideas with new eyes.

Let me tell you how this thesis changed my life

I've picked up my research where I dropped it a week ago and now I'm suffering from the fear that some sort of revolution occurred in the conventions of literary analysis and no one bothered to tell me--or maybe it's just a coincidence that the first half-dozen articles I looked at all featured the same type of thesis statement, of which the following is the most egregious example: "In this paper, I will explain how the fortunate discovery of the source for a passage quoted in [work of literature] has helped me to formulate a deeper understanding of [author] as a [representative of a particular school of literary theory]."

If I read this thesis in a student paper, I would scribble some polite variation on "so what?" in the margin. This thesis is the academic equivalent of walking up to a stranger at a party and saying, "Let me tell you how X changed my life" (where X equals Buddhism or running a marathon or liposuction or studying Kabbalah or reading Kant or whatever).

As a sentence, it lacks flair, subtlety, rhythm, and any sense of the wonders of the language, and while it puts forth what may well prove to be an interesting idea, it makes no attempt to engage a reluctant reader or suggest that the idea may have relevance beyond the writer's personal enlightenment. On all counts, it's just a lousy thesis.

So why am I seeing it over and over and over again? I understand that the "In this paper I will show" structure is common in the sciences (another good reason I'm not a scientist!), but people who write articles in academic journals about literature ought to be able to produce a thesis statement that sounds as if it belongs in the world of literature--and people who edit such journals ought to be able to discourage the "Let me tell you how X changed my life" sort of approach.

But maybe I'm just a dinosaur. Someone out there must really like this kind of thesis statement or I wouldn't be seeing so much of it. Did someone change the rules while I wasn't looking? If so, I'd like to file a protest. Whom shall I sue?

Take two Mayberrys and call me in the morning

Remember all those trembling maidens in novels of yore who were always succumbing to brain fever? Hounded into illness by some horrible wretch of a man, they either survive to lead pitiful broken lives or expire and leave behind a coil of glossy auburn hair in the bottom of a trunk.


Well I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV and, frankly, I don't even know what "brain fever" really is, but I think I have the antidote: those ladies need to spend some time in Mayberry.


I've been there this week while flattened by fevers that leave me feeling as if my brain has been replaced by a bowl of stewed prunes, but I've found soothing therapy in a pile of DVD's featuring episodes of old television shows. In my current condition, the frenetic action and rippling repartee on an episode of CSI or Law & Order would send me right over the edge into delirium, but watching Sergeant Joe Friday and his partner Frank discuss Joe's toothache, with frequent references to Frank's sister's wisdom teeth and the severity and persistence of the pain she experienced, is just about my speed. Crime can wait! Let's sit around the precinct and talk about our dental health.

I can't watch Flash Gordon while in my right mind because the urge to mock is overwhelming, but in my weakened condition, the implausibilities roll right over me. So the current galactic bad guy is wearing what looks like a George Foreman grill on his head? How handy that must be when Mr. Evil Despot arrives home at night and calls out his usual greeting to Mrs. Evil Despot:

"Honey! I'm home!"

"Oh hello darling, how was your day?"

"Oh you know, a little paperwork, a little torture, a little maniacal laughter--same old same old."

"That's nice, dear. Now pop up your lid and let me put some nice tofu burgers on the grill."

"Tofu burgers again!? How about some real food?"

"Now sweetheart, you know what the doctor said: if you don't watch your cholesterol, you could have a heart attack, and then who will torture Flash Gordon?"

"I guess you're right,dear. Tofu burgers it is!" (Laughs maniacally.)

I noticed that Flash Gordon was filmed in West Berlin, which means that from now on whenever I envision that scene at the end of Gravity's Rainbow, the rocket that comes screaming down out of the sky will be Flash Gordon's Skyflash, which is clearly made of cardboard covered with aluminum foil and therefore poses no threat to any living being. Once again, Flash Gordon saves the day!

Watching the Andy Griffith Show is like being spoon-fed chicken soup by a kindly aunt who mops your brow and says, "There there, there there." In Mayberry, niceness always prevails--and even the problems are mild enough to be soothing: Opie brings home a stray dog. Barney disapproves of Andy's date because all she knows how to cook is a TV dinner. Some guy's goat eats a case of dynamite. No problem: niceness conquers all.

(Q: Who would win the Annoying Character Smackdown between Gomer Pyle and Jar-Jar Binks? Or would they just nice each other to death?)

Niceness also rules on a show I'd never heard of before. Mr. and Mrs. North (from 1952) is probably somewhat more visually sophisticated than the radio show of the same name, but not by much. Jerry and Pam North are a charming career-oriented couple living in Greenwich Village, where they solve crimes in their spare time. They suffer, sadly, from what experts call the Jessica Fletcher Disease: everywhere they go, people die violent deaths. You'd think their circle of friends would figure this out after a while and give the perky crime-solvers a wide berth, but no: even the police fail to notice that Mr. and Mrs. North are the epicenter of murder in Greenwich Village. Their best friend, genial Officer Weigand, just laughs and says, "Thanks for the help, Jerry and Pam! We couldn't have solved this one without you!"

(Horatio Caine would whip off his sunglasses, glare at the doorknob, and say, "You've contaminated the crime scene and tampered with evidence and assaulted a key witness with a butterfly net. Jerry and Pam, you're coming with me.")

What I admire about Mrs. North is her ability to chase villains down dark alleys, wheedle confessions out of hardened criminals (while analyzing their faulty syntax!), and hold dying gunshot victims in her arms without ever get a spot of blood on her lovely gown. I can't eat lunch without dripping mustard on my blouse (and the finer the fabric, the bigger the drip), but she can catch hold of a woman who has just been stabbed in the back and lower the carcass to the floor without so much as smudging her lipstick.

And she's always nice. Niceness rules for Mr. and Mrs. North just as it does for Andy and Barney and Opie and even for Flash Gordon, who gives Mr. Evil Despot his comeuppance without ever giving in to the urge to make snide comments about his ridiculous headgear. In the end, these shows bring just what a fevered mind needs: peace, quiet, niceness, and order, order, order!

I'll take a tofu burger on whole wheat, hold the mustard.

Z-Pack Saves the Day!

Back in the land of the living, thanks to the wonders of Z-Pack. I don't know what Z-Pack is, but at the moment it's keeping me off my back and that's what matters. Now if only I could get it to do some laundry and clean all the parts of the house that have failed to clean themselves while I've been flat on my back, I'd be happy.

I came out of the doctor's office with my arms liberally decorated with band-aids. It never fails: some chipper young person comes whistling into the room ready to take my blood and move on, but half an hour later she's utterly demoralized and I've got band-aids all over my arms. I don't know how many times blood-drawing persons have told me, "Don't worry, I always get it the first time." Ha! To make it worse, today the experienced blood-drawing person thought she would use me as a guinea pig to train a less experienced person. They finally managed to get some blood, but not without a struggle.

Sometime soon I'll need to take a look at my writing projects and the garden and the new computer that got delivered to my office last week and the pile of stuff on my desk, but not right now. Z-Pack can only do so much.

Fever dreams

Spent most of the weekend fighting a high fever that resulted in intensely vivid hallucinations involving malevolent zucchinis, thousands and thusands of 'em. (When I was a child, a fever would inevitably be accompanied by dreams in which I was menaced by various geometric shapes, but now I've moved on to zucchinis. I can't explain it.) Finding a doctor on a weekend around here is a herculean task that I was not quite up to with a temperature of 102, so I've been looking forward to Monday: finally I'll get to see a doctor and find out what's eating me.

Except now I feel fine. No fever at all, just a little back pain and a lingering headache. The zucchini dreams have gone as well. Whatever it was, I hope it's over.

Walking uphill

My second-favorite walk (second because it's too steep to be accessible in all seasons) goes not to the right or left but straight up the hill beside the house. The house sits halfway up the hill and walking downhill would take me to the lower meadow, the gardens, the creek, the road, and, eventually, civilization, but walking straight up takes me to another world.

First there's a steep patch of lawn and a few ornamental bushes, then the pine trees close in to define the threshhold to the upper meadow. Walk through the opening under the pines and I come out in the butterfly meadow, a steep rounded space fringed by pine groves. Paths to the right and left lead to the thickest stands of pines, butI prefer to start with the wide path straight up the middle.

It's a steep walk through sunny meadow studded with Queen Anne's Lace, milkweed, butterfly weed, thistle, wild raspberries, and scraggly hawthorns. Today the meadow is flitting with swallowtail butterflies, deep velvety black with iridescent blue on the lower wings. The shy indigo buntings call from an ancient blasted apple tree, and another tree farther up the hill is abuzz with chattering chickadees.

At the top of the hill where the pines close in there's a bench where I sit and look down over green stillness. Stepping into the shade of the pines brings me into a cool grove smelling of pine needles and sweet honeysuckle. In the fall we sit here to watch nuthatches, titmice, and woodpeckers in our neighbor's woods across the fence, but today all is quiet.

A walk straight down the path to the left takes me to the most remote part of our property, a flat opening where the meadow meets the pine grove on the steep bluff above the creek. By the time I get down there, the birds have gone silent; I hear nothing but the wind in the trees and the buzzing of locusts--but suddenly from right above my head comes the unearthly shriek of a red-tailed hawk. It circles, shrieking, right above me and won't let up until I walk well out of range. Is the hawk on the hunt or protecting a nest in the tall trees along the creek?

I follow the path back to the beginning and then walk up the middle again and veer to the right to pay a visit to the young pear trees we planted in the spring. One looks healthy but the other has lost a lot of leaves. I'll report that to the resident tree expert.

I follow the path farther down to the other pine grove on the bluff above the driveway. I hope our recent rains have brought out some Indian pipes or other interesting fungi, but no such luck. The ferns and wild ginger provide patches of green on the carpet of brown pine needles.

Iwalk under the cool canopy of trees and back to the beginning, passing the tall, strong stems of ironweed and joe pye weed, not yet blooming but well on the way. Then I'm through the threshold again and back down to the house. I could walk farther down to the lower meadow where bee balm waves in the breeze, but that's a walk for another day.

Learning to land

I've just finished reading a wonderful little book but I'm a little reluctant to write about it because the title sounds like it belongs on a sexy potboiler with a picture of Fabio on the cover. Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatima Mernissi is a fascinating and beautifully written memoir of the author's childhood in Morocco in the 1940s and 50s. The prose is stately and elegant, the stories fragmentary and meandering but always circling around a cluster of images related to security, captivity, and escape.

Mernissi recalls her childhood attempts to understand the limits on women's freedom and locate the door that crosses the threshold between the realm of women and the realm of men. "[L]ooking for the frontier has become my life's occupation," she explains. "Anxiety eats at me whenever I cannot situate the geometric line organizing my powerlessness." She describes the various methods the women of her household used to trespass those boundaries, including a dangerous route over the rooftops:

The terrace exit route was seldom watched, for the simple reason that getting from it to the street was a difficult undertaking. You needed to be quite good at three skills: climbing, jumping, and agile landing. Most of the women could climb up and jump fairly well, but not many could land gracefully. So, from time to time, someone would come in with a bandaged ankle, and everyone would know what she'd been up to. The first time I came down from the terrace with bleeding knees, Mother explained to me that a women's chief problem in life was figuring out how to land. 'Whenever you are about to embark on and adventure,' she said, 'you have to think about the landing. Not about the takeoff. So whenever you feel like flying, think about how and where you'll end up.'

Later, several of the more rebellious women try to take flight by embroidering elaborate birds on their robes, a departure from traditional embroidery patterns. However, since they are not permitted to shop for their own silks and threads, they have to describe their needs to a male cousin whose idea of "blue" or "red" does not always agree with theirs: "So each woman described her dream-embroidery--the kind of flowers she wanted and their colors, the hues of the buds, and sometimes whole trees and delicate branches. Others described entire islands surrounded with boats. Paralyzed by the frontier, women gave birth to whole landscapes and worlds. "

In Dreams of Trespass, Fatima Mernissi gives birth to whole landscapes and worlds that seem exotic but also familiar. Frontiers come in all shapes and sizes; this book is required reading for anyone who has ever tried to cross the invisible kind.

Queen o' salads

We had a house full of people last night and I made my very favorite salad, which gave me yet another opportunity to go through a familiar song and dance: "What is this stuff?" (Quinoa.) "Where do you get it?" (Grocery store, rice section, top shelf, red box.) "How do you cook it?" (Like rice.) "May I have the recipe?" (Um, no recipe really...just wing it and see how it turns out.)

This final answer always fails to satisfy, so for the benefit of my favorite salad's adoring fans, here I offer my method for making Quinoa Salad:

Put two cups of quinoa and four cups of water in a saucepan and heat to boiling. Cover and simmer for around 15 minutes. Remove from heat and cool thoroughly. (I'm always in a hurry, so I set the pan in a big bowl of ice and stir occasionally to get it to cool.)

Chop a big bunch of fresh cilantro, about half a large red onion, some celery, one or two large bell peppers or pimento peppers (I like to use one red and one yellow pepper to make it colorful), and a large cucumber (peeled and seeded). Toss in a big salad bowl. Add a handful of raisins or currants, some small cherry tomatoes, and whatever other fresh veggies you like. Stir in the cooled quinoa. Add salt and freshly ground black pepper, the juice of two lemons, sugar (a tablespoon or two depending on how sweet you like your salads), and olive oil (start with a few tablespoons and add more to taste). Stir it all together and chill thoroughly, then taste and adjust the seasonings.

It's a little different every time I make it, but one thing never changes: the whole song-and-dance that starts with "What is this stuff" and ends with "May I have some more?"

TMZ Season

I have seen the future and it looks like salad.

Early this morning I went to the garden and picked a big firm head of crispy lettuce, a handful of cherry tomatoes, some cute little cucumbers and lovely little yellow summer squash, a few heads of broccoli, and enough zucchini to feed all the starving people in the world. It won't do any good to take the zucchini to the Farmers' Market because everyone has too much zucchini right now. You might call this Too Much Zucchini Season.

The tomatoes are still a little slow thanks to the dry weather, but there are plenty of green ones out there and if they all ripen at once, we'll have bushels. There' s no such thing as Too Many Tomatoes--as long as there's room in the deep freeze. I notice that we still have some sweet corn in there from last year's bumper crop, which is good because this year's corn crop is pretty puny. First the ground was too cold and then it was too dry, so the little bit of corn that came up looks stunted, with ears hanging low to the ground like a buffet set out for the raccoons and other small woodland creatures. We'll be lucky to get a dozen ears.

In the herb garden, the sage and thyme are doing great and the lemon basil is growing so quickly that I have to pinch off dozens of buds every day (which makes my hands smell luscious), but the other basil plants and the rosemary seem utterly uninterested in growing. Maybe they're sulking.

The hollyhocks out front got flattened by a sudden storm and have not responded well to being staked up. They're still standing, but they look like refugees huddling together after some devastating natural disaster. It doesn't help that the Japanese beetles have turned their leaves all lacy. I need to learn a little something about hollyhocks before next summer.

Meanwhile, I think I hear a salad calling.

Stories from the bargain bin

Feeling unreasonably glum over the weekend, I stayed in and read a book I'd picked up in the clearance aisle at Border's for $3.99--not bad for close to 800 page. Transgressions is a collection of ten previously unpublished novellas by Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Walter Mosley, Ed McBain (who also edited the volume), and six other authors. The only common denominator is that all the stories deal somehow with crime.

Overall, the book is uneven but enjoyable. The most memorable work is Joyce Carol Oates's creepy but compelling thriller "The Corn Maiden," which gives away many of the secrets right at the start but remains suspenseful throughout. Oates knows how to make syntax sing. Sharyn McCrumb's "Resurrection Man" is a really lovely treatment of an ugly historical fact: the need to procure fresh corpses for medical students at a time when dissecting human corpses was illegal. Her carefully researched novella explores the intersections of medical ethics and racial discrimination in the American south before the Civil War and during Reconstruction.

Several of the authors deal with racial or ethnic hatred (McCrumb, Mosley, McBain, Anne Perry), and several explore the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks (McBain, King, Lawrence Block). Stephen King's "The Things They Left Behind" provides a thoughtful metaphor for survivor guilt but is also disarmingly funny.

And then there's "Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large: Walking the Line" by Walter Mosley, an utterly improbable mystery full of unbelievable characters which I nevertheless found delightful. Lawless is a volatile character, looking like "a rattlesnake in a Sunday bonnet, a stick of dynamite with chocolate coating up to the fuse." Mosley's confident prose goes rollicking off in all directions and there's nothing to do but hold on and enjoy the ride.

A few of the works are less than stellar. "Hostages" by Anne Perry introduces an unlikely but likeable hero, but the other characters tend toward caricature. "The Ransome Women" by John Farris features a suspenseful and original plot, but I couldn't shake the feeling thatI was reading a movie treatment for a blockbuster summer thriller starring Julian McMahon as the psychopathic artist, Scarlett Johansson as the dewy-eyed ingenue, and Demi Moore as the murderous Lady in Black.

"Forever" by Jeffrey Deaver is crawling with crime-fiction cliches, but it features an interesting detective, Tal Simms, who approaches all of life with the mind of a mathematician: "Yes, he'd had many interesting evenings with his 2 2/3 dates every month. He'd discussed with them Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. ... They'd draft mathematical formulae in crayon on the paper table coverings at the Crab House. They'd discuss Fermat's Last Theorem until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. (These were not wholly academic encounters, of course; Tal Simms happened to have a full-size chalkboard in his bedroom.)" Sadly, these brief moments of humor are the sole bright spots in an otherwise unmemorable work.

So all told the collection of 10 novellas contains four I would gladly read again (Oates, King, McCrumb, Mosely) and several others I enjoyed reading even though I'll forget them by tomorrow, Wednesday latest. Not bad for $3.99.

Dimock on "deep time"

In Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, Wai Chee Dimock encourages a reading of American Literature that is simultaneously close and distant, deep and wide, a reading that extends beyond national borders and relatively recent chronology to explore what she calls "deep time": "I have in mind a form of indebtedness: what we call 'American' literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for a much more complex tangle of relations. Rather than being a discrete entity, it is better seen as a criscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures."

Dimock provides a thorough theoretical underpinning for "deep time" and then, through a series of illuminating readings, demonstrates how the concept might inform literary analysis. The book is an important and thought-provoking contribution to the current debate on the status of comparative literature and world literature, and it provides a forecast of what's next in literary theory.

My favorite part, though, looks to the past. In "Transnational Beauty," a chapter on Ezra Pound, Dimock reminds readers of a time when close reading was considered downright un-American. After Pound received the Bollingen prize for poetry in 1949, Robert Hillyer led a chorus of voices condemning Pound and the poets and authors promoting the New Criticism, now considered a very old-fashioned form of criticism indeed. Dimock explains:

The idea that poetry might be written (or read) with an evaluative criterion other than its American-ness was treasonable in itself....Hillyer found it ominous that these 'new esthetes' had gone so far as to compile a taxonomy of their own, with this title, 'A Glossary of the New Criticism.' Not finding words such as 'traitor' and 'treason' in that glossary, Hillyer hurled at these delinquent judges a charge they were to receive again and again: 'To a world eager for the clearest vision of poets they offer only the analysis of disillusioned irony, word by word. Close reading was downright unpatriotic. What made it even worse was that the practice seemed to be quite common; college professors and even high-school teachers were addicted to it...'

Everything new is old again--or vice versa. Dimock's "deep time" considers "America" a fluid, permeable concept deeply rooted in the past but imagined anew by each generation, an idea as revolutionary as the New Criticism was in its day and therefore just as likely to be alternately applauded and condemned, adopted and rejected, lauded and forgotten, someday to return as a footnote in a future text reminding us of a time when those old fuddy-duddy ideas splashed upon the scene with all the freshness of spring rain.

Midsummer madness

The summer is half over, so it's time for an update on my summer academic goals (read 'em here):

I have hired two full-time people for fall (Goal 1) and written an orientation booklet to help them make the transition to our department. I have written and delivered a paper at the ASLE conference (Goal 2) and attended the learning communities conference in Olympia (Goal 9). I have written the capstone syllabus (Goal 6) and written big chunks of the syllabi for composition and postcolonial lit (Goal 7, half done). I have finished all but the final polish on the Atlanta essay (Goal 3, almost done). I have made some progress on the research for the major article (Goal 4), but there's still quite a lot to do.

That leaves small chunks of two goals (3, 7) and a huge chunk of Goal 4, and I haven't even touched Goals 5, 8, and 10. As usual, I have completed the smaller and easier tasks first, leaving the more challenging ones for the end. Now the pressure's on: will I finish the major article before the assessment report deadline arrives? Will I locate a copy of Horton Hears a Who in time to double-check a fact for the Atlanta essay before the semester begins? Will I find a way to chop down the reading list for postcolonial lit to make it fit the confines of a 15-week semester?

One thing's for certain: I'll never get any of it done if I sit here babbling.

Technical difficulties

This time I can't blame my computer, not that it would help if I did. Heaping abuse on inanimate objects rarely improves the situation. But if I were inclined to holler at a piece of technology right now, it would not be my computer but my telephone line, which sounds like it is hosting a static convention. Data can't squeeze through all that noise, so I'm having trouble getting online and staying connected.

This is not an unusual occurrence: whenever the weather is especially hot or wet, our phone line becomes useless. It's one of the drawbacks of living so far out in the middle of nowhere that the phone line has to undergo ridiculous contortions just to reach the house. I generally compensate by doing my e-mailing and blogging at the office, but I'm trying to avoid the office this week and focus on some big writing projects, so I'm essentially incommunicado.

Except once in a while I can get through, like right now, and all I have time to do before I get cut off again is to apologize for my silence. I'll be back and I ought to have plenty to write about, but meanwhile, I'm accepting suggestions.

Greetings from Hooligan Central

We watched some very old episodes of Dragnet last night, all in black and white with stationery cameras and very earnest people standing awkwardly and uttering long speeches without affect or interruption, and of course all that dramatic music--quite a bizarre viewing experience. The resident 17-year-old retired to his room to read his way through a pile of Patrick O'Brian novels, so he missed out on the episode that explains why 17-year-olds are such hooligans.

It went like this: Joe Friday and his loyal partner Frank are working in the juvenile division. No one knows why; in the previous episode, they answered the phone by saying "Accident Division," but this week they're saying "Juvenile Division." It's the same phone and the same office, so apparently it's a moveable division.

They get word of a fracas at a movie theater, where unruly teenagers have disrupted the movie, started a fight, knocked an usher into a plate-glass display case, and dropped a box containing (duh-duh-duh-duuuuh!) marijuana. Friday and Frank spend the rest of the episode investigating a narcotics ring that has infiltrated a very nice neighborhood full of stable two-parent households and nice furniture. Frank comments on the nice furniture, as if he's shocked that youngsters could get involved in drugs when they're surrounded by such classic lines.

Anyway: the "narcotics ring" turns out to be six teen boys, each with an upstanding father dumbfounded to discover that sweet little Johnny hasn't been spending his evenings at the library. But Sergeant Friday isn't satisfied: he must find the supplier, another 17-year-old whose father abandoned him at a young age. The mother does the old "I tried my best but a boy needs a father" routine, and Friday and Frank move on to trace the miscreant through his girlfriend. They have to find him because he has beaten up his supplier and stolen a large quantity of high-grade heroin, much stronger than the stuff he normally peddles, and Friday is afraid that if the inexperienced and naive teenaged customers get hold of this stuff, they'll all (duh-duh-duh-duuuuuuh!) overdose.

Sure enough, Joe Friday proves a prophet, but this time it's not the customers who overdose but the 17-year-old pusher. As he stands on a dark path over the body of the dead teen, Friday tries his best to comfort the pusher's distraught girlfriend, although Friday isn't exactly a fount of compassion. Frank wonders why it happened: why would a young person from a good neighborhood stoop to selling drugs? And Friday delivers the sermon: "He didn't need a reason. He's 17."

So there you have it: 17-year-olds are just natural hooligans. If Sergeant Friday says it, it's got to be true.

A foul phrase

The resident baseball fan wandered into the room and pulled the earphones away from his ears just long enough to utter the following remarkable sentence: "The Indians are being no-hit."

What he means, of course, is that the Cleveland Indians are on the losing end of a no-hitter, but when you take the noun "no-hitter" and transform it into the verb "no-hit," suddenly the syntax gets very interesting. The Indians are not hitting the ball, but I can't imagine anyone saying they are "no-hitting the ball," because no-hitters are perpetrated by pitchers, not hitters (and not not-hitters either).

Put it in the passive voice--"The Indians are being no-hit"--and the hitters (or not-hitters) become the victims of the pitcher's action (throwing a no-hitter). The hitters are acted upon rather than acting, but I doubt that they are standing at home plate with their hands in their pockets as the ball whizzes past. Where is the verb to describe what they are doing?

Walking upstream

My favorite walk starts with a right turn at the end of my driveway. The left-hand walk is also good, but it's better with company; when I'm walking alone (and often when I'm not) I turn right and follow the road upstream.

At first my road squeezes between the creek and a wooded slope that turns into a steep rocky bluff holding in moisture, shade, and cool air. On the creek side are kingfishers, tiger-lilies, and sycamores, on the steep side ferns and jewelweed (and in the spring, trilliums). The brilliant white blossoming stalks of the black cohosh shine like a beacon in the woods while the blue vervain sends up stalks of deep purple.

Follow the road around a sweeping right-hand curve and then a sharp jog to the left, however, and the terrain suddenly flattens into wide meadows bathed in sunshine. The creek meanders in the distance now beyond the neighbor's hayfield, and instead of jewelweed beside the road I see brown-eyed Susans and Queen Anne's lace and a persistent stand of stonecrop. As soon as I turn the corner I hear a familiar sound and look up: there's that mockingbird perched atop the telephone pole chattering away as usual. Is it the same mockingbird every time or do they take turns?

Soon the road dips down toward the creek again and crosses a bridge and then makes a sharp left to continue upstream, plunging suddenly into thick forest. Red-tailed hawks nest along the creek here, and in the woods I often see pileated woodpeckers or their smaller red-bellied cousins. Walk along a straight stretch to the mile marker and suddenly I'm surrounded by farmland--and it's time to turn around before the farmer's dogs notice me.

Then I turn back and walk through the same changing zones: forest, meadow, creek and bluff, all within a mile of my front door. I take that walk in any season and never get tired of what I see because it's always changing but somehow the same, and I take it with or without company--but I like company, so feel free to come along sometime.

You make my heart sing

So I was in a local business this morning--I'd rather not mention which one, but the women who work there tend to be large, lumpish, and lumbering, so that any transaction requires of the customer a kind of coma-inducing patience. Why doesn't such slow service scare away the customers? Because it's the only business of its kind in town and we all need it, so we stand there trying to maintain consciousness while our request makes its glacial way through the system.

This morning I was there early on the day after a holiday, so I was not surprised to detect more than the usual level of sluggishness on the part of the woman who waited on me; however, I was surprised to see what she was wearing. This woman, who appears to be pushing 60 pretty hard and whose shape is not unlike that of a forklift, was wearing a pink V-neck T-shirt with sequins on her voluminous bosom spelling out the words "Wild Thing."

I'm pleased to report that I managed to hold in my laughter until I got out the door, but then I didn't stop laughing for a long, long time.

Free free free

Today we observe Independence Day by enjoying some of the fundamental freedoms that make America what it is:

Freedom of assembly in front of the change machine at the car wash, where those seeking cleansing discuss the best way to feed a dollar bill into the slot so that the machine will recognize George and spit out some quarters.

Freedom to mock the headlines in the local press, including today's gem, "Ethical breach leveled at official," which, if I'm reading it correctly, suggests that a person or persons unknown has forcefully directed a hole, gap, or absence at an unnamed official. You know that's gotta hurt.

Freedom to bear armloads of sweet corn out to the kettle and grill salmon and stir risotto without fear that the Culinary Police will object to the promiscuous mixing of cuisines, and then freedom to bear armloads of food inside the house when the rain starts pouring down.

Freedom to speak out against going to see fireworks in the rain and in favor of staying home to play Monopoly while enjoying root-beer floats made with homemade vanilla-bean ice cream, even if it means landing on Boardwalk with a hotel. I tend to lose at Monopoly, but I'd rather be bankrupt on Boardwalk than dripping wet out in the rain.

And if things get really rough, there's always that Get Out of Jail Free card.

Finished

My colleagues asked me, "Have you finished traveling?"

"No," I said, "traveling has finished me."

If you notice any brain cells wandering around looking lost, please send them my way.

Tattoo or not tattoo?

By the time I stumbled off the plane back home, I had been wearing the same clothes for more than 24 hours while trying to sleep or trying to stay awake, neither very successfully, in various airplanes and terminals, and I felt as if I'd just oozed out from under a pile of slime, so naturally the first person I saw when I got off the airplane was our college president looking cool and professional and rested.

She asked about the conference and I said, "It was great! We worked really well as a team except that we had a little trouble agreeing on the team tattoos, and one of us had to convince airport security that he wasn't a terrorist or a hijacker despite the fact that he was carrying a knife and a camp stove and a tent, and the team leader drove on the sidewalk once, and we ate a lot of seafood and rocked at Team Haiku."

She raised her eyebrows and said, "Tattoos?"

Okay, so we didn't get team tattoos--but all the rest of it is true.

All work and no play

Today we finished the "work" part of this workshop and tonight is all about having fun...so naturally I feel so rotten I didn't even try to walk over to dinner. All week I've felt great and had a terrific time, but today's lunch just didn't agree with me so here I sit in our spacious and elegant suite (sarcasm alert--we're staying in a dorm featuring carpets held together by duct tape and dirt) noodling around online instead of enjoying a Northwest barbecue while listening to the results of the Team Haiku project. I know my team's haiku rocks because, frankly, our team rocks, but I'd like to hear some others for the sake of comparison. I would be willing to bet that our haiku is the only one that includes a reference to D.B. Cooper.

Tomorrow morning we check out and tomorrow night I fly out on the redeye, but not before spending a day exploring Seattle. I intend to recover fully by then. It's just not fair to get sick at the very moment when things start to get interesting.

Creative vs. functional

Today I attended a terrific session on electronic portfolios, which helped me see what kinds of obstacles we'll need to overcome as we move toward a portfolio-based system of program assessment. The session included lots of hands-on exploration of many different examples of portfolio systems, so the content of the session was great, but (you knew there would be a "but") the environment was not conducive to learning and the portfolio samples highlighted the difficulty of balancing creativity and functionality.

The room was dark and hot, so that those inclined toward sleepiness had to work to keep the eyeballs focused on the screen and the ears focused on the facilitators, who could not be heard over the sound of several fans. The computer screens stood a little higher than I'm accustomed to, so the only way I could read the text on the screens was to lean my head back so my eyes hit the right spot on the bifocals. And then some of the pages were so busy with distracting backgrounds and decorative fonts that they were practically unreadable. It's heartening to see students take so much care in the design and presentation of their portfolios, but if the page is so full of bells and whistles that the text is unreadable, then what's the point?

Sometime this summer I'll put together a proposal for a new one-hour lab course for beginning English majors, a course on research methods and portfolio development, and I'll have to find a model for successful portfolios. Today's facilitators tell me it's important to let the students be creative, and I concur, but is it necessary to sacrifice functionality to creativity? I hope our experiment will result in something more satisfying than portfolios that cannot be read on screens that cannot be seen. If not, we'll go back to the drawing board.

What I'm learning in Olympia

1. It's important to leverage synergies through cross-fertilization.

2. No matter how much you dress it up in fancy jargon, a bad idea is still a bad idea.

3. It takes a team to get the big swing moving.

4. Teaching at an institution where most faculty members actually like and respect each other is a rare and precious privilege.

5. No matter how well I think I know my colleagues, they never cease to surprise me.

6. If the food is good, the view is good, and the college is footing the bill, there's no shame in eating at the same restaurant three times a week.

7. The difference between seafood in Olympia and seafood in the midwest is like the difference between the goldfish and the goldfish cracker, the cottage and the cheese, the Rhine and the rhinestone.

8. There is a limit to how long I can last without writing, but after I've reached it, my fingers start to itch and my brain explodes.

9. No matter how many smart people are in the dinner line, the line isn't going anywhere without adequate serving spoons.

10. When the question is "Why did you choose a career in higher education?" and your answer is "Because I wanted to hang out with smart people," everyone will look at you funny--even the smart people.

Name that nightmare!

So I was snoring through a Sunday afternoon nap when suddenly, without warning, my son woke me up to deal with a severe gratitude-related emergency: he had been writing thank-you notes for graduation gifts when suddenly, without warning, he ran out of note cards. Normally I would be annoyed at being awakened for such a paltry reason, but in this case I was pleased because nothing could have been more annoying than the dream from which my son's request rescued me.

The entire dream featured a sound track of Borat singing his version of the Kazakh national anthem, but he kept getting stuck on the line about "inferior potassium," which doesn't scan no matter how you sing it. Having that particular song stuck in one's head is nightmare enough, but that's not the worst of it: I was standing in front of a class of freshmen on the first day of class and I couldn't get the technology to work. There was this rolling cart with a projector and a laptop computer and a lot of cords, and the only way I could make the thing work was to attach all the cords to the right pieces of equipment in the right configuration. In the end I had cords wrapped around my wrist and stuck to my glasses and in my ear, and every time I moved just a little bit, the cart would shift and throw the whole thing out of whack again so I had to start over.

Meanwhile, all these students, unamused by my incompetence, were getting restless in their seats. "We'll get started just as soon as I attach this cord," I would say, and then I would cough and dislodge all the cords again. And Borat just kept singing.

Which would you rather deal with: Borat and cords and restless students or a lack of note cards? I got up, found the note-cards, saved the day--but for some reason, that Borat fellow just won't shut up.

Stop me before I shoot again

I keep telling myself that I've taken enough photos of butterflies to last the rest of my life and I don't need to take any more, but then I walk up the hill and find all these photogenic fritillaries and swallowtails posing for the camera and I can't stop myself.

Call me inaccessible

Once again I have been challenged to defend my cellphone-free status, and I can't do it. It's easy to come up with lame excuses: cellphones are expensive, there's no tower out in the sticks where we live, I can't read the small print on that little screen, I like being inaccessible, and so on.

I'm not a Luddite: I have nothing against technology. Some of my best friends are technology! My problem with cell phones is much more elemental: I don't like carrying things. I will happily carry a briefcase or a camera bag if I really need to, but beyond that, I'd rather not. I can't even carry a purse. Trust me, I've tried: it makes me crazy. I can't carry a glasses case. I don't like carrying an umbrella. I'm not even comfortable wearing jewelry; in fact, I once went ten years without wearing a watch, until I started teaching on a campus with no clocks in the classrooms.

I realize that my dislike for having stuff attached to my person borders on the pathological, but I've learned to live with it and so have my friends, except when the topic is cellphones. "They're so small and convenient," they tell me, "and so helpful in emergencies."

And they're right. Occasionally when I'm traveling I'll carry my husband's cellphone for a day or two, but I don't enjoy it. Carrying a cellphone makes me feel as if I'm dragging behind me an unruly appendage that's constantly demanding attention: it wants to be answered, it wants to be charged, it wants to to tell me about missed calls. I don't want to know about missed calls. If it's important, they'll call back, and if it's not important, who cares?

Raising these objections out loud in public, however, is a losing proposition. For every objection, the cellphone aficionado provides enough excellent answers to persuade any rational person of the benefits of carrying a cellphone. So I think I'll stick with the irrational: "I can't carry a cellphone," I'll say, "but when they make a cellphone that can carry me, we'll talk."

Everybody to the Time-Out Box!

The current furor over Salman Rushdie's knighthood again places The Satanic Verses in the spotlight, which is annoying because it may not be Rushdie's best work but it consistently overshadows other novels worthy of discussion. Who talks about Shame or The Ground Beneath Her Feet or even Midnight's Children? Despite his other accomplishments, in the popular consciousness Rushdie remains a man of one book.

I've never taught The Satanic Verses for several reasons: it's too long and requires too much background information for an undergraduate survey course, and the political furor tends to overshadow the text itself. It's like teaching Sylvia Plath's poetry: students get so caught up in the poet's biography that they can't focus on the poetry as poetry. Further, it is difficult to hold a reasonable discussion The Satanic Verses when any critique of the novel runs the risk of being interpreted as favoring the fatwa.

The whole discussion would simmer down a bit if everyone took a time-out to read Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the next novel Rushdie published after The Satanic Verses and certainly his most joyful, though it begins in sadness:

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue.

The source of the sadness is simple: the Sea of Stories is being polluted, silencing the old stories and preventing the creation of new ones. The parallel between this silencing and the fatwa is clear throughout the book, but the possibility of a political interpretation does not overshadow the wildly inventive pleasure of the prose. On the simplest level, the book is a children's adventure story with heroes and villains and even a captive princess unlike any other captive princess you've ever encountered, but it is also a profound exploration of the costs of silencing stories. Haroun looks into the Sea of Stories:

He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained differents sorts of stories, and as all the stories that have ever been and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

The Sea of Stories is inhabited by the aptly-named Plentimaw Fishes, whose many mouths constantly swallow streams of story:

...and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing . . . no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new.

Restoring the health of the Sea of Stories is Haroun's work and Rushdie's as well. His novels thrive on the kind of creative recombination that takes place in the Sea of Stories, drawing from all manner of texts (myths, fairy tales, sacred texts, literary works, news stories) to produce plots, characters, and images that are startlingly new. This, of course, is what caused all the trouble with The Satanic Verses: while no one objects to Rushdie's taking liberties with Omar Khayyam or the Sleeping Beauty myth in Shame, plenty of people do object to similar treatment of the Koran in The Satanic Verses. Hence all the fuss and bother, and let us not forget the violence. Rushdie may still be among the living, but others associated with The Satanic Verses have suffered or died: the Italian translator and the Norwegian publisher were wounded in attacks, the Japanese translator was stabbed to death, and the Turkish translator of The Satanic Verses narrowly escaped an arson attack that killed 37 people.

It's time for all this violence to stop. Everybody to the Time-Out Box: let's all take a long look into the Sea of Stories until the anger dies down. Maybe then we can have a reasonable discussion about Salman Rushdie.

Pining for Evergreen

I just unpacked two days ago but I'm already thinking about packing for my next academic conference. I rarely go to more than one conference per year and I wasn't originally scheduled to attend next week's conference, but a member of my college's team couldn't go and I was the first alternate. So next Monday morning at the crack of dawn, off I go to the airport to take one of those Stop-Everywhere flights to Seattle, followed by a van ride to Olympia, Washington, followed by a week at Evergreen State College, where we will learn about learning communities.

I have taught in a learning community and I like the concept, but the conference schedule is a bit daunting: sessions starting at 8:15 every morning, team presentations and activities all day long, even a Team Haiku session at the end of the week. I'm okay with Team Haiku, but if they ask us to join hands and sing Kum Ba Yah, I'm hiding under the table.

So I'm looking forward to the conference but here's the thing: I've never been to Olympia, never even been to Seattle except to change planes once, and I don't know what to do with myself in my little bits of free time at the conference, not to mention the long bits of free time I'll have in airports and airplanes. I like the colleagues who make up my team, but I'm aware that an uninterrupted week of my company is enough to drive anyone insane, so I need to give them a break by getting away once in a while. So what's to do in or near Olympia? I welcome suggestions.

Falling for Falling Man

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Don DeLillo's Falling Man is a bit of a downer. It is, after all, a novel about the effects of the 9/11 attacks, and DeLillo's fiction has never been known for optimism or hearty good cheer. He is known for bitter satire, however, which this new book lacks almost entirely, and he has been known to create believable children (especially in White Noise), but the children in Falling Man are ciphers.

What this novel does well is evoke the horrors of that day and its effects on a family in luminous and lyrical prose. The opening and closing sections plunge readers into the experience of a man who escapes the towers alive but certainly not unscathed. Mute and zombie-like, he puts one foot in front of another until he finds his way to a home, however unhomelike. DeLillo is less successful at connecting the 9/11 attacks with a universal sense of fallenness and loss, a sense of compassion for all of suffering humanity. People are falling all over the novel, but the book's suggestion that all suffering is essentially the same falls a bit flat.

But it's difficult to avoid falling for DeLillo's lovely sentences, such as this one:

But what made her think of this, ethnic shampoo, in the middle of Third Avenue, which was a question probably not answerable in a book on ancient alphabets, meticulous decipherments, inscriptions on baked clay, tree bark, stone, bone, sedge.

Watch how the sentence starts so awkwardly, as if to mimic the action of a startling and incongruous idea that interrupts a train of thought and stumbles around all akimbo before being smoothly incorporated into the stream of meaning. Read the final phrase out loud: the words scan, the sounds tumble past like pebbles on a talus slope.

DeLillo's novel offers precious little hope for a human race trapped in the embrace of brute, indifferent chance. It does, however, offer hope for the future of prose, for it is heartening to see sentences so lovely made out of mourning.

Suddenly, hollyhocks

The mystery plant that has been growing in the flower garden out front has finally been identified. I've been tempted to pull that thing up more than once because it looked pretty weedy and no one could tell me what it was, but the resident gardener insisted that it wasn't a weed and in fact had been planted last year by our daughter.

I can now report that the little nondescript bushy thing is not a weed. In fact, it's not little or nondescript anymore but big, bold, and abounding with purply-pink blossoms that attract abundant hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees.

Yes, we have hollyhocks. The tallest blossoming stems are seven feet tall and there are plenty of 'em. Recent dry conditions have left our other flowers looking puny and limp, but the hollyhocks are thriving and so, apparently, are the hummingbirds. Now I just need to find out how to take care of them so they keep thriving.

Most of the mystery plants that pop up in our gardens are invasive pests, so it's a nice switch when a mystery turns into a pleasant surprise. And to think: I almost pulled it up!

How does your garden grow?

It occurred to me as I was weeding the tomato patch this morning that stooping in the dirt is much more satisfying when the result is a quart of strawberries than when it's a pile of weeds. We haven't had much rain lately so the weeds are not out of control, but I spent a good 45 minutes this morning just clearing the tomato patch of unwanted vegetation.

And how did the garden respond to a week of neglect? Blueberries and raspberries are ripening nicely and the asparagus is still producing pretty well. I saw some finger-sized zucchini and summer squash, lettuce that desperately needs a drink, tiny green peppers, and some small, hard, green tomatoes, which will grow up to be plump red juicy tomatoes provided we get a little rain pretty soon.

That's what kept me going this morning: the promise of plump red juicy tomatoes. When my calves ached and my feet hurt and my hands got so muddy the weeds were slipping through my fingers, I just held on to that vision. They say gardening builds faith and when it comes to fresh tomatoes, I'm a believer.

Now everybody pray for rain.

But what if they grade on a curve?

We've returned home after a week away and we have all passed the test: the kid passed the Home Alone test and the parents passed the Staying Sane while the Kid is Home Alone test.

I didn't mention to many people that we were leaving our 17-year-old son home alone for a week because it's not something the entire universe needed to know. I suspect that any attempts at true secrecy would be futile, because adolescents just seem to know when one of their number has been left the keys to the castle: they suddenly sense a strong disturbance in the parental force and the next thing you know, it's party time!

Another reason I didn't mention it much was that I didn't need to hear any more stories like the one my very helpful colleague told me about the parents who were enjoying their trip to Europe when the responsible teenagers they'd left home alone called to say, "Mom? Dad? Don't worry, we're fine! But oops, we burned down the house."

I'm delighted to report that my son did not have a wild party or burn down the house while we were gone. He did the laundry, washed the dishes, took out the trash, cleaned the catbox, remembered his dental appointment, got to work every day, and basically had a very boring week. He did neglect to check the mousetrap in the kitchen, but the mouse didn't get too terribly ripe before we got home. I give him an A-.

The parents didn't do quite as well. We kept telling ourselves we weren't going to call home, but we called, for no really good reason, on six of the eight days we were gone, and we said stupid parent things like "Don't forget to set your alarm!" and "Don't burn down the house!" But we didn't waste much time worrying and we sometimes went minutes at a time without wondering what the kid might be up to. I give us a B, maybe even a B+.

The real test comes in August when we'll send the kid away to college in Texas while we stay home alone. How will we fare on that test? Good thing we've got two months to study because I'm aiming for an A+.

On humility

Yesterday one of the sessions I attended dealt with misappropriation of sacred texts: not scripture, but literary texts that get adopted by individuals and groups to achieve their own ends. One very thought-provoking paper criticized a certain interest group for misinterpreting a literary text and appropriating it for the group's own purposes.

The indignation in the room was palpable, but here is my question: don't we all appropriate texts to our own purposes? And if it is easy for others to misinterpret texts, what makes us think we've got it right? It seems to me that this paper should spark not an attitude of superiority over the misguided souls who have mishandled texts but an deep sense of humility in our own handling of texts. Someday some more enlightened scholar will point to us with pity over how badly we've mishandled our own sacred texts. What poor misguided souls we are and how prone to error.

Summing up

One more item to add to my list of helpful hints for presenters of conference papers: remember that summary is rarely as interesting as analysis--and in fact, if the audience has some familiarity with the text under discussion, summary may not be necessary at all.

Would that all writers about literature could remember this important point.

Of humming and hair

This morning while listening to a paper on a topic totally unrelated to my research, I suddenly understood how to organize the next stage in my big research project. That's the advantage of academic conferences: get the brain cells humming and they suddenly start making beautiful music. Now I'm eager to get home and get to work on the project.

First, though, a few more sessions, some of which I'm really eager to experience. I hope I don't have to hear the word "imaginary" used as a noun too many more times, because it makes me crazy. What's wrong with plain old "imagination"? And I hope I don't have to sit behind any more hair-obsessed scholars. This morning the tall woman right in front of me spent most of the session alternately smoothing and fluffing her long blonde hair, drawing attention away from the speakers and toward her tresses. If her hair requires that much public attention, I'd be glad to supply some scissors.

But I'm willing to ignore all that in gratitude for the great idea that popped into my head this morning. I wrote it down so I won't forget it. Now I just need to get home and get to work.

Fragments of fragments

Yesterday I bought a book, my first book purchase at this conference and it's a hardback: The Wet Collection by Joni Tevis. I heard Tevis read from the book the other day and I had to have it. The title offers no hint of the joys within: it's a collection of brief, almost fragmentary essays written in lyrical prose; in fact, Tevis said that some of these essays started off as syllabic poetry. Here are a few fragments of her fragments:

From "A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory":
Bring silence, and an ear tuned to slight differences. Bring palms embedded with grit; bring water. Comb the world for clues. The banded agate damp with lake water, crusted with sand: get close, peering, picking through. Find the pottery shard hid in dirt; find the dirt. Exile is a condition of the redeemed life. Remember: you find what you look for; when presented with a fragment, fit a builded life to it. Line the pieces up and study them, catalogue and compare. Remember to keep careful notes. In India ink, which resists fade and run.

From "Postcards from Costa Rica":
Marks on a page, tracks and punctures and glyphs in the sand: these, my closest notes, I still can't translate, only squint and puzzle while the wind scours them clean. Years have passed and here's what I remember: a beloved child; the careful, constant work of insect, crustacean, reptile. I'll honor the glory of these days' passing, tell the things my eyes have seen.

I've owned the book under 24 hours and I'm more than halfway through. It's luminous, sometimes humorous, always evocative, and it demands re-reading. That's my kind of book.

Unusual academics

There's one big difference between this conference and others I have attended: conference participants here look less like English professors than like whitewater rafting guides. There's none of that pale, pasty, haunted look that comes from too many hours of communing with the computer, none of that Anguished Artist Angst so common to creative writing conferences.

No, these people look wholesome and fit, as if they're accustomed to teaching classes at the top of mountains accessible only to experienced rock-climbers. They hike, they bike, they commune with the earth--and some are even camping in tents on the campus where the conference is being held. You'd never see that kind of behavior at the MLA.

I may be the least fit person here, but today I'll try to guide a few of them on a tour of some rivers of nostalgia in midwestern poetry. Hope my paper's not all wet.

From memorable to maddening

Of the seven or eight papers I've heard so far today, one was memorable, three were quite good, and the rest...well, you judge:

There was the guy who admitted that he had spent most of the previous evening trying to cut down his 24-page paper to make it fit within the 15-minute time span allotted. He finally gave up the effort and decided to just wing it, which resulted in 15 minutes of unfocused rambling.

Then there was the guy who spent so much time talking about the topics he didn't have time to cover that he didn't have time to cover the topics he did have time to cover.

And who can forget the young woman who held a spiral notebook up to her face and squinted at the dense, hand-written text of her paper?

Someone needs to teach these people some basic rules of conference papers:

1. Type it up.

2. Cut it down.

3. Deliver it clearly.

4. Don't apologize.

That's what makes the good papers good. The memorable papers add a dash of humor, a vivid image, or some interesting language. Hoping for one of the memorable ones--well, that's what makes the bad papers bearable.

Taking a stand for the bland

I walk into the hotel ballroom for the first plenary session at the conference I'm attending and I sit down in one of those generic hotel conference chairs, except this time my back goes back farther than I'd expected. Is the chair supposed to recline or is it getting ready to collapse beneath me? Awkward moment.

A casual glance reveals a few others suffering that same moment of surprise, but the experience is far from universal. A few trick chairs thrown into the mix to liven things up, or an epidemic of broken chairs? Do I dare put my full weight on the chair back or will it collapse and drop me on the carpet? That would be unfortunate, because that carpet violently disagrees with my red blouse.

It's one of those hotel ballroom carpets, covered with patterns that verge on garish without ever leaving the land of hotel ballroom bland. "Have you ever seen a hotel more bland?" asked a total stranger in the elevator, and the answer is, "No, I've never seen a hotel more bland, but I've also never seen one less bland. This hotal defines the mean of hotel blandness."

The carpet could use a spot of creativity, a dash of the unexpected--like a professor sprawled out over the splintered remains of a broken chair. All I have to do to deliver this ballroom from being the epitome of blandness is to lean back firmly in my seat!

Frankly, I'd rather stand.

Driving in survival mode

What do you do when you're driving down a truck-packed interstate at upwards of 70 miles an hour in a construction zone with the shoulders blocked off by cement barriers and suddenly, in a drought-ridden part of Florida, the sky opens and dumps water in such volume that you can't even see the lines on the road?

Survive...and pray that it never happens again.

Summertime, finally

Time for an update on my summer academic goals (read it here):

Goal 1: done.

Goal 2: done.

Goal 6: done.

The remaining seven can wait until I get back to town on June 17. Until then, I'll be visiting family, giving a paper at a conference, and just generally goofing off. This is when the summer really begins.

Dude, you're getting an El

I think I may have just been offered a bribe. I was talking on the phone to the father of a student who wants to be excused from fulfilling a certain general education requirement, and I was blandly uttering the usual blah-blah-blah about the importance of a well-rounded education and what we need to see in a transfer course to allow it to substitute for the requirement, and it was all very calm and pleasant and low-key, and then the dad said something like, "You know, the college wants me to make a substantial donation, but before I help the college, I'd like to see how the college is willing to help me."

Now what am I supposed to do with that? If it's intended as a bribe, then he ought to offer something I'll find more immediately useful, like a new starter for my husband's car. (His final words as I left the house today: "Be sure to park on a slope so it'll be easier to push-start." And you know what? I did.)

But really, what does this dad expect me to do? "Okay, sir, how much is this little favor worth to you, on a range from Endowed Chair to packet of Post-It Notes? Install an elevator in my building and I'll make the requirement disappear!"

I suppose administrators hear this kind of bribe (threat?) often enough to have developed a coherent response, but I've never had a parent try to bribe me before so I was a bit flabbergasted. I elected to ignore the comment, merely returning to the usual blah-blah-blah. Next time, though, I'll have my wits about me. Next time I'm asking for an elevator.

Caution: falling library

Arrived on campus this morning to find a huge crane systematically knocking over the old library building in the middle of campus. To keep the dust down, this guy is holding a firehose and training a stream of water on the remaining bits of building all the time. It's a very hot day and he's standing pretty close to the clang and thump of falling library parts, but all he has to protect him from the elements is a hardhat. Right now, that's either the worst job on campus or the best.