Saturday in the park

Dear Student,
Of course I would be delighted to meet with you at 11 on Saturday. I understand that you have a very busy life and can't possibly meet during any of my posted office hours, so I would be happy to devote my weekend to your needs. "Anything for my students" is what I always say, and the fact that you are not even my student is utterly irrelevant. The important point is that you, a student, need to me with me, a professor, at 11 on Saturday, and my only problem is that you don't specify a.m. or p.m.

Now I might have a little difficulty meeting with you at 11 a.m. because that's when I expect to be cleaning the bathrooms at my house. I realize that the condition of my bathrooms is not nearly as important as your personal concerns, but we're having company tomorrow and I'd like to beat some sense into those little grimy microbes trying to colonize the world one bathroom at a time. Before that I'll be harvesting, chopping, and processing hot peppers to make pepper sauce, and after that I'll be reading a pile of student drafts that I need to return at 9 a.m. on Monday.

If you had suggested 11 on Sunday, then it would be easy: I could take you to church with me and discuss your issues during the sermon. (No one ever listens to the sermon anyway!) Sunday afternoon won't work because I'm expecting eight extra people at my house for a cookout and you're not one of them--and besides, if Sunday worked for you, you would have mentioned it in your e-mail.

So I suggest that we meet, as you requested, at 11 on Saturday--11 p.m., that is. By then I'll be done with the cleaning and cooking and paper-reading and I'll be ready for a nice restful 20-minute drive to town to meet with a student who isn't even mine. Of course we won't be able to meet in my office because the building will be locked up tight, as will all the other campus buildings. Besides, the weather is so nice that it would be a shame to be indoors, so let's have an outdoor meeting. I suggest the city park down by the river, where you will find a number of piers. Find the shortest pier and walk to the end; if you don't see me right away, take one more step.

See you soon!

Impossible dream

"Is it still possible for me to get an A in your class?"

Three different freshman students came into my office this week to ask this question, and in each case I had the same answer: "Possible, but not probable."

They always look at me quizzically after that, so I explain: "Mathematically, you might be able to get an A if come to every class on time, turn in every assignment on time, and earn 100 percent on every assignment from now until the end of the semester, but looking at your record so far, I don't consider that terribly likely."

They always respond the same way: "Thank you! Thank you! I can still get an A!"

I can't decide whether they're poor listeners or whether they're blithely inhabiting a fantasy world in which a barely competent writer can suddenly develop the ability to produce first-rate, sophisticated prose, where the alarm clock always rings on time and the printer is never out of ink, where extracurricular activities never distract from academics and where a student can play Grand Theft Auto all night every night without ever missing a class or failing to shine on an assignment.

I don't want to lie to my students, but sometimes I wonder whether it's cruel to give them false hope. Maybe I should tell them, "No, you can't get an A in my class, and in fact you're going to have to work pretty hard to scrape by with a C-, so why don't we skip the math lesson so you can get back to work?"

If I tell them it's impossible to get an A, maybe some of them will be motivated to prove me wrong. It's possible--but not, I'm afraid, very probable.

Of mice and men

I came home this afternoon to find the resident fix-it man sitting on the porch surrounded by the bright-yellow entrails of a broken tape measure doomed to retract no more. "It broke," he said. "I tried to fix it." Note the past tense. The eternal optimist always thinks broken things can be fixed, and they probably can, but at some point you have to wonder whether the fix is worth the time it takes.

So we've added "tape measure" to the shopping list, but the time he spent taking it apart was not wasted: while he was sitting out there fiddling with it, he killed a mouse. How? "I threw my boot at it," he said. Not the most orthodox method of mouse-killing, but effective nevertheless.

It was one small step for man--but we'll never know just how small without a functioning tape measure.

The Midwife Committee

It doesn't happen often, but yesterday in the middle of a meeting I had an epiphany. Conditions were not ripe for epiphany: it was my third meeting of the day, a late-afternoon meeting in a small, stuffy room, and the agenda suggested a distinct lack of drama, but in the course of a discussion about a proposal for a new program, I suddenly had a vision of how it could work and I thought, "There is hope!"

It was a simple realization but it made the rest of the day bearable. I can't even talk about the proposal itself because it's still a glimmer in a committee's eye, but its very existence gives me hope. So no more griping about too many meetings: sometimes collective effort allows new life to spring forth, and those of us who get to serve as midwife to new life can only share the joy.

A failure to communicate

I have to read five more freshman drafts before 8 a.m. tomorrow and I have two long meetings this afternoon, so here I sit practicing avoidance. Some of these drafts desperately demand avoidance, such as the one that starts off by asking whether a career as a professional football player is likely to hurt my health. Given that I am unlikely to pursue a career as a professional football player at this late date, I do not find the question compelling.

I suppose it is unreasonable to expect students to write about topics I care about, but it would be nice if they would either write about topics they care about or make some effort to show me why I should care about them. "Write as if your paper will change the world," I tell them, "but remember that most people resist change. Make me care!"

The same could be said of another little writing project: revising our department's vision statement. The best thing that can be said about our official vision statement is that its syntax is unobjectionable; however, our official vision focuses entirely on what we expect our students to do in the future after they leave here, leaving the present out of the picture. The message, in a nutshell, is that students should come here not because it's a great place to be but because it's a great place to have been. It's a particularly vacuous vision, probably no more compelling to prospective students than my freshman drafts are to me.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. To my students and my colleagues I say the same thing: "Make me care!" Otherwise, I might not be able to resist the temptation to pursue asecond career as a professional football player.

Pure, unadulterated tripe

I just received a document containing the sentence "I got my tripe hurt."

What is the context?

What is the purpose?

What is the appropriate response?

Working on my MTR (Master of Tent Rental)

Yesterday I once again found myself speechless. I met with some prospective students and their parents, which I generally enjoy because I get ask prospective students what they love about literature and talk about all the exciting things going on here and how fun it is to be an English major. But one of those prospective students was accompanied by a parent who asked a series of unanswerable questions, starting with "Why should my sweet little pumpkin come here when she can go elsewhere and major in [insert major not available here]?"

What do I say to that? "Um, sorry, I'm not an expert in that discipline, and neither is anyone else here, which is why we don't offer a major in it, which makes me wonder why you're here. Why visit colleges that do not actually offer the major your daughter wants? Seems like an incredible waste of time."

But I can't say that, can I? My role in this little drama is to sell the benefits of my program, not to drive people away. So I smile and nod and explain that while no, we do not offer that particular major here, we do offer students many opportunities to hone their talents so they can be prepared for a wide variety of challenges blah blah blah...

And then the mom asks another one: "Is there anything to do here on weekends?"

I start talking about the variety of cultural and athletic events offered on weekends, but that's not what she wants. That's when the real questions come out: "Where do students go to rent camping equipment? And what about canoeing? Does the college sponsor canoe trips? Is there a hiking club?"

That's when I realize I'm out of my depth. I'm an English professor: ask me about literature and writing. I'll even take a swing at questions about local cultural events. But don't ask me about programs we don't have, and don't ask me where to rent a tent. I'm sure someone on campus knows where to rent a tent, but if I were you, I wouldn't look for that person in the English department.

But again, I couldn't say all that. "Maybe someone from Student Life can help you with that," I said, smiling, but Mom didn't look pleased. What kind of English professor doesn't know about tent-rental opportunities? I suspect that she shook the dust off her feet as she left campus.

But that's okay. People who don't want what we offer should go somewhere else. We'll take the ones who really want to be here--provided that their mothers stay home.

My lips are sealed

So I've been noticing this peculiar trend in letters from applicants for the open position in my department....but oops, can't talk about that.

And then there was this bizarre comment that came up in a committee meeting the other day! But it's strictly under wraps.

Hey, I read about this neat pedagogical technique...in a colleague's tenure file, so my lips are sealed.

Did I mention that my brother called last night out of the blue to ask me about--never mind.

And the hubby and I had some rather sharp words about--better not go there.

All zipped up and nothing to say!

Candy from a baby

A new study (read it here) suggests that students who are offered chocolates give their professors higher marks on course evaluations than students who are not offered chocolates, even though the professor was not the one distributing the candy. In this study, a person unconnected with the class offered chocolates to students, saying the candy was left over from an event. Some students did not even accept the proferred candy, but overall ratings for professors improved anyway. So apparently the mere fact of being offered chocolate influences students to give professors higher ratings.

I always thought that getting good evaluations was as difficult as taking candy from a baby, but apparently I had it backward: give candy, get good ratings. And if candy, why not doughnuts, cookies, or chips 'n' salsa? Why not money? If it'll result in higher ratings, we should hire someone to come into classes on evaluation day and offer students sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll--although, come to think of it, that might distract them from those little bubble-sheets.

Better stick with chocolates. I'd buy stock in Nestle if I were you.

Plunging into Rushdie

I was introducing my postcolonial lit class to Salman Rushdie this morning and I had talked about the whole Sea of Stories idea (making new stories from recombined and reimagined strands of old stories) and explained how The Satanic Verses imaginatively riffs on the Koran, and one of my more vocal students said, "I'm surprised no one tried to kill him!"

Which gave me a perfect opening to talk about the fatwa and all that followed, which made me realize that these events that seem so real and present to some of us are fading firmly into that dim and distant realm known as History. In the eyes of my students, Rushdie is their angry grandfather who's always trying to tell stories of his childhood and his heroic action in some war or other and the crazy guys he knew way back when; they wonder when he's going to shut up and talk about something that matters.

But that's okay. I love Shame and I could talk about it to an empty room, so I'm delighted that some of my students seem to be digging into the book with some gusto. Granted, a few are sitting in the back of the room looking befuddled ("Omar Khayyam? What's that supposed to mean?"), but let 'em look. I'm plunging into the Sea of Stories and I'm taking some students with me, and I'm having so much fun that I don't really care if the rest of 'em want to sit on the shore and try not to get splashed.

If the shoe fits....

Shoe retailers are trying to make a man out of me and I'm not sure I appreciate the effort. I sort of like being a woman vis a vis shoes. Granted, it's not easy being a woman with feet like mine; I walk into the biggest shoe store in town, ask the helpful salesperson to bring me everything she has in my size, and wait for her to emerge, eventually, from the storeroom with a single pair of spike heels in green suede.

Or, more likely, nothing at all. "We don't carry any wide widths in sizes larger than 8," they insist, and when I ask why, they say, "Because there's no demand for them."

"You want demand?" I say. "I can be pretty demanding when I put my mind to it. I am 10-wide, here me roar!"

But it's useless, so for some years I've made a habit of driving two hours to the Big City a few times a year for the express purpose of buying shoes at the one store where I'm certain to find them, and when I find a pair I like in my size, I don't even look at the price tag. It gets expensive, but it beats going barefoot.

So today I'm on fall break and the loyal spouse took a day off so we could go gallivanting off to the Big City in search of shoes: a pair of walking shoes and a pair of casual loafers to replace my old Eastlands that finally became too disreputable-looking to be worn anywhere but in the garden. A simple task, you might think. Ha!

My old faithful store no longer carries my size. "Nothing over size 8 in wide widths," said the salesperson. The guy in the sports store said the same thing. "Women don't wear shoes that wide," he said. By that time I was so demoralized that all I could do was sigh deeply and move on.

Across town a bigger sports store had the goods: one pair of walking shoes, my size, my price. Perfect. We asked about loafers and they suggested the big shoe warehouse nearby.

It was big, all right. If I'd needed patent-leather thigh-high boots with five-inch stilleto heels, I could have chosen from a wide spectrum of colors ranging from lime green to eggplant to princess pink. We wandered rows and rows of women's shoes: camouflage print pumps, plaid Keds lace-ups, shoes with criss-crossing velcro straps, bowling shoes, hiking shoes, showing-off-your-funky-socks shoes, but nothing resembling a loafer and nothing--nothing!--in my size.

I was about ready to give up when I ran into a former student who lent a sympathetic ear. "You ought to try the men's department," she said. "They have loafers over there."

She was right. I tried on one pair after another before settling on a perfect pair of Sperry Topsiders. They fit! They're comfortable! They even look good! Okay, they weren't cheap, but it beats going barefoot.

I did get a few odd looks while trying on shoes in the men's department, but after a two-hour drive and five solid hours of shopping, I didn't care. If the shoe retailers of America insist on squeezing me out of the women's department, there's not much I can do about it but stand up and take it like a man.

Socked in

The fog comes in
on little cat feet,
lies down,
curls up,
and settles in
for a long
lazy
nap.

The sun comes in,
trips over the fog,
mutters "Outta my way!"
and stands
glaring.

The fog looks up
with sleepy eyes,
blinks,
yawns,
stretches,
rolls over,
and curls up
for a long
long
lazy
nap.

A new contender for the Obvious Award

"Reading poetry is always a good way to expand a person's ability to interpret what the author is saying."

So true! And so is the converse: Not reading poetry is a good way to reduce a person's ability to interpret what the author is saying.

When I think of all the ways to expand a person's ability to interpret what the author is saying, reading the poetry ranks way above other methods. Telepathy, for instance, is rarely reliable, and putting the poem under one's pillow at night just wrinkles the paper. Give that student an A for Obvious!

Coasting

The sun has barely risen but my composition students are busily at work writing their midterm essay exams. Once again I posted sample essay questions on the class website and allowed students to bring to class any resources they might need: textbooks, notes, laptop computers, pocket translators (for the Chinese students), anything they could carry into the room aside from a brilliant roommate. And once again some of them have interpreted this as a sign that the exam would be easy, that they would not have to prepare in advance. I can tell which students did this because they are now frantically trying to catch up on their reading before they respond to the essay prompt. For first-year students, the midterm essay exam is a learning experience--even before they start to write.

For me, the essay exam is a chance to relax a little bit before the grading frenzy begins. I'm caught up on my other grading and I have only one more class to teach before fall break begins, so I'm coasting. This afternoon I have to review a colleague's tenure file and observe a different colleague's teaching, both activities that require some mental alertness, but right now I'm just letting the soothing sound of fingers flying across keyboards soothe my exhausted gray cells. In a moment I'll sit at my desk and pretend to be doing some serious work when I'm really reading Salman Rushdie and losing myself in a world far removed from the composition classroom (and regretting that Rushdie once again did not receive the Nobel Prize in literature, no offense to Doris Lessing).

They're thinking and writing; I'm coasting and reading. For now, that's the way it ought to be.

Aches and pains

Let the record show that I felt FINE when I left the house this morning--so why am I a wreck right now?

Some background: I've been having muscle spasms in my back on and off for about three days now. Pain-killers dull the pain but don't stop the spasms; muscle relaxants stop the spasms but also knock me out, so I've been trying to tough it out until the weekend. Yesterday the pain was so intense that it hurt to breathe, so I went home early and went for a long walk through the fall countryside.

After the walk I felt significantly better, and the lack of pain allowed me a good night's sleep for the first time all week. And when I left the house this morning, I felt great. The spasms started up again just as I was stepping out of my car, and they haven't stopped.

Is it my car? My shoes? My midterm stress level? I can't blame my office chair because the spasms started before I ever sat down. (Some years ago I was forced to use a chair that caused me pain every day of my life--but that's another long and not terribly interesting story.) Something is making my back spazz out and it's not making me very happy. I'm getting really boring about it: "Gather round, children, and let me tell you about my aches and pains...." But right now pain is all I can think about, which makes me not a very fun person, but I can't go home early today because I have a 4:00 meeting. I'm already tired of listening to myself whine. There must be a solution somewhere, but what is it?

Just being unreasonable

Unreasonable, that's what I am. I wouldn't let a student keep a cell phone on the desk during a midterm exam, and I wouldn't let another student have an extra 20 minutes to finish the exam after she wandered into class 20 minutes late without an excuse. I wouldn't make a special trip to my office on Sunday to send a new copy of the study guide to a student who lost his, and then, if you can imagine an act so cruel, I insisted that my freshman composition students learn the correct format for citing essays from anthologies.

They rolled their eyes at me, of course--the ones who still had their eyes open. They muttered angrily and wondered why they even have to learn this bleep. I skipped the long philosophical disquisition on the value of a well-rounded education and stuck to the essentials: "Your midterm essay exam is Thursday, and if you do not properly integrate, punctuate, and cite quotations in your essay, you are unlikely to receive a passing grade."

Harsh, I know. Unreasonable. Perhaps even inhumane. But let them mutter. Someday they'll thank me--and if not, I can live with that. I'm not in it for the gratitude.

I'm in it for the parking.

Walking nowhere

My least favorite walk goes not uphill or upstream but upstairs at the campus rec center, where I walk on the elliptical machine to earn Wellness Points. I don't much care about Wellness Points qua points, but if I walk often enough, then at the end of the year the points turn into money, which is just enough to motivate me to trek up to the gym two or three times a week and take a walk to nowhere.

Dressed in shapeless blue workout clothes, I climb onto the machine and start walking and I don't stop until 30 minutes have passed (only 29 minutes until I can quit...only 28 minutes 59 seconds until I can quit....). Now when I walk at home, there's always something interesting to look at or listen to, so I'm often surprised by how much time has passed when I get back; at the gym, on the other hand (only 27 minutes 27 seconds until I can quit...), I am aware of every passing minute and sometimes even the seconds (only 27 minutes 26 seconds until I can quit...).

Walking at the gym is, let's face it, boring. There's not much to look at and even if there were, I can't exercise with my glasses on so everything becomes a colorful blur. I look through the big windows down toward the track and sometimes I see students running sprints or playing basketball or old folks walking patiently around the big blue oval (only 25 minutes 52 seconds until I can quit...), but in the afternoons the place is often empty, so the windows don't really help. I could watch one of the televisions mounted on the wall at the front of the room, but there's no sound and I can't read the captions without my glasses, and even if I could, why would I want to? They're always showing high-stakes poker or daytime soaps, and if I'm not willing to watch them when the sound is on, I'm even less likely to put the required effort into reading the captions. (Only 23 minutes until I can quit...)

The other day I was walking to nowhere (only 22 minutes 45 seconds until I can quit...) when a student (male) mounted the machine next to mine and started offering a running commentary on the poker game taking place on the television in front of us. He seemed deeply moved by one player's missing queen, but frankly, I did not share his anguish. When I exercise, my anguish comes from motivating myself to take another step on the road to nowhere (only 21 minutes until I can quit...)

And then there are the sweaty grunting guys on the weight machines. Every gym has 'em. I don't know why they grunt (17 minutes 32 seconds until I can quit...) but I know their grunts are not nearly as interesting as the sounds I hear while walking at home: kingfishers chattering by the creek, wind whispering in the trees, shotguns blasting on the hilltop. When I walk at home, everything reminds me that the world is alive and growing; when I walk at the gym (only 16 minutes 55 seconds until I can quit...), I often wonder whether someone is being eviscerated on one of the torture racks behind me. And while I may occasionally encounter some sour smells on my walks at home (dead possum, anyone?), there is at least the possibility of encountering honeysuckle, freshly-mown hay, or the rich moist earth of farm fields; the air in the gym (only 15 minutes until I can quit...) is constantly suffused by the sour smell of sweat.

But I keep walking anyway, even if I don't seem to be getting anywhere. I am making progress, I remind myself: I am healthier, happier, soon to be wealthier once those points turn to money. I am getting somewhere; I just wish the road were a little less boring. Only 14 minutes 59 seconds until I can quit...

Authors, critics, and tulafale

In a really interesting collection of essays called Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific (ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson), Vilsoni Hereniko and Sig Schwarz complain about the tendency of critics to write about Pacific Islands literatures without adequate understanding about those islands' cultures or politics. They suggest that a the role of the literary critic should resemble that of the "talking chief" or tulafale, who speaks for a chief from a place of in-depth understanding: "Not everyone an be a tulafale; similarly, the role of critic should be reserved only for those who know Pacific cultures and peoples well and have a broad knowledge of the literature. The tulafale speaks on behalf of the chief, explains or clarifies when necessary, and interacts with the rest of society regarding the intentions of the chief."

How would these traits transfer to the literary critic? "Critics," say Vilsoni and Schwarz, "like tulafale, should take pains to ensure that what they say about an author's work is accurate." So far I follow them: there is nothing more annoying than blather produced by ignorami. But what is the educated critic to do? "The critic's role," they add, "should be to represent, elucidate, provide context and background information, mediate between the writer and the readers, and criticize constructively when necessary. The critic's ability to elucidate the writer's political and social worldview in relation to his or her work is very important in the Pacific. For example, who does the writer claim is the oppressor? From within or without? Where is the writer positioned in the spectrum? How has the colonial past influenced the politics of the present? How have oral traditions influenced the form or structure of the author's work?"

These questions raise some important issues, but here is my question: if the author's political standpoint and relation to oral traditions are so important, why does he (or she) require a critic to state them? Why are these ideas not apparent in the text?

Now I'm being just the kind of critic Vilsoni and Schwarz denigrate: I don't know much about them or their politics or their relationship to oral literature; all I have are their words on the page. That is how authors get their ideas across to readers: through words on a page. And while the critic's role may well include helping readers understand the words on the page and their relationship to politics or oral literature, critics should, in general, refrain from being spokesmen for authors. An author is, by definition, someone who has something to say and knows how to say it with appropriate form and language; if they can't do so, maybe they should take up forklift repair.

Let authors speak for themselves. Let critics speak for (or against) texts. Let ignorami speak for no one.

Foundational

When I walked to my car around 6:30 last night, I was definitely going in the wrong direction: all kinds of people were converging on campus to watch the new library's foundation being poured, a 12-hour continuous pour involving many loads of concrete. Little boys on Big Wheels were rattling down the mall to watch the cement mixers line up to offload the cement into a truck that sent the mixture in long tubes down into the pit, a truck that looked like an immense alien inseminating the campus. Students and faculty members gathered on the mall to watch the pour and eat free pizza, and the library director looked as excited as a little boy finding a dump truck under the Christmas tree. I didn't enter the contest to guess how many cubic yards of concrete would go into the foundation and I haven't heard yet who won the $50 prize, but this morning the mall is quiet and the cement mixers are gone and the emerging library has a solid foundation. That's the only prize I need.

A testy triumph

I just wrote an exam for the first time this semester and I'm so proud of it I'd like to carry it around and show it off a bit, but I wouldn't want it to fall into the hands of the students who will be taking it next week. I'm giving them a study guide, but in this case, giving them the actual exam would be counterproductive.

In general, I'm giving fewer exams and demanding more papers than I used to, primarily because most of my literature classes now fulfill the general education Writing Proficiency requirement so I need to devote significant time to improving students' writing skills. But sometimes an exam is called for, and that's when I get to have some fun.

Writing exams really can be fun. I enjoy putting together a set of questions that will require students to demonstrate the depth and breadth of their mastery of information, and sometimes I allow them to be a little playful or creative. It's very satisfying to write a challenging but balanced exam that brings together ideas and texts in interesting ways, but it's difficult to share that satisfaction with others. The students taking the exam are so focused on getting the answers down that they don't notice or comment on how well the exam is constructed, and my colleagues have exams of their own to worry about, so writing an excellent exam is a solitary pleasure.

This semester, though, I'm enjoying the opportunity to pay attention to my colleagues' exams. As a member of the committee evaluating portfolios assembled by faculty members seeking tenure, promotion, and third-year review, I get to look over the shoulders of colleagues in other disciplines and notice the pains they take in writing exams that matter. I appreciate the artistry that goes into writing many exams, and I enjoy having a part in affirming those efforts.

But I'm not up for review this year so I can't go around showing off my wonderful exams to anyone. You'll have to take my word for it: I just wrote a terrific exam. Let's hope my students agree.

Take your recycling somewhere else

The stack of freshman papers on my desk reminds me why I dislike assigning literary analysis papers to beginning writers: many students think it's so darn clever to recycle papers written for high school English classes. I don't really need to read the same old tired ideas about how Gatsby represents the elusive American Dream and "The Road Less Travelled" is all about the joys of nonconformity, with touching examples from the students' own lives. Any assignment that produces this much recycled nonsense is clearly deeply flawed, but where did I go wrong? Back to square one. It's time to shut down this recycling center.

Let the wild rumpus start!

Kamau Brathwaite's poem "Blues" begins with a section labelled "Basie" that starts like this:

Hunched, hump-backed, gigantic,
the pianist presides above the
rumpus...

And suddenly I'm transported to a Maurice Sendak scene, with Basie playing for a wild rumpus while pink palm trees sway in the breeze. Better romp while we can because when the boat leaves, the rumpus is over.

Finally fall

Bright yellow trees stood out like beacons behind the thick layer of fog blanketing the valley this morning. Fall is finally here: I smell it in the air and feel it in the morning chill. In the garden, the tomatoes are done but the root crops and cabbages are begging to be harvested, and deer are chomping on the sweet potatoes. Yesterday I chopped a turnip so fresh it came open with a snap, and I peeled beets so rich and dark they smelled like earth. Beets, potatoes, cabbage, turnips, parsnips, onions: a pot of borscht, a loaf of home-made pumpernickel, and good company made an excellent way to welcome the season.

A man hears what he wants to hear

I seem to have fallen into a time warp: this morning on the way to work I kept hearing Don MacLean singing "American Pie" in my head for no clear reason, and then in class one of my students turned in a paper that contained an oblique reference to "The Boxer," and since then I haven't been able to dislodge Simon and Garfunkle from my brain.

I seem to have squandered my resistance: will someone please tell me how to say bye-bye to "American Pie"? I am leaving, I am leaving but the the fighter still remains.

Getting my feet wet

Rain all day and relentless gray clouds, but that's good! We need the rain! Brown lawns and dry creeks will be happy! But it was a bad day to wear the shoes with the holes in them, the only shoes that go with my favorite suit, which now fits me after languishing for three years in the "two small" section of the closet, which is good news, and the even better news is that I'm now making forays into the "WAY too small" section of the closet, which means I need new shoes, which is bad news, except the raise letters came out today and I'm getting more than I expected, which is good-ish news, especially since I need to go pick up the shiftless car, which has just had a used rack and pinion installed, which is good news, except that means I have to drive the car, which is off the charts on the "bad" end because that means I have to go outside in the rain with leaky shoes on and then work the stubborn clutch with wet feet.

Will somebody please send me the faculty helicopter?

My fantasy book-signing

At the end of a thoughtful post complaining about a particular book, Bardiac admits that despite her reservations, she asked the visiting author to sign her copy: "I'm torn," she says, but "Hey, if I could get my Shakespeare text signed, I totally would!"

Which made me wonder: which author, living or dead, would I most like to ask to sign a book?

I have books signed by Anthony Doerr, Scott Russell Sanders, Bill Bryson, and Tim O'Brien, who seemed flattered that I was teaching "The Things They Carried." (If you locked those four authors in a room together, what would they talk about?) I have a book signed by my very talented colleague and a few visiting authors of varying talent levels. I have clearly spent too little time in the presence of greatness, because that's about it.

I'd love to have Toni Morrison sign my copy of Paradise and explain the answer to the riddle posed by the opening line, but that would defeat the purpose of the book, and if Hone Tuwhare signed a copy of his poem about the bronze Maori warrior, it would make me feel like one of the tourists the poem denigrates, the ones who seek "authentic" souvenirs of indigenous people in order to enhance their own hollow identities.

If I could get Derek Walcott, James Joyce, and Homer together, I'd like them each to sign the others' works, and then I'd like to see them all put out to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat.

If I had any books by Jim Harrison, I would ask him to sign them with an apology for all his clumsy syntax. (Sorry, Jim!) Likewise, I'd ask Ralph Ellison to sign Invisible Man with an apology for all the other books he never wrote.

I would ask Robinson Jeffers to chisel his name into a stone that I could use as a paperweight to hold open my copy of his Selected Poems to the page containing "To the Stone-Cutters," and I would ask Kurt Vonnegut to scratch his name on a stack of cannonballs covering my copy of Cat's Cradle.

I would ask Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to a mutual book-signing just to see what they would say to each other, and I would make Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf share pens. The list could go on: Salman Rushdie, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Chesnutt, James Wright (whose name could be writ in water, provided the water came from the Ohio River). And one of these days I'd like to sign my own name in a book.

But first I'll have to write it.

Free-writing or writing-free?

Moment of truth time: my freshman composition students turned in their first major papers this morning, and afterward I asked them to free-write for five minutes on the topic "What I've learned about writing so far." They wrote and they shared ideas with partners and the rest of the class, and then I told them what I had written about: the value of writing regularly. "When I make an appointment with myself to write every day," I said, "then when the appointed time comes, I find ideas waiting to meet with me."

Blank stares.

"Writing regularly improves the fluidity of my writing," I insisted.

More blank stares.

"How many of you write a blog?"

No response.

"A daily journal? Diary?"

Nada.

"Regular e-mail messages to a particular person?"

Crickets chirping.

"Does anyone in this room besides me write anything aside from class assignments?"

Silence.

The sound you now hear is the professor's head banging against the wall.

Transcend yourself!

An e-mail message from a textbook publisher invites me to "transcend the essay!" by considering three new composition textbooks. Frankly, I'm not sure I know what it means to "transcend the essay!" and even if I had clear, detailed diagrams, I'm not sure I'd be ready to take that step. I love the essay form. I even like the word "essay," despite the dark cloud of connotations it can carry in the minds of many students. To essay is to attempt, to try, to give it a shot; it's a step into the unknown, a tentative bridge across the abyss, and if it fails--well, it's not rocket science or heart surgery. No one ever died of reading or writing a bad essay (although I've read a few that have driven me pretty close to the edge).

The essay I would be tempted to transcend is the mediocre essay, if by "transcend" we mean move beyond, rise above, escape the limitations of. Very bad essays can redeem themselves by providing some humor, and good essays help me transcend the limitations of the human condition and experience exaltation to the world of ideas, but what can you do with a mediocre essay? It just sits there like radioactive waste with a long half-life, polluting everything it touches, or it sucks up ideas the way a black hole sucks up matter, inexorably drawing even light into its gravitational pull. Show me a way to transcend the mediocre essay and I might buy your textbook. Ask me to transcend the essay form entirely and I'll delete your message, exclamation points and all. It may not be easy to "Transcend the essay!", but I can transcend the e-mail with a click of a button.

The bikers, the bovine, and me

So I'm driving along a country road barely wide enough for two cars to pass when I zip around a corner and suddenly find that I'm sharing the road with three bicyclists and a cow. The bikers, clad in bright yellow and orange biker shorts, shirts, and helmets, were just ahead of me in my lane and were conscientiously observing the rules of the road; the cow, naked as the day it was born, was trotting
blithely northward in the southbound lane as if utterly unaware of the traffic code, weaving in and out of the lane and even pulling over onto the shoulder without once signalling its intentions.

I had plenty of time to slow down to accomodate traffic conditions, but the bikers, the bovine, and I were all heading slowly up a steep incline and anyone coming the other way would have been blissfully unaware that he was about to face an important decision: hit the cow head-on or swerve straight toward the bikers? I had no way to warn any approaching traffic, nor am I proficient in the appropriate methods for removing a bovine scofflaw from the right-of-way.

Fortunately, the five of us topped the hill without incident, and then the cow, perhaps seeing the error of its ways, took a left turn into a meadow. I didn't see a turn signal, but at least I was spared the sight of seeing a healthy cow turned into hamburger on the highway. 

Into the labyrinth, across the abyss

About Rome, Anthony Doerr says this:

History lies beneath the city like an extensive and complicated armature. Emperors were stabbed beneath tramlines. Sheep grazed beneath supermarkets. The thirteen obelisks of Rome have been toppled and reerected and shuffled around so many times that to lay a map of their previous positions over a map of their current ones is to evoke a miniature cross-hatching of the city's entire memory, a history of power and vanity like a labyrinth stamped beneath the streets.

Doerr's new book Four Seasons in Rome is a memoir of his attempt to negotiate that labyrinth armed with a grant, a wife, their six-month-old twin sons, and an inadequate understanding of the Italian language. He struggles to write, sleep, think, and survive in a place where his babies suffer jet-lag and he doesn't know the words for diapers, fever, crib sheets, but most of all he observes the swirl of events around him and writes about them in prose that sings.

Rome, he writes, is "a contest between sun and shadow, kingdom and time, architecture and weeds. The shadows will win, of course, and time, and weeds. But this morning the match seems close." He muses on time and eternity, wars present and past, the nature of power and the power of change, and he records his observations with the wonder of a bright-eyed boy from the provinces who suddenly finds himself in the midst of the Eternal City, where he learns to see things new:

Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw--actually saw-- a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there'd be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs.

Doerr records his wrestling with the novel he had intended to write in Rome, a project he finally shelves in favor of a story that he takes through draft after draft, revision after revision; like parenting twins, writing is a perilous adventure through unknown territory: "[T]o write a story is to inch backward and forward along a series of planks you are cantilevering out into the darkness, plank by plank, inch by inch, and the best you can hope is that each day you find yourself a little bit farther out over the abyss."

Four Season in Rome follows Doerr as he ventures out above the abyss, fumbles about to find his footing, and eventually arrives safely home again, a journey described in prose so compelling that readers will want to follow his path.

Baker's dozing

My father is in a hospital in Florida out of his mind on pain-killers while awaiting surgery and there's not a blessed thing I can do except wait for the phone to ring, but when it rings, it's one of our church members calling with the news that a sweet old lady in our congregation is not expected to live through the night and could the pastor please come? So the resident pastor, up to his elbows in bread dough for tomorrow's market, mutters a few hurried instructions and goes out the door.

Which is how I end up in charge of baking the bread tonight. "These are the easiest loaves to deal with," he says. "You can't go wrong." But the brain cells that were alert and active in my 8 a.m. freshman comp class are now running on auto-pilot and wondering: did he say 300 degrees for 45 minutes or 450 degrees for 30 minutes? The recipe is in his head, which is on its way to the hospital. My head, on the other hand, is full of fatigue.

I figure I can bake two batches before midnight and then I'll call it quits. That's not nearly enough to satisfy tomorrow's customers, but I need to teach a class at 9 a.m. so that will have to do. Besides, the resident baker may be home by then and he doesn't mind staying up all night baking bread. I'll wake up to the delicious aroma of freshly-baked bread and for a few moments I won't have to think about the fact that my father is in a hospital in Florida out of his mind of pain-killers while awaiting surgery and there's not a blessed thing I can do about it.

Enigmatic

Full text of my lecture notes for this morning's class:

1. ergonomic pirates
2. electronic reserves
3. Baudrillard

Q: What was the class? What was the topic? What was the point?

Picky, picky

A correspondent told me that his daughter, a college freshman, received a zero on a quiz because she had turned in a paper with ragged perforations on the edges. This strikes me as a bit picky; after all, a professor who gets that wigged out about ragged perforations has set his annoyance threshold pretty low. But then the question arises: when is such pickiness justified? And how picky is too picky?

For instance, when marketing and business education majors at Illinois State University were required to dress in "business casual" attire or be thrown out of classes, they rebelled; as a result, the dress code remains but the potential penalty has been softened: professors are allowed to deduct up to 10 percent from a student's final grade for unprofessional attire or behavior. (Read about it here.)

And a philosophy professor at McGill University requires students in her course on Plato to earn 100 percent on a quiz on the Greek alphabet or drop the class. (Read it here.) An uproar ensued, with students rejecting rote memorization and faculty members pointing out that learning the Greek alphabet is probably the easiest task encountered in a course on Plato.

And then we have ongoing debates on many campuses about whether hats, pajamas, cell phones, laptop computers, bare midriffs, or slippers should be permitted in class, and what about the student who comes to class accompanied by his therapy ferret?

Pickiness in the service of education is justified: students seriously studying Plato need to know a little Greek, and students entering the business world need to learn about professional behavior. I'm not sure what educational purpose is served by flunking students who turn in quiz papers with ragged perforations, unless the goal is to teach that form is more important than content and that nothing is more important than kowtowing to a professor's personal neuroses.

But then I always tell my students that I don't care how they complete their in-class writing assignments as long as I can read them. One of these days a student will try to write the quiz answers on his hand and try to turn it in at the end of class, and then I'll be sorry. Until then, thoough, I'll keep my annoyance threshold pretty high and be picky only when it serves a clear educational purpose.

Defining moments

Yesterday in the middle of my Postcolonial Literature class, a class that has spent three solid weeks reading and discussing and writing about literature by twentieth-century African authors, a senior in the back raised his hand and asked, "What's apartheid?"

I covered my consternation by turning around to write "apartheid" on the whiteboard, and I vividly recalled the time I had asked the same question. I pronounced it "apar-thade," but I was in eighth grade at the time and I was a reader, not a talker. I don't recall now where I had encountered the term, but I asked a classmate to define "apartheid" and she gave me a look I'd seen before--the glare of consternation she wore whenever I provided further evidence of my mis-spent youth--and then she corrected my pronunciation and explained the concept. I've often wondered what ever happened to Diana: if any eighth-grader was cut out for a career in teaching, she's the one.

I thought of her as I was writing "apartheid" on the whiteboard and then I turned to the class and asked for enlightenment, which, thankfully, they were able to provide. But how did we get through three weeks of reading and writing and discussing (including a major reading assignment establishing the historical context) without a clear understanding of such an essential concept? And, more importantly, how did a student manage to make it to his senior year of college without knowing the meaning of the word? Where have I gone wrong--and how do I make it right again?

I wish Diana were here. She would know.

Bulwarks of something-or-other

A colleague and I were speaking very circumspectly about a recent incident involving Professors Behaving Badly: no one listening would have been able to discern the identity of the miscreant or the exact nature of the offense, but a student standing nearby expressed surprise at the existence of drama among the ranks. "Professors aren't supposed to have drama," she said; "Professors are supposed to be bulwarks of sanity in an insane world!"

I'm sure you can still hear the bitter laughter ringing through the air.

Inexplicable omissions

Movie listing found in the Sept. 17 New Yorker:

Helvetica
A documentary about the typeface and its historical significance. Directed by Gary Hustwit.


Movie listings inexplicably not found in the Sept. 17 New Yorker:

Sciatica
A musical about lumbar radiculopathy. Directed by Julie Taymor, who also designed the costumes.

Niagara
An animated adventure following the progress of two brave little drops of water as they journey through the hydrologic cycle and encounter the joys and dangers of our great big wonderful world. Disney animation at its best!

Toyota Celica
A romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts as a woman with a cranky car and Hugh Grant as the man with the oil can. Directed by Jane Campion.

Fra Angelico
Saints with paint take the screen in this psychological thriller about the development of linear perspective. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Asbestos
The epic story of asbestos abatement and the gutsy men who make it possible. Directed by Peter Jackson, with music by John Williams.

Trifecta
This year's hot sports flick pits Tom Hanks against the odds in a celebration of parimutuel betting. Directed by Ron Howard.

Dulcimer
Matt Damon stars in this thriller about a dulcimer repairman who maliciously mis-tunes antique instruments. Directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Quincunx
Woody Allen wrote, directed, and stars opposite Scarlett Johansson in this comedy of mathematical mysticism on the streets of Manhattan.

Another addition to my imaginary entourage

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a sign that said "Reality Specialists," and I thought, Just what I need!

When I'm shopping online and on the verge of clicking on "Add to shopping bag," I need a Reality Specialist to say, "Remember the last time you ordered from that company? That vest may look exquisite in print, but the fabric will be as flimsy as well-worn pajamas."

When I'm grabbing for another handful of free popcorn in the faculty lounge, I need a Reality Specialist to say, "Free food is not the same thing as calorie-free food, and a bag of popcorn does not count as a serving of vegetables."

When I'm planning my syllabus for the coming semester and I schedule all my classes to turn in major papers on the same day, I need a nudge from my Reality Specialist to remind me that even Homer nodded and that English professors likewise need their rest.

When I'm dreaming of all the wonderful ways I can spend my tax refund, I need a Reality Specialist to wave a sheaf of credit-card bills in front of my face.

Someone to stop me from stepping off the cliff into fantasyland: that's the sort of Reality Specialist I need. Where can I find one?

Not here, apparently, because when I looked a the sign more closely, I discovered that it actually advertised "Realty Specialists." Nuts: now how am I supposed to add a Reality Specialist to my imaginary entourage?

Time to advertise: "Reality Specialist needed. Join a team of imaginary individuals devoted to making my life easier. Must be willing to work for popcorn."

Now I'll just wait for the applications to roll in.

Evaluating evaluations

I just received an e-mail from the provost thanking me for writing a colleague's annual evaluation. "It must have been a joyful task," she wrote. And you know what? She's right.

Writing evaluations is one part of my job that I really enjoy. I love visiting my colleagues' classes because I always learn something and I find their passion for teaching inspiring. I enjoy reading updates on their research and their plans for the future. I don't always enjoy reading student evaluations because there's a certain inanity to many of the comments; I don't really need to hear from any more students who think it's unreasonable that a Writing Intensive class might, of all things, require a lot of writing. But I read them, glean what's helpful, and move on.

And I really enjoy writing about my colleagues and bringing their accomplishments to the awareness of others. When I nominate a colleague for an award or write a letter of support for a sabbatical request or write an evaluation that will be a part of a tenure file, and when my efforts produce positive results, I'm like a parent whose child has just earned a round of applause: "Yep, that's my kid up there! Part of me! Couldn't be prouder!"

I suppose things would be different if I had a group of cranky or creepy or annoying colleagues in my department, but I am blessed with some really wonderful co-workers. Spending time observing and writing about wonderful people: could there be a more joyful task?

Shiftless revisited

I need to clarify a few points about my recent car fiasco (read it here) for the benefit of concerned colleagues ("You did WHAT?!") as well as those impressionable young readers who might be my daughter:

1. I was NOT hitch-hiking. I was simply walking along the shoulder of the highway minding my own business, and if I had not been picked up, I would have kept walking until I hit the gas station on the edge of town (about a mile) or perhaps even the Farmers' Market (three or four miles).

2. So why did I get into a car with a strange man? Well, for one thing, he wasn't that strange: he was a clean-cut middle-aged guy, and his truck carried the logo of a prominent local business known for its integrity.

3. But how did I know he wasn't an ax murderer? My firm belief, perhaps misguided, is that ax murderers don't search for prey at 8 a.m. Saturday morning. In fact, I have always subscribed to the Puritan belief that people who get up early in the morning are inherently virtuous, which suggests that the ax murderer who wants to sneak up on me should disguise himself as a clean-cut middle-aged businessman driving a company truck at 8 a.m. So I guess the moral here (and I hope my daughter is listening) is this: keep walking! Don't get in the truck!

4. Why didn't I call a friend and ask for a ride? First, no cell phone; second, unsavory edge of town where none of the houses looked as if they welcomed spontaneous friendliness; third, unwillingness to knock on strange doors before 8:00 on a Saturday morning; finally, by the time I had reached a friend, roused her from sleep, and gotten her to drive out to wherever I was calling from, I could have walked all the way to the Farmers' Market.

5. Why didn't I call AAA? See above, plus this: I always forget that I have a membership with AAA. I've had a membership for three or four years and I've used it exactly once, primarily because I have difficulty thinking of myself as the kind of person who can afford AAA. (Crazy, I know.) I actually woke up in the middle of the night Saturday and remembered: "I could have called AAA!" And then Sunday afternoon, we did just that and got the car towed to our mechanic's garage.

It's back now, by the way, and it runs, except it won't go into fifth gear. It needs some pretty serious work that could end up costing more than the car is worth, but while the mechanic gets us some quotes, we're driving the car--very carefully. We do have a new rule, though: whoever drives the gimpy car must carry the cell-phone. Next time I end up shiftless, I'll be ready.

It's not the heat...

This morning in class I had trouble handing out papers because the humidity had turned them limp and sticky. We've had a little rain this week (badly needed) but mostly we've had gloomy dark clouds and little spitty bits of drizzle and a constant annoying moisture that creeps into photocopiers to make the paper jam and oozes into keyboards to make the keys stick and looms over students and faculty alike to dampen spirits and drain energy. It's the kind of weather that makes you want to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over your head, but here we are instead trying to learn a few things.

Can I declare myself a conscientious objector to the weather?

Art from evil

When you have a bad experience with a book, sometimes the best thing to do is to set it aside and wait a while before giving it another chance to prove its worth. In the case of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, my reading experience was poisoned by its context.

The book was required reading in the worst graduate-school class I ever had, a three-hour seminar that met on the fourth floor of a very old building in which the only ladies' rest room was on the first floor--and there were no elevators. The professor was, excuse the technical language, a wuss: he allowed a small group of American Cultural Studies grad students to dominate the discussion and run roughshod over other students' ideas, and he wouldn't even start the class until those three favored disciples arrived, even if they were 20 minutes late. But that kind of behavior was not unusual at a university in which the American Cultural Studies program was nationally renowned while the Literature Ph.D. was being phased out. (I may have been the penultimate recipient of a Literature Ph.D. in that program--unless one of those perennial ABDs finally finished the dissertation.)

The event that really soured me on that course occurred the week before we were scheduled to discuss Blood Meridian. Now on the first day of class, Professor Wuss had explained why he had selected each book on the reading list and described it in glowing terms, but as we approached Blood Meridian, it was clear that something was awry. The professor looked distressed. "I'm sorry I assigned Blood Meridian," he said. "One of my colleagues pressured me to include it on the reading list. I just started reading it and I find the violence disturbing. Frankly, I couldn't get past page 57."

The next week when he asked the class what they thought of the book, you wouldn't believe what they said: "Disturbing." "Appalling." "Couldn't get past page 57."

(Page 57, for those familiar with the novel, is where our hero stumbles upon the dead-baby bush. It's a pretty clear indication that the reader will be spending the next 300 pages in Hell.)

Now I'm just contrary enough to have been annoyed by the professor's attempt to dictate students' responses to the book, so I had read the whole thing--and from casual conversations before class, I knew a few others had read it too. But when the professor asked how many people had finished the book, my hand was the only one that went up.

The favored disciples shook their heads as if I'd just admitted to eating small children for breakfast, and the professor demanded that I defend the book. "You assigned it--you defend it" was what I wanted to say, but that would not have been wise. (Given his specialization, that professor could easily have ended up on my dissertation committee, and I can thank my lucky stars that he did not). The class was three hours long. I did my best.

For years I've wondered whether Blood Meridian was really worth all that fuss, because it would be ridiculous to be publicly crucified over a book that isn't really very good. So finally this year I decided to read it again, and the verdict is mixed.

Let's admit right at the start that the violence is disturbing, but on the other hand, the worst violence is described with the same sort of affectless prose we encounter in some of those Old Testament passages dealing with dashing babies' heads against the rocks or chopping a concubine into 12 chunks for easy mail delivery. More disturbing is the fact that some of the violence inspires really beautiful prose, such as the vivid passage in which a man's death by burning is described in words that flame right off the page.

Is it acceptable to make art out of evil? That would have made a great discussion question in that long-ago grad-school class, but it would have been difficult to discuss without some reference to the book that no one had read. It's a question that comes up in reference to Holocaust literature and, more recently, literature about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The same question could be asked about, for instance, Dante's Inferno, but the Inferno is not the end of the story: Hell might be full of wretched people gnawing on each others' necks, but Paradise is always ahead.

McCarthy, on the other hand, offers Hell without the promise of Paradise. If McCarthy's purpose was to immerse readers in the problem of pain and rub their noses in the type of evil that like a roaring lion searches to and fro seeking whom it may devour, then the book is a success, but it's not for the faint of heart. I wouldn't recommend it to Professor Wuss or his ilk. It takes a strong stomach to walk through Hell, and some are just not up to the journey.

Shiftless

This morning I wondered when I would be able to squeeze a walk into my busy day: with papers to grade, cabbages to chop, and an essay to revise, it just didn't look like the right weekend for a walk. But the day had barely started when suddenly a walk insinuated itself into my schedule, just between the time I abandoned the car on the side of the highway and the time when the nice man in the white pickup truck offered me a ride.

It wasn't a flat tire this time but something more challenging. I was driving my husband's car because he needed my van to haul all the veggies and home-made bread to the Farmers' Market, and I had a few errands to run before I joined him there, the most important being the task of getting the bank to change a bunch of 20-dollar-bills into ones and fives for the Market cashbox, so that I was carrying significantly more cash than I normally do, not to mention that I had my camera bag with all the fancy lenses in it and a travel mug (why didn't I leave that in the car?) and a library book, so when the car finally cruised to a stop in an unsavory neighborhood beside a busy highway, I was a little nervous. But what could I do? The car would not go on.

I can't really blame a 16-year-old Honda CRX with 185,000 miles on it for wanting to take a rest, but it could have given me a little more warning. I had no idea anything was wrong until I turned right onto the highway and tried to shift into first gear, but it wouldn't. The gearshift lever just flopped around as if unattached to anything. I let the car coast down the hill and pulled over when it ran out of steam, and then there was nothing to do but walk.

I walked past a house surrounded by a big chain-link fence decorated with signs saying "Beware of the Dogs." I walked past a construction site, quiet on Saturday, and a bar, closed at 8 a.m., and an old farm house with boarded-up windows and a saggy roof. I could see the interstate in the distance and hear the sound of trucks and travelers zipping past at 70 miles per hour, and I tried to send some silent signals begging them to take this exit and drive my way, but no. Pleasant day for a walk, I thought, but that was just whistling in the dark--if I could whistle.

Finally a local landscaper stopped and gave me a ride to the Farmers' Market, where I grabbed the van and finally got a start on my immense to-do list. At least I can cross off the walk--except it was never on the list to begin with.

Score one for the flies

So I'm out in the garden stooping and squatting to pick hot peppers when suddenly a horsefly as big as Connecticut discovers my sweaty back, much in the way Christopher Columbus discovered America: "Look! A vast expanse of unclaimed territory bulging with natural resources--and mine, all mine!"

Meanwhile, I'm suddenly straightening up with a yelp: "Hey! If you haven't noticed, I'm sort of using this back right now, so buzz off!"

But the fly not only fails to listen, but he also notifies his extended family of an unprotected back in the pepper sector, and before you know it I'm spending half my time bending to pick peppers and the other half standing and swatting myself spastically with my visor or whatever else happens to be at hand, including, once, a red chili, which was less effective at discouraging the horseflies than you might think. One time I knocked the biggest horsefly to the ground, but he was only stunned. Before I could squash him, he was buzzing around my back just out of my reach.

I somehow finished picked my peck of peppers and headed for the house, where a careful examination revealed three big horsefly welts on my shoulder, neck, and back--but don't worry about me. A horsefly bite is no more painful than, say, being beaten repeatedly about the shoulders with a ball-peen hammer.

Today's score: horsefly 3, human 0, but I'll survive to swat another day.

How to read Terry Eagleton

"In everyday life, talking about imaginary people as though they were real is known as psychosis; in universities, it is known as literary criticism."

So says Terry Eagleton in his entertaining book How to Read a Poem. While the book provides a fount of helpful information about the history of literary criticism and the relationship of form and content in poetry, I'm mostly enjoying his pithy asides, such as the statement on the first page that "[l]ike thatching or clog dancing, literary criticism seems to be something of a dying art."

What nightmare haunts the literary critic? "Literary critics live in a permanent state of dread--a fear that one day some minor clerk in a government office, idly turning over a document, will stumble upon the embarrassing truth that we are actually paid for reading poems and novels. This would seem as scandalous as being paid for sunbathing or having sex."

How is a poem different from a candy bar? "People sometimes talk about digging out the ideas 'behind' the poem's language, but this spatial metaphor is misleading. For it is not as though the language is a kind of disposable cellophane in which the ideas come ready-wrapped."

How is a poem different from an e-mail message? "[T]hey treat the poem as though its author chose for some eccentric reason to write out his or her views on warfare or sexuality in lines which do not reach to the end of the page. Maybe the computer got stuck."

And so on. I'm halfway through the book so I've reached the part where he writes in depth about specific ways to approach and analyze poetry, and while my goal is to determine how useful this book might be in an undergraduate survey class, I'll keep the book even if I decide not to use it in class--primarily because it's pleasant to spend time with someone who shares my peculiar psychosis.

Summertime, sort of

This afternoon I've been transported to next summer without the benefit of a time machine. How? By writing a proposal for a summer research grant.

I can't tell you reliably what I'll be doing in the middle of next week, but today I have produced an action plan and timetable showing what I expect to be doing all next summer, research-wise. It's a little early to submit the proposal, but I want to write it while the research I've already done is still fresh in my mind. This has forced me to look over what I accomplished on this project in summer 2007, and you know what? It's pretty cool.

I just hope the faculty development committee finds it as cool as I do, because if I get the grant, I can spend all next summer immersed in this cutting-edge piece of literary scholarship without worrying about teaching summer classes. Go, grant proposal! Make it so!

Cantaloup vs. Reality

I came home tonight to find on the table a cantaloup straight from the garden--the sweetest, freshest, juiciest cantaloup I have ever tasted--and it could not have come at a better time. I made it through the first week of classes with plenty of energy and optimism, but yesterday, I hit the wall named Reality and came home feeling flattened.

So we took a walk and looked at red-tailed hawks and saw an oriole, which helped a little, and then today I went out to lunch with a person who can be relied on to cheer me up, which helped more, and then I stopped by for a chat with someone I rarely see, which helped even more, and then I came home and found that cantaloup. In a one-on-one smackdown between the cantaloup and Reality, the cantaloup wins.

Still, I'm taking ome leftover cantaloup to campus tomorrow just in case Reality once again rears its ugly head.

Laboring on Labor Day

"Why are we here?"

When my student asked the question this morning, he was not introducing a metaphysical exploration into the meaning of life. Rather, it was a practical question: Why are we here having class when everyone else is off having picnics?

"It's Labor Day," I said. "We labor."

But it is a legitimate question: on a campus bulging with really smart people, why can no one figure out how to put a Monday holiday into the academic calendar? My two children are split on this--one has classes today and the other does not--but the one who has the day off illustrates the problem: since her classes started last Tuesday and she has no classes today, she'll be three weeks into the semester before her Monday classes ever get a chance to meet.

On my campus we have a number of labs and a few evening classes that meet only on Mondays, so a Monday holiday means a week's worth of missed work. But surely other colleges figure out how to avoid this problem, so why can't we?

Some people have the day off: the secretaries and janitors and other support service employees are enjoying their family picnics today, which means we're having classes in buildings that haven't been cleaned since Friday. But because that's the way it's always been done and because no one is sufficiently motivated to find a solution, the rest of us labor on Labor Day.

And that's why we're here. Next question?

Finally Somebody

"Somebody needs to clean that catbox," I said, but Somebody has gone away to college and I doubt that he'll drive 1000 miles every weekend just to tend to the cat's needs.

"And what about the okra?" I said. "Somebody needs to pick it." But Somebody has gone back to Kentucky where she's busy picking out songs for her junior recital.

"And while we're at it," I added, "Somebody needs to fill the birdfeeders," but Somebody has gone away to earn his own wings.

"Will Somebody please pick the blossoms off this basil?" I asked, but Somebody is at college learning how to make her own talents blossom.

I've always wanted to be Somebody. Looks like I've found my chance!

A learning experience

The first week of classes is over and what have I learned?

1. How fun a class full of senior English majors can be. I haven't taught the capstone for a few years and I had forgotten the joy of tossing an idea out on the table and watching the majors toss it around. Any class in which I'm not the only one teaching is a good class.

2. How different and smart and new every class of freshman writers can be but how nevertheless the same old questions keep coming up: Yes, the class starts promptly at 8 a.m. whether your alarm rings or not. Yes, the computer lab across the hall is a great place to print out assignments, but if the door's locked or the paper runs out, you're out of luck. No, I won't accept your homework assignment late. Yes, I do expect you to do the assignment even though you don't have a textbook because you ordered it online and it hasn't arrived yet. No, you may not borrow my textbook.

3. How old I'm getting, part 1: my Postcolonial Literature Survey is a big class in a big room and if the students in the back row don't speak up, I can't hear them.

4. How old I'm getting, part 2: the new faculty members don't appear to be a whole lot older than the students in my freshman comp class, and I seem to have more in common with the graybeards labeled "Senior Faculty" than with the fresh-faced young scholars.

But at least I'm still learning. If learning has occurred, then some good has been done here.

The curious incident of the book in the airline

Last week I discovered the perfect airline travel book: Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. An airline travel book must be engaging enough to distract me from the rigors of airline travel but not too taxing on the little grey cells, and it should not include disasters involving flight or travel or anything else too emotionally demanding. Let's face it: modern airline travel is demanding enough. The book should provide an escape from misery, not an immersion in it.

Anything by P.G. Wodehouse or Douglas Adams makes a good airline travel book, and I once read Julian Barnes's England, England while flying to England, which worked really well. A Spot of Bother is Haddon's second novel; I think I also read the first while traveling (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time). A Spot of Bother has a plot similar to that of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, but Haddon's book is a better traveling companion because (1) it's shorter; (2) it's funnier; and (3) it features characters you'd actually like to spend time with.

Haddon got me through my long day of flying and waiting to fly home from Texas last week, but the great thing about reading a book in terminals and airplanes is that the travel experience tends to erase everything I read from my brain within nanoseconds after I've read it. That means I'll be able to enjoy Haddon's book again--this time while sitting still.

Walking downstream

Walking upstream or uphill or downhill from my house can be accomplished alone, but walking downstream requires company. I've walked that route alone just once and every car that came along stopped to see if I needed a ride--it just doesn't look like the kind of walk anyone would take voluntarily. I also need someone to keep me walking through the steep spots when I'm wondering why I shouldn't just turn around and mosey back down the hill. Strange but true: following the creek downstream requires walking up the steepest, twistiest, orneriest stretch of road within a mile of my house.

It's also the most populated route. It's possible to take a two-mile round-trip hike upstream without ever passing a human dwelling, but the downstream walk leads past six or eight houses, some hidden in the hollows of the hills and others right up next to the road. It starts with a left turn at the end of my driveway, where I am generally greeted by the dogs that live at the little house across the road. One particularly friendly basset hound will follow any fool who wanders past, but at least he's pleasant company. The first curve in the road leads past another house where an elderly doddering border collie guards the road, challenging every creature that walks or drives by. That dog sits all day with its nose just touching the edge of the road on a sharp blind curve where there's really no room for two vehicles to pass--it's a wonder it has lived to get so old.

The border collie and the basset go through their usual challenge-and-response ritual, the elderly collie always ending up as top dog. Sometimes the basset turns back and sometimes he keeps going. Either way, the road goes on, dividing the neighbor's hay meadow on the left from the steep cow pasture on the right. Usually the cows are out of sight up on top of the hill, but sometimes a few cows pause in their chewing to watch me pass. All summer we've been seeing indigo buntings right through here, so we assume they're nesting nearby. Goldfinches and butterflies flitter through the tall weeds in the hay meadow, and in the spring, red-winged blackbirds perch on the fenceposts around the cow meadow.

The road stays level at first, curving gently through the hollow, but then the creek disappears behind a hill while the road goes straight up--except it's not straight at all. First it curves to the left and then to the right and then sharply to the right again around the blind curve that forces us to drive by faith all year round. The road squeezes between a steep bluff falling down toward the creek on the left and a wooded slope rising on the right. There's no shoulder and nowhere to run should a car suddenly appear around the curve, but fortunately, traffic on this road is pretty thin. My road doesn't really go anywhere except home for the few people who live out here.

They're farmers mostly, although no one really makes a living as a farmer out here so they all have other jobs. The biggest spread is visible from the walk up the hill, an old white farmhouse surrounded by outbuildings of every kind: corncribs and cattle barns and pig barns and tractor sheds, the sort of neat and tidy farm you'd see in a documentary about America's noble farmers. This is the old home place for the family that owns most of the property along our road; one son's family lives up on the hill where the cattle run and the other son's family lives across the road with the friendly basset hound. When he's not farming, the basset's owner is a riverboat pilot, which lends a sort of pioneer spirit to the area, although it's not as romantic an occupation as one might think. He spends weeks at a time playing cards in cold, cramped cabins of boats pushing barges full of coal.

Back up the hill the road continues, up and up without a break while my pace slows and my heart-rate quickens. Reaching the top is a triumph, but the walk's not over yet: the road leads downhill gently through deep green woods that fall away toward the creek on the left and rise up the hill on the right. Just past the curve I can still see the spot where the school bus slid off the road, but the woods are quickly healing that wound. No houses are visible here, which makes it a perfect spot for people to stop their cars and dump loads of trash over the side of the hill; if you look down at just the right angle, you can see an old recliner among the underbrush. I'll never understand why people mistake the countryside for a landfill.

This is also where we most frequently see deer and where I hit one once. They come down from the safety of the woods and cross the road to get to the creek below. This summer we kept seeing a small speckled fawn wavering by the edge of the road and we wondered where its mother was, and another summer we saw big awkward families of wild turkeys scrambling hysterically through the underbrush.

The road moves down gently toward the state highway, where the road ends and the creek meets the river. The last gentle bends of the creek are deep and wide and harbor herons and sometimes ducks, and there's an amazing sycamore near the bank that's shrouded in a garland of bright-red ivy leaves long before fall color arrives anywhere else.

Reaching the highway feels like victory: the end of the road! I made it! But the only way back is to turn around and face that hill again. The slope is gentler from this side, but who has any energy left to climb it? On my own, it feels impossible--but with company, it's just another walk.

When perfection isn't the goal

I have a dilemma.

Students write a lot in my classes, and sometimes their writing provides excellent examples of concepts I'm trying to teach, so I frequently type up sentences or paragraphs from students' writing to share with the rest of the class (anonymously, of course, although some students speak up and identify their work). I choose work not because it is the best or the worst but because it illustrates a particular concept or technique, even if it's not perfect.

And here is where the problems arise: suppose a certain paragraph from a student's paper includes a really interesting example that I'd like to share with the rest of the class, but it also includes some small errors in grammar or spelling. If I'm trying to get students to pay attention to the way one of their classmates incorporates quotations, then I don't want them to be distracted by the fact that a comma is missing or an author's name is spelled wrong.

Is it better to silently correct the small errors or to leave them alone and display the sample warts and all? Which is more important: clarity or accuracy?

My practice is to silently correct small errors unless they provide opportunities for learning, but I've never felt good about this. On the other hand, I hate to put a piece of student work up there and point out everything it does wrong; I'd rather focus on what it does right.

Which is better? Any suggestions? Maybe I ought to ask the students.

Reading and writing and grinning

One of my colleagues came into the department office after teaching his first class, a huge smile on his face. "Good class?" I asked. "Great so far," he said, "but I haven't read any of their writing yet."

Well I have read some of their writing and I'm still smiling. Yes, at 9:00 on the very first day of classes, I made my students write about a poem they'd never seen before. The results are not bad. There are a few marginal responses, but several of the essays made me want to pump my fists and say "Yes!"

Writing about poetry on the first day of class is part of the assessment plan for my literature survey classes. I need to measure students' ability to conduct a close reading of an unfamiliar text, so I give them a poem and a question on the first day and a similar task on the final exam and evaluate both of them with a common rubric. The result is a meaningful number: most semesters, more than three-quarters of my survey students improve their close-reading ability, many of them significantly.

There is an ulterior motive for this exercise, though: to scare students away. The literature survey courses carry general education credit, so they're always overenrolled and waitlisted. What's the best way to scare away the students looking for an easy A? Toss 'em a poem on the first day and make 'em analyze it.

Finally, the exercise requires students to think (and write) about the purpose of literature. In American Lit Survey, I'll often use "To the Stone-Builders" by Robinson Jeffers, and in this morning's Postcolonial Lit Survey, I used "On a Theme by Hone Taiapa" by Hone Tuwhare. Both poems compare the creation of poetry to working with the hands (building a wall or carving a totem), and both raise interesting questions about what literature is for. I get excited about that kind of question and I want my students to do so too.

So if anyone asks me why I'm grinning today, I'll say, "Great class--and I've read their writing."

Ready or not, here they come!

Syllabi are copied and rosters are printed out (after a brief moment of frustration when my computer insisted on printing out the class rosters roughly two inches tall--I'd need an electron microscope to read those names!). There's a nice spread of muffins and fruit in the department office to welcome back my wonderful colleagues. The bulletin board is finished, books are in stock, and this morning's lesson plan is all prepared.

There's just one thing lacking: the students. They're the final element that will make this day complete.

While you were out....

Go away for a few days and what happens?

Well, um, nothing much. I stopped by my office today to see if there were any frantic messages on my phone or in my box, but no. Everything seems to have run smoothly while I was gone. Great. There's nothing like feeling needed!

Well, okay, a few things happened while I was out. One of my colleagues had a beautiful baby girl. Another one sent me a proposal for a grant from a committee of which I am no longer chair. The garden produced many many hot peppers of various types. The heat element in the oven shorted out, producing a lovely sparkly show before dying completely. A big pile of mulch appeared. Progress was made on the library. Committees were appointed. Life goes on.

I ought to have just enough time to deal with some of those hot peppers before classes start on Monday. It's the calm before the storm...so let's spice it up a little. Salsa, anyone?

Sweat happens

The good news is that the first 700 miles of our car trip were accomplished in air-conditioned comfort. Those last 300 miles, though, were pretty miserable: triple-digit temperatures, no air conditioning, open windows rattling every time a truck zipped past. But at least we were still moving! One of these days that car's going to collapse in a heap and refuse to go on, and then it won't matter whether the air conditioning works or not.

We've been in Texas under 24 hours and the kid is all moved into to his dorm. He really didn't need much help from me, so I'm enjoying the cool air and internet access in the library.
Tonight we have an indoor picnic and the opening convocation, and early tomorrow I fly back home. I'll let the kid deal with the ailing car. After a few days in this weather, he ought to be highly motivated to find a mechanic.

We are driven

You know you've been on the road too long when a sign advertising "Used Cows For Sale" looks tempting. My first question would be "Used for what?" Because let's face it: there's a huge difference between the cow Aunt Mabel drives to church every Sunday and the cow that spends every Friday night drag-racing on country roads.

Nine hours on the road today, half of them in a Noachic deluge accompanied by radio news reports about severe drought. If I had a dollar for every tractor-trailer that passed us on I-40, I'd be in the Bahamas instead of sitting in a La Quinta Inn in Jackson, Tennessee (home, in case you hadn't heard, of the Casey Jones Homeplace and Museum). Apparently, that whole 70-miles-per-hour thing is just a suggestion.

We didn't stop to check out the used cows (because, frankly, the Neon is so full of the kid's college stuff that I don't know where we'd stash a cow), nor did we stop at Dinosaur World or the Equine Podiatry Clinic. Didn't stop much at all, in fact. Just kept driving. And we'll do the same tomorrow. College is calling: cows can wait.

Bundles of sunshine

Tomatoes: little bundles of sunshine.

Okra plants (below) make a fairy forest of tiny trees straight out of a Grant Wood painting. My husband's grandmother used to say that if you go out in the light of the full moon, stretch your arm as high as it can go, and drop the seeds from on high, then the okra plants will grow as high as your hand. I'm sure that's an old wives' tale, but our okra plants are all over three feet tall and getting taller.

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?