Arbiter of Apostrophes

The person in charge of producing the college's commencement program just asked me to serve as Arbiter of Apostrophes. A sentence describing the commencement speaker required editing to indicate possession, so one senior administrator added apostrophes thus:

John Lewis's, Georgia's House of Representatives

However, another administrator objected, insisting that it should look like this:

Lewis', Georgias'

What does the Arbiter of Apostrophes say?

The first version (Lewis's, Georgia's) consistently uses MLA style while the second follows AP Style for the name (Lewis') and no recognizable style for the state (Georgias'), unless we're referring to multiple states named Georgia.

I vote for consistency: stick with MLA even though AP aficionadoes will shriek. At least the person following MLA format got both apostrophes right!

A literary wish list

Last week a student asked me what class I most enjoy teaching, and I wanted to say, "Whichever one I happen to be teaching at the moment," but that's not a satisfying answer. I enjoy many classes for different reasons, but the class that I consistently enjoy teaching year after year is the American Lit Survey, and not just because I've taught it so many times I could do it blindfolded and with both hands tied behind my back. I just get really excited about introducing students to all those wonderful authors.

To help me decide how to update the syllabus next year, I asked my students last week to respond anonymously to three simple prompts:

• the most important thing I've learned about literature is...
• the most important thing I've learned about writing is....
• I wish....

I've found their responses interesting and sometimes surprising. I'm not surprised at the number of students who wished for less poetry ("Poetry isn't all bad, but short stories are better!") or less of certain works (David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross leads the pack in this category), but I was surprised by several specific suggestions for additions to the class. "More Plath, less Whitman," insisted one student, while others requested more Jhumpa Lahiri, more Beat poets, and works by Nikki Giovanni and Dorothy Parker. One student requested "more poems about food" while another requested less realism and more fantasy. I can feed the first student's appetite easily but I'm not so certain about the second.

"We went through the Civil War, two world wars, and Vietnam. I would have liked to read more about those historical events," wrote one student, while another asked for "more uplifting works," objecting to the Holocaust literature and poems responding to the 9/11 terrorist attacks: "Grief is a part of the world, but literature is about escaping it."

A number of students expressed surprise that American Literature is so darn good. "I had no idea so many American writers had developed and written worthwhile works," wrote one student. Where are they picking up the idea that American Literature is a ragged step-cousin of British Lit?

Several students expressed appreciation for information on literary movements. "I've really enjoyed studying postmodernism," wrote one. "I've never studied it in a class before, so basically everything I know about it is from here! I also enjoyed learning about other literary movements because they helped me connect with works from different time periods."

One student wrote that she learned an important lesson about writing from studying imagist poetry: "Be brief! But also be clear." Other students learned about the value of pre-writing and revision, the need for a solid thesis statement, and the difference between summary and analysis. One student confessed to an epiphany: "The most important thing I learned about both literature and writing came from reading A.R. Ammons and Allen Ginsberg. Their writing stresses the commitment of a writer to their work. They talk about giving away part of oneself in the name of literature and poetry, and this idea really struck me. I’ve always enjoyed literature, but in this class I have come to realize that writing it is a calling. Literature has the power to move people, to lend a voice to tragedy or hope or joy, but it requires the soul of the author to achieve this transcendence."

And that's why this is my favorite class.

The Wikipedia Excuse

A student who used direct quotes without quotation marks or citations tried to defend his actions thus: "In high school they told us we didn't have to cite Wikipedia!"

Questions I'd like to ask:

What high school teacher would encourage students to borrow quotes from Wikipedia without quotation marks or citation? Give me a name and school district so I can make some calls.

The assignment sheet calls for the use of reputable print sources appropriate for academic writing. What makes Wikipedia appropriate for this assignment?

I know your freshman composition professor, and I've seen what she does to students who insist on using Wikipedia in academic papers; moreover, I know she emphasizes the importance of punctuating and citing quotes correctly. How did you pass her class without learning these essential lessons?

You're a junior, three years removed from high school graduation. Did that precious high school diploma grant you immunity from ever learning anything new?

Constructive campus reflections

Tilt!

A free day without the freedom

Today is our one "free" day before finals begin, but I'm still hunting for that promised freedom. First thing this morning I interviewed a potential adjunct, took care of the paperwork required to issue a contract, attended a going-away party for one colleague and a retirement party for another, attended a committee meeting called hastily to cope with questions about a proposal to be presented at today's faculty meeting, and attended the long and contentious faculty meeting...which means I haven't copied tomorrow's finals or graded any of the 64 papers awaiting attention on my desk. Now I need to leave early to attend to a sick spouse. If this is freedom, I'll take captivity!

Forgetting to remember to forget

Last night I planted some flowers in planters in front of my house--ivy (two kinds), pansies (purple and white and yellow), and angelonia (purple)--and I liked the effect so much that I told my husband, "I hope I forget all about planting these so that when I come out the front door first thing in the morning, they'll be a wonderful surprise." He laughed, and rightly so. No matter how many times I reminded myself to forget the flowers, I still remembered them when I got up this morning and as I ate breakfast and while I showered and dressed. I'm a failure at forgetting, I told myself. May as well not even try.

So I stopped trying to forget. Instead, I did my nails and then immersed myself in Remembrance of Things Past while the nail polish dried. When I finally went out the door, I was so intent on avoiding smudging my nails that I didn't even think about the flowers but walked right by without even seeing them.

Then I got in the car and looked through the windshield and there they were: pansies and ivy and angelonia. I had forgotten all about them and now, seeing them as if for the first time, they were a wonderful surprise, an unexpected gift.

Is it the gift that keeps on giving? Note to self: remember to forget the flowers.

Syllabus smackdown

Dear Student,

I am sorry to inform you that, contrary to your fond belief, you are not exempt from meeting the demands of the syllabus for my class.

I am aware that you were absent on the first day of class when we discussed the syllabus, but I am also aware that I gave you a copy of the syllabus when you finally, two weeks into the semester, honored the class with your presence. "Let me know if you have any questions on the syllabus," I said, but you didn't ask any questions so I assumed that you understood it. Furthermore, I clearly recall giving you a second copy of the syllabus after you lost the first one, and then after you lost the second copy, I pointed out that the syllabus is also easily accessible online.

Your grades in the class are also easily available online, so I'm not sure why you waited until the final week of class to look them up. I understand that you're a creative genius, a free spirit who finds the whole idea of grades and deadlines oppressive, but if that's the case, isn't your current panic about the grade a bit hypocritical? Your policy of not caring about grades and deadlines has resulted in a pretty pathetic grade, which would not be any surprise if you had bothered to read the syllabus.

I am aware that you also did not read (and perhaps did not purchase) the textbooks for the class or do most of the work, although the work you did produce was competent enough. I suspect that you are quite satisfied with your own writing skills and hope that those writing skills will someday usher you into a realm in which you will be rewarded for exercising creativity without reference to oppressive deadlines or rubrics or performance expectations--but if that world exists, you're not there yet.

You are here in my classroom, where the syllabus applies equally to all students. I am aware that you consider it demeaning to be forced to fit your creative talents to the expectations of a tyrant wedded to the oppressive world of grades and deadlines, but it's entirely possible that you could learn some valuable lessons from a professor who has actually earned a living by writing. One important lesson I've learned in my writing career is that writers who can't meet deadlines don't have careers.

Similarly, students who don't follow the syllabus don't pass the class. It's that simple. If you find my expectations oppressive, feel free to file an academic grievance with the provost's office. Instructions and deadlines for academic grievances are clearly outlined in the student handbook, which is probably located right next to your class syllabus.

Struck speechless

If literature has nothing to say to tragedy, then what good is it?

This question arose in my American Lit Survey class today during a discussion of a section of Art Spiegelman's Maus and some poems responding to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The fact that the Norton Anthology, like so many others, divides American literature into eras based on wars suggests that literature does have something to say in response to tragedy. Sometimes what literature says to tragedy is that there's really nothing that can be said, no gesture sufficient to respond to the enormity of the situation. D. Nurske's poem "The Reunification Center," for instance, catalogs the unusual offerings distraught survivors pressed on those working through the chaos following the collapse of the towers: "we offered aspirin, / stock certificates, a child's rocking horse, / a teddy bear with an empty eye socket, / but no one consented to receive that treasure."

I don't have any eyeless teddy bears to offer my colleague whose husband died unexpectedly yesterday morning. Everyone who heard the news was stunned speechless, unable to comprehend that a person we just saw last week walking hand-in-hand with his wife has suddenly left us without warning. People keep pointing out what a genuinely nice person he was, as if nice people ought to be immune from death, and we wonder what we ought to do for our colleague. Of course there will be the common gestures, but cards and flowers seem inadequate to the shock.

What would I want if I suffered such a loss the week before finals? I would want someone to bring the loved one back to life, but resurrection is beyond the power of poets and professors alike. I would want someone to take care of my classes, my advisees, my meetings and grading and assessment reports, but my grieving colleague's close-knit department will manage that. What can the rest of us do?

And if we can't do anything, then what are we good for?

Under siege by student writers

I'm under siege this afternoon, doing individual conferences on final paper drafts with one film student after another all day long. I did the same thing yesterday and I'll do the same thing tomorrow. These conferences are optional, so naturally, the students who are most in need of help with their writing have not signed up, while the best students are coming in to work one-on-one to perfect their papers.

The American Lit Survey class turned in drafts last week after an in-class peer review session, and I was so impressed by the excellent suggestions students made on each others' drafts that I found very little to suggest myself. Meanwhile, my creative nonfiction class is workshopping final paper drafts all this week. They're so proficient at reading and responding to each others' papers that I generally get to sit there and listen, but this morning I had to interject. "You've all written lovely personal essays," I said, "but unfortunately, that's not what the assignment calls for." Good thing they've got a week to revise!

I've left just enough space between student appointments to snatch a few minutes here and there for lunch and class preparations and trips to the rest room, but as soon as I get started on something, I look up to see another student at my door seeking help. Which is fine. I enjoy working with them, particularly when they're working so hard. Still, I'll be glad when tomorrow is over and I can get back to business as usual--which, starting Friday, will include grading all those papers that now exist only as drafts.

Charmingly insouciant with earthy undertones

You know how real estate ads tend to tout properties with "mature plantings"? You never see listings proclaiming "immature plantings" or "charmingly insouciant plantings" or "plantings in the final stages of decrepitude," but I know those plantings exist. In fact, some of them exist very close to home.

On a scale from "infantile" to "senescent," the plantings around my house appear to be entering adolescence. They've learned the lesson of the birds and the bees: namely, if you want to attract birds and bees, you need to put on a show. The lilacs and azaleas and even the tiny pink dogwood tree have suddenly transformed themselves from scrawny, scraggly collections of sticks to plantings bursting with va-va-voom blooms.

In the upper meadow an apple tree gnarly enough to date back to the Johnny Appleseed era has attracted a riot of buzzing bumblebees. Dead branches are destined to flavor meat smoked for our departmental picnic, but the living branches have put forth blossoms of such density that the scent carries across the meadow and down the hill. Meanwhile, the pear trees we planted last summer are producing their first blooms, along with the apple, cherry, and almond trees we planted the previous year.

The least mature plantings in our emerging orchard are the two kiwi vines, male and female, planted just yesterday uphill from the ancient apple tree. It'll take two years or three for those vines to start casting the first lingering looks at one another, but one of these days, they'll mingle and produce fruit. For now, though, they're positively infantile, two toddlers playing in the dirt, stretching their roots out to experience their new environment.

To a writer of real-estate ads, these immature plantings would be inconsequential, even invisible. To me, though, they are a sign of hope, a promise for the future. The gnarly apple tree might be nearing senescence, but it can't stop the kiwi vines from climbing toward the sun.

Scrablivion

Today I heard a student complaining that it's not her fault she drinks so much--she can't help it if there's "nothing to do here but drink."

Whenever I hear that complaint, I'm tempted to hand over a list of things a student could do instead of drink. Homework, for instance, or pulling the weeds from the flower beds behind the rec center. But I suspect that the student really wants to do something that will help her forget the fact that she's in the weeds vis-a-vis homework. If it's oblivion she's after, then drinking is one way to find it.

But what if she seeks an activity that does not necessarily result in oblivion? I recommend a portable Scrabble board. A student with a Scrabble board is never at a loss for something to do.

Not that anyone asked.

Stooping for asparagus

I picked the first asparagus of spring tonight, just five small stalks, not even enough for a single meal, but more asparaguses are poking their little heads through the earth and even more will come up if I get the weeds out of the way. I went after the weeds with a vengeance, pushing in the potato fork to loosen the roots and then stooping and grabbing and pulling up one pestilent weed after another, and now I'm sore all over. Apparently the muscles I've developed this winter with all that walking and climbing are not the same ones I need for stooping and pulling.

There's certainly nothing wrong with the muscles in charge of chewing and swallowing. Nothing tastes more like spring than fresh asparagus straight out of the ground.

River of forgetfulness

The day isn't even half over yet but I have already called several students by either no name or the wrong name and referred to the poet James Whitcomb Riley as Charles Nelson Reilly, who is not at all the same person. Not even close.

It's appropriate, then, that today's reading for American Lit Survey included the Billy Collins poem "Forgetfulness," which begins, "The name of the author is the first to go." I suppose I should be happy I didn't call the poet either Billy Carter or Martha Layne Collins. It's annoying, by the way, to effortlessly recall the name of a former president's black-sheep brother or the name of the first female governor of Kentucky when I can't recall the name of either a familiar student or the poet who wrote "The Happy Little Cripple."

"Whatever it is you are struggling to remember," continues Collins (Billy, not Martha Layne), "It has floated away down a dark mythological river / whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, / well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those / who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a bicycle." I've been heading down that river for a while now, but suddenly the current seems to be picking up speed. Can somebody throw me a lifeline?

Up in the air, junior birdmen!

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I have in front of me a photograph of my son standing in front of the airplane in which yesterday afternoon he took his first solo flight.

Maybe it's the angle of the photo, but the airplane looks teeny, hardly taller than he is. I'm trying to get accustomed to the idea that my younger child is flying around alone in the sky in a piece of equipment that looks not much bigger than a Honda Civic, but my brain cells resist, no matter how many times I look at the photo.

He's leaning his arm on the airplane in a proprietorial manner, the way he leans on his car in his prom picture, as if to mark his territory. He looks happy, like someone who has spent the afternoon blatantly defying the laws of gravity--and, moreover, intends to continue to do so. He's comfortable. He's in his element. He can fly!

And, best of all, he can land.

Puffin prose

In "The Way of the Puffin" in the April 21 New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen traces the origins of a stuffed puffin golf-club cover back to the factory in China, with some visits along the way to Chinese nature reserves and bird-watchers' meetings. First, though, he explains his love-hate relationship with golf:

My difficulty with golf is that, although I play it once or twice a year to be sociable, I dislike almost everything about it. The point of the game seems to be the methodical euthanizing of workday-sized chunks of time by well-off white men. Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl. I dislike the self-congratulations of its etiquette, the self-important hush of its television analysts. Most of all, I dislike how badly I play the game. Spelled backward, golf is flog.

I'm not much of a fan of golf, but I'm a big fan of Franzen's use of parallel structure in the third sentence and the clunky, bumptious phraseology in the second half of the second sentence.

But what does golf have to do with puffins? To find out, you'll have to read the article.

Avoiding the feedback loop

Today I received the fourth request to fill out a campus survey in four days. I have completed two of them because they were very brief, well designed, and relevant to topics of great concern to my working life, but I have thus far avoided responding to the other two. For the benefit of those vast hordes of students, faculty members, and administrators interested in receiving my valuable feedback on various topics, here's some advice:

Don't demand. Ask, request, cajole, wheedle, but don't demand.

Especially don't suddenly pop up in my inbox or in my office and demand that I drop everything and respond to your survey right now. If I tell you I'm busy right now, don't imply that your survey is more important than anything else I might be doing, and don't whine about your deadlines. I have deadlines too, and I'm not going to meet them if I drop everything to help you meet yours.

Pay attention to the wording of questions. If I can't figure out the question, I'm unlikely to come up with a meaningful answer.

Offer me several different ways to respond. Numbered scales are fine, but some questions resist quantification. Text box, anyone?

Explain why you need my expertise on this topic. If you're just looking for warm bodies to fill a quota, go ask some of those people chatting loudly on cell phones in the middle of the hallway and let me get back to work.

If this information has been helpful to you, I would value your feedback...not.

What happens when I spill a whole cup of tea on my desk

Some things get destroyed, including a note pad, some miscellaneous filing, and my desk calendar. Notes written in black ink remain legible, while those written with the gel pen dissolve into green soup, obscuring the name of the person with whom I have an appointment next Thursday at 1:00.

Some things, on the other hand, remain untouched, including a book I borrowed from a student, framed photos of my children, and a pile of ungraded quizzes.

Some things are damaged but salvageable, including a whole stack of papers I need to return today, some of which now feature illegible green blobs where comments used to be. The grades, fortunately, are still legible.

My desktop is now sparkly clean, thanks to my secretary's quick draw on the Windex trigger, but the absence of a desk calendar is a bit disturbing. I need those rows of little boxes to tell me what day it is, what I'm supposed to be doing, who needs me and why: without it, I feel lost, confused, untethered.

Come to think of it, that's not entirely a bad feeling. Toss of the tethers! It's Friday!

At least I think it is.

Upholding mystery

Today is Poem In Your Pocket Day, when people who love poetry carry poems in their pockets to share with their friends, but I have a big problem: no pockets. Since I carry my keys everywhere, I used an alligator clip to attach a poem to my key ring, which will serve as surrogate pocket for today only.

The poem in my surrogate pocket is Denise Levertov's "Man Wearing Bird," one of my favorites because of the wonderful image of the man standing on the lawn of the insane asylum with a pigeon on his head: "This is my pigeon / and I its prophet." The man may be unhinged, but he has a sense of his purpose--a purpose not unlike that of the poet: "I am a column, a pillar of / / righteousness, upholding / mystery...."

Today I'll be upholding mystery in my surrogate pocket. This is my pocket and I its prophet....

Truth is beauty, except when it isn't

Yesterday a perfect storm of rumor and innuendo swirled across campus, and each time someone told me the latest version of the ugly "truth," I told myself, "It can't possibly get any weirder than this." But it can, it can! It can always get more weird...particularly as it gets less true.

In the end I fled from the craziness and went for a walk around the woods, where I saw the first indigo buntings of the season along with lots of trilliums, spring beauties, and dutchman's breeches. No weirdness there: just honest-to-goodness beauty...but if beauty is truth and truth beauty, then I must have encountered truth as well. I go to the campus to find gossip: to find truth, I go to the woods.

Taking a poem

In "A Poem is a Walk," A.R. Ammons asserts that "every walk is unreproducible, as is every poem. Even if you walk exactly the same route each time--as with a sonnet--the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same....If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster."

I'd like to take a chance on taking a walk today, provided that the weather cooperates and my 4:00 meeting doesn't run long, but just in case the sky falls or the meeting runs overtime, I think I'll take a poem instead.

The nightmare of misnumbering

I had a nightmare last night involving a long annotated bibliography with misnumbered pages. I was desperately searching for information on page 14, but the page numbers skipped from 5 to 79 and back to 23, with no apparent order. I woke up in a cold sweat.

I'm definitely working too hard.

An unexpected windfall

We got a check in the mail yesterday and we're trying to figure out what to do with it. We'd like to spend it on something really special, something we'll remember for a long time to come. After all, it's not every day we receive a check for 31 cents.

What can we buy for 31 cents? Even a pack of gum costs more, unless we use the unique payment system demonstrated by the small child in the line in front of me at the grocery store yesterday: while his mom was distracted by the payment process, he picked up a pack of gum and put it in his pocket. I looked him in the eye and said, "That's really good gum, isn't it?" He looked at me, hand in his pocket, and thought about it a while, and then he slowly drew out the pack of gum and put it back in the rack.

If I were to follow his example and shop-lift a pack of gum, I would still be left with the 31 cents, which would defeat the purpose of the exercise. There must be a memorable way to spend 31 cents! One colleague suggested that we go to an old-fashioned feed 'n' seed store--the kind where they sell bulk seed by weight--and purchase 31 cents' worth of our favorite flower or vegetable seed. Then we can watch our 31 cents growing and multiplying all summer long.

But that's just his 31-cents'-worth. How about yours?

Ah, that fresh country air!

Today my husband is hosting a group of area pastors at our house, allowing them an opportunity to relax after the exhausting Easter season. Coincidentally, our normally quiet country road has suddenly become a locus of loudness and stink.

Some neighbors up the way have been having trees cut on their hilltop, and for the last few days, trucks pulling large loads of hardwood logs have been barreling along our road, which is just wide enough for two cars to pass and has no real shoulder, so driving is a challenge. And then yesterday the county road crew decided that it was time to send out the heavy equipment to clear debris out of the drainage ditches along the road, creating yet another obstacle to navigation along with a great deal of noise and bother.

To top it all off, yesterday our neighbors decided it was time to top-dress the fields surrounding our property, so out came the manure-spreaders.

Ah, that fresh country air!

What a Department Chair can't do

Hear ye, hear ye:

By the powers vested in me by virtue of my position as Department Chair, I hearby outlaw all medical conditions that might threaten departmental stability. I banish all allergens, viruses, cysts, bugs, and fluxes, and prohibit all such pestilences from entering my domain.

For let the record show that the English Department has suffered enough. When three out of six full-time faculty members end up in the hospital in a mere three weeks' time, it is high time for human frailty to find another venue. And so I proclaim my department off-limits to illness.

There. That ought to take care of the problem.

How journalist [sic] do their job

An article in the student newspaper states that a respected journalist who recently visited campus "believes that journalist [sic] can change the world by doing their job well and being credible."

The newspaper demonstrates its commitment to this creed by spelling the speaker's name incorrectly on the front page, spelling many words wrong within the article, using verbs that do not agree with their subjects ("sloppiness and overreaching has given readers a sense that the news media are more biased than they should be..."), and implying that George W. Bush was convicted and pardoned of charges related to failure to fulfill his National Guard duties.

I could go on, but I don't have all day.

I used to be a student journalist. I know how difficult it is to maintain journalistic standards while relying on a staff of untrained and often overcommitted writers, but one would think that a journalist writing about the need for accuracy and credibility would attempt to achieve those virtues herself.

The irony would be amusing if it weren't so tragic.

May I ask who's (not) calling?

Suppose someone walks up to your front door and rings the doorbell while you are on vacation. Could be anyone: a Jehovah's Witness, a school board candidate, your mother-in-law. And then suppose you have a doorbell that records the number of times it has been rung in your absence. When you return from vacation, do you feel any obligation to track down the ringer?

This is my main point in the arg--er, discussion I keep having with my husband about missed cell-phone calls. He sees the little number on the "missed calls" list and he becomes obsessed with finding out who has been trying to reach him; I assume that if someone really needs to reach me, he or she will call back. But then I don't have a cell phone so what do I care?

(I care because I pay the phone bills, as I reminded him the time he wanted to track down a missed call from a number in Germany....)

What did we do before the missed calls list came into our lives? The phone rang in an empty house. No one answered. End of story. Or an answering machine picked up or the call went to voice mail, which means the story lasted a little longer, but we still choose not to return some calls. For instance, I never return those calls from recorded voices telling me that the warranty on my car is about to expire. The newest car in our household is 12 years old, so if it's still under warranty, I'll eat my cell phone. (Except I don't have a cell phone, so never mind).

The missed call list is probably intended to make our lives easier, but does it really? If we didn't know about those calls, we would go blithely on our way without devoting so much as a single brain cell to their existence. The missed call list, though, puts those numbers in front of our eyeballs and demands that we decide which ones to delete and what to do with the rest.

I don't care about the rest, okay? Except when I do, such as this morning, when my husband, while driving to work, called me at home to say that his cell phone listed a missed call from the area code in Texas where our son is at college. It wasn't our son's number, so I didn't worry about it.

At first.

But then it started gnawing on me while I drove to work: who would be calling us at 6:13 a.m.--5:13 in eastern Texas? Salespeople and computers know better than to call that early in the morning. It could have been a wrong number, in which case calling back would only cost money and extend the confusion. Or it could have been my son calling with some dire need...but it would take a platoon of armed soldiers to drag him out of bed that early on a Monday.

If he needs us, he'll call. That's what I keep telling myself. So far, the phone is not ringing, which makes me wonder: may I ask who is not calling?

And who will answer?

Punching my time card

In the past 24 hours, I have:

1. Taught a class. (Dismissed early...because we were done.)

2. Read and commented on 34 student drafts ranging from superficial drivel-fests to well organized, beautifully written, appropriately documented masterpieces. About one-third of the drafts open with two sentences lifted directly from the assignment sheet. (Those are my sentences, students! Go write your own!)

3. Attended a Faculty Forum, where I nibbled on cheese and crackers while colleagues reported on their research, including an interesting foray into the junior high school reading class in rural Appalachia and another into the mathematics of complex polar spaces, and frankly, if they're giving away free vacations to either location, include me out.

4. Read a New Yorker article by Michael Kinsley titled "Mine is Longer than Yours," which is not about what you think it's about. It's about...six pages long.

5. Spent some quality time with my beloved spouse, who could not knead bread dough last night because he was substitute-teaching in an old building yesterday and a sticky window fell right smack down on his thumb, which now looks quite festive. He's stuck on the injured/disabled list without a pinch-kneader.

6. Slept. Not much, but still, it was something.

7. Expressed disbelief when the alarm clock rang at 6 a.m. and my husband insisted that I get up. "You've got to go do that thing today, remember?" It's Saturday! Let me sleep. "You told me to remind you about that history thing. " Oh yeah, that thing.

8. Served as judge for a district event at which junior-high-school students demonstrated their mastery of various historical concepts, such as the concept that Pearl Harbor ushered America into the Civil War. The students were bright and articulate and enthusiastic and polite and I am delighted that they are interested in history, but...it's Saturday! And I have another 14 drafts to read before Monday!

9. Written this blog post...which takes me right about up to the starting line for the next 24-hour marathon.

A gift of daffodils

We bought our house five years ago without ever seeing much of the property. It was February and the slopes were too icy to allow us to examine the hills or meadows, but as we stood in the driveway and looked over the view, we all saw possibilities.

"If we buy this house," said my son, "we'll have to buy a four-wheeler."

"If we buy this house," said my husband, "we can plant a garden--a big one."

"If we buy this house," said I, "I'll plant daffodils right there along the curve of the driveway."

We bought the house. We bought a four-wheeler. We planted a garden--a bigger one every year. And every spring we have daffodils exactly where I wanted them--but I didn't plant them.

I don't know much about the woman who planted them except that she lived in our house for 40 years and raised horses, but I know what she planted: forsythia, rhododendrons, redbuds, and dozens and dozens of daffodils, one flower deer won't eat. The first year the daffodils were a wonderful surprise springing up exactly where I wanted them, but as we've cleared the thick brush in the woods along the driveway, more and more daffodils have popped up where we've never seen them before.

I think of that woman kneeling with a trowel in her hand to tuck bulbs into the soil just where I wanted them and I want to thank her, but I don't know where she went after she sold our house and the house changed hands three times in the six years after she left. I wish for her a gift of daffodils at least as nice as the gift she's given me.

Elvis has left the driveway

I dreamed that Elvis wrecked my car and experienced such remorse that he handed me a fistful of $20,000 bills. "I've never seen a $20,000 bill before," I said. "Are these real?"

Okay: Elvis wrecks my car and hands me a fistful of money and the only thing I find odd is the denomination of the bills? Why didn't it occur to me to question whether Elvis was real?

Worlds made of words

"There was nothing in the story that really caught my attention," complained a student. "It seemed to be just words."

Well, yes, words are the basic building-blocks of any story. Words are what we work with in fiction: they're all we have.

But why do some stories seem to provide more while others remain "just words"? What elevates a story beyond the province of words? How do some stories make us forget that everything we experience in fiction is a world made of words? And why didn't that happen for this particular student in this particular work?

Those are the questions that keep me in the classroom.

X in excess

Judging from my experience at the doctor's office today, the ideal name for a new drug would be something like Xxyzzyxx. I commented on the odd name of the antihistamine sample she gave me (Xyzal), and my doctor explained that marketing studies show that customers are more likely to remember names of drugs that include the letters X or Z than those that don't.

....come to think of it, maybe I'd better patent Xxyzzyxx before someone else gets to it first!

Sick season

Of the six full-time faculty members in my department, one is home recovering from surgery, one was in the emergency room last night and won't be in for a few days, one was out sick on Friday, and I'm not feeling so hot myself.

Read my lips, people: no new sicknesses!

Stairway to heaven

I saw a stairway dangling in the sky above my head this morning. At first I didn't know what it was: it looked like just another big chunk of steel being lifted up to the dome of the emerging campus library, but then I remembered that the last bit of steel supporting the dome was installed last week with great hooplah and hurrah.

I saw it first from blocks away from campus, the huge hunk of something dangling from a towering crane, and it was only as I got closer that I recognized it as something I really don't expect to see high above my head: a stairway. We're now one step closer to the finished library--but that first step is kind of high!

One bird two bird red bird blue bird

I didn't walk far this morning but within the first half-mile I saw one kingfisher chattering by the creek, two eastern bluebirds perched on a phone line, and three (!) red-tailed hawks making slow circles above the meadow.

Birds are back!

Next I'll be listening for the song of the oriole.

Rx for happiness

So I'm griping with a colleague about some of the annoying people we can't seem to avoid when she says, "Sorry I'm so catty...maybe I need to take a nice pill."

And the next thing you know, we notice bright yellow blossoms standing out against the bleak brown deadness of early spring. "Forsythia is blooming!" I say. "There's a nice pill!" We came back smiling.

But is forsythia nice enough to overcome the anguish of spring allergies? Everywhere I go today, someone is sniffling--or coughing or sneezing or reaching for a Kleenex. We've had rain on and off for the past three days, which ought to have washed all the allergens out of the air, but my nose is running and my throat is sore and my head feels crowded. How can something as wonderful as spring make me feel so rotten?

Could I have my forsythia without the pollen, please? That would be just what the doctor ordered.

Answer Man = Obstacle?

The faculty book group was discussing Donald Finkel's Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, so I wanted to take a roll of duct tape to the meeting. Finkel wants us to shut up and let the students (or the book or the activities) do the teaching, but those of us who take up teaching as a profession often like speaking more than listening. The book offers some interesting suggestions for engaging students in the process of inquiry, but I found most interesting Finkel's claim that when we provide all the answers, we "rob the students of their own struggle" and become an obstacle to learning.

Knowing all the answers is how we got where we are, isn't it? Over the years we learned to excel at the process of inquiry and answer enough questions correctly to work our way up to the front of the classroom, where we can serve as founts of knowledge, sources of correct answers.

Now Peter Finkel wants us to shut up--to put wonderful books in front of the students and provide the right circumstances to allow them to struggle toward their own answers. Over the next few weeks we'll be discussing what those circumstances might be, so I guess it's too soon to insist that everyone sit down and shut up. It's just as well that I forgot that roll of duct tape...but I'll keep it handy just in case.

Playing hooky

Today I did something I've never done before: cancelled two classes for no good reason.

There are reasons, of course, and if someone asks me, I'll spout them off glibly: My students are working on group presentations and I want to give them some time to meet outside of class. The online essay they were supposed to read for today has been inaccessible for the past few days. My allergies are acting up and I feel a sinus headache coming on. Besides, it's spring!

But that's not the real reason. The fact is that I'm teaching three large writing-intensive classes this semester and I've fallen behind on grading, and if I don't do something drastic, I'll end up collecting another set of papers before I've finished the previous set. I graded 24 papers last night, and if I can get through another 24 today and then whiz through two sets of quizzes and a half dozen revisions, I'll be more or less caught up.

In all the years I've taught, I've never been this far behind. Of course, I've never taught an overload before or taught an overload while chairing the department or taught an overload while chairing the department, running a search, planning a reading by a visiting author, advising the literary magazine, and coping with the absence of a sick colleague (who came through her surgery just fine). It's all part of the job, I realize, but just for today I need a break.

So instead of teaching my two film classes, I'll shut my door and grade papers. I'm sure the students won't complain about getting an unexpected day off, and if anyone else wants to complain, let them go to my department chair.

You may already be a winner!

A Prada bag full of sidewalk chalk, a swim in the English Channel, an all-expense-paid trip to Omaha: these were just a few of the prizes I could have won this morning in my Creative Nonfiction class.

The goal of the exercise was to work on arranging words euphoniously, with an ear for rhythm and repeated sounds, and an ideal way to accomplish that is to work with lists. But first we had to generate lists, so the students broke into groups to brainstorm lists of items that could be prizes in a contest. One group listed things, one listed activities, and one listed locations. After each group had generated 20 items, they selected at least five of the items and drafted a letter informing the winner of his or her good fortune.

The letters were creatively banal ("Dear Mr. or Mrs. Individual"), but the lists--well, they were simply incomparable. Let's go to Omaha for some bird-feeding, bear-hunting, cow-tipping, and rhino-wrestling! How about a two-hour visit to lovely Los Angeles followed by a junket across India via third-class train? And I'll wear my Prada bag atop my polo pony for an afternoon chukker in Gary, Indiana.

If these students ever get a chance to put their prize-giving talents to serious use, I fear for the sweepstakes industry. Just listening to the results of the exercise made me feel like a winner!

Heated words over words

The committee was wrestling with a rigorous challenge: whether the document under discussion should use the word "rigorous" or "challenging." After some debate, we moved on to the next major issue: "appropriate," "actively engaged" or "productive"? I've already forgotten what the context was but it was important enough to inspire heated debate amongst seven overworked professors.

This is why committee-inspired prose comes out sounding so awful: clarity, simplicity, elegance, even common sense all fall by the wayside in favor of the phrase that pleases the most people. I confess that I was once a party to the production of what may well be the worst example of committee prose ever perpetrated, a policy statement that begins thus: "A perceived and sometimes real conflict of interest can occur...."

When a committee starts mincing words about the appropriate (or rigorous or challenging) adjective, I experience a perceived and probably real conflict between my interest in serving the college and my desire to write effective prose and I develop a sudden overwhelming urge to become actively disengaged from the writing process. But fortunately, all committee meetings eventually come to an end, and within the hour I've forgotten every detail of the meetings...except that rigorous and challenging debate about the appropriate word.

The rest is silence.

Torture in living color

Two recent articles exploring the lives and motivations of photographers raise similar disturbing questions. The current Atlantic--yes, the one featuring the really unflattering cover photo of Britney Spears--takes readers into the alternately frenetic and boring lives of paparazzi and asks the question, "How did they get that picture?" And then in the March 24 New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris's article "Exposure" examines the complex motivations of Sabrina Harman, who obsessively photographed prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The Atlantic article suggests that celebrities and paparazzi exist in a torturous intertwined dance from which neither partner really wishes to be removed, but the New Yorker article makes a broader statement about public fascination with images of humiliation:

Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man, tortured to death--or, more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of the savage death of Jesus are a byproduct of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?

Play ball!

Work is piling up on my desk and I haven't prepared for tomorrow's classes yet, so what did I do this afternoon?

Walked down to the softball field to watch the first few innings of the home opener.

We're not having particularly good weather for softball: torrential rains have left the spectator area muddy and slick, and high winds kept blasting me in the face. I wasn't wearing the right shoes for walking in mud or the right clothes to keep out the cold wind (although I was grateful to be wearing a faux-wrap skirt and not the non-faux kind). And frankly, I'm not even a tremendous fan of softball. I always enjoyed watching my daughter play, but I would have watched my daughter playing tiddly-winks if she'd taken that up instead. I have a few students on the softball team but none of them are my daughter. So why did I walk out and watch the game?

Because a softball game isn't another student draft, another committee report, or another plea for assistance with an annoying problem. Because any problem that arises during a softball game is not going to fall at my feet. Because softball is something I don't have to think about. I can think later. For now, let's play ball!

One actor, three characters

Interesting activity in today's film classes. We're working on analyzing acting as an element of meaning in film, so we looked at clips of three performances by Robert Duvall: unflappable Tom Hagen in The Godfather, cocky Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, and soul-searching Sonny in The Apostle. All three clips involved meals: Tom Hagen eating while Woltz screams at him, Kilgore enjoying a barbecue on the beach before bombing a Vietnamese village, Sonny eating shrimp during an awkward dinner date. It's amazing how Duvall seems to transform his voice and body to inhabit these very different roles, each character problematic in his own way.

....Which of these three dinners would I most want to share? I hope I'm never that hungry!

A peculiar peddler

In the quiet of the late afternoon I look up from my desk to see standing in the door a flea, a fat one, the fattest flea I've ever seen but nicely dressed, not sloppy like a lot of guys get when they bloat. If my life were The Maltese Falcon he'd be Joel Cairo, which I guess makes me Bogart, if Bogart were an English professor and a woman and still alive, but never mind.

So this flea comes sauntering in like he owns the joint, stops in front of my desk and just taps it gently with his walking stick--tap tap, like that, just to get my attention. "I heard you was looking for a flea," says the flea.

"Am I?" says I.

"That's what they say," he says.

"Who says?"

He taps the desk again. "Never mind who," he says. "I got connections all over. Let's say a little bird told me you was looking to pay a fat flea for a pedagogy workshop."

"But--but wait--there's been a mistake--"

"My sources never make mistakes. Said youse guys need a workshop. Workshops I got." He unbuttons his overcoat and opens it up to show me rows of pedagogy workshops hanging there like fake Rolexes. "What'dya want? Got 'em in face-to-face, hands-on, online, whatever, all your big names--here, this just came in, a genuine learning communities workshop, just a little dent in the corner is all, good as new."

I try to break in but every time I open my mouth he slaps another workshop down on the desk. "Got a great deal here in online diversity workshops, all colors, just fell off the back of a truck, and you want to talk about assessment! Buyers' market in assessment workshops right now, but you'd better get 'em while they're cheap. Custom orders too--just tell me what you want and I'll make you an offer you can't refuse."

"But I don't need any of your workshops!"

The flea looks at me the way Dad looks at the kid who just wrecked the car. "I'm disappointed in you," says the flea. "I hear you have a need and I come right away to fill it, and wha'd I get? Nothin' but lip. What's the point of sendin' for me if you don't want my services?

"But I didn't send for you!" I insist.

"My sources tell me you did," says the flea. "Got the text message right here on my cell phone: says the provost wants the committee to pay a fat flea for a pedagogy workshop. Couldn't be clearer. When the provost says 'Jump,' I say 'How high?' So here I am."

The minute I lay my eyes on that text message, it's like somebody turned on the lights. "It all makes sense now," I say with a smile. "It's just a little misunderstanding is all. See, at the meeting today, the provost didn't ask for a fat flea," says I.

"What kinda flea did she ask for?" says he.

"None at all," says I. "She was trying to say flat fee but she got her words mixed up. A mistake, that's all it was. Simple spoonerism."

"Spoonerisms? I'm all out of those, but I got a great deal on a critical thinking seminar if you're in the market."

"Thanks," I say, getting up from my desk and ease him toward the door, "but don't call us, okay? We'll call you."

"Not so fast! You didn't even look at my symposia--"

But I had already shut the door.

Universal Excuse Generator

Dear

1. Mom and Dad
2. Professor
3. Love of my Life
4. Blog Readers

Please excuse my

1. failure to phone home
2. failure to write my term paper
3. failure to remember your birthday
4. failure to recall your existence

I was so busy

1. serving soup to homeless people
2. attending my grandmother's funeral
3. writing a term paper for Dr. Demanding
   
4. banging my head against the wall until it hurt
   

that I totally neglected my responsibilities. However, I am prepared to make up for my neglect if you will only

1. send money
2. give me an extra credit assignment
3. bake me some chocolate chip cookies
4. excuse me for having a life

So let's just put this behind us and move on!

Sincerely,

1. Your loving child
2. Your diligent student
3. Your only true love
4. You lookin' at me?
   

Snowbirds

My students and colleagues have flown south for Spring Break, but the birds stayed around to keep me company.

Spring break without the break

Spring Break is well under way and I've already turned in my midterm grades, so why am I sitting in a cold, empty academic building waiting for the phone to ring?

A professor in my department suddenly needs surgery and will have to miss the second half of the semester, so I'm working on finding people to cover four classes. I've managed three so far, but the fourth is proving more difficult. I have called all my contacts at other colleges, worked my way through my Potential Adjunct Pool, and even called the former chair, who retired two years ago. Those who would like to teach the class can't manage the schedule, and those who can manage the schedule would rather not teach the class.

I have one more feeler out, one more person who could conceivably take it on, so I sit here and wait for him to return my calls when I ought to be anywhere but in the office. It could be worse, I suppose. I could have four classes still to fill instead of one, or I could be the one having the surgery. The worst-case scenario is that I end up teaching the class myself, even though it's outside my area and I'm already teaching an overload, but I'd rather not think about that.

Instead, let's think about the phone and wonder why it isn't ringing.

Recycled metaphors, pre-owned words

Last week I posted this paragraph from The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean because I found the metaphor fresh and compelling. Yesterday I picked up Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (the Moncrieff translation because that's the only one I have) and encountered the very same metaphor:

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

This passage appears at the end of the "Overture,"the opening chapter in which Proust provides a sort of raison d'etre and reading manual for the work as a whole. It's an important enough passage that I should have remembered it when I saw the same image in The Orchid Thief--and maybe, at some level, I did remember it. I hadn't been planning to re-read Proust this week, but by Sunday afternoon, I had already exhausted my Spring Break reading. Maybe some dim memory of that blooming paper image drove me to reach for Proust when I had been inclining toward Dickens.

Was Susan Orlean aware that she was employing a recycled metaphor? Does Proust's use of the metaphor nearly a century ago make it any less fresh and compelling? And where did Proust find the metaphor?

I've always been a sucker for the bright, sparkly image, but this experience reminds me that it is always wise to kick the tires and look under the hood just in case someone is trying to hide a pre-owned vehicle under a shiny new coat of paint.

Wait a minutes...hasn't that used-car metaphor been used before?

Thirteen ways of looking for Wallace Stevens

Somehow, I seem to have misplaced Wallace Stevens. He should be on the syllabus, tucked neatly between William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore (and don't you wonder what they talk about when no one is listening?). But no matter how carefully I look, I just can't find him.

I didn't even realize that I had left Stevens off the syllabus for my American Lit Survey class until I sat down to write the midterm exam, using last year's exam as inspiration. Wallace Stevens was on the exam last year, which means he must have been on the syllabus last year. Why isn't he on the syllabus this year? I don't remember taking him off. Editing error? Momentary lapse of attention? Triumph of my subconscious mind, which still quakes in panic at the memory of that moment in my oral comprehensive exam when I suddenly froze up on being asked to explicate a Stevens poem?

The more important question is whether my students are suffering from the absence of Wallace Stevens. I haven't heard any complaints, but that's not surprising. The survey class is designed to introduce students to the important authors of the era, but for most of them, it is a first-time meeting (and often a final meeting as well). How many introductory survey students would know enough to notice the absence of Wallace Stevens? I suppose I would hear about it if I neglected Robert Frost, but Stevens is a taste many of my students have not yet acquired.

And now they won't, thanks to me. If the Canon Police find out that I'm loosing a whole class full of students into the world without any awareness of Wallace Stevens, they'll brutally beat me about the shoulders with the Norton Anthology of American Literature (and not the shorter version either). So let's hope they don't find out! Let's just keep this between you and me.

Muting the political rhetoric

Something has been lacking in my life lately and I now realize what it is: I have not seen a single televised political ad this year. Not one. This morning I heard an NPR report on a particularly nasty ad campaign, and I was suddenly struck by the dearth of political advertising in my life. We still have a television but it's no longer connected to any service provider and there's no signal out in our hollow, so the screen has gone black.

Am I missing anything exciting? From what I've read, the political rhetoric is no more rational this year than in any other year, but it's much less strident when I encounter it in print than when it assaults me in living color on the television screen. I have heard from some of the candidates. They call me on the phone. They don't listen very well, though--just keep nattering on regardless of any comments I may interject. What kind of relationship can we build based entirely on one-sided conversations?

I look out the window of my office and see posters of a particular candidate looking sincere and serene--but silent. The lack of political advertising in my life has muted the strident rhetoric--but after all the shouting is over, I'll be content to read all about it calmly, privately, and, best of all, silently.

Seeing the blossom

"I read lots of local newspapers and particularly the shortest articles in them, and most particularly any articles that are full of words in combinations that are arresting. In the case of the orchid story I was interested to see the words 'swamp' and 'orchids' and 'Seminoles' and 'cloning' and 'criminal' together in one short piece. Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something more, some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can't believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water."
--Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief

Lives of quiet desperation?

Highlights from my early-morning inbox:

1. Excuse from a student who represented the college at an out-of-state event and got stranded in Dallas with no flight home.

2. Excuse from a student who broke his elbow skateboarding and therefore wants to turn in a hand-written draft. (But at least he turned it in!)

3. Excuse from a student who can't make it to class because of a sinus infection and therefore wants to turn the paper in on Wednesday.

4. Excuse from a student whose weekend was so exciting that he is suddenly obliged to appear in court.

And some are inclined to envy the young!

Recycled weather

One of our visiting job candidates asked whether we get much snow here. "We don't get a lot of snow," replied my colleague. "We just get the same two or three inches over and over."

We're getting that same snow again today and frankly, I am tired of it. Public schools all over the county keep having snow days and delays, so students and faculty have been scrambling to find appropriate care for their school-age children. No sooner does my driveway become driveable than we get another smattering of snow--just enough to make the roads slick and the sidewalks salty, but never enough to make us feel like bold adventurers triumphing over the elements.

Wouldn't it be better to get 18 inches of snow all at once instead of six three-inch snowfalls spread out over six weeks? In a real blizzard, no one would worry about trudging to campus, with or without children in tow; we could all stay home in front of the fireplace with cups of hot cocoa. A three-inch snowfall doesn't provide enough material for serious snow-fort building or snowball battles, but a real blizzard would inspire creative minds toward new heights of snow sculpture. And enduring a real blizzard would allow us to congratulate ourselves on our resourcefulness in facing nature's challenges.

Instead, we have another three inches on the way. Maybe this one will be the last. I certainly hope so, because the crocuses are coming up and I'm ready for spring.

Confessions of a unilateral gesturer

Forgive me, business office, for I have sinned.

I have sent flowers to a colleague--using departmental funds!--even though no one died.

The colleague in question stepped in to fill a difficult situation last semester, teaching four classes for very little pay while passing her comprehensive exams and preparing to have her first child. Then last month when she gave birth to a bouncing baby girl after 53 hours of labor (!) followed by a C-section (!!), my department decided that flowers would be appropriate.

I now know that it is not permissible for departments to "independently and unilaterally" send flowers, but I did not know that last month. I was not born Department Chair, nor did I ever receive any formal training in proper procedures re: sending flowers, and it never occurred to me to wonder whether sending flowers might be perceived as a subversive act. I just thought that someone who had worked as hard as our colleague and then labored so hard in the delivery room had earned a little congratulatory pat on the back.

Silly me.

Sending flowers, I have been told, is the privilege of the president's office, which sends flowers primarily when someone has died. In all other cases, sending flowers does not qualify as a business expense because it is a "personal gesture." (Not at all the type of personal gesture another colleague referred to yesterday when he offered to direct some personal gestures toward the business office.)

Now that we have all been informed of the folly of making independent and unilateral personal gestures, we have agreed to comply with the business office's request that we reimburse the college $36.38 forthwith.

I just hope the business office doesn't mind pennies.

Transcendent[ly bad] prose

After 45 years of stumbling toward transcendence, I have finally discovered my greatest talent: I have a gift for writing really good bad sentences. It is a difficult cross to bear, but with great power comes great responsibility, so I persevere in my calling.

Today, for instance, I needed an editing exercise that would give students practice in positioning the most important information in a sentence so that it carries the greatest impact, and I came up with this:

Despite his encounters with malaria-carrying mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, and hungry piranha, the intrepid explorer on his first mission into the Amazon without a guide to help him overcome the inevitable obstacles discovered a living pterodactyl dwelling contentedly among the exotic flora and fauna near the confluence of two uncharted rivers.

Earlier, when the class was working on the dangers of overdependence on incompatible adjectives and adverbs, I gave them this:

On the other hand, if they use few adjectives but only, like, make them really incredibly wonderfully awesome, then they will have esoteric, poignant, and just plain neat prose that marvelously overshadows all that high-falutin' gussied-up bullcrap.

My ultimate achievement, however--the epitome of awfulness--occurred in a discussion of faulty parallelism:

Derrida's seminal analysis of Wenbley Weasel's "Unseemly Seeming" suggests that the free play of signification may prove disorienting to readers accustomed to works grounded in linear reasoning, anthropocentric culture, and who don't understand the French language; however, his analysis fails to consider Weasel's seemingly infinite ability to multiply meanings, his concern for non-human ways of knowing, and he translates all the French terms anyway.

"This is awful," said a student.

"Thanks," I said. "It's a gift."

Walk away from the baloney

"The viewer already has a sense of grandeur from the silhouette on the baloney."

This wonderful line from a student paper inspires me to imagine what a wonderful world this would be if every balcony were replaced by baloney. Many ordinary experiences would be altered, from photographing the Pope to buying cheap theater seats to selecting hotel rooms. Would the Marriott charge extra for baloney suites? Think of the lives that would be saved if hordes of students on spring break decided to climb drunkenly from baloney to baloney!

Picture the baloney scene in Romeo and Juliet, in which Juliet pines for a lover who has a first name spelled O-S-C-A-R. And Henry James's The Ambassadors would be an entirely different kind of novel if Lambert Strether took to observing the enigmatic Chad from a perch high atop a baloney!

It could happen. Likewise, an English professor exhausted from reading too many student papers might fall into a fit of despair and develop a sudden urge to fling herself from a great height...but in the absence of baloney, the danger would dissipate.

Just for the sake of safety, someone ought to post a sign declaring every English department a No-Baloney Zone. The life you save may be your own.

Doing the candidate quick-step

Neither snow nor sleet nor dark of night can keep the candidates from coming to campus and running from breakfast to interview to campus tour to interview to lunch with students to interview interview interview to presentation to dinner with the search committee, and if this trial by fire is exhausting for the candidates, it's not much easier on the search committee.

We take our candidates to dinner at the best restaurant in town (where we can rarely afford to eat unless the provost picks up the bill), but soon we find ourselves sated with the town's best cuisine. "I'm tired of that same old ahi," said my colleague last week, so we changed things up and went to the Italian place instead. We enjoy meeting new people and spending time with our departmental colleagues, but eventually we get tired of asking the same questions and telling the same stories--and as soon as we finish up with one candidate, another looms one the horizon.

The good news is that we're almost done. When the moment of decision arrives, we'll say goodbye to all the ahi, the Bob Evans breakfasts, the presentations, interviews, campus tours, and candidates, and say hello to some new colleagues.

Whoever they are, I hope they stay awhile. No one wants to go through all this again!

Lacking lunar energy

Rumor has it that the lunar eclipse was pretty impressive last night. I wouldn't know: anything that happens outdoors when the temperature is 3 degrees Farenheit is a mystery to me. Telescopes were set up on the college mall so students and others could stand out in the cold and look at the moon and stars; meanwhile, I huddled at home in layers of longjohns and sweaters, wool socks and slippers, trying to stay warm enough to concentrate on my reading.

The resident Clevelandman poked his head in the door. "You've got to see this!" he said. "It's amazing!"

"It's three degrees," I said. "Nothing is that amazing."

Which proves, I suppose, that cold-weather wimps miss out on some remarkable experiences. Frostbite, for instance. I've seen lunar eclipses before and they're not very effective at warming my feet, so this time I decided to keep my feet where they could be comfortable: beneath a nice, warm, cozy blanket.

Firing Ice

I've just given up on trying to read the novel Ice by Russian author Vladimir Sorokin, primarily because the first hundred pages have not managed to make me care about the characters, but also because I'm getting tired of a particular syntactic tic:

A dark blue Lincoln Navigator drove into the building. Stopped....Gorbovets leaned on the gates. Pulled. The steel sections aligned. Clanged. He slid the bolt shut. Spat. Walked to the car.

That's just a sample from the first page of the book, and while those solitary-verb fragments emphasize the staccato nature of the actions here, the pattern is repeated over and over in the book, all those solitary verbs pelting my eyeballs like sleet pellets in an ice storm. Sorokin's style is edgy and hip, often self-consciously so; like a small child who has just learned to ride a tricycle, the sentences clatter past while yelling "Look at me! Look at me!" After a while, it just gets tiresome.

So I give up. Unless someone can provide a compelling reason for me to keep reading, Ice is going directly into the giveaway pile. But who would want it? Here's an offer: make a case for the book in the comments to this post and I'll mail the novel, free of charge, to whoever is most convincing.

Musical madness

We've entered the part of the semester when the eye-rolling gets intense among certain students in my film classes. It's the men, mostly, who object to the subject matter I'm forcing them to consider, and it's not all the men either but just a certain baseball-capped contingent of them. They know what they like and they know what they don't like, and they don't mind letting me know that they don't like musicals.

Yesterday I subjected my film classes to torture by talking about the history of musicals and making them watch short clips from The Jazz Singer, 42nd Street, Top Hat, and West Side Story, and in a week they'll be writing about Singin' in the Rain. They grimace and groan and want to know why: "Why can't we watch something we like?"

"Because Saw isn't a musical," I want to say, "and because we can't watch Fight Club or Superbad every day of the week." (Well, maybe they can, but I can't.) We could spend the hour identifying and repairing comma splices and run-on sentences, or we could take a nice little quiz on vocabulary terms from the textbook, but instead we're sitting in a dark room watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing and singing and falling in love while the rain pours down around the gazebo. What's not to like?

Yesterday's West Side Story clip portrayed the characters' attempt to use music to bring order to a chaotic situation, but in my classroom, musicals do just the opposite, inspiring an epidemic of squirming and grumbling and shuffling of papers. When music leaves my students cold, I want to snap my fingers and say "Play it cool, boys--real cool."

And I would--if I could just carry a tune.

So what IS a thesis?

"She called me at 1 in the morning to ask me, 'What's a thesis?'"

The speaker is one of my students, and "she" is another. The first major paper is due in five minutes. The students had read a chapter on writing a thesis statement and I had talked about thesis statements in class, demonstrated how to formulate thesis statements for this type of paper, and offered specific suggestions for improving their thesis statements in my comments on their drafts. Also, last Friday I reminded the class that I would be happy to look at revised thesis statements over the weekend if they would e-mail them to me. Two students did--but not the girl who had to call her classmate at 1 a.m. to ask "What's a thesis?"

Sometimes I wonder why I even open my mouth.

Sing a song of daughters

When my daughter walked out in front of the audience last week at the beginning of her vocal recital, she looked as if she owned the stage. When she opened her mouth, she owned the music. By the time the hour was over, she owned the audience.

How did she do it? Where did all that talent and confidence come from? I'd gladly take the credit, but I can't sing a note, nor can I stand on stage in front of a group of staring people without wanting to hide in the closet. She looked radiant, as if she'd found her rightful place in the universe. Once upon a time she was a five-year-old singing her first duet with her dad in church, and then she became a 10-year-old orphan belting out tunes while tumbling all over the stage in "Annie." Now she's this radiant woman singing art songs and arias in languages I don't understand--but music is universal and her performance makes the meaning clear.

I used to be able to track down my daughter wherever she was just by following the sound of her singing; now she's so far away that I never get to hear her except when she comes home for a visit. But last Thursday, she filled my ears with beautiful music that will ring in my memory for years to come.

The wrong way to walk the loop

I didn't set out to walk the six-mile loop this morning, but after I'd passed the point of no return and conquered the ice-covered slope, there was nothing to do but keep going.

I've kept that loop in front of me all winter as I've walked around the countryside and worked out at the rec center. One fine spring day, I told myself, I'll gather together a few congenial friends and we'll walk up the hill and along the ridge and down the other side of the hill and along the creek and back home again. I'll choose a day when the sky is clear and the road is dry, and we'll equip ourselves with water bottles, high-protein snacks, sunscreen, pepper spray, perhaps a notebook and pen for recording brilliant Thoreauvian insights. We'll look at birds and wildflowers and we'll encourage each other through the steep stretches, and at the end of the loop we'll come home to a celebratory lunch of homemade soup and sandwiches.

That's the right way to walk the loop. Today I did it the wrong way. For this I blame the anger.

Last night I went to bed angry and woke up angry (never mind why), and I tried all morning to work through the anger: I washed dishes, cleaned the kitchen, did laundry, emptied the catbox, filled the birdfeeders, listened to Car Talk, read some Henry James. Still angry. There was no one to complain to except the cat and I couldn't go out anywhere without coming to terms with the car that hates me, so I went for a walk.

I took a water bottle and some kleenexes but no snacks, which was a mistake since all I'd had for breakfast was a little toast and juice. No sunscreen, no pepper spray, no notebook and pen (which was fine since it's difficult to have insights when you're angry), no congenial companions, and no celebratory lunch at the end of the road. The temperature was in the 40s but up on the ridge the wind was sharp, and the road was icy in the shady spots and muddy in the sun.

At first I intended to keep walking until the anger dissipated and then turn around, but somewhere along the way I lost track of time and place. I was halfway up the dangling deer-spine hill when I realized that I'd been walking without seeing anything, all my attention focused on the internal chaos. I forced myself to look around, but it took a great deal of effort.

I made it to the top of the ridge still angry, walked past the impressive views still angry, avoided the annoying dogs still angry. I plodded through the mud and ice not caring where I ended up, and as I walked down the hill on the other side, I was surprised to find that I'd passed the half-way mark on the six-mile loop. Might as well just keep walking--still angry.

Then I came around a curve and saw in front of me a stretch of road that squeezed between a rocky bluff and a steep wooded slope falling down to the creek. For about a quarter mile the road sloped up, first gently and then steeply, and the entire surface was covered with ice.

One thing I know: walking uphill on ice right next to a cliff is not easy, and anger doesn't help. There was no way around and I wasn't going back, so I swallowed my anger and picked my way along the narrow snow-covered shoulder, certain that if I fell and broke my neck, no one would even know where to look for me.

But I didn't fall. I made it home in one piece, hungry and thirsty and sweaty and tired but no longer angry. I'm a little annoyed with myself for walking the loop without any hoopla, but I suppose the hoopla can wait for the next time. Next time I'll walk the loop the right way. Next time I'll leave the anger at home.

The ghost of closets past

At the Goodwill store I am haunted by the ghost of closets past: between a slinky psychedelic mini-dress and a dress-for-success suit with shoulder pads the size of dinner plates hangs a drab, boxy drop-waist jumper everyone was wearing in the 80s. I owned that dress! I wore that dress!

I loathe that dress.

The Goodwill store makes no distinctions among sizes, styles, or even decades. Clothes are sorted in the most rudimentary fashion: a long row labeled "Tops" over here, and beyond it another labeled "Bottoms." Pastel silk blouses with bows as the neckline rub shoulders with tattered T-shirts advertising the wearer's devotion to the Grateful Dead. (Good color for me, but can I wear it in the classroom?)

I'm at the Goodwill store because my wardrobe budget can't keep up with my weight loss. In the past year I have lost the equivalent of a person--a small person, but a person all the same--and I have nothing to wear. My colleagues are not inclined to sympathize with this problem. "Not a bad problem to have!" is the way they put it, but I get up every morning and look in my closet and wonder what I can wear today that looks professional enough to carry me through a meeting with college Trustees: pants so baggy in the back I look like I have diaper-butt, or purple corduroys a little too casual for the classroom, or a skirt that fits topped by a blouse that doesn't? That's too much stress first thing in the morning.

A few weeks ago I tried to address the problem by buying a chunk of wool and making a skirt, just to see whether my sewing skills might still be useful. They might. Then again, it was a straight skirt with no frills, a pattern so easy a trained monkey could have made it, and it took only about three hours of focused work. But I can't do that every weekend, especially with papers to grade, so I've been trying to patch together a professional wardrobe wherever I can find one, which is how I ended up at the Goodwill store.

I head toward "Bottoms" to look for a skirt. No problem finding skirts: here's a plaid wool mini-skirt wider than it is long, and right next to it a swirly confection in floral chiffon, then a pencil skirt with kick-pleats, size 6 petite (dream on!). I find home-made skirts with uneven hems next to skirts with designer labels, spotless skirts next to torn and ragged skirts, long wool wrap skirts next to the merest of minis, but everything in my size looks faded and matronly.

In fact, the only thing I find in the whole store that might fit me is that hideous boxy drop-waist jumper. I wore that dress when I flew to Florida with my two-year-old daughter, who was wearing a matching dress I had made from the leftover fabric. I'm sure we looked just darling, but that was 20 years ago and I'm not going back there.

I leave the store empty-handed. I'd rather muddle through with what I have than haunt campus dressed as the ghost of closets past.

Calming the savage blast

Today I'm taking a hiatus from the hectic life, opting out of the ordinary, fleeing the controversies that leave me flabbergasted, including:

1. The current controversy over whether every course that "uses" literature ought to be labeled a literature course for the purposes of General Education. My question: what does the course use literature for? Fuel? Insulation? Target practice?

2. Students who want to quibble over whether their borrowing from SparkNotes constitutes plagiarism if they just borrowed ideas but switched the words around. My question: why are you relying on SparkNotes for a paper that is not supposed to use sources outside the primary text?

3. Bill collectors who call at all hours to demand money from a person whose name is similar but not identical to my husband's, a man who apparently owes a lot of money to some very persistent people. My question: how about letting me have your full name and phone number so I can pass it on to the State Attorney General's office? I promise to get your name exactly right!

As absorbing as all these issues are, I'm waving bye-bye this afternoon and zipping down the interstate to Kentucky to see my daughter and hear her sing. They say music calms the savage beast, so it ought to calm the savage blast of demanding calls and messages from all the other voices in my life.

Small and sleek meets big and bulky

A brief window of decent weather inspired me to walk farther than usual this morning, which allowed me to witness an unusual encounter. I walked past the place where my road shifts from tar-and-chip to gravel and then on past the place where the two-lane gravel road narrows down to one lane to twist its way up a steep hill, and that's where I saw a sleek little FedEx delivery van come face-to-face with a big ugly township dumptruck lumbering up the hill with a full load of gravel. There's no room to pass, so one of the vehicles had to back up. In a showdown between the sleek and the substantial, who wins?

The dump truck backed down the hill and around the curve until it found a place to pull off, and the FedEx van went zipping on its merry way. In this case, small and sleek triumphed over big and bulky.

I thought of that encounter later in the day as I stood with a handful of lug-nuts next to my husband's small sleek Honda. I've tried for years to convince that car that I'm the boss, the driver, the powerful member of our partnership, but in a face-to-face contest between my will and the will of the car, the car wins every time. I say "Drive!" and the Honda says "I don't think so." First it was the starter, then the alternator, then the transmission, and today a nearly-new tire blew, leaving me pretty well stranded.

I may as well just back off and admit that I'm the powerless one here. All right, car, you win! I give up! You go on and do what you want to do and I'll just stand off to the side and yield the right of way!

If a dumptruck can do it, why can't I?

Yes, we're all getting older

Funny thing at last night's candidate dinner: as soon as my colleague arrives at the restaurant, she hands me the departmental credit card and I stick it in my purse. The restaurant is noisy and crowded and I'm on the opposite side of the table from that colleague, so when she gets up and dashes out of the restaurant to go look for something she's misplaced, I'm pretty much in the dark. She comes back a bit agitated because she hasn't been able to locate the missing item, and when I ask for enlightenment, I hear her say, "I can't find my car."

"You can't find your car?" I ask. "How could you lose your car?"

She looks at me as if I am a raving lunatic. "Car-DUH," she says. "I can't find the department credit card."

"That because you gave it to me as soon as you came in the door," I remind her.

Yes, we're all getting older...some of us more rapidly than others.

This is the week that was

At one point during yesterday's chaos I heard myself asserting that things couldn't possibly get any worse. Those words came back to haunt me at 2 a.m. as I lay in bed trying to block out the sound of my husband in the next room tossing his cookies--loudly. He had violated the First Law of Healthy Travel: Never fill your gas tank and your stomach at the same establishment.

After a week of complications caused by less-than-rational individuals (student with guns and 1000 rounds of ammo on campus, other students expressing desire to cause severe bodily pain to said gun-toting student), weather (flooding, trees falling, wind whipping the door open while I tried to fill the wood-burner, daughter waiting out tornadoes in the basement of her dorm in Kentucky), quirky job searches (first candidate cancelled, second candidate got stranded at O'Hare, second candidate finally arrived 12 hours late and had to have all appointments rescheduled), classes (graded 28 essays in just 24 hours so they'll be out of the way when the next 48 papers come in today, and let me just say that at this point I don't ever need to see a work of literature described as "relatable" or, even worse, "really relatable"), and sheer bad luck (choosing the shower stall with no hot water after a hard workout on a very cold day, knocking all the pens on the floor not once but twice while reporting the shower malfunction at the main desk of the rec center, dropping all my dirty sweaty workout clothes on the floor while picking up the pens)--after all that, I was really looking forward to the husband's return from his travels and a good long restful sleep.

Ha! And again I say, Ha! I was still awake at 3 a.m., and the alarm rang at 6:30 as usual. Today's forecast calls for no guns, no floods, no candidates, and no vomiting--which will make those 48 student drafts so much more bearable. All I have to do is stay awake and go through the motions and before you know it I'll be able to close the book on this bizarre week--and not a moment too soon!

Diligent but unlucky?

For the past year or two I've been periodically hearing an odd sort of excuse from students who have done poorly on papers: "Oops, I sent you the wrong version of my paper!" While I can sympathize with a student who revises a draft and then sends the earlier unrevised version, I hear this excuse most often from students suspected of plagiarism or whose papers clearly do not fulfill the requirements of the assignment. What they're really saying is, "I wrote two versions of my paper, one plagiarized and one original, but oops, I sent you the wrong one!" Or "You know, I wrote a whole different version of this paper that actually did follow the guidelines for the assignment, but silly me, I sent you the one that didn't!"

Are students these days really writing multiple versions of all their papers? What diligent students! I've revised hundreds of drafts, but once the final version is done, the draft goes into the trash. And suppose a student wrote a paper full of plagiarized passages and then revised it to "fix" the plagiarism; wouldn't he want to delete the plagiarized version just to destroy the incriminating evidence? But no: these students carefully store the plagiarized versions and then send them to me purely by accident. What unfortunate students! To think that a minor and completely understandable error in clicking on a file name should result in a Very Bad Grade!

Such diligent but unlucky students deserve my compassion, don't they? I ought to give them the benefit of the doubt. "All right," I'll say, "since you've worked so hard to write two different versions of your paper and since the 'right' version is sitting right there in your document file, go ahead and send it to me. You've got sixty seconds...starting now."

Timing is everything

"Rain, flood warnings, guns on campus...great time to be bringing in job candidates!"

So said my colleague first thing this morning, and he's right. The gun incident is all over the papers, the sky is gray and dripping, flooding is in the forecast...and our first candidate arrives tonight!

Dodging a bullet...or many of them

My colleagues and students have been up in arms about an incident on campus, but I'm opting out of the campus hysteria. It's true that campus police discovered a cache of guns (some semi-automatic, some loaded) stashed in plain sight in a student's car on campus, but it's also true that the student was quickly removed from campus and will not be returning. There was some miscommunication at first, some tendency to treat the incident as just a minor infraction, but that mistake was quickly repaired. In the meantime, the hysteria level has gone off the charts, with some students eagerly expressing a desire to see this student drawn and quartered along with several administrators whose responses to the incident were perceived as too slow. It's a little frightening when the first response to fear of violence is to threaten more violence.

Yesterday morning several colleagues came in and asked me what I intended to do about the situation, and I was befuddled. I'm an English professor: what can I do? Tell my students not to bring guns on campus? They've already heard that message. Later I learned the student's name (it's a small campus...everyone knew the kid's name by the end of the day) and recalled my rather unpleasant encounters with him a few years ago, not to mention his more recent run-ins with several of my colleagues. If he intended a massacre, I'm sure my department would have been high on his hit list.

This brings the threat closer to home, but I don't intend to lose any sleep over it. It is the responsibility of campus police to keep us safe, and in this case they did just that without any assistance from me. I may be too trusting, but I'm happy to let them do their job while I focus on mine. So instead of getting hysterical, I'll be thankful that in this case, at least, we've dodged a bullet...or many of them.

Making an entrance

"I brought the offending alarm clock with me," said my student as he dashed into class, plunked the clock down on the desk in front of me, and stood there panting (from running across campus) and dripping (without an umbrella).

We'd started class 25 minutes earlier, but his alarm clock still claimed he had another hour free. "I knew no one would believe me if I said my alarm clock was wrong," he explained, "so I said, 'You're coming with me!'"

It's a small class and fairly informal so his entry wasn't terribly disruptive. At least he came to class, I told myself. In the same situation, I think I would have skipped class entirely, unwilling to draw attention to myself by walking in half an hour late.

My student, on the other hand, saw the situation as an opportunity for theater. When an otherwise reliable student takes center stage in his own entertaining spectacle--well, the only proper response is applause.

Why I need a cat-nap

My husband has been out of town less than 24 hours and I'm already plotting to "lose" his cat. Okay, she's not exactly his cat; she's our cat, and we carefully divide the cat-care duties: the husband feeds, pets, brushes, plays with, and thoroughly spoils the cat. I clean the catbox.

She's not a terribly demanding cat most of the time, but when the guy who fills her food dish leaves she gets a little alarmed. This morning she began expressing this alarm at about 4:00 and she didn't stop until I got up and fed her.

I tried to ignore her at first. She doesn't have claws, but she sort of bats her paws against the bedroom door to make it rattle and meows in a loud and insistent manner, as if to say, "Who's in charge here? Where's my food? Doesn't anyone care about my NEEDS?!!" I do care--I care deeply--but I'd rather care a little later in the day. At first I resisted feeding her, assuming that if I give in and feed her at 4:30 a.m. today, tomorrow she'll want to be fed at 3:30. But I couldn't sleep through the caterwauling and I was getting less relaxed as time went on, so I finally got up and dumped some kibble in her dish.

"Satisfied?" I asked, but to a cat with food in front of her face, I am invisible.

I spent the next two hours trying unsuccessfully to get back to sleep, and when I finally got up, the cat was snoring comfortably on the sofa. Tomorrow I intend to wake her up at 3 and demand my breakfast, and while I'm eating, we'll have a little chat about her neglect of her mouse-catching duties. It's time that cat learned to sing for her supper--as long as she doesn't do it at 4 a.m.

Strictly complimentary

You know you're in for an interesting lunch in the faculty lounge when a colleague (male) starts off like this: "What I'm about to say is not intended as sexual harrassment" (and a quicker-witted listener would interrupt with, "You mean unlike everything else you've ever said?"--except that in this case such a statement would be inaccurate) "but you look great!"

This led inevitably to a discussion about whether and when it is appropriate to compliment colleagues on their looks. When is "Nice tie!" just a comment and when is it a come-on? Does it matter if the giver of the comment is in power over the recipient? On a small campus, we all have opportunities to exercise some sort of power sometimes--by serving on a committee that grants money for faculty travel or makes recommendations about tenure, for instance, or by taking a turn as chair of the department. We're all occasionally in a position to help (or hurt) each other, but is complimenting a colleague's appearance helping or hurting?

We didn't solve the problem over lunch, but if you locked an infinite number of monkeys in the faculty lounge with an infinite number of attractive ties, perhaps eventually they would come up with some coherent guidelines on how to compliment colleagues without incurring a lawsuit. Until those monkeys arrive on campus, though, I'm accepting all compliments--and giving some in return.