Long and rising road

"May the road rise to greet you" runs the well-known Irish blessing, but I did not feel at all blessed this weekend when the road kept looking as if it was about to rise up and slap me in the face.

I blame my new glasses. I picked them up just before leaving for my trip to Pittsburgh, and my prescription has changed so much that I was a bit disoriented at first when everything below eye-level kept trying to tilted toward me.

I got sort of accustomed to this tendency during the three-hour drive (which would have been a two-and-a-half-hour drive if I hadn't taken a wrong turn on a one-way street that introduced me to a larger swath of the city than was strictly necessary), but then I had to get out of the car and walk--first on city sidewalks and then on garish hotel carpet covered with geometric prints. The road was rising up to greet me all right, and it hurt.

But that's not the only reason I spent much of the weekend feeling disoriented. This was a peculiar conference. I attended six sessions, and only two of them had more people in the audience than on the panel. (The largest audience I saw--12 people--attended a session on blogging inside and outside the classroom.) Gathering a semi-huge assemblage of scholars together to deliver papers to virtually empty rooms seems an immense waste of time, energy, and resources, especially when so many of the papers I heard were (sorry, folks) pretty superficial: no theoretical foundation, little in-depth consideration of ideas, vast billowing clouds of vague generalizations delivered in smug, self-congratulatory tones. Why do we do this to ourselves? Is a line on a vita really worth all this fuss?

And let's not even talk about the state of the academic wardrobe. No job interviews were being conducted at this conference, and yet at fully half of the sessions I attended, every presenter was wearing a black or dark gray suit. One panelist livened up an otherwise somber ensemble with red patent-leather shoes, but aside from that, the entire experience was swathed in blah. I would have been happy to see some navy blue--and I was delighted that I'd decided to wear my new goldenrod jacket, which made me feel like the sun breaking through a storm-darkened sky.

Frankly, Pittsburgh looks as if it could use a little sunshine right now. I remember when my father used to come home from work and open his briefcase to release the distinctive odor of Pittsburgh's steel mills into our house in the northern suburbs; today the mills have left and taken their pollution and stink with them, but the city still feels dark and bleak, dressed in black and shades of gray.

But maybe that's just me. I was, after all, experiencing the conference and the city through lenses that made me frequently fear for my life. Maybe I ought to try again after the road loses interest in rising up to greet me.

Mixed messages

Suppose you need to communicate some bad news to a significant chunk of the students in a class: "If you keep missing class, you're in danger of failure" or "Your plagiarism has resulted in an F on the paper" or "I'm really disappointed in your performance on the midterm exam." Many--but not all--of the students need to hear the message, and you'd rather say it once and get it over with than deal with students one-on-one, or maybe you've already tried the one-on-one route and it's time for the Come to Jesus Speech.

Here's the question: how much time do you devote to delivering this message in class?

And here's the other question: how do you soften the blow for the students who don' t need to hear the message?

This morning I needed to remind about a third of my freshman writing students that consistently coming to class late will result in a lower grade. Earlier in the semester, I spoke to the offending students individually and saw some improvement, but lately this big clot of students has been wandering in late just about every day, and I wanted to sternly remind them of the consequences. On the other hand, I didn't want to dump this big pile of negative energy on the students who somehow manage to come to class on time every day.

So I thanked them. At the start of class, before the habitually tardy students arrived, I told the students how much I appreciate their prompt attendance, and then I said, "In a little while I'll be delivering a different message about tardiness, but I wanted you to know that it's not for you." They seemed pleased. To judge from my e-mail inbox, the tardy students were less pleased with the message I reserved for them.

The worst waste of time I've ever seen was when a professor spent 50 minutes of a 75-minute class reaming out the students for their bad performance on an exam. Halfway through the tirade, the student sitting next to me turned red and started to vibrate as if about to spontaneously combust, and that was before she saw her grade on the exam.

She got a 92.

That's one student who did not need to be raked over the coals for poor performance for 50 minutes, and I suspect there were others in the same boat. I can imagine other solutions: allow the students who did well to leave early; cut down the length of the tirade so that it's not an entirely wasted class; deliver the bad news briefly and with a smile and schedule a separate session for students who need extra attention.

It's probably easier to just stand up there and yell for 50 minutes, but what possible pedagogical purpose could such a performance serve?

Send in the bulldozers

Anyone want to loan me a bulldozer? I'll need one to shove around the big piles of work on my desk: papers to grade, advising folders to update, reports to file, committee work to continue ignoring until it can no longer be ignored. I promised myself that I wouldn't leave today without attending to enough of the piles to make it possible for me to go out of town on Friday, and even though I weaseled out of two afternoon meetings, I'm still here working 11 hours after I arrived.

I'm giving a paper at the College English Association conference in Pittsburgh on Saturday, which means that all my Friday tasks have to be tackled on Thursday, except Thursday is pretty crowded with advising appointments, which are crowding out my usual oases of work time. I value the time I spend with my advisees, but their presence causes some other matters to slip. This week's slippage has been immense. But I'm digging my way out little by little so that I can roll out of here on Friday without so much as a glance back at whatever's left of the piles of work.

My fear right now is that the slippage will get extreme and I'll be buried under piles of papers. If you don't hear from me in 24 hours, send in the bulldozers.

Hope for late bloomers?

"People serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable." --Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?

Me and my shadow

Telling secrets can be fun--except when it's a secret no one really wants to hear.

I remember that wonderful moment years ago when I knew I was carrying around a mysterious secret, and all I had to do to make people's eyes light up was to spill the beans: "I'm pregnant."

I'm a little more timid about spilling the beans since I learned last week that my womb is now nurturing a bouncing baby tumor. As tumors go, it's fairly harmless, causing a great deal of what the doctors like to call "discomfort" without being life-threatening. Everywhere I go I carry a mysterious secret, but it's unlikely to make anyone's eyes light up.

It's impossible to casually insert the word "tumor" into a conversation without introducing a note of awkwardness, an uncomfortable solemnity:

"How's your bracket looking?"

"Pretty good except for that Ohio State upset. How about yours?"

"Well, it's hard to focus on basketball when I'm distracted by this whole tumor thing...."

Pregnant people pass around ultrasound photos of their unborn children--in fact, they invite half the planet into the ultrasound room to watch the process. While I was waiting for my ultrasound last week, three different pregnant women went in for their ultrasounds trailing parades of supporters, one of them followed by seven friends and family members, all eager to see some nebulous shadows on a field of gray.

I went to my ultrasound alone. No one wants to see an ultrasound image of a tumor. Not even me.

But like Jack Gladney in White Noise I suddenly find myself carrying around a reminder of my own mortality. Jack believes computer data and graphic images will help him cope with the human condition, as if quantifying death as a series of "bracketed numbers and pulsing stars" could make death comprehensible, controllable. What I'm carrying is not death but discomfort, and no one really welcomes that sort of secret.

Somebody's hiring!

I dreamed that one of my beloved colleagues announced that he would be leaving to take a better job elsewhere.

"Where in the world did you find a job?" I asked. "Nobody's hiring!"

"Vulcan," he said.

"Vulcan College?"

"No," he said. "The planet Vulcan."

Which, I suppose, demonstrates the lengths to which job candidates will go to find meaningful employment in the current academic market. Nobody's hiring! The regional state university about 40 miles from here cut nine adjunct slots in December, so I've been hearing from a lot of disgruntled ex-adjuncts and I hired two of them this semester. Thanks to some changes in our first-year program, I have a larger than normal number of adjunct slots available in the fall, but I've been receiving unsolicited queries from newly minted PhD's as well as seasoned professors whose jobs have been downsized, all eager to work for peanuts teaching the classes no one else really wants. At some level I feel a little guilty about exploiting the misfortunes of others, but on the other hand, at least I have something to offer.

I just hope I can offer more than they do on the planet Vulcan.

Coincidental

Twenty-seven years ago a brand-new professor arrived on my undergraduate campus to teach journalism and serve as advisor to the college newspaper; since I was the editor, we spent a lot of time together, and since she was just 10 years older than I was, we hit it off pretty well. I learned an awful lot from her, and now her daughter is learning an awful lot from my daughter. That's right: my daughter served as student-teacher for a class including the daughter of my former teacher and mentor.

I guess this means that we're all getting older, but it's nice to know that the gift of teaching keeps on giving.

News junkie

"Young people don't read newspapers anymore," I said. "At least that's what the candidate for the journalism position told us today. They just can't be bothered with reading the paper when all the information they want is instantly available online."

We were sitting at the table together, my husband and I, smelling the delightful aroma of roast pork and rice pilaf, but we didn't want to dig in until the Texas kid joined us. He's home from college on spring break but even home cooking could not distract him from the newspaper article that held him in thrall--"Just let me finish these last two paragraphs!"

"That's right," I said. "Young people aren't reading newspapers at all. Not a bit of it."

But he didn't come to dinner until he was done reading the paper.

Meta-photography

Today a professional photographer took a picture of me taking a picture of her. You can't see me. I'm kneeling in the mud by the creek--but then, so is she. She's shooting me shooting her, but why?

The college magazine is running an article on the experiment in cross-disciplinary creativity in which I am involved, the project that inspired me to take a Scientific Imaging class to spark new ideas for teaching nature writing. The article talks about taking the plunge into unknown territory, using the example of my adventure stomping in cold creek water to get a photograph (read it here), and the photographer wanted to get a photo of me stomping in creek water to get a photograph. So I taught this morning in my creek-stomping clothes and then changed into my creek-stomping shoes and went out to stomp in a campus creek.

"Pretend you're taking a picture of something interesting," said the photographer, but this creek offers little of interest besides a deflated St. Patrick's Day balloon and a lot of mud. So I shot the photographer. It was a totally meta-photographic moment--well, except for the mud. There was nothing meta about the mud.

My own economic stimulus plan

At first I felt guilty about taking two new pairs of dress pants to a seamstress to be shortened. Why pay someone else to take up a few hems when I could do it myself for free? But the fact is that I can do it myself for free only if my time is worth nothing, and this week in particular, my time is pretty valuable. Besides, cuffs are a pain--and in these difficult economic times, I'm doing my patriotic duty by stimulating the local economy.

Likewise, that speeding ticket my husband got last week in West Virginia is simply our opportunity to stimulate West Virginia's economy, and all that shopping I did last week looks like a bold statement of patriotic fervor. Even my recent spate of expensive medical care might look like an close encounter of the painful kind, but the pain dissolves when I consider the sacrifices I'm making to stimulate the local health-care economy.

Now that I've done my part, though, I'm happy to pass the torch on to others. I'm just waiting now for someone to come along and stimulate my economy!

Full service

I got up this morning to find two inches of snow covering my car. In mid-March! In Kentucky! That's just wrong. My daughter helped me scrape it off and we set off for Lexington, where I dropped her off at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, where she is student-teaching. I refrained from reciting any Dunbar poetry. I'm not sure I could do it without my morning dose of caffeine anyway.

Now I'm sitting at a BP station taking advantage of their free wireless Internet access. The local Starbucks charges $9.95 for wireless access, but at the BP station, it's free. Gas stations used to check your oil and wash your windows, but now they offer free wireless Internet instead. That's fine with me. I can check my own oil.

I've got the rest of the day to enjoy before gathering my daughter and having dinner with her and her fiance, so I think I'll do some more shopping. I've already bought all the interesting items I need for spring, so I'm now stuck with the boring but essential stuff: underwear, towels, a new suitcase. Maybe I'll go downtown and visit Black Swan Books, a treasure trove of used and rare books. Or maybe I'll just sit here at the BP station all day and enjoy that peculiar gas-station/convenience store ambiance.

Choice: that's what Spring Break is all about.

Boldly going where no Bev has gone before

Early this morning I awoke from a shopping nightmare: desperate to find a new suit in a store that was about to close, I couldn't even find the right department; I would ask salespeople for directions and try to follow, but I kept ending up in the children's section or in some dark musty sub-basement full of broken furniture.

Fortunately, my actual shopping expedition wasn't the least bit nightmarish. I drove to the Big City this morning along with an artistic friend who kept encouraging me to try on colors and styles I normally wouldn't consider so that at one point I found myself in the dressing room at Sak's trying on a gorgeous orange jacket ($568) and a stunning pair of white pants ($300), which seemed, oddly enough, quite reasonable at the time. But instead, I came home with two very nice but moderately priced teaching outfits and a dress to wear to my daughter's wedding. I still need a spring suit, but I'll have a chance to do some more shopping as I head to Kentucky to visit my daughter tomorrow.

Next week when all my colleagues get back from spring break compare notes about their amazing travels, it'll sound a little lame to admit that I mostly spent my break hiking and shopping--but today in those dressing rooms I found myself boldly going where I've never gone before, which is pretty exciting (and much more pleasant than my shopping nightmares).

Hawk's Nest

A few shots from yesterday's hike: Cathedral Falls, a view of the river, the rhododendrons slope, and the cliffside trail.

Day tripper

Today we drove through towns called Boomer, Alloy, and Smithers on our way to Hawk's Nest State Park in West Virginia. Just two hours south of here the fosythia is already bright yellow and daffodils and tulips are blossoming, but we were more interested in hiking a steep cliffside trail that led first through dry deciduous woods and then suddenly turned a corner into a lush green grove of rhododendrons. Bright sun, clear skies, stunning views, and the sounds of songbirds and waterfalls cleared out the cobwebs and left behind a feeling of peace that, thankfully, survived the drive home.

D- in Scofflaw Studies

Once upon a time when I was a student at a college with very strict rules for dress and behavior, I realized that I had made it almost all the way through my freshman year without a single demerit in my file and I thought that was kind of pathetic. So I set out to break some rules. What sort of misbehavior would earn the wrath of the Powers That Be without resulting in some drastic measure like expulsion? I decided on a desperate plan: on a lovely afternoon in spring, I screwed up my courage and walked right into the college library--barefoot.

No one noticed. There I was doing the worst I could imagine and no one gasped in shock or handed me a demerit slip or complained to the PTBs. As a scofflaw, I was utterly worthless.

I thought of that experience the other day when I carried a cup of coffee into our brand-spanking-new high-tech library. Part of me expected a white-haired librarian with a hanky stuffed up her sleeve to gasp in shock and faint dead away, but we don't have any white-haired librarians with hankies stuffed up their sleeves and even if we did, they wouldn't be shocked. Why? Because the new library welcomes food and drink.

There are limitations, of course. Nobody wants to see big greasy messy pizzas or take-out Chinese noodles or cheese fondue in the stacks, but self-contained snacks are permitted, water bottles are everywhere, and coffee is de rigueur.

But I still felt like a scofflaw when I carried my coffee cup into the library. It'll take me a while to shush the voice of the white-haired librarian who lives inside my conscience. One of these days I'll lure her up to the stacks and crush her between those movable shelves--especially if she keeps reminding me of the time I went to the library barefoot and utterly failed in my attempt to be a scofflaw.

Breaking away

It's amazing how a little sunshine improves the prevailing mood on campus. All week faculty members and students have been rushing from building to building, their faces hunched into their collars for warmth, while today they're sauntering about or just sitting on benches and soaking in the sunshine.

I've been asking students where they're going on Spring Break next week and the one thing we all agree on is that we're ready for a break regardless of where we're going. Many of them are taking trips to Florida to play baseball or softball or lounge on the beach, but most of my students admitted that they're just planning to spend the week goofing off at home.

I'm with them. Sure, I'll do some shopping and maybe take a day trip to a good hiking area, but I'll be happy just to sleep a little later than usual and to not be required to read any essays full of strangled syntax and tortured logic. Maybe I'll zip down to Kentucky to spend a few days with my adorable daughter. As long as I get a break, I don't really care much where I go...and if Spring Break brings a break in the weather, that's even better.

The Funnel-Cakes of J. Alfred Prufrock

When I read the midterm essay in which the student asserted that T.S. Eliot in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" created a feeling of happiness by introducing images of funnel-cakes and fireworks, my first response was to laugh. Unless my edition is sadly lacking, funnel-cakes do not appear in Prufrock, although there are spots where they might not be terribly out of place:

Should I, after tea and cake and ices and funnel-cake,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis, for goodness' sake?

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant funnel-cake vendor, one that will do
To swell a belly, start a fart or two....

Even though funnel-cakes do not appear in Prufrock, I completely understand why this student placed them there, and thereby hangs a tale that will enlighten gentle readers about students' essay exam preparation practices: while there are no funnel-cakes in Prufrock, the word "funnel-cakes" did appear on the blackboard on the day when we discussed the poem in class.

Why? Before we began discussing the poem, I wanted to explain Eliot's idea of the objective correlative in terms understandable to the non-majors who make up the majority of the class. Suppose you are a poet and you want to create within your reader an experience of happiness without coming right out and saying "I am happy!" What sorts of images would you present to readers that might suggest happiness?

"Funnel-cakes," said one student, so I wrote that on the board, followed by a plus sign. "Fireworks," said the next, and soon we had a list of images designed to add up to an equation for the feeling of happiness. That's the objective correlative: a set of objects that serve as the formula for a particular emotion.

"Now let's see how this works in the poem," I said, and we began working our way, line by line, through "Prufrock," examining Eliot's assemblage of discrete images that add up to a particular emotion--not happiness, though, thanks to the overwhelming absence of funnel-cakes and fireworks.

It's easy to see how the funnel-cakes moved from the blackboard to the student's notes and from thence into the midterm essay exam. The only essential element missing from this equation is the poem itself. If the student had been listening closely in class or if he had bothered to study the poem instead of simply memorizing his notes, he might have noticed Eliot's avoidance of funnel-cakes, fireworks, and happiness. But that would be too much work.

I suppose I should be flattered that the student found my words more memorable than Eliot's, but that won't improve his grade any. I don't know what sort of emotion the grade will cause the student to experience, but I doubt happiness will have anything to do with it--unless he has easy access to a healthy supply of funnel-cakes.

A gaggle of guys

This month as we celebrate five years in our little house in the not-so-big woods, I'm thinking about all the different ways this house has enriched our lives. For one thing, we've developed close working relationships with a variety of guys.

For instance, you can't live with a driveway like 0urs without getting to know your gravel guy pretty well, and living in the woods requires dependence on the chainsaw guy. (Who knew chainsaws could be so persnickety?) We rely regularly on our furnace guy and our electricity guy, and the tree-trimming guys know just where to dump those piles of mulch.

Some guys come and go. Our garage guy has moved on to other projects and we haven't needed the septic tank guy for a while, but we're now working with a llama-dung guy who promises to supply fertilizer for our garden this spring.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to have one do-it-all guy who could take care of everything that needs attention, but on the other hand, variety is the spice of life--and all these guys have definitely brought some spice into ours.

Milestones

This morning I put on a wonderful suit that I haven't been able to wear since 1986. I didn't actually wear the suit to work because I don't have a blouse that matches, but still, it was pretty exciting to zip up the skirt on a suit that has been languishing in the cedar chest for 23 years.

It's a terrific suit: 100 percent wool, rich rusty brown, classic lines and timeless style. Last spring I took it out of the cedar chest, had it dry-cleaned, and hung it in a highly visible spot in my closet to act as inspiration, and I've been trying it on about once a week all winter. Now that it finally fits, I'll need to buy a blouse so I can wear it before the weather turns too warm. That will be my weekend challenge: find a wonderful blouse so I can wear my wonderful suit.

And then I'll work on getting into another treasure from the cedar chest: the Black Watch kilt skirt I bought in Ontario in 1984 (fits in the waist but not in the hips--yet). It hangs in my closet like a flag waving me on: "Get up off your buns and go for a walk!" it says, and if I obey often enough, one of these days I'll be able to wear it.

Catch-22, take two

Last time I taught Joseph Heller's Catch-22, it was a total disaster; this time, it's a delight. What made the difference?

Context is key: I taught Catch-22 three years ago in a sophomore-level Literature into Film class full of non-English majors interested in fulfilling two General Education Requirements (Literature and Writing Proficiency). Many students were attracted to the class because they saw the word "Film" in the title and assumed that it would be less demanding than a literature class focusing entirely on books.

They balked at Heller. Didn't like him one bit. Didn't understand why he couldn't just tell the story straight out instead of jumbling the chronology and switching between so many characters the students found incomprehensible and introducing obscure theological debates and going on and on and on for so many hundreds of pages.

And then they didn't like the movie any better: too scattered, too unpatriotic, too confusing. They really didn't like the brief moments of semi-nudity, complaining on course evaluations that I forced them to view pornography in class.

Those were probably the worst course evaluations I've ever received, and not just because of the nudity thing. It was the first time I had ever taught a three-hour evening course. I am a morning person. My brain shuts off the lights and pulls down the blinds at about 7 p.m. The class lasted until 10. For that particular group of students, I needed to be at my best, and I simply wasn't.

This semester it's all good: I'm teaching Heller in an upper-level American Novel class full of English majors who enjoy dissecting Heller's rhetoric, his characters' peculiar moral arithmentic, and his theological debates. I'm teaching in the morning when my brain is fully functioning, and I'm showing brief clips from the film but avoiding nudity.

Well, mostly. Yesterday I wanted to show the scene in which Yossarian receives a medal in the buff, and I warned students that they would be exposed to Alan Arkin's bare butt, but I also offered the advice my adorable son gave me years ago when my husband and I were setting out to see Titanic for the first time: "I heard there's a naked girl in it," he said, "But you can put your coat over your head when it gets to that part."

I didn't notice whether any coats went over any heads in class yesterday, but I did hear the sort of painful laughter that arises at so many points in both the book and the film. Heller takes all the ideas mid-century Americans held dear and twists them until they squeal in joy or pain or sometimes both, and that's a complex set of emotions for the average student to encounter.

Good thing I have above-average students this semester, because they make Catch-22 an awful lot of fun.

Outside my bailiwick

Every time a student tries to excuse clueless behavior by saying something like "It wasn't my intention to turn in my paper five days late" or "I never intended to plagiarize," I thank my lucky stars that the task of judging the thoughts and intents of the human heart does not fall within my bailiwick. I'll leave that task in more capable hands and concentrate instead on what the student actually did, not what he or she may or may not have intended.

What makes a great weekend?

1. A long walk in the sunshine before the snow started falling.

2. Really cool birds enjoying really cold weather.

3. An article accepted by an academic journal in record time.

4. A completed draft of the next article for submission.

5. Homemade broccoli soup with triple-cheese-and-chive bread.

Dumb and dumber

The worst way to start the day is to grab a pile of student writing and immediately notice not one but two obvious cases of plagiarism right on top. Copying and pasting from Cliffs Notes? You just can't get any stupider than that. I hate to go to class angry but I have under an hour to calm down before I have to confront the charming young people who have ruined my day. Can I have a lifeline?

Update: One of the students e-mailed me to ask whether I could be "generous enough" to overlook his infraction. Great: now the issue is not his academic dishonesty but my generosity (or lack thereof). That puts things in a whole new light! Why didn't I realize earlier that it's not about the student at all! It's all about me!

The hovering blur

Yesterday for the first time I was able to follow the professor's instructions in a Photoshop exercise, and it felt really good. My problems are not the professor's fault: Photoshop is entirely new to me and I haven't spent enough time playing with it to have an innate sense for where things are. But the other problem is more personal: when we're looking at what the professor is doing on the big screen up front and then look back at our little monitors to try to do the same thing, my eyes simply cannot make the adjustment in focus quickly enough, so I end up missing the next step while I'm waiting for my vision to un-blur.

Yesterday, though, it all came together: I knew where to find things on the menu bar, how to locate the appropriate tool, how to undo a disastrous choice. I still can't switch between small screen and big screen without feeling as if my eyes are popping out of their sockets in protest, but I compensate by listening closely and rarely looking at the big screen. Photoshop is pretty cool now that I'm getting the hang of it; it's teaching me that I can't always trust what my eyes are telling me, particularly when it comes to color and composition.

Neither can I trust my eyes to keep functioning properly without the occasional eye exam. Spring Break is hovering like a blur on the horizon, but after my Spring Break eye exam I hope to start seeing things much more clearly.

Notes to my tardy students

To the student who shows up five minutes late every day: I admire your consistency, but why don't you initiate that consistency five minutes earlier?

To the student who comes thumping into class 45 minutes late mumbling a totally lame excuse: You may be here in body, but you're absent where it counts--in the gradebook.

To the student who keeps sending assignments as imaginary e-mail attachments: I can't grade what I can't see.

To the student who comes to about one-third of the class meetings and shows up 15 to 20 minutes late: I hope you never need any grace from me (deadline extension, grade nudge, or letter of recommendation) because the most memorable thing about you is your willingness to disrupt class.

Twilight

Being married to a man who thinks he can climb a tree leaning dangerously close to high-tension power lines on a cold day at twilight and cut it down armed only with a bunjee cord, a rope, and a handsaw has it advantages and disadvantages.

The chief disadvantage is that all I can do is watch--I can't even catch him if he falls.

The advantage? Really cool photos.

Adventures in photography

It took me a while to figure out how to approach this week’s assignment for my Scientific Imaging class. The task: take a photograph of liquid in glass. Sounds simple enough, but avoiding glare and reflection can be a challenge, and then what do you do when the background shines through the liquid?

The sample images feature a lot of beakers, test tubes, and other scientific equipment, but I wanted to take a photo more relevant to my interests while still suggesting some scientific purpose. Finally it came to me: I would fill a Mason jar with silty creek water, set it on a rock in or near my creek, and create an image that would show how much stuff is floating around in water that appears to be clear and sparkling.

So I found a jar, bundled up against the cold, and headed down to the creek, where I had no problem locating water full of floaties—but where would I set the jar? I found a flat space on a log next to the creek, but the log was studded with bright white plate-size fungi that made annoying reflective patterns on the glass.

How about a rock? We have plenty of rocks both in and out of the creek, but few flat spaces where the jar wouldn’t wobble. The perfect rock was about four feet into the creek in water about eight inches deep, which isn’t much if you’re wearing waterproof boots, but I don’t have any waterproof boots so I was out stomping around in the creek in a pair of raggedy old sneakers.

Have I mentioned that it’s cold outside? The air temperature was in the mid-30s and the water felt like knives shooting through my ankles, but to an intrepid student, cold is no obstacle. So I waded out into the creek, positioned the jar perfectly, set the exposure, and knelt down to start shooting pictures.

Nothing happened.

I’ve had this camera for about a month and I’m still learning the meanings of various blinking lights and symbols, so it took me a while to figure out the problem: low battery. Too low to run the shutter.

Note to self: buy a back-up battery.

So I went up to the house to charge up the battery, change into dry clothes, and warm up with some hot tea, only to repeat the entire adventure again a few hours later. (And when wading in cold water on a freezing-cold Sunday afternoon qualifies as an adventure, what does that tell you about my life?)

The result? A whole bunch of photos of a jar full of creek water. I need to pick the best one and run it through Photoshop, but when it’s done I think I’ll call the finished product “Dull as Ditchwater.” Story of my life.

Spark, shine, song

"When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud."

The theology is a little screwy, but this is what I love about teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: she immerses readers in the mud so we can see the shine and hear the song.

Blowing in the wind

At lunchtime the sky was clear and blue, but some interesting weather seems to be blowing our way, bringing black clouds and wicked wind. Last night we listened to wind blowing limbs down in the woods, but none of them caused any damage or blocked the road. Others on our road were not so fortunate: power was out to a large area this morning, while the power stayed on at our house.

Well, mostly. Yesterday afternoon the furnace fan seized up and blew the circuits to part of the house, but last night was not a bad time to live without heat. This morning the furnace guys came out to fix the fan and they were surprised to find that we still had power when so many others don't.

These swift weather changes leave people dull and cross, and the same thumping headache seems to be sweeping the campus. Meanwhile, I'm hoping the wind will blow some of the cobwebs out of my mind. For the first time all week I'll go home before dark today, and I intend to do some therapeutic cooking and then spend some totally mindless time with the spouse, playing Scrabble or reading or watching a DVD. Maybe we'll just sit and stare out the window as the interesting weather blows in. Consider it free entertainment--and it doesn't even require electricity.

U who?

Dear U-ser,
That's right, I'm talking to you: the student so addicted to text-speak that she peppers her papers with "u," even papers that have no reference to "u" or "you," such as literary analysis essays. You may have noticed that your "u" habit is not earning you any kudos in the the classroom, but have you ever wondered why? What's wrong with "u" anyway?

You'll notice that I'm liberally using the word "you" in this open letter. I can do this for several reasons:

1. I have made it abundantly clear to whom the "you" refers, so I'm not employing "you" in that lazy way that means "people in general."

2. On the Formality of Writing continuum, a blog post falls somewhere between the abbreviated informality of text-speak and the more formal writing expected in academic essays.

3. This is my blog, and I set the standards. I don't go to the grocery store in my pajamas and I don't strip a perfectly good pronoun of two-thirds of its letters in writing intended for public consumption. When you are in control of the rhetorical situation, you can decide what's appropriate and what isn't.

You'll notice that in your classes, you are not in control of the rhetorical situation; instead, you are expected to adapt to standards imposed by others. You could argue that this system is oppressive and squelches individual expression, but unless you make your argument in language your oppressors recognize as valid, you will not be heard. It's a sad truth but you might as well get used to it.

Many professors will tell you that it is never appropriate to use "you" in academic writing, but my policy is: never say never. Every writer should approach each rhetorical situation with full access to all the capabilities of the English language and should then make appropriate choices based on the audience and purpose of the writing task. I can easily envision times when it would be not just acceptable but essential to use "you" in academic writing, but those situations are fairly rare and are unlikely to arise in an essay analyzing a work of literature.

In your essay, you use "u" to mean something like "people in general," the sort of undefined usage that reinforces your essay's overall sense of vagueness. This usage can actually work against you when it makes inappropriate assumptions about your audience. Look at these sentences:

When you read poetry, it is hard to understand what you're reading.
When you braid your hair, you should decorate the braid with pretty ribbons.
When you murder someone, you should hide the body very carefully.

The first sentence assumes that your reader has a hard time understanding poetry, which may be true--but if not, you have just alienated that reader. The second and third make similarly alarming assumptions about readers; since I'm not planning to put ribbons in my hair or murder anyone anytime soon, these sentences tell me that you're not talking to me. There may be times when you want to strictly limit your readership--when writing a how-to manual on braiding or murder, for instance--but again, those situations are unlikely to arise in an essay analyzing literature.

In a literary analysis essay, you focus on the literature itself ("it") or sometimes on the author ("he" or "she"). "You" and "I" don't really enter into it unless you're doing some fairly sophisticated reader-response analysis, which you are not. So for the sake of this assignment, assume that the word "you" is off limits.

But then if you must use "you"--if you simply must feed your addiction--then for heaven's sake spell it correctly, okay? Save the "u" for informal settings in which spelling doesn't matter--and then on those special occasions when you want to sound educated and credible and careful, give the word its full complement of letters. Adding those letters may be painful, but trust me: "u" will get you nowhere.

Weird whimsy

I've just read a student draft that refers to a character with a "whim of iron." I've heard of an iron will before, but what is an iron whim and who carries one? A footloose and fancy-free sprite equipped with brass knuckles? A sylph packing heat? A cuddly panda trained in Kung-fu--oh wait, that's been done.

From now on I intend to wrap all my whims in iron. The better to brain you with, my dear.

Starry-eyed spelling

Some of my colleagues are wondering whether Alex Rodriguez's name ought to be spelled with an asterisk in the middle, but I'm more concerned about how they pronounce "asterisk." No one seems to have any trouble with the first s, but that little s near the end gets overlooked all the time. It's "asterisk," people, not "asterik"! The last syllable sounds like "risk," not "rick." What's so difficult about that?

Partly sunny

This morning I drove to work in daylight, which sounds fairly ho-hum unless you've been driving to work in the dark, driving home in the dark, and spending the entire day indoors for at least a month. Yesterday the sun was shining all afternoon, and Saturday morning I managed to walk the loop under blazing sun, and even though I still had to pick my way around veritable glaciers covering shady sections of my road, it still felt like I had walked from darkness into light. It was just about one year ago that I first walked the loop (read it here), but since that time I've done it so many times that if I can't walk for a few days, I feel deprived. The recent cold and icy conditions have prevented me from walking for nearly a month, so Saturday's walk was quite welcome.

Moreso because that walk was really the only relaxation I enjoyed all weekend. I revised a journal article, reviewed a textbook proposal, did some housework, assembled a pile of papers to mail to my tax guy, took some pictures, prepared for classes, and basically spent the entire weekend working--except for the two hours it took me to walk the loop. That walk may have provided enough solar energy to recharge my batteries for a few days, but it won't last. One good dose of sunshine leaves me wanting more....so let's hope more is on the way.

Laughable phone lines

When the guy from the phone company got a good look at the telephone pole leaning across the corner of our back yard, he laughed out loud. "You should have called this in years ago," he said. My husband pointed out that we did indeed call the phone company to complain about the pole five years ago when we first moved in to this house, but the phone company said that they had just recently fixed a bunch of poles in our area and therefore there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with it.

So PhoneCoGuy did some further investigation and discovered that the phone company had paid a sub-contractor to do those repairs in 2003, but it was clear from the situation on the scene that the repairs had never been done. The only reason we were able to get the phone company to take any interest in the situation right now is that we finally have a renter living in our garage apartment so we need to get a phone line out there, which is more difficult than it sounds given the distance from the house to the garage and the presence of intervening trees.

"I'll tell you what," said PhoneCoGuy. "I'll write on the repair order that this pole is on the ground" (which was not too far from the truth) "and that'll get someone out here to take care of it right away."

Of course, at that time he could not have known that an ice storm would distract the phone company's attention, so three weeks later there's still no phone line to the apartment--but we do have a new telephone pole in our yard and it's not on the ground. It's not even leaning. I don't miss the old pole, and I certainly don't miss the static caused by the old pole's tendency to sway in the wind and scrape the phone line against trees. Next week they're bringing out some new line, so one of these days we'll be fully connected and static-free. No one laughs at my telephone pole!

My septic tank, on the other hand, is kind of amusing.

Chiasm R Us

You know you're a certifiable language nerd if the act of constructing a sentence with chiastic structure makes you feel as if you've swallowed sunshine. Unfortunately, this kind of joy is difficult to share with others. Anyone who asks me why I'm grinning like an idiot this morning and hears my response ("I just created the most wonderful chiasm!") is likely to back slowly toward the door, nodding and smiling all the way. "There, there, now," they'll say, or "I think they've got a new treatment for that--you might want to check with your doctor."

But I can't help it: it's not every day that an opportunity to employ chiasm arises, and I intend to enjoy it while I can. I'll tell everyone--and if they don't understand, that's their loss, not mine.

Enchanting

I've finally finished Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, which is both enchanting and infuriating. Rushdie creates an amazingly rich world blending history, fantasy, and myth, a world so enchanting that it is impossible to imagine an end, so it's inevitable that any ending would be disappointing, and Rushdie's is doubly so--a lush, baroque plot rushes suddenly to a lame, unsatisfying conclusion. That's the infuriating part.

But it is an amazing book. The novel explores the public hunger for myth, the sort of hunger that today inspires cable news networks to cast every petty newsmakers as epic hero or villain. Rushdie suggests that the human desire for myth functions just fine even when the only means of transmission is word of mouth: "Plainly Lady Black Eyes was becoming all things to all people, an exemplar, a lover, an antagonist, a muse; in her absence she was being used as one of those vessels into which human beings pour their own preferences, abhorrences, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, secrets, misgivings, and joys, their unrealized selves, their shadows, their innocence and guilt, their doubts and certainties, their most generous and also most grudging response to their passage through the world." Few know better than Rushdie that in order to become a vessel for the public's hopes and fears, one must first be reamed out, emptied, scoured, and possessed.

The idea of possession recurs throughout the book, with characters becoming possessed by hungers for passion, power, and poetry. The protagonist is a compulsive storyteller who "had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wonderous travelers' tales." Even when he finds himself in a dark dungeon slithering with vermin, his greatest fear is that he will die without telling his story: "He found this thought intolerable and so it refused to leave him, it crawled in and out of his ears, slid into the corners of his eyes and stuck to the roof of his mouth and to the soft tissue under his tongue."

While the ability to create a fluid universe of narrative eventually elevates the storyteller into a position of power (however temporary), other characters illustrate that narrative creativity is not the only way to win political favor. Sometimes success comes to those willing to disgorge the undigested contents of an excellent memory, those like Bakti Ram Jain, who "proudly held the rank of Imperial Flatterer First Class, and was a master of the ornate, old-school style known as cumulative fawning. Only a man with an excellent memory for the baroque formulations of excessive encomia could fawn cumulatively, on account of the repetitions required and the necessary precision of the sequencing."

Such playful moments have been fleeting in Rushdie's recent novels, but The Enchantress of Florence bubbles over with delight in the intricacies of the English language and the follies of the human condition, as well as a wealth of playful allusions suggesting that Rushdie has drunk deeply from the Sea of Stories and served up a generous draught for his eager readers. I just wish it hadn't ended quite so quickly.

Bonus tidbit: "By the Caspian Sea the old potato witches sat down and wept," begins one chapter, but "When they heard the news of Ismail's rout, the eastern potato witches wiped their eyes, ceased their wailing, and danced. A pirouetting Khorasani witch is a rare and particular sight, and few who saw the dance ever forgot it." Those who teach on my campus are laughing uproariously right now, but others don't get the joke. Every campus ought to come equipped with a pirouetting Khorasani!

Other side of the desk

I just spent two hours in the lab struggling to complete my homework assignment for this week's Scientific Imaging class, and I'm exhausted. I don't understand the assignment! I can't make Photoshop behave! The prof is too demanding! Doesn't he know we're not all science majors?!!!! Doesn't he realize that I have three other classes??!!!!!!!!

Okay, I exaggerate. Actually, the fact that I spent most of the afternoon working on an assignment for a class in which I'm not even receiving a grade tells you more about me than about the class. Why don't I just slack off? It's not as if this will go on my Permanent Record!

We're only three weeks into the semester and I've already learned a few things from sitting on the other side of the teacher's desk. I've learned that I'm not too old to learn a few new tricks with technology, and I've learned that I need to work on my dithering (and if you haven't used Photoshop, you don't know squat about dithering), and I've learned that procrastination is not always a character flaw but can also be a survival technique--if I'd tried to do this assignment between meetings yesterday, my brain would have popped a circuit and sizzled until crispy.

Tomorrow I'll take a look at my classmates' results and see how my work measures up. I'm sure I'll learn a few things from them too. More than anything, I hope my classmates will teach me the secret to slacking off, because otherwise, it's just a matter of time until the sizzling starts.

Things that go Bark in the Night

Whenever I mention the nocturnal creature that has been attacking animals in my part of the county, my colleagues look skeptical. If some rough beast has been slouching around the area eviscerating animals, they wonder, why haven't they heard about it?

If they spent some time out in my part of the county, they'd hear about it. The local newspapers have been full of reports about a series of vicious attacks on animals, all within a mile or two of my house. The death toll so far includes two pygmy goats, a golden retriever, and a 750-pound adult female donkey, which apparently fought pretty hard to protect her offspring but was still brought down by whatever is out there.

Local animal control officials are stymied, so they've brought in a predation expert (and how would you like that job description on your resume?) to examine the remains of the unfortunate animals. So far they've ruled out bears and coyotes, which are known to occasionally roam these woods, and they believe it's either a pack of wild dogs or one honking big vicious dog. (Dog vs. donkey: that's got to be a really big dog.)

Those of us who live in the affected area have been warned to stay in at night and carry protection, although what sort of protection will fend off something capable of bringing down a enraged mama donkey? Are vicious dog packs deterred by pepper spray? Will my tiny flashlight intimidate whatever is out there?

I'm certain that something is out there. Last night our dog, who rarely barks, joined the neighbors' hounds in barking frantically for five solid hours, starting at around 3 a.m. when the clamor woke me up. The dogs sometimes bark when deer are crossing the meadow or when raccoons get into the garden, but those incidents last 20 or 30 minutes and then stop, while last night's barking went on and on. I tried to get back to sleep but I kept being haunted by questions: what mysterious beast is out there riling up the dog population? Is it just a persistent herd of deer or has Sasquatch's cousin invaded our turf?

Whatever it is, I hope it moves on quickly. I've had about enough of Things that go Bark in the Night.

Invisible Woman

Last week a colleague publicly berated me for maintaining a "secret" blog, despite the fact that I have spoken freely about my blog in the faculty lounge, given the address to anyone who asked for it, put a link to my blog on my Facebook page, and even printed the address in my annual Christmas newsletter.

This week a campus committee sent me a form letter full of the usual passive-voice language one expects from a committee burdened with informing unfortunate nominees that they will not be receiving any teaching prizes this year, but they also committed the further indignity of spelling my name incorrectly.

One of these days I'll just change my name to Mudd and go live under a rock.

Why I love my library

Among the many reasons to love my new library, I really love the way certain shapes and colors are echoed throughout the building and the way unexpected openings frame design elements. It love the fact that it is full of light and color and interesting upholstery.

And then there are those chairs. If Pixar were producing an animated film featuring talking chairs, they would look just like the study chairs in the library's Center for Teaching Excellence. If these chairs could speak, what would they say?

Exercise what?

Yesterday's local newspaper reported on the ice storm that made travel treacherous in our area, noting that later "the advisory was downgraded to a Level 1, with motorists still asked to exercise when driving on snow- and ice-covered roads."

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to ask motorists to exercise while driving on snow- and ice-covered roads--but then I suppose it depends upon the nature of the exercise. I wouldn't recommend taking a treadmill or rowing machine out on the road, but small barbells wouldn't be any more distracting than, for instance, a cell phone. Sit-ups would be possible for those with electronic seat adjustments, but it's difficult to see out the windshield from a recumbent position. And jumping jacks are out of the question.

Still, if the Powers That Be insist that I exercise while driving on snow and ice, who am I to challenge their authority? I just need to find a stability ball to coordinate with the color of my car.

Sneak preview

The Sticky Situation

It began like any other day. We came into class at 8 a.m., opened our books, and began to discuss the previous night's homework. Then, she sprung it upon us: the challenge of epic proportions, to make this class interesting to an outside reader. What was this great challenge? We were to dream up the perfect title accompanied by an introductory paragraph describing today's class. Thus, we found ourselves stuck in a sticky situation.

...It sounds better if you read it in a deep movie-preview-announcer voice, but even without such dramatic tones, don't you want to know what's going on here?

I wanted to make my freshman writing students think about methods for attracting reluctant readers, so I did the usual in-class exercise involving looking at a bunch of titles and opening lines and determining what makes them effective (or not). They agreed that it's easier to make readers care about topics that are inherently interesting or controversial, but what about a topic no one in his or her right mind would want to read about?

Hence the assignment: in groups, students had to write a title and introduction for a hypothetical essay describing today's freshman writing class. Given such a dull topic, how would they make reluctant readers care?

They did it by using vivid verbs, immersing readers in specific examples, introducing interesting questions, and generally avoiding the kinds of vague opening lines that tend to appear in freshman writing ("Education means many things to many people in society today...."). Now that they have some experience in producing interesting openings, they face the real challenge: will they be able to transfer these skills to their first major essays? Tune in next Tuesday for the thrilling conclusion of--The Sticky Situation!

Icing on the cake

Early this morning we lay awake listening as ice-covered tree limbs crashed to the ground in the woods, and we wondered what sights daylight would reveal. It's a shiny white world where pine trees struggle to hold up ice-laden limbs and icicles drip from the edges of everything. My college cancelled morning classes, a wise move considering the treacherous circumstances, so I'm planning to stay inside and grade papers all day in front of the fire while enjoying the savory aroma of potato soup bubbling in the crockpot. I know I'll have to pay for this day off eventually, but for now, I intend to cherish the ice.

Third Monday Syndrome

The first Monday bubbles with the excitement of new classes, new students, new stories about what happened over break: on the first Monday, anything is possible.

On the second Monday, reality begins to set in: the weekend simply wasn't long enough but the week ahead looks doable, not quite as sparkly new as the previous week but still possessing possibilities.

The third Monday comes barrelling in like an out-of-control freight train carrying piles of student papers, e-mailed excuses, venomous glares, malfunctioning technology and meetings meetings meetings stretching down the rails from here to eternity.

Everyone at the department meeting today looked as if they'd stepped directly into the path of that train. It was a clanking screeching train wreck of a day, and right now the debris is piled so high that it's impossible to see over the top. Hello! Is anyone out there?! If so, would you mind tossing me some rope and a lantern and a healthy supply of hope? We're fresh out.

Xtreme cluelessness

After some heated cogitation, I believe I've figured out the function of extreme sports. I was up at the rec center working up a sweat (because it's too cold and windy for a winter wimp like me to walk outdoors) while watching these Xtremely insane young men compete in a series of Xtraordinarily ridiculous events in the Winter X Games, and at first I couldn't figure out the point.

You want to drive a snowmobile up a steep ramp and then flip it upside down while swinging your feet from side to side and doing a little can-can kick? That's got to violate a whole mess of rules--if not the laws of physics, then certainly the conventions of common sense. Snowmobiles are heavy, clunky chunks of equipment full of moving parts that could splatter your body all over that pretty snow, sort of like the wood-chipper scene in the movie Fargo. If God had intended for snowmobiles to fly, He would have equipped them with full-time orthopedists and traction gear.

And yet here were a bunch of guys willing and eager to go out in the cold and do Xtremely dangerous things with vehicles capable of killing them. Why? Granted, the medals look like lethal snowflakes you could use to disembowel your worst enemy, but even a good old-fashioned disembowelling is hard to enjoy if you're on crutches. People willing to fly through the air on and under twirling snowmobiles must fulfill some sort of redeeming social purpose, but what could it be?

The answer came to me when I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the glass: a middle-aged, pudgy professor wearing mismatched floppy workout gear to climb steps to nowhere, hair flapping and sweat dripping down her face, looking about as ridiculous as a person not wearing clown shoes can look and feeling not a whole lot better because she's spent a little too much time obsessing over stupid decisions, missed opportunities, failures large and small, and summing it all up, the person I saw reflected in the glass struck me as just hopelessly clueless.

And that's when I understood: no matter how many dumb things I may have done, I've never tried to make a snowmobile fly. I'll never earn a lethal snowflake medal, but when it comes to common sense, I'm way ahead of the pack.

Dance of the Scheduling Fairies

For the past two weeks committee chairs have been performing the twice-yearly Dance of the Scheduling Fairies as they try to determine a day and time on which every member of the committee can meet. It's sort of like those logic problems on standardized tests: if the peas must be on the shelf above the corn but the beets can never abut the brussels sprouts, where should you put the celery?

Professor A teaches four classes back-to-back TTH and can meet only MWF, except for alternate Fridays. Professor B teaches all morning and Professor C teaches all afternoon, right up to the moment when Professor D has to leave campus to drive his offspring to hockey practice. No one wants to meet at lunchtime or early in the morning, and everyone wants to get off campus before 5, but there are only so many hours in the day so someone will have to bend. It's the same dilemma we face when scheduling classes: if the students had their way, all classes would be offered at 11 a.m., but we don't do that, do we?

Last week a committee chair sent out an Excel spreadsheet and invited committee members to block out the times when they definitely could not meet. The result was a nearly black spreadsheet with one open hour glowing cheerfully in the lower left corner, so that's when the chair scheduled the meeting. The next day he received an e-mail message from a faculty member senior enough to know better: "I know I said I could meet at that time," he wrote, "but I was an idiot."

Back to the drawing board. I say toss that committee member in the bin with the brussels sprouts and if he doesn't like it, let him eat corn.

Out of the bendy byways

It's not often that a student introduces a word I've never seen before, and when it happens, it's generally the result of inventive spelling. Very rarely does a student offer up a useful and satisfying term like the one I learned yesterday when a freshman writer gave me "circumbendibus."

Say it out loud: it fills the mouth deliciously, and it sounds like what it means--a circuitous, bendy route. Michael Quinion over at World Wide Words explains that circumbendibus "was created in the late seventeenth century as humorous fake Latin from circum-, around, plus English bend, plus the Latin ending -ibus." Goldsmith used it in She Stoops to Conquer as a noun meaning something like "roundabout way" with overtones of "wild goose chase." Quinion produces only two examples (from Goldsmith and Walter Scott) and asserts that writers continue to employ the term occasionally, but I found so few instances that I have to wonder where a freshman came up with such a rarity.

The answer, of course, is in the box--the little hand-held translators many of our Chinese students use to help them find the words they need to communicate in English. Sometimes these translators offer up words that are denotatively correct but inappropriate for the context--too earthy, too formal, too archaic. In this case, the student was writing about different approaches to writing tasks. Americans, he says, tend to get straight to the point, while Chinese writers use more circumbendibus.

For which I am grateful, because a word that wonderful ought not to be relegated to the bendy byways of the English language.

On the stuffness of things

At the moment my mental life seems to be dominated by stuff--things, objects, all that ordinary everyday stuff that gathers dust around the edges of life. Just last week the prof admitted that the photography class I'm taking is "stuff-intensive," and this morning my American Novel class considered the impact of all that stuff that crowds Mrs. Peniston's parlor in The House of Mirth. So it's only natural that I should read a book on the meaning of stuff: The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity by Richard Todd. This elegantly written and highly accessible collection of essays delves deeply into the human tendency to fetishize our stuff, to endow certain objects with special meaning.

Todd considers the stuffness of art, asserting that a work of art is a physical object that at once draws us away from the material world and directs our attention back toward it. Art is different from mundane stuff because its value is not determined simply by its materials but is instead constructed within a community that fetishizes objects because of their origins, their rarity, or their ability to transcend stuff. "Art is to objects as sainthood is to people," he explains. "Most people can't be saints, and most objects can't be art, but in each case the extent to which they are marked by an impulse toward grace is a measure of their worth."

Even ordinary objects, though, can gain an aura after they have outlived their usefulness. Todd examines the power of nostalgia to endow antique tools and tractors with new value when these objects no longer serve their original purpose. Nostalgia even influences the relative value of places as urbanites seduced by nostalgic narratives of simple country life move to the countryside only to transform the agrarian spaces that seemed so appealing. "All places are stories, stories we tell to ourselves," he says, adding that no matter how apparently pure and untouched a place may appear to be, "all inhabited places... are in fact polluted with meaning."

If natural places are polluted with meaning, what of artificial places? Todd describes trips to Las Vegas and Walt Disney World, reveling in the self-conscious artificiality of the first but finding Disney's dream world oppressive and claustrophobic. Walt Disney, asserts Todd, "is what we had instead of Hitler. He gave us a fascism of smarm. If real fascism ever comes to this country, can one doubt what it will look like? It will not be goose-stepping legions and blaring music. It will be cute, like a Disney movie. There will be country music and laconic heroes and lovable dogs."

The idea that our stuff says a lot about us is so obvious as to be a cliche, but Todd makes the topic fresh and treats it in unexpected ways. This is a very stuff-intensive book, but like the works of art, places, and objects Todd writes about, the book directs our attention to the tyranny of stuff while also endowing it with an aura of grace.

Learning the ropes

For a week or so I've been slowly allowing my new camera to show me what it can do. It's not easy. I used the same old film camera for so many years that my fingers keep reaching for buttons that aren't there, and I'm always half afraid that I'll press the wrong button and wreck everything.

But what's to wreck? So far, I've taken a bunch of pretty lousy pictures. One problem is that I've always been better taking available-light photos than shooting with flash, but it's just too darn cold to spend much time taking pictures outside. But this afternoon I had to get out and see what winter is bringing to the upper meadow, so I bundled up and went up the hill and saw...well, not much. Deer tracks. Lichens. Dry brown thistle and desiccated goldenrod.

My dog spent the entire time hiding in her doghouse, but the neighbor's dog Duke joined me on my short jaunt up the hill. I took a bunch of badly exposed photos of Duke before I finally realized what a stupid thing I was doing: when I tilted the camera to see the readout on the back and adjust the shutter speed and aperture, the light meter was "reading" my dark pants instead of the scene I was trying to photograph. I finally managed to get a few decent shots but I dumped a lot of images--after learning what they wanted to teach me. That's the great thing about digital photography: the instant feedback lets me know exactly how dumb I'm being.

The first three-hour session of my scientific imaging class left me really excited about what I'll be learning this semester, including all the ins and outs of Photoshop. For now, though, I'll just be happy if I can get my fingers to stop reaching for buttons that aren't there.

A surreal conversation

The phone rang and the caller identified herself as the mother of one of our students.

"My daughter is in a literature class," she said, "but I don't know the name of the professor."

I asked her for the course's name or number.

"It's just called Literature," she said.

"We're offering several literature classes this semester, but we don't have any classes just called Literature," I said.

"Well, if I tell you my daughter's name, can you look up what class she's enrolled in?"

"No, I really don't have access to that information."

"All I know is it's a literature class that meets at 1:00 three days a week."

So I looked at the online course listings and found only one course in our department meeting those criteria and I told the caller the name of the professor.

"That doesn't sound right," she said.

"Sorry, it's the only literature course we offer at that time," I said.

She paused. "I really need to contact the professor," she said.

I pointed out that there are literature courses taught in the Theater department, but she said no, it had to be an English class.

"Why do you need to reach the professor?" I asked. "Maybe I can help."

"I just need to know whether tomorrow's class will be cancelled."

"Okay, let me just get out my crystal ball" is what I probably should have said, but instead I pointed out that our college almost never cancels classes because of weather (and besides, tomorrow's weather is supposed to be quite cold but not too snowy) and if the professor has some other reason to cancel the class, it would be difficult for me to ascertain that information without knowing which class we're talking about.

She was disappointed but I'm just annoyed and puzzled. I can imagine several scenarios to explain this surreal conversation:

1. Mother wants to make sure we won't force her precious little snowflake to venture forth when the wind chill is -15.

2. Mother wants her precious little snowflake to come home for the weekend and hopes to persuade professor to cancel class.

3. Student has told Mother that Friday's class is cancelled and Mother is checking up to make sure Student isn't feeding her a line.

I vote for 3, although I could be wrong. I'm certain of only one thing: that's five minutes of my life I'll never get back.

A novel theory

Yesterday I heard (for the third or fourth time) the story of an esteemed senior colleague who won $6500 on one hand of cards at a casino over break, and another esteemed colleague--a psychology professor--offered a novel theory to explain the gambler's persistent good luck:

"He's very religious," explained the psych prof.

I pointed out that many religious people never win six dollars at cards much less six thousand. Like me, for instance.

"Yes," said the psych prof, "but he also tells the world's dirtiest jokes, and that gets God's attention."

Someone ought to put this theory to the test. Do you suppose there's a grant available?

A paeon to parking

Early this morning as I walked to the garage I saw snow sparkling in the moonlight along the deer-track-pocked path--but anyone unfamiliar with our immense complex garage saga has no idea why that statement is so remarkable.

We have a garage! And for the first winter since we moved out to the woods, I can park my car in the garage every single day if I want to! Which is a really good thing, because last week one day when I left the car outside in some wet weather followed by a hard freeze, my car doors froze shut and then froze open, refusing to latch despite all our efforts. "I can drive to work holding on door shut," I said, "but it's hard to drive while holding both doors shut!"

When I get home from work these days I'm so exhausted that I function on auto-pilot: drive halfway up the driveway, get out of the car, open the garage door, get back in the car, pull into the garage, close the garage door, walk the rest of the way up the hill to the house....I do it without much awareness. But early in the morning when I walk back down the hill, I am grateful for my garage. No more scraping, no more doors frozen shut, no more wondering whether the car will make it around that last steep icy curve; just snow sparkling on moonlight and the sound of woodland creatures scurrying into the undergrowth and a car safely stowed where ice and snow can't go.

Some opening-day observations

1. I know classroom space is at a premium, but is it really wise to schedule a technology-intensive class of 20 students to meet in a broom closet? Even if they overturn all the mopping-up buckets for seats, most of the students will end up sitting in the hallway--and where will they plug in their laptops?

2. The ability to work out on a step machine does not necessarily translate into an ability to walk up long flights of steps.

3. If 22 students are enrolled in the class and the bookstore orders only 10 copies of the textbook, someone is bound to suffer--but why does it have to be me? The bookstore should provide a gopher to run around the library finding materials and putting them on reserve so my students can complete their assigned reading.

Sleepless in spring semester

My first class of the semester is at 9:00 this morning but I was wide awake at 4. Why? No forgot-to-write-the-syllabus dreams, no teaching-naked nightmares, just a lot of excitement about the new semester.

There's plenty to be excited about, starting with an excellent schedule. I have only one section of freshman writing two mornings a week, and I'll be teaching two American Lit classes back-to-back three mornings a week: a sophomore-level survey and an upper-level class called Later American Novel, starting with Edith Wharton and ending with Toni Morrison. Last year I taught overloads in both spring and fall semesters and also taught a J-term class and a summer independent study, for a total of 10 classes (while chairing the department); teaching only three classes this semester will feel like a walk in the park.

I'm also excited about the return of the students, without whom the campus is entirely too dull. I want to know what my wonderful English majors have been reading over break, what they're talking about, where they've been.

I'm thrilled about taking my freshman writing students to the new library--or taking anyone to the new library, for that matter. Just having a new library is enough to make me happy.

Unfortunately, the library isn't open at 4 a.m., and the students are sleeping (I hope) and the classrooms are empty, so there was nowhere to channel all that excitement. I tried to sleep for a while but finally gave it up as a lost cause. Now I'm chomping at the bit, ready to get into my first class and get this exciting semester off to a good start. Here's hoping I don't fall asleep in the middle of class!

Library magic

The shelves in our new library are moving and sensitive: press a button on the end of the row and a whole series of shelves scoots silently out of the way so patrons can walk between them, but if a patron steps into the path of a moving shelf, it stops at once. How does a mere mass of metal sense the presence of a patron? I suspect magic.

Our new library opens to the public on Monday, but I paid a visit today to pick up some books, and one of the librarians gave me a private tour. The flat, monochromatic design we viewed so often on blueprints has become an attractive and functional building flooded with light and full of wonders: shelves that move, high-tech classrooms where students can learn research methods and faculty can try out new technology, a center for teaching excellence that houses our brand-new instructional technology expert.

And books--lots of books. Most of the library's books have come back from remote storage, and the special collections will return in the coming weeks. The warm, inviting tones of the woodwork and paint make the library a welcoming place, and amenities include an outdoor amphitheater, a small coffee shop, and lounge areas featuring faux fireplaces, but all those things would be irrelevant if it weren't for the books.

Jorge Luis Borges envisioned Paradise as a library, but his Paradise was not dependent on moving shelves, faux fireplaces, or high-tech classrooms. Borges knew that the library's magic lives in its books. Now that the books are back, we can all pay a visit to Paradise.

Picture-perfect delivery

In the midst of a week crammed full of class preparations, meetings, and sudden unexpected hiring of adjuncts, I received a phone call from UPS informing me that they'll be delivering a package tomorrow between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. and someone needs to be at home to sign for it.

So it looks like I'll be staying home tomorrow, but I don't mind. I brought my laptop home and I have all the info I need to work on my final syllabus, and I don't have any more meetings until Thursday. And besides, I'll be delighted to stay home and wait for UPS since they're delivering MY NEW CAMERA!!!!!!!!! (Oops, it's a little early in the year to use up my annual quota of exclamation points....better calm down.)

Lest you think that I'm a tad too excited about this event, I have my reasons. First, my current camera is 15 years old and served me well during my years as a journalist, but it has a serious light leak and Nikon doesn't make the parts for that model anymore. Second, photography has been a serious hobby of mine for going on 30 years and I can't imagine greeting the spring birds and wildflowers without camera in hand. And finally, this camera will enable me to do something I haven't done in nearly a decade: take a college class.

I've been eager to take this class for some time. It's listed as a 300-level biology class, but the title is Scientific Imaging and it is taught by an expert in bird and insect photography. The class will refine my skills in nature photography, introduce some interesting software, and help me to view nature through a scientific lens.

This last goal is important because I am part of a group of three faculty members who will attend the College English Association conference in March to present a panel on how cross-disciplinary experience influences our practice and teaching of creativity. Last semester, a creative writing professor and fiction writer took a drawing class, and this semester, an art professor is taking creative writing. The Scientific Imaging class will give me experience with various methods of observing and representing nature, which ought to spark creative ideas as I design a summer special topics course in writing about nature.

With so many good things depending upon the arrival of this camera, I'm happy to stay home and await the special delivery. Freezing rain and ice are in the forecast, but as far as I'm concerned, tomorrow will be a picture-perfect day.

Can't curb my enthusiasm

As a department chair and a member of the committee that makes recommendations about tenure, I get to read a lot of course evaluations, and I'm puzzled by a statement that pops up frequently across the campus: "The class would be better if Professor X realized that not everyone is excited about Topic A."

I get that comment occasionally on my own evaluations and I see it on many others, and I wonder what I'm supposed to do about it. The fact is that I already realize that not everyone is as excited as I am about the topics I teach; indeed, if everyone in the world were as excited as I am about American literature or writing or poetry, I wouldn't need to teach it: students would be knocking down the doors of the library in their eagerness to soak up everything they could discover about the topic.

So I understand that many students are not excited about the things I teach, but I'm puzzled about what they want me to do about it. How should this realization affect my teaching? I could stand up in class on the first day and say, "I realize that many of you are not excited about Topic A; therefore, I'll be teaching Topic B instead." Or I could take a poll and see what topic excites the most students in the class and teach that, but I can envision some problems with this approach. What if I don't know anything at all about the topic that excites them the most? If I could teach a class in how to be rich, thin, sexy, and popular without any effort (Topic C), I wouldn't be an English professor. And then what do I do with the outliers who really aren't excited about Topic C? Regardless of the topic, some students are bound to be bored by it.

Maybe students just want me to curb my enthusiasm and pretend that I'm as disgusted with the topic as they are: "Class, I know American literature can be a real drag and writing about literature isn't your idea of a day at the lake and studying poetry isn't going to make you rich or thin or popular, but we're all in the same boat so let's just be miserable together like those four unnamed guys in Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat,' and speaking of 'The Open Boat,' don't you just love the way Crane manipulates perception so that the boat seems to be standing still while the beach rises and falls? And how about those shadowy sharks? And what the heck does he mean by the 'sacred cheese of life' anyway?"

No, I'm afraid my excitement about Topic A is incapable of being held in check. But if I can't curb my own enthusiasm or teach the topic that excites the most students, then how am I supposed to respond to that puzzling comment? What do they want me to do?

Timeless

My very favorite comment on last semester's course evaluations: "One of those classes where when you look at your watch the first time you're surprised to find that the class is almost over."

The tulle turn

We were halfway home from the Bridal Extravaganza when I finally figured out why I had found a particular wedding gown peculiar: it looked like a dribble castle.

You know when you're at the beach and you keep dribbling wet sand out of your hand until it makes grotesque, lumpy shapes? That's exactly what that gown looked like: a dribble castle.

In four hours of rambling amongst vendors of wedding stuff, we saw plenty of dresses that didn't look like dribble castles. The typical wedding gown looked like a little girl's princess dream, complete with yards of tulle, sweeping trains, and glittering tiaras. It was a little jarring to see these Princess Barbie dresses modeled to the tunes of "Brick House" or "Bringing Sexy Back," especially since the amateur models had clearly had little experience in flouncing about in spike heels and unwieldy gowns. We kept seeing one particularly unprincesslike maneuver: in order to make her turns properly without stepping on the train, the model would reach around as if getting ready to scratch her behind and then grab the train and fling it furiously in the right direction.

We've already bought my daughter the perfect wedding gown so we weren't terribly interested in the fashions on display, but we did spend some time sampling the caterers' wares and tasting various types of wedding cake and frosting. It was a brilliant marketing strategy: after trying every conceivable variety of canape, shrimp cocktail, chocolate fountain, and cake, attendees would be in such a glucose-induced stupor that they'd agree to anything. Yes, we need to have the happy couple's name in lights on the dance floor! Videographers? We'll take two! Camouflage tuxedoes, satin-draped folding chairs, live doves released at the door? Sign me up!

We managed to resist all these temptations with one exception: we fell in love with a trio playing classical music on violin, cello, and piano. There will be no tiaras at my daughter's wedding (because a bride is not a princess), no camouflage tuxedoes (because if the groom wants to be invisible on his wedding day, who needs him?), no "Bringing Sexy Back" in the ceremony (because it's a worship service). But we will have beautiful music and classy clothes and interesting food--and, best of all, not the slightest hint of a dribble castle.

Collecting garbage

I don't recall how the topic came up but at some point during the MLA conference I found myself proposing that I ought to teach a course about the literature of garbage. We already teach literature courses called Concepts of Nature, Concepts of Progress, Concepts of Gender, and so on, so why not Concepts of Garbage?

I was only half joking. Every year in American Lit Survey I teach a section of the A.R. Ammons poem "Garbage," which asserts that garbage is the poetry of our time, and I always enjoy the moment when I write on the blackboard "garbage = poetry" and ask the class whether the equation works both ways. It makes for an interesting conversation, particularly since at that point we've already read and discussed the Robinson Jeffers poem "Shine, Perishing Republic" in which he asserts that we're all heading eventually for the compost bin.

I'm tempted to design a Garbage Lit course every time I re-read Our Mutual Friend, the wonderful Dickens novel in which garbage links every level of society, cutting across social strata and providing the hidden foundation for the sparkling lives of the privileged. Don DeLillo borrows this conceit for his massive novel Underworld, in which garbage links the worlds of art, politics, sport, and entertainment.

I'd love to juxtapose these readings in a class and see what comes from the combination, but two poems and two huge novels do not make a coherent course. I'm sure I'm overlooking some relevant works, and someone out there knows what they are. So come on: send me your garbage. It is, after all, the poetry of our time.

There Will Be Papers

The chief advantage of attending the MLA without having to spend hours doing interviews is getting to attend a lot of sessions. This is also the chief disadvantage, because more sessions = more papers = more opportunities to hear bad papers. I heard my share of bad papers at the MLA.

But I heard my share of good papers too. The best paper I heard was in the smallest room, a tiny, cavelike conference room that could accommodate maybe 24 people. Lars Erik Larson delivered an outstanding essay on Frank Norris's McTeague, a novel I have always loved without often finding others who share my enthusiasm. Larson's paper was insightful, original, beautifully written, and well delivered, with lots of enthusiasm and a little drama. He made an interesting connection between McTeague and the movie There Will Be Blood, and it was easy to tell who in the audience had seen the movie and who had not. Best of all, his paper and the others in the same session provoked some real discussion in which ideas were exchanged in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding, with no rancor or grandstanding. That's an ideal MLA paper.

The bad papers were less memorable. One paper was particularly unmemorable because the grad student delivering the paper spoke tentatively and kept backing away from the microphone as if afraid that it would bite her, so the text of the paper vanished into the ambient noise. I attended several pedagogy panels and I was not surprised to find that pedagogy papers tend to be less formal and less theoretical than literature papers, but I was surprised to find that several of the pedagogy papers I heard were just sloppy: poorly written, poorly organized, poorly delivered. It's always shocking to discover that purported experts on teaching writing are often not particularly good writers.

And my paper? It went well. The crowd was small but enthusiastic, laughing in all the right places, and afterward I was approached by someone interested in publishing my paper, which was encouraging. But you never know...probably there's someone out there right now blogging about all those awful MLA papers--including mine. When it comes to the MLA, you never know whether the papers you hear will be good, bad, or mediocre, but if nothing else, you know There Will Be Papers.