Island time

After hours winging across country in an airplane cold enough to chill an Eskimo, I emerge into the bright Seattle sunshine and start soaking in the warmth. I have two hours to kill before the ferry takes me to Victoria, so I set out for a brisk walk along the waterfront to wake up the muscles that have atrophied during a long day of sedentary travel.  After around 20 minutes I look at my wrist to check the time and notice that my watch is missing--lost somewhere along the busy path where walkers, joggers, and bicyclers zip past in a steady stream. 

So I turn around and start briskly retracing my steps, my eyes glued to the ground just in case all these healthy hordes have overlooked my errant watch. Surely someone has picked it up by now--but no, there it is, glittering in the sunlight.

I take this as a sign that I need to slow down and little, stop and smell the roses (and poppies and lilacs and whatever these unfamiliar flowers are all around me). I am, after all, on vacation. It's a working vacation, true, but it's the only vacation I'm getting this year and after I get back I have to dive into the fray of preparing for my daughter's wedding, moving to my new office, and preparing for my surgery. So if I'm going to relax at all, it's now or never.

So I walk with my watch in my pocket for a while, drifting where the tide may take me. I pause to consider the ampersand. Cincinnati has flying pigs on pedestals along its waterfront; Seattle has a large red ampersand spinning atop a pole in Olympic Sculpture Park. And why not? 

Eventually the tide takes me back to the ferry that takes me to Victoria. I'm on island time now, and who needs a watch for that?

Awaiting ASLE

I've packed my bags, printed out my paper, and painted my nails, so I'm ready to go to the ASLE conference. Unfortunately, my plane doesn't take off until 6:30 tomorrow morning.

ASLE is, I think, my favorite academic conference. There are no job interviews so the stress level is low and you don't see so many self-important scholars dressed in black as you do at MLA. Some of my favorite people will be there this week, at a lovely location (Victoria, British Columbia) where the forecast calls for warm temperatures and sunshine all week long. Last time I presented at ASLE, my session had a large and attentive audience who raised interesting questions at the end. All in all, a positive experience.

I'll arrive in Victoria Tuesday evening and stay until next Monday...but first, I've got to get off the ground. Only 14 hours...

Showers of spatulas

The first thing I noticed about my daughter's wedding shower last night was how stress-free a party can be when someone else is hosting. I had time to sit and chat and take a bunch of photos while other people scurried around making sure everything was perfect--and it was. Even the weather was sufficiently showery.

My daughter received showers of home-related loot, much of which I'd like to have in my own house, which makes me wonder when we'll finally establish a tradition of Old Married People Showers. I could use some matching casserole dishes and fluffy new towels and a can opener--and spatulas, a veritable bouquet of pretty red spatulas.

We played some of the typical bridal-shower games, and as usual, I did pretty poorly. How am I supposed to find someone in the room whose favorite television show is the same as mine when we haven't had any television service for two years? There was no listing for "none of the above." And then there was the game in which women earned points for the stuff they carried in the purses: low points for a credit card or driver's license, high points for band-aids, jump drives, or underwear. No one in our group would admit to carrying underwear but one woman had not one but two pairs of tweezers in her voluminous tote. (She'd never make it through airport security.) I flunked the purse test. I don't carry a purse. Haven't carried one for years. I had my camera bag and billfold and a jump drive with me, but other than that, I was unencumbered.

But I did not go home unencumbered. This evening we've been working on stashing the wedding loot someplace else because it was threatening to take over the living room. Of course there's one simple way to solve that problem...think she'd notice if I snagged one of those spatulas?

Yum yum

I saw a sign outside a restaurant advertising the following special:

Liver & Onions Lasagne

I sincerely hope that this represents two different menu items, because I'd really like to avoid any restaurant that thinks it's appropriate to put liver and onions in lasagne.

Impending panic

Recently I encountered a woman who is preparing for her daughter's impending wedding, and she was buzzing with energy like a hive of angry bees. "I have a list," she said. "I know everything I have to do every day between now and the wedding." I didn't want to sit too close to her because it appeared that the stress might make her spontaneously combust at any moment.

Before that encounter, I had been feeling pretty mellow about my daughter's wedding next month. Things are moving along nicely, and I am confident that everything that needs to get done will get done. But now I wonder whether I'm missing something important: is it my duty as Mother of the Bride to panic? Must I perpetually quiver with anguish over the tasks yet undone? If I start panicking a month before the wedding, I'll be a basket case by the big day.

I have a list too, but it's fairly manageable. I have made my dress, but now I need to buy shoes and other accessories--and at some point I ought to buy a wedding gift. In anticipation of the hordes of houseguests who will descend upon us, I need to do some cleaning and cooking, but that's well in hand. I washed curtains and windows yesterday, and I've already made three gallons of homemade ice cream and stashed them in the deep-freeze. The main thing I need to do for the wedding itself is hand over piles of money to a host of people, but as painful as that might be, it doesn't make me want to panic. In fact, none of this stuff makes me want to panic. Maybe all that will change as the bid day draws closer, but at the moment I'm mellow.

Maybe I need to panic over my lack of panic. I'll add that to my list.

Content counts; or, why you have to know stuff to write about it

Spring semester's crop of course evaluations produced a common complaint across several sections, one I would paraphrase this way: "This is a writing class! The grade is supposed to be based on the quality of my writing, not on the content! How dare you expect me to actually know stuff!"

I sympathize because I am aware of how easy it would be to grade student writing based on whether I agree with their claims rather than on how competently those claims are presented, but the problem is that it's difficult to separate writing from its content. Writing is made of words and words convey content in an interlocking web of signification--or confusion, as the case may be.

Which essay deserves a better grade: the well-written one that has nothing to say or the one that tackles complex ideas but bobbles the syntax? A researched essay that presents outdated or inaccurate information violates one of major tenets of good research, and a comparison essay that can't clearly distinguish between the ideas of two prominent thinkers has failed in its task even if every word is spelled correctly.

The desire to separate writing from content can only lead to content-free writing, and frankly, I've seen enough of that to last two lifetimes. Yes, you do have to "know stuff" in order to write about it. But isn't that why we're here? I wish I knew which students expressed these complaints so I could ask them all a question: if you don't want to learn anything new, why are you (or your loved ones) paying upwards of $30,000 a year in tuition?

Content counts, and so does quality of writing--and in the best writing, the two cling together so closely that separating them would be a sacrilege.

Traumatic tourism

I've just been reading Nicola Watson's The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain, which is a very interesting, engaging, and (mostly) well written book--but I have to confess that a sentence describing a certain site associated with Robert Burns gave me a bit of a start: "Encrusted with shells on the outside, and mirror on the inside, favoured visitors of a certain class were asked in to admire the rafters in their startling new setting."

What would you call the favored class of tourists willing, for the love of Burns, to be encrusted with shells on the outside and mirrors on the inside? Whatever you call 'em, count me out.

Cardinal obsession

That cardinal I photographed yesterday keeps coming back. All day long she seeks communion with her own reflection--in the car mirror, in a shiny garbage-can lid, in various windows. Right now she's perched on a potted plant just outside a big picture window, where she can peer at her own reflection, burst forth in flight, bang against the window, drop to the ground, and then start the whole process all over again.

We've had birds bang into that big window before, but those that survive the impact get the message and move on, while this cardinal keeps coming back for more. Surely she ought to be out doing whatever it is that cardinals do instead of peering into the glass all day long. Is she obsessed, possessed, distressed, or just confused from banging her head against the window so many times?

Cardinal virtues

This female cardinal, fascinated with her own reflection, kept repeating the same series of actions for more than an hour this morning: first, look closely at the reflection; second, attack with a flurry of wings; third, perch on top of the mirror and look confused.

In praise of puttering

So far this summer I'm working hard in every way--keeping my muscles moving, my brain cells firing, my creativity sparking--but somehow all this summer work feels less onerous than the work I accomplish during the academic year. The difference, I believe, can be attributed partly to one simple truth: summer offers me the freedom to putter.

During the academic year I focus like a laser on the task at hand, whether it be teaching, reading, writing, or whatever. My days are structured and time on task is clearly defined, so I point my nose toward the goal and never waver before I reach it.

When classes are over, however, the days stretch out in loosely structured waves and my life takes on a different kind of rhythm. I like to walk or work in the garden early in the morning and write for a few hours before noon, but then in the afternoon I might do a little of this, a little of that, and a little of something else, trusting that if I don't get it all done in one day, there's always tomorrow. I putter over to the bedroom to sew some seams in the silk I'm wearing to my daughter's wedding, and then I putter out to the mailbox to pick up today's bills, and then I might pay a few bills or I might sit down and read the paper first, and if I read it outside I might notice that the herb garden needs watering and I really ought to do some weed-eating along the driveway, and how about planting some tomatoes?

At some point in there I'll make some supper. If the resident bread-baker is at work in the kitchen, I'll start a fire in the grill and toss some meat on the coals, and I'll sit out on the deck and read the next chapter of something while it's cooking. The other evening I persuaded my husband to take a break from his baking long enough to teach me how to drive the tractor, which allowed me to spend the evening putt-putt-puttering around the meadow mowing down the tall grass. Mowing is an utterly mindless task--but I had worked my mind pretty hard in the morning, so it was ready for a break.

And that's really what puttering is: after the intensely focused tasks that drive my life during the academic year, the freedom to putter is all the break I need.

The hopeful wolf

The other day I heard a report about one important difference between dogs and wolves--and I heard it on NPR, so it has to be true. This noted dog researcher (meaning a person who does research on dogs, not a dog who does research...although I'd like to hear that report!) claimed that when a human being points a finger toward something in the distance, a dog will look off in the distance while a wolf will look at the finger.

Unfortunately, my dog didn't hear that report. This morning we were walking past the neighbor's hay field when I spotted a good-sized deer about 100 feet away. I immediately pointed my finger toward the deer and said, "Hopeful! Look!"

Hopeful looked--at my finger.

"No, look over there in the field! A deer! Look look look!"

She kept looking at my finger in hopes that it might at some point produce a doggy treat, as it has been known to do in the past. She never even glanced toward the deer before it bounded off into the woods.

I am forced to conclude that either the dog researcher got it wrong or I've skipped an important step in the human/dog communication process. Or maybe we're actually harboring a wolf. A Hopeful wolf--or a wolf wannabe?

Second thoughts

After weeks of gathering information and months of mentally planning my ASLE paper, today I sat down to actually start writing the thing--but first, I took a look at the abstract I submitted with the paper proposal to see what I said I was planning to say, and my first response was, "What was I thinking?!"

Of course it's quite obvious what I was thinking because the abstract explains very clearly what I was thinking. The problem is that in the months since I wrote the abstract, my thinking has veered off toward a slightly different conclusion, one that would require focusing on a very different aspect of the works from what I promised in my abstract.

What do I do now?

I always hate showing up to hear a conference paper on what sounds like a fascinating topic only to hear the presenter state, "I had planned to discuss [the topic you're all eager to hear about], but instead I've decided to focus on [some other topic only vaguely related to the original fascinating idea, and probably a self-indulgent topic at that]." I don't want to do that.

So instead I've spent the morning twisting together my current strand of thinking with the strand I stated in my abstract, and I think I've come up with a workable solution that will make the finished project even stronger. It certainly provides more room for expansion when I turn the short conference paper into a journal article, and it dovetails nicely with my larger research project, of which this paper will eventually form an important chapter.

Now I just need to start writing.

Ironic quest

I've been trying to buy a new ironing board--a simple enough task, you might think, but so far I can't find them at any local stores. One store carries only the type of ironing board that folds up into a cabinet on the wall, while another carries only mini-ironing boards that fit over the back of a door. I need a no-nonsense, full-size ironing board in which to iron my husband's dress shirts and my blouses and skirts and (most importantly) the dress I'm making for my daughter's wedding, but I can't find one anywhere.

I can imagine two reasons for this local dearth of ironing boards:

1. Nobody's ironing anymore. The people who used to iron are now wearing no-iron fabrics or taking all their shirts to the laundry or walking around looking like they've been sleeping in their clothes.

2. Everybody's ironing more. There's been a run on ironing boards and the local stores are all sold out.

Either way, I'm left with an ironing-board-shaped void in my life and I don't know how to fill it.

Ready to read

I knew I had forgotten some important preparation for summer break. I've ordered all the library materials I'll need for my research project, assembled the ingredients for my herb garden, ordered hand-painted Thai silk for the dress I'll wear for my daughter's wedding, arranged travel to the ASLE conference...and now at the end of the day I find myself with nothing to read.

Of course there's the newspaper and the latest Chronicle of Higher Education and the New Yorker, but I need a summer book--or, better yet, a whole pile of summer books. I'm not talking about heavy-duty theory or books related to my research project; I'm talking about the kind of book I want to read at the end of the day when my muscles are tired from weed-eating or gardening, something that will let my eyes just glide across the page without making too great a demand on my brain cells.

I've ordered the new Colson Whitehead novel but it's not here yet. Ditto Apologize, Apologize and the third volume of Javier Marias's Your Face Tomorrow, which isn't even available in English yet. But that's not nearly enough! I need an emergency infusion of light summer reading and I need it NOW. Suggestions, anyone?

Strictly peripatetic

WHEREAS sitting for long hours in meetings creates a dull throbbing in the back, distracting participants from the important matters under discussion; and

WHEREAS all that sitting makes the blood settle in the butt, diverting it from the brain, which succumbs to an overwhelming dullness; and

WHEREAS the air inside meeting rooms tends toward staleness, promoting physical and mental torpor; and

WHEREAS nothing gets the blood flowing and the senses sparkling and the ideas germinating better than a good brisk walk straight up the side of a steep hill;

THEREFORE, by the authority vested in me as Faculty Chair, I hereby proclaim that all campus meetings will henceforth be conducted in the open air by peripatetic participants engaging in brisk hikes.

Aerobic gardening

I haven't worked out at the rec center all week, but today I indulged in some aerobic gardening, digging up a chunk of ground for a new raised-bed herb garden and then helping my daughter plant a butterfly-and-hummingbird garden in front of the house. The muscles I've developed on the rowing machine all semester helped me dig up the rough, rocky soil where we'll relocate the herb garden, and I did enough bending and stooping in the flower garden to give the abs a decent workout, but tomorrow I'll be sore all over...which will give me an excellent excuse to sit out in the sun and admire the flowers. Come on, sunshine! I'm ready to rest.

Weed miss you!

You know, weeds, I have to admire your effort. While I've been off enjoying a brief vacation, you've been diligently growing and spreading and multiplying all over my lawn and my flower garden, and I've got to say that the results are impressive--but do you think you could give it a rest? Surely you need a little vacation after that exhausting growth spurt. Wouldn't you like to just take a brief respite from growing like weeds? There's nothing more relaxing than a nice road trip--in fact, I'd be happy to pack your bags for you if you'd just make up your mind to go!

And if you simply can't get motivated to come back, that's okay too. I'll miss you, really I will, but somehow my heart shall go on.

What the well-dressed graduate is wearing

When Salman Rushdie gave the 1996 Commencement Address at Bard College, he explained that he was nearly prevented from graduating from Cambridge in 1968 because of inappropriate footwear:

I went to the ceremony wearing brown shoes, and was promptly plucked out of the parade of my gowned and properly black-shod contemporaries, and ordered back to my quarters to change....I gave in, sprinted off to change my shoes, got back to the parade in the nick of time; and at length, after these vicissitudes, when my turn came, I was required to hold a university officer by his little finger, and to follow him slowly up to where the vice-chancellor sat upon a mighty throne. As instructed, I knelt at his feet, held up my hands, palms together, in a gesture of supplication, and begged in Latin for the degree....

My daughter's commencement ceremony required no Latin supplications, nor did anyone get plucked out of line for wearing inappropriate shoes, and when the ceremony was over, she had the sense to take off her fancy high heels and slip on some flip-flops. She gets an A+ for footwear management. Now let's see how she manages the rest of her life!

The race is on!

A baccalaureate service in Kentucky a week after the Kentucky Derby naturally featured horse-racing allusions. At commencement, said the speaker, the trumpet sounds and the gates open and the graduates burst out of the gates into the race...and at that point, there's no getting them back in the barn.

My daughter was out of the barn last night at baccalaureate singing her heart out and then directing the entire crowd in singing "How Great Thou Art." She had tremendous presence on the stage, keeping the crowd moving vigorously through the verses by the sheer force of her voice and arms and personality. Today she'll walk across the stage and pick up the diploma for which she's worked so hard and then we'll have a mad dash of packing up and moving on out to the next turn in the horserace.

I have no clear memory of my own college baccalaureate service in that same auditorium 25 years ago, perhaps because more recent turns in the horserace are dominating my mind, but I do recall that sense of possibility that I see displayed so prominently in the faces of my daughter and her classmates. From this point on, anything can happen--and there's no getting them back into the barn.

Which is fine, because who wants to live in a barn?

This entry is about "This entry is about..."

Now that classes are over, I'm diving into research for my ASLE paper and other projects, and even at this early date I am already tired of seeing scholarship that starts off with a lame "This book is about [something interesting]" or "This article will consider [something else]."

Listen up, scholars! The opening line is the first opportunity to make an impression on a reader, to grab the reader by the eyeballs and make him or her pay attention. "This book is about" just doesn't do it. I suppose this sort of opening line would be helpful to the sort of reader who picks up a book entirely at random without any prior awareness of the topic of the book and without any ability to discern what the topic might be based on the title or cover blurb, but really: how many readers get to the opening line of a scholarly tome without first developing some inkling of its general topic? And why would anyone want to cater to such lazy readers?

And yet this opening move seems to be multiplying like kudzu across the academic writing environment. Will somebody please make it stop?!

So much beauty so close to home

This morning I discovered that the wildflower I identified yesterday as wild oat is actually, on closer inspection, perfoliate bellwort (and what a clownish name for such a delicate yellow blossom!). The two plants have similar flowers, but the leaves of perfoliate bellwort look as if they're being pierced or perforated by the stem.

I also found both Solomon's Seal and False Solomon's Seal blooming in close proximity. The two species have similar foliage, but on Solomon's Seal, the tiny white-green blossoms hang like little lanterns along the underside of the arched stalk, while False Solomon's Seal features a cluster of blossoms bursting from the end of the stalk.

Finally, I noticed tiny feathery ferns unfurling in the underbrush. A few years ago in New Zealand I marveled over ferns unfurling in soft spirals, but I had never looked closely enough to notice so much beauty so close to home.

Fight and flight

On an early-morning walk we saw a pair of male orioles fighting over a female, twisting and twirling around one another in the air before dropping into the creek and then flinging themselves off into the blue again. I wish I'd had the camera with me, but it all happened so quickly that I probably would have missed it anyway.

I also didn't get a photo of Solomon's seal in bloom or the burgeoning beds of twinleaf or the really lovely wild oat flowers. This cold, wet spring seems to be bringing forth more of my favorite flowers and some new ones I haven't encountered before. It also seems to be discouraging the invasive garlic mustard, which is much less prevalent than in previous years. Of course, the weather has made it impossible to plant anything in the garden, so for now we'll just have to content ourselves with fresh asparagus. Not that there's anything wrong with that. If my garden produces nothing but asparagus this year, it will have done enough.

Count me out of the Hosseini fan club

I've finally figured out why I'm not joining the "I Love Khaled Hosseini" fan club. I was significantly underwhelmed by The Kite Runner, and I finally read A Thousand Splendid Suns over the weekend and was similarly unimpressed. I realize that millions of people all over the world think these books are just wonderful, so who am I to gripe?

And yet: I just don't like his writing, and now I can tell you why. I figured out the problem after I noticed that at several points throughout A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini echoes certain phrases or ideas associated with Salman Rushdie. For instance, one of Hosseini's main characters is born on the date of an important historical event (as in Midnight's Children), and at some point the ground beneath her feet shakes--which evokes Rushdie's brilliant novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. It doesn't really matter whether these echoes are intentional or otherwise; I'm certainly not going to complain about an author's facility with allusion.

What these allusions accomplished for me, though, was to juxtapose Hosseini's novels and Rushdie's in my mind, and Hosseini suffers in the comparison. Both authors create strong, memorable characters whose personal sufferings reflect violent public events, but there the resemblance ends. Hosseini competently wields two essential tools of fiction writing--character and plot--while Rushdie's toolbox is brimful of figurative language, inventive syntax, and images that give new life to tired ideas.

Hosseini's sentences sit on the page flatly conveying information, while Rushdie's sentences sing and dance across the page like caged birds suddenly released into the sunlight. Hosseini afflicts his characters with suffering that wrings readers' hearts for a while, but Rushdie transforms his characters' experiences into vivid images that prowl around in readers' minds, connect with other fragments of the collective unconscious, and spawn new offspring that will infest literature for a long time to come.

One example will demonstrate the difference: in A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini plays with the fine line between safety and imprisonment, creating a household in which the women are "protected" by being brutally controlled. The house where this happens is...just a house. Ordinary, mundane, unmemorable.

Rushdie juxtaposes the same safety/imprisonment dichotomy in the first section of Shame, but this is no ordinary house: Rushdie's house expands and contracts like a womb, first expelling its offspring in an act of bloody violence and eventually entombing him. This womb/tomb image returns subtly throughout the book, serving as a powerful image representing the violent birth pangs of Pakistan.

Hosseini's novel, while competent enough, never comes close to producing such a powerful image. His writing is prosaic, his language unmemorable, his imagery negligible. Which makes me wonder: why do so many millions of readers love his books?

The friendly exclamation point!!!!!

Do exclamation points make prose friendlier? This is one of many questions Stuart Jeffries explores in "The Joy of Exclamation Marks!" in The Guardian (read it here). Surveying changing attitudes toward this most excitable piece of punctuation, Jeffries quotes a Terry Pratchett character who considers excessive use of exclamation points "A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head."

"There are lots of people these days with figurative underpants on their heads," asserts Jeffries, blaming the trend on online communication styles. Jeffries notes a study that determined that women tend to use exclamation points more than men because the exclamation point conveys friendliness. "When, though," asks Jeffries, "did friendliness become the arbiter of orthographic etiquette? There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness."

My favorite comment on exclamation points comes from the late Lewis Thomas, who wrote, in "On Punctuation,"

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

Couldn't have said it better myself!

Invisible poetry

After spending two and a half hours freezing half to death while my American Lit students took their final exam, my brain is melting under the heat of their pressure-cooked prose. These exams show the same wide range of understanding that I'm accustomed to seeing in survey courses, but one section seems to have stymied a large group of students at all levels: given some characteristic chunks from two long poems, students had to identify the authors and titles (A.R. Ammons, "Garbage," and Allan Ginsberg, "Howl") and write a little bit about the ideas or techniques the two poems share. I thought this would be the easiest question on the exam because these two poems are so distinctive in both style and content; "Garbage" is the only poem we studied in this unit that's arranged in couplets, and nothing else we've read in this unit looks the least bit similar to "Howl."

And yet: more than half of the class got this section wrong. Many identified "Howl" as "Garbage" and vice versa, while others offered up a wide range of authors, including Sylvia Plath, Billy Collins, and Jack Kerouac (who makes more sense than the others, but still!). Even if a student has difficulty figuring out what a particular poem is trying to say, shouldn't he or she at least notice the distinctive shape the poem makes on the page? Even if I'd substituted gibberish for the words, students should have been able to look at the lines and identify the authors, especially given the limited number of poets we studied in this final unit. Further, I selected sections of these poems that we had discussed at length in class, so even if they didn't read on their own, they should have heard the words more than once if they'd been paying attention.

Maybe they're trying to study poetry without actually looking at it. That's a novel method, but for a large group of my students, it clearly isn't working.

Peace and quiet

It's unbelievable how quiet my classroom building is this morning...I haven't seen or heard another human being in the hallways. Somewhere in this building final exams are being administered, but to sit in my office and listen, you'd think you were in a mausoleum. It's a great place for grading papers, but I need to crank up some tunes before the silence soothes me off to sleep.

Visions and revisions

Yesterday I received the verdict from an academic journal to which I had submitted an article in February: revise and resubmit. This is fine with me. The flaws the readers found in the article are exactly what I had expected, and they said some pretty nice things about my work so I'm not complaining. This will be my first big summer project.

Except wait, it'll have to be my second big summer project. First I need to write a paper to deliver at the ASLE conference in June, a paper that I'll later revise and submit to another academic journal. That's two big projects involving revision, and that's just the beginning: I need to revise syllabi for fall classes and redesign writing assignments and work with a faculty member from another department on a new learning community we'll be teaching in the fall.

I'll also be doing some revision in other areas. In June I'll be revising my family status to include the mother-in-law role, and I'll have to revise my income tax withholding when I lose my daughter as a dependent. My surgeon will be editing out a pesky organ later in June, and I'll have to revise my summer gardening schedule to allow time for recovery. (I'll be laid up during tomato season! That's just wrong.)

Finally, I'm planning a major revision to my job title. I'll still be teaching, but this fall I'll move over to the new library to serve as the first director of our new Center for Teaching Excellence. I've always wanted to live in a library, so now I'll get my chance!

What vision do I have for this new venture? A vision of revision after revision--and it starts right now.

Ruminating

One of my students keeps writing about the problems that arise when students spend too much time maintaining their "online dairies," and I so enjoy the image of tiny electronic bovines mooing away deep within verdant server farms that I'm reluctant to point out the small but important difference between "dairy" and "diary." Do students rise at 4 a.m. to milk the virtual cows in their online dairies, and what do they do with all that virtual milk? Where does one store the silage in a virtual dairy? And are e-cows happy cows?

Problems like these I'd gladly read about, but that's not what I'm reading today. Ah well, there's always next semester.

Comings and goings

Orioles are back! I thought I would have an oriole photo to share this morning, but they're all blurry. Neither do I have any photos of the rose-breasted grosbeak that turned up yesterday. They're shy, those fellows, and they seem to view cameras with suspicion. Not so the red-bellied woodpeckers, which go about their business without any apparent awareness of my presence.

Fire pinks and waterleaf are blooming and the first crop of asparagus is ready to cut. The Dutchman's Breeches in the photo are the last blossoms remaining on a patch of hillside that was covered in blossoms a week ago. Trilliums remain abundant and beautiful.

Over the weekend I did my first weed-eating of the season, got my first sunburn, and encountered my first tick. But the joy of hearing orioles again outweighs the annoyance of ticks, and the sunburn just makes me fit in with my red-bellied and rose-breasted and orange-backed feathered friends. Call me a red-shouldered tick-avoiding asparagus-fancying weed-eater. That's about right.

The passing of a pacesetter

In the bleak midwinter, a group of female faculty members gathered to express appreciation for a woman who had paved the way for us. Our colleague was preparing to retire, but before she moved on to new challenges, we wanted to let her know how much we valued her encouragement, her mentorship, and her feistiness in fighting the battles that opened opportunities for women on our campus.

That was just three months ago. Today, our colleague is dead. We will all miss her: she was a tall, imposing presence on campus, a passionate teacher, a distinguished scholar, and a valued mentor, willing to fight like a bulldog for what she believed in. She went out of her way to encourage me at a particularly low point in my career, and she also gave excellent concise advice about the road to tenure. "Finish things," she said. And she was right.

Today I'm sad that I won't be seeing my colleague in the hallways anymore, but I have one consolation: I'm grateful for that winter party, where we all took the time to tell her "Thanks."

Stalking words

According to Dictionary.com, that highly reputable and authoritative source so beloved by students eager to pad their research papers, a pedicle is "a small stalk or stalklike support, as the connection between the cephalothorax and abdomen in certain arachnids." I had to look this up today in order to understand a sentence in a student paper, but I'm afraid my foray into the dictionary did not, in this case, clarify the matter at all. The paper asserts that one of the "many common factors" shared by Muslims and Christians is that "they both hold their men on a high pedicle."

Maybe if it's a really big arachnid....

Shaking hands with the dead

"Where facts are few, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history."

There's a sentence I wish I had written. You can find it in a very interesting article in the New York Times by Stacy Schiff, "Who's Buried in Cleopatra's Tomb?" (Read it here.) If she is correct, the problems faced by powerful women have apparently not changed much over the course of the centuries.

Which reminds me of my recent conversation with the outgoing Chair of the Faculty. We're trying to set up a meeting so he can teach me the Secret Faculty Chair Handshake and show me where the bodies are buried. The problem, he said, is that the Secret Faculty Chair Handshake is properly performed by firmly grasping hands with long-dead corpses.

He wouldn't reveal whether the ceremony requires the presence of asps. Go ask Cleopatra. She'll know.

Straw prof

In the April 24 Chronicle of Higher Education, Mark Edmundson calls on English professors to "befriend the texts that we choose to teach," pointing out that texts are "the testaments of human beings who have lived and suffered in the world. They too deserve honor and respect." While I find this idea appealing, I'm a bit befuddled by the sort of teaching he finds objectionable.

The article is called "Against Readings," and in it Edmundson objects to literature professors who, instead of befriending and honoring texts, instead stand before a class and subject texts to readings informed by particular theoretical schools. Edmunson constructs an image of the literature professor who stands in front of a class and performs, say, a Marxist reading of Blake or a deconstructionist reading of Eliot. What he wants, says Edmundson, is "A Blakean reading of Blake, or an Eliotic reading of Eliot."

Great, but who is this straw man against whom Edmunson rails? Do lit profs really stand before classes performing theoretical analyses of texts as students silently watch? What would be the point of that kind of teaching? If my goal is to equip my students to develop their own literary analysis skills, how will my solo performance help them?

Maybe I've missed the boat here, but I don't know many profs, if any, who teach like Edmunson's straw man. Am I just out of touch or is his description more accurate elsewhere?

Grace happens

The weather is bleak and I haven't been getting much sleep and all day long I have been suffering the kind of pain that feels as if it being inflicted by a sadist wielding a ball-peen hammer, and yet: I am happy. I know, it doesn't make any sense to me either.

What do I have to be happy about? Well, yesterday I got all excited about taking photos of buckeye buds (in the rain!) and then this morning I was so eager to get down to the computer lab to run the photos through Photoshop that I arrived there in the dark (in the rain!) while the custodians were still cleaning the room. I mean, they're just photos of buds and leaves! There are not even any people in them! And yet they made me very happy.

It made me happy to open today's mail and see three cards responding to invitations to my daughter's wedding. We haven't even finished mailing all the invitations and already we're hearing daily from people eager to let us know they're planning to attend (or not). I was very happy about the leftover salmon and asparagus for supper and even more happy that I didn't have to cook, and then there was that homemade vanilla ice cream with strawberries, an excellent distraction from the whole ball-peen hammer scenario.

I was delighted earlier today to devote a small chunk of my federal income tax refund toward stimulating the economy of Oregon by ordering a healthy supply of Stash loose teas, including all my favorite varieties to pour over ice when the clouds part and summer finally arrives.

I'm happy that I finally made a dental appointment and finished a book I've been reading and wrote one and a half (out of three) final exams. I'm happy that I had fun playing Boggle with students yesterday and didn't fall asleep in the middle of class today and tried to set an errant student on the path toward redemption (of her grade).

If I set all those things on one side of the scale and, on the other side, set the nasty weather and insomnia and pain, the bad stuff ought to outweigh the good--after all, that ball-peen hammer alone ought to smash the bejeezus out of all the tea in Oregon. And yet I am happy.

My cup runneth over. Care for a drink?

Alien life forms

In April, buckeye leaves burst from their buds like B-movie aliens from the head of an unsuspecting human host. One day the tight red buds perch on the ends of bare stalks, and the next day the buds disappear and the leaves leap into bright green growth. It's easy to miss the in-between stages, when the incipient leaves look like alien life forms unfurling toward nefarious ends. For that one brief moment before the leaves take their final form, it's easy to believe that April is indeed the cruelest month.

Captain Obvious Strikes Again!

Yesterday I read 26 student drafts (because I really really really didn't want to take them home with me on such a beautiful weekend!) and while many of them were quite good, I was especially impressed by one student's ability to take obviousness to new heights. I received no more than the usual number of papers proudly asserting that "poetry means different things to different people" or "throughout time, authors have used many different ideas and techniques," but this time I received a statement that moves to a whole new level of achievement: "These works would appeal to the kinds of readers who find these kinds of works appealing."

There's just no arguing with that logic. I could screech "tautology!" until I'm red in the face, but the word would not be meaningful to the sort of student who does not know the meaning of the word.

The cow that stomped Tokyo

This morning as I left for work I saw a 12-foot-tall cow.

I know it wasn't really 12 feet tall. Cows don't grow that tall around here, and if they did, the barns wouldn't be big enough to hold 'em.

But there's a peculiar optical illusion that occurs when our neighbor's cows wander across the high ridge on the other side of our road: when they reach a particular bare spot with no trees or shrubs to lend a sense of scale, they seem to balloon into monsters tall enough to stomp across Tokyo. It's hard for a cow to look menacing, but when they're 12 feet tall, they look positively primeval and even powerful--until they move closer to the trees and shrink again into ordinary bovines, utterly harmless and eminently ignorable.

For that brief moment, though, when the cows are 12 feet tall, they definitely get my attention.

Added later: One of my students turned in a draft containing the word "cowage," which seems to be a combination of "coward" and "courage." Cowage is what I need when I encounter the Cow That Stomped Tokyo.

My inspiration

Once as a child when I had performed some geeky feat like winning the county spelling bee, I was interviewed by a newspaper reporter who asked me that question every child dreads hearing: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

My mother, who was present at the time, probably expected me to say something normal like "a nurse" or "a teacher," and she would have smiled even if I'd admitted the truth and said I wanted to be a writer. Instead, when the reporter asked what I wanted to be, I said, "An inspiration."

My mother was appalled, but at the time I didn't understand why. "Inspiration" isn't one of those vocations open to the granddaughter of a tobacco farmer, and no matter how carefully you comb the classified ads, you're not going to find a lot of companies desperately seeking Inspirations. Maybe my mother foresaw a future of compromise and broken dreams.

These days, though, I understand even better why my bizarre response made my mother uncomfortable, because I find it very uncomfortable to be told over and over again, sometimes by people I barely know, that I am an inspiration--and not at all the sort of inspiration I dreamed of being as a child. I was thinking of writing some amazingly wonderful book that would inspire awe at my insight and creativity and inspire readers to take bold steps to make the world a better place. Little did I know that all I had to do to become an inspiration was to lose 100 pounds.

Now the people who keep telling me I'm their inspiration always want to know the same thing: how did I do it? And their interest is not purely academic: they want me to reveal the secret, tell them the name of the magic pill that will melt all their fat away without effort. The problem is that I don't know the secret, and the things I can tell them aren't terribly inspiring.

For instance, the plain and simple truth is that if you want to lose 100 pounds, the first thing you have to do is gain 100 pounds. This is actually the easy part (two words: Taco Bell), but there's nothing the least bit inspiring about it (and if you don't believe me, pay a visit to Wal-Mart on a Friday night).

Losing all that flab is more difficult, and people who want a quick and easy way to burn off unwanted weight aren't going to like what I tell them: Eat right and exercise. Turn off the television and plant a big garden. Stop drinking pop, even diet pop. Losing 100 pounds took me two years of pretty much constant effort, and I can't ever go back to the kind of lifestyle I led before or all that weight will come back.

Not very inspiring, is it? Maybe that's what my mother understood: being an inspiration is not a vocation you can actually seek, and if you stumble into it, it's just not as exciting as you might have expected.

Promises, Promises

My first act on being elected Faculty Chair will be to demand a recount. There must be some logical explanation for this stunning result. I suspect hanging chads.

Next, I'll take advantage of the fact that fully half of the members of next year's Faculty Council are English professors and institute a series of sweeping reforms on campus. We'll establish a crack squad of Grammar Police armed with red pens and authorized to issue citations to anyone apprehended in the commission of a solecism.

Classes will be cancelled on T.S. Eliot's birthday, Bloomsday, and the first day the trilliums bloom in spring.

Every student will be required to recite Donne's "Meditation 17" from memory before receiving a diploma.

New faculty members will be required to wear beanies embellished with the college logo; beanieless newbies will be required to sing the Alma Mater on demand and pay a steep fine if they bobble the high notes.

In order to study effective models of academic leadership, the entire Faculty Council will take a two-week fact-finding excursion to London and Paris. How will this junket be funded in these bleak economic times? Simple: Faculty members will be required to pay-to-play in faculty meetings. The first 30 seconds of speech will remain free, but speakers will pay tolls based on a sliding scale keyed to years in rank. Further hefty fines will be imposed upon anyone slipping into the subjunctive mood. (Would that it were so!)

Finally, Faculty Council will finally find a solution to that serious problem that is always with us but no one seems willing to tackle. I refer, of course, to the weather. If our campus leadership is unwilling or unable to ensure a comfortable working environment both inside and outside the buildings, then who needs 'em?

Light strikes a pose

How do I write the light?

I value light for what it illuminates, but what happens when the light itself becomes the main show?

I wondered during our sunrise service how to put light itself into the spotlight. Outside the church window the light turned from midnight blue to purple to pink to a soft clarity that seemed to caress everything it touched, but how do I write about that without resorting to time-worn cliches? This morning the sunrise mottled the sky with rough patches of cotton-candy pink tinged with firey orange and surrounded by whiteness so soft it looked like felt--but even as I write this description, I am struck by its inadequacy. The sky didn't really look like felt or fire or cotton candy or like anything so much as light. I want to say "Just go look at it for yourself," but by the time I'd noticed the peculiar quality of the light, it was already starting to change. I can't make light sit tight or stay put while I go find the camera, and even if I could, the photograph would frame a woefully incomplete distortion of a transcendent experience. Light refuses to pose, at least for me.

An evanescent natural phenomenon that defies description: that's the light I'd like to know how to write.

Trillium time again

I'm not sure why I get so excited when the trilliums bloom in the spring. It shouldn't be any great surprise: given the right growing conditions and an adequate amount of sunshine, the trilliums will return year after year; they may be more or less abundant from one year to the next, but they can generally be relied upon to bloom. They're not even the earliest wildflowers in our woods; we've had spring beauties and stonecrop blooming for weeks and the Dutchman's Breeches are just coming into bloom, but I look forward to the trilliums the way a child looks forward to Christmas.

This morning on my walk I saw just a few trilliums blooming in the woods where there were none a week ago. It was 40 degrees and foggy when I left the house, but by the time I returned two hours later, the sun had burned off the fog and the temperature had risen a whopping two degrees. I was chilled and sore (leg cramps...forgot to take a water bottle) but excited about what I had seen: buzzards making big lazy circles above a freshly plowed farm field, dozens of goldfinches flitting like flecks of sunshine through the woods, mottled leaves of the waterleaf speckling a hillside. Earlier in the week, my husband located the nesting site of a pair of wood ducks--a hole about twenty feet up in a sycamore beside our creek--but I haven't had any success in finding the wood ducks, probably because my dog always accompanies me on my walks and she's not as helpful as she seems to think.

On the entire six-mile loop, though, I found trilliums blooming in only two spaces: on the hillside next to our driveway and on the slope right across the road from our house. So far there are just a few, but seeing their bright white faces brightening up the dark wintery woods is like opening an unexpected gift and knowing that it is exactly what I needed.

Great performances

In the past 24 hours I've witnessed some terrific performances:

1. The prof in my Scientific Imaging class introduced some new and challenging photo techniques and then set us loose to try out the techniques on campus and then return to share what we had done. In under an hour, my classmates managed to take some really cool photos demonstrating both great technical skill and impressive artistic sensibilities.

2. A whole mess of students and a few faculty members read selections from their creative writing last night at the public reading our department sponsors every semester. The variety of materials was great, from dramatic monologues to personal essays to an awesome villanelle, and it was wonderful to be a part of a highly responsive audience. For the first time since we've been offering these events, we ran out of pizza. Time to think about a bigger venue.

3. This morning five of my freshman composition students did class presentations about their research topics, and once again I was amazed at students' facility with PowerPoint. The presentations were not all equally wonderful, but I saw some remarkable graphics, amazing animations, and pleasing color palettes. For students who sometimes struggle to express themselves clearly in prose, they sure know how to create effective slide shows.

Now I need to follow their example by taking some wonderful photos, writing creatively about them, and putting the results into a PowerPoint presentation for my Scientific Imaging class. I've worn myself out teaching my students this semester and now I'm delighted to sit back and let them teach me a thing or two.

To cite the unciteable source

A student wants to know the correct MLA format for citing a source that she is not, technically, in the strictest sense of the term, actually using. Why, she wonders, doesn't the MLA guide tell her how to do this?

Well, that's a tough question. The issue arose when I read her draft and noticed that she credited about three sentences to a particular book without including page numbers. I pointed out that there's nothing easier than citing information from a book with one author: simply put the author's name and page number in parentheses at the end of the sentence. We have covered this simple procedure throughout the semester, so what's the problem now?

The problem is that the student doesn't know where, exactly, the information appears in the book. And that's because she has not actually held the book, opened the book, or read the book, and it is not available in our library so there's no chance that she will do so now. She knows what the book talks about and wants to refer to it in broad, general terms, but she doesn't want to go to the trouble of actually reading the thing.

I tried to explain that a book that is not being used as a source cannot actually be cited as a source, but she's pointed out that she doesn't have enough sources to support her argument and she thinks this book would lend credibility.

I have no doubt that numerous students over the years have cited as sources books that they have not actually read, but at least those students were aware that they ought to be ashamed of themselves. This student sees nothing wrong with trying to improve the credibility of her argument by citing a book without ever opening the book.

Gee, I don't know why the MLA guide doesn't offer a way to accomplish that. If enough students complain, maybe they'll include it in the next edition.

Caught up or left behind?

I don't want to say this too loud lest the Powers That Be dump a pile of work on my head, but: I think I'm caught up.

I have no papers or exams to grade. I am prepared for tomorrow's class. I could teach Wednesday's classes blindfolded and with both hands tied behind my back. I have updated my online syllabi as needed.

I have submitted the paperwork to hire two adjuncts and sent them a stack of helpful information. I have written and distributed letters thanking various colleagues for serving as judges for our scholarship competitions. I have started on the book orders for fall classes, except that I need to review a few texts before I make a final decision. (Has anyone seen the new edition of the MLA guide? I don't know whether to require it for freshman composition.)

I'm prepared for this afternoon's two committee meetings, and I have approved supplemental questions on course evaluations. I have even read the immense document the provost distributed related to perceived inequities in course loads across campus. I don't know what to do about the problem, but at least I am well informed.

I have taken the photographs for this week's Scientific Imaging assignment, and later this afternoon I'll go down to the lab to run them through Photoshop. First, though, I'll go to the rec center for a badly needed workout--I enjoyed some wonderful walking weather over the weekend, but I haven't done a full workout a the rec center since last Tuesday.

Why have I been skipping workouts? Because at no point last week could I have called myself "caught up." In fact, I was the antithesis of caught up, whatever you call that--left behind? I kept hearing the voice of the Red Queen urging Alice on: "Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Along with Alice, I'd like to reply, "I'd rather not try, please....I'm quite content to stay here."

I couldn't say that last week, but today is another story. I think I'm caught up--but don't tell anyone or I'll have to start running again just to stay exactly where I am.

Finally, spring

It's a little early for wildflowers, but yesterday I saw my first Dutchman's Breeches of the season, hovering over the forest floor like tiny white balloons. The towhees have returned but I'm still waiting for orioles. If the rain holds off, this evening I'll plant pansies in the flower boxes in front of the house. Finally, spring.

Information overload

Years ago when I was a journalist, I wrote a newspaper column about my children's struggle with head lice. The response from the local community was made up of a loud "How could you write about such a thing!" followed by many whispered confidences about epic battles with head lice. I quickly became a walking repository of head lice horror stories.

Something similar has been happening ever since I learned that I'm heading for a hysterectomy. Women I barely know have told me about fibroids the size of a golf ball, baseball, or grapefruit (yes, I realize that the next logical point on that continuum ought to be "softball," but they always go with "grapefruit") and, just to be different, a cyst the size of a hockey puck. I have heard horror stories about nicked ureters and life-threatening infections. Today as my surgeon was examining me I mentioned the name of a friend who had also been his patient. "Sure, I remember her!" he said. "She had a really big uterus too!"

You know, I've never really thought about the size of my friend's uterus, and I'm okay with that. My feeling about internal organs is that there's a good reason they're kept under wraps. Now, though, I've stumbled into some parallel universe in which it is considered appropriate to bandy about information about the relative sizes of various organs, excrescences, and unnatural growths. I've received all kinds of helpful brochures from the doctor's office, all written in that perky tone designed to make disease sound non-threatening, but nothing telling me how to cope with this flood of information. I realize that people are just trying to be helpful, but do I have to think about tumors and wombs 24 hours a day?

Next time someone starts sharing too much, I think I'll just tell her to put a sock in it...but what size sock? Golfball, baseball, or grapefruit?

Opie, Reggie, and imperfect unions

I'm reading drafts of my freshman writers' research essays, which are more interesting than usual and mostly pretty well done. Somehow I managed to impress upon most of my students the importance of using reputable sources, but I got a pretty big laugh out of the way one student cited one of his sources: he interpreted "Opec Secretariat" as the name of the author. This is almost as brilliant as a previous student who interpreted "Regina, Saskatchewan" as a reporter's name.

Of course, given the current trend toward peculiar baby names, it's only a matter of time before some poor infant gets tagged with one of these names--and then what if they later meet and marry? Opec and Regina Saskatchewan-Secretariat: the cost of ink for the invitations would be outrageous, and their adorable children Opie and Reggie will be mercilessly hounded by classmates envious of their unusual monikers.

Let's just put a stop to this right here and now. OPEC is an organization and Regina is a city, and I'm not aware of any locale where marriage between two such incompatible forces would be permitted.

Tilt!

After three days I'm finally getting accustomed to my new glasses, but I still find myself tilting my head up and down to find the right spot for various distances. In class I look from my notes to the blackboard to a student in the front row and then to a student clear in the back, and with each adjustment I have to tilt a little up or down and then maybe a little more.

I know I'll get used to these glasses eventually, but meanwhile, just call me Bobblehead Bev.

Fur and loathing

I saw clear evidence of the economic downturn when I went shopping for a raincoat in Pittsburgh Friday night. I found a rich deposit of colorful raincoats on clearance at the downtown Macy's, a vast multi-floor complex filling a city block, but I saw no more than half a dozen customers the whole time I was there.

The raincoats were adjacent to the fine fur department, an area that appeared to have been abandoned by the human race. When I had made my selection (with not a hint of assistance from any sales clerks), I went to the nearest cash register, where three sales clerks were standing and gabbing.

"You can't buy that here," said one of them. "We deal only with customers buying furs."

"And how's that working for you?" is what I wanted to say, but instead I took my raincoat across the store to another register and checked out. If they're planning to stand and chat until the next serious fur-buying customer appears, I have a feeling they'll be waiting a while.

So if you're in the market for a fur coat, I know three salesclerks who are eager to serve, but if it's a raincoat you're after, you're on your own.

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.