Traffic jam

This morning on my walk I saw a box turtle, a pair of indigo buntings, a red-tailed hawk, and an array of spangled fritillaries, but I didn't see another human being or a car for the first five miles, and then suddenly I found myself in the middle of a traffic jam--or what passes for a traffic jam out here in the middle of nowhere.

I was walking across a barely-two-lanes-wide bridge accompanied by my dog and the neighbor's lab pup, whom we call "Goofy" because he walks with a distinctively Disneyesque lope, sort of like a teen boy who has just gone through a growth spurt and doesn't quite know what to do with those lanky arms and legs. We were halfway across the bridge when two cars approached, one from each direction, and I suddenly realized that the bridge was not big enough for the five of us. What could I do? I had nowhere to go unless I jumped off the bridge--a 10-foot drop to a creek carrying about six inches of water. Not an attractive option.

I controlled my dog, but Goofy doesn't recognize my authority so he was running around playfully while these two cars crept carefully past. Somehow we all got across and my dog got a treat for being good, and Goofy went on being goofy. He's just a kid. One of these days he'll figure out that cars are not puppy toys. I just hope he doesn't have to learn that lesson the hard way.

Gallant advice

In the current issue of Granta, Jhumpa Lahiri interviews Mavis Gallant about her life as a writer, including a brief stint as a writer-in-residence in Toronto:

JL: Did you enjoy the experience?

MG: I would never do it again. I think it's a dead loss. I'm opposed to it. You can't teach writing.

JL: Given that you were there, what did you teach them?

MG: They should know their language and read. Read, read, read.

Many would disagree with Gallant's claim that writing cannot be taught, but her advice is excellent: the first step toward being a good writer is knowing one's own language. This seems like a no-brainer--after all, plenty of people are competent enough to communicate effectively in English! But I can count on the fingers of one hand the students I've had who have cared enough to really know the English language, to know it so intimately that they can take it apart and play with the pieces and put it all back together again in original and creative ways.

Where does this intimate knowledge of language come from? I don't know, but I know the symptoms when I see them: students who take linguistics classes for fun, who read stylebooks and language-related blogs, who play word games, who delight in exploring the origins of words, who employ syntax with precision and mastery born of a love for language.

The difference between a person who can use the tools of language and one who intimately knows the language is like the difference between a real artist and one who excels at paint-by-numbers, or the difference between a computer user and a computer programmer. It's a passion I don't see often, but when I do, I know that the student who possesses that passion for language is well on the way to becoming an excellent writer.

And what better way to know and love one's own language than to read?

Spuds find new digs

I still need to hang some pictures and empty some boxes, but I've officially moved to my wonderful new office. What makes it wonderful?

1. It's a virgin office, never used before, so I don't have to put up with anyone else's mistakes, which leaves me plenty of room to make my own mistakes.

2. Beautiful soothing sage-green walls.

3. Warm wood tones.

4. Great big desk.

5. Gigantic windows let in plenty of light.

6. A little round table with three comfy chairs.

7. Mr. Potato Head and friends have room to stretch.

So far I've encountered only one problem: no one knows where to find me. It's a little quiet up here, people--how about some visitors?

A dream come true

Last fall after my daughter got engaged I started having crazy dreams about her wedding: the pews faced the wrong way, or the bride and groom got pushed out of the church in a giant perambulator, or the bride wore a blue dirndl skirt and carried a bouquet made of orange pipe-cleaners.

Well, only one of those dreams came true. At the wedding the bride carried white roses, but at the rehearsal her bouquet was considerably more colorful.

I am pleased to report, however, that no perambulators were involved, and the pews faced forward just as pews ought to do.

Attention deficit

Back in my new office ready to tackle the big pile of work I've been putting off until after the wedding...but first, I'd better empty out the last few boxes and file things away. Except now that I look at them, I remember why I haven't put them away already: I need to sort through them and toss some outdated stuff, which requires thought and attention, both in short supply at the moment.

So I'll leave that pile for later and take a look at my inbox: request for payment of bill, request for additional section of composition, request for extension from summer student...I can't think about all that right now. Let's close the inbox and take a look at the piles on the desk.

On second though, let's not. Too many small details need careful attention. Maybe I could decide where to hang the pictures in my new office, but that would require getting the last few boxes out of the way, which would require sorting through that wretched pile of files that seems to be growing by the minute. On such a lovely summer day, who can think about plagiarism documentation and assessment reports?

Could someone please come do my thinking for me?

Wedding accomplished!

Friday evening some tall handsome young men came to me and in very serious tones asked formal permission to set off some fireworks in our lower meadow. "All right," I said gravely, "but you have to remember one thing: all our neighbors own shotguns."

At any rate the fireworks went off with a bang with no mishaps or complaints. My son and my new son-in-law's two brothers put on a pretty spectacular show for about 20 young people gathered on the night before my daughter's wedding; meanwhile, the bridesmaids moved furniture and rolled up rugs in the garage apartment to make a pretty passable dance floor, where they gave the assembly swing-dance lessons. All I had to do was stay out of the way.

The wedding and the reception were entirely free of fireworks, although we had plenty of laughter and joy. At the wedding I had a whole row of my daughter's music-major friends sitting behind me, so when we all stood up to sing "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name," it felt like heaven.

One small glitch arose Saturday morning, when my husband woke up feeling quite sick. He had spent a good part of the week baking many beautiful loaves of braided challah bread to serve at the reception, but then he was too sick to take the racks of bread to the reception hall. So I set off with a van full of bread and a bridesmaid, and I left my son behind with exactly one task: "Make sure your father gets to the church on time" (which was pretty important since he, along with the groom's uncle, was officiating at the service!). I delivered the bread to the hall and my son delivered the pastor to the church, and in the end everyone ended up in the right place.

But where are the bride and groom? The drove two hours last night to stay near the airport, and today they fly out to an undisclosed location, which will be revealed on the groom's Facebook page sometime today. If the past week's events are any indication of their future, I suspect they'll be sharing a great deal of laughter and joy for a long time to come.

And dancing, of course. And maybe even some fireworks.

Torn

Last night we had elderly neighbors bearing wedding gifts at the front door and young future in-laws bearing a fresh catch of crawdads from the creek at the back, and I felt a bit torn. I expect that this feeling will be quite common over the next few days as we attempt to entertain the wide variety of people assembling for our daughter's wedding.

All week my driveway has looked like a used-car lot and the garage apartment has been crawling with bridesmaids, lovely young women bubbling with energy, which is a good thing because a great deal of energy is needed and I'm running out. The groom's dad and brothers arrived last night and delivered my son, who had to get up at 4 a.m. yesterday to get to the airport in time for his flight home. The groom arrived a little later after taking an extra trip back home to pick up the wedding rings (oops). Today my parents and brothers and in-laws will be rolling into town--just in time for the rehearsal tonight.

And here's the really fun thing: tonight the mayor is blocking off a section of the main street in town for an outdoor concert, so when the wedding party travels from the rehearsal to the rehearsal dinner, they will find the street blocked off and no parking places available within miles. It will be interesting to sit down to a terrific dinner at the best restaurant in town while a block away the mayor's bluegrass band sings their usual songs about the joys of eating roadkill. Eat more possum. It's America's other other white meat.

Rehearsal today, wedding tomorrow, big family cookout Sunday, and then my household will return to its usual state of sedate dullness, when the choices become much simpler: weed the tomatoes or pick blueberries or mow the meadow? I'm enjoying all this hubbub but I know it won't last, and when it's over, the garden will still be silently waiting.

Shiftless and shrieking

What does it mean when the entire electrical system in your car stops working at it starts to shriek every time you shift gears?

We may never know, because it acts that way only when I'm driving. When my mechanic tried it, the car worked normally--a little cranky, but plenty of electricity and no shrieking.

He's a magic man, my mechanic. He drove into town and met me at my car just to see whether it was safe to drive or ought to be towed...and then it rewarded him by depriving him of work. I drove it home without a problem, but I don't trust it. I suspect that my mechanic will see that car again soon.

If the car had been the only thing that didn't work right today, it would have been enough, but no: my brain wouldn't work right, and neither did my ability to communicate, thanks to the lack of a phone in my new office and some internet connectivity problems. My attempts to finance my son's fall tuition also ran into a brick wall (thank you, worldwide economic crisis!), and an unexpected storm interrupted the gardening and weed-eating. And now my arms are not working. For that I blame the weed-eating.

So now I come to the end of the day having accomplished little that I set out to do but exhausted all the same. I just need a break. Maybe that's what my car is trying to tell me: "I'm tired of the constant motion. How about a day off?"

This evening I'll do my best to emulate my car: I'll refuse to function--and I may even shriek.

Wedding fever

I'm not sure what compelled me to select Anna Karenina for my casual reading in the week before my daughter's wedding--after all, the novel doesn't exactly inspire trust in the institution of marriage. On the other hand, it's probably a wiser choice than one made by another mother-of-the-bride, who insisted on using her favorite song as the processional at her daughter's wedding. The song? "Send in the Clowns."

I don't need to watch Bridezillas to know that weddings can inspire unusual behavior; all I have to do is consider the uncharacteristic actions I've recently committed:

I have had my hair cut at a salon that actually requires appointments.

I have purchased underwear that can be worn with only one outfit--and paid more for it than I've paid for underwear in the past five years.

I have made an appointment to have my eyebrows waxed.

I have purchased a purse just big enough to hold car keys and a handkerchief.

I know what you're thinking: "Who are you and what have you done with Bev?" But I can't help it: I seem to have been attacked by some sort of virus that weakens my will and compels me to do things I've never considered doing before. I'm glad the wedding is less than a week away because if this doesn't stop soon, there's no telling what sort of wacky compulsions might come my way. Someone stop me before I paint my toenails!

If marriage causes the malady, maybe Tolstoy will provide the cure.

Lacking gravitas...but not gravity

In the midst of dark times of economic distress, incomprehensible news, and unusual weather, I am pleased to report that at least one force remains undeniably reliable. I refer, of course, to gravity.

My experience suggests that gravity is working just fine out there, utterly unaffected by the worldwide economic crisis, the war in Iraq, or climate change. I base this conclusion on a series of unintentional experiments involving an office full of books, a rickety library book cart, and an uneven flagstone path.

The path leads from Point A (my current office, soon to be my former office) to Point B (my new office). These points are not particularly far apart as the crow flies; in fact, it is possible to look out the window of my new office and see the window of my soon-to-be-old office. However, I have not been able to interest any flying crows in moving my pile of books between these two points, and since the campus has not yet installed a teleporter, I'm moving them manually.

I thought the rolling library cart would make the process easier: I can simply take books off the shelf in one office, put them on the cart in the same order in which I want them to appear on the shelf in the new office, and roll them over there and unload them directly onto the new shelves. No boxes, no need to re-sort books, no dollies...piece of cake.

The problem is that the best path between Point A and Point B runs out the door, across uneven flagstone pavement, down a little slope and up a steeper slope, into the library, up an elevator, and around the corner to the new office.

Do you have any idea what happens to a neatly-arranged row of books on a rolling cart when the cart rolls over uneven flagstones? They vibrate, jump, and shift out of place. And then what happens when the cart needs to go up or downhill while moving over uneven flagstones? You guessed it: gravity takes over. The books shift toward the downhill side, the entire row bulging outward until one slippery book jumps off the cart and the rest quickly follow.

Yesterday I transported two loads of books in this manner, trying to keep the cart straight on the slopes so the books wouldn't bulge out so much, but I soon realized that this was a two-person job. This morning my daughter helped me take a few more loads over and it worked much more smoothly. We'll take one or two more loads over and then we'll be done, but not before confirming, for those who might have been worried, that in a world of uncertainty there is still one force on which we can all rely.

Gravity: it's everywhere you want to be.

My miracle swimsuit

I hesitate to brag about my miracle swimsuit because then everyone will want one, but it's so terrific that I can't keep it to myself. My new swimsuit fits! Comfortably! And it looks terrific! And it was free! Mostly! Except for postage!

Let me explain: before I flew out to ASLE, I did some shopping in the Big City with my daughter and bought a new swimsuit, something I have not done in probably five years. (This suit is five sizes smaller than my previous purchase, which tells you something about those five years.) It cost more than I generally spend on a swimsuit but it looked stunning, so I couldn't resist.

I didn't take the suit to ASLE because swimming wasn't really in the game plan, so I didn't look too closely at it until after I got home, when I noticed that the sales clerk had failed to remove the security tag. How annoying. I have no plans to drive two hours back to the Big City to get that stupid ink tag removed.

So I called the store and explained my dilemma very calmly. There was some conferring with higher-ups on the other end, and then the clerk told me to mail it back to the store and they will remove the security tag, send the suit back to me, and credit my account for the full purchase price.

So today I'm putting it in the mail in the full confidence that it will return to me tag-free. One of these days I may even get to wear it. That's my kind of miracle.

Reflections on Victoria

I took hundreds of photos at ASLE but now I notice that very few have people in them.

Lost in a good book

I'm in the Seattle airport trying to relax and finish Tess of the D'Urbervilles before my flight, but I'm distracted by voices from above. I can ignore the flight announcements and security announcements pretty easily, but from above my left shoulder a television brings news bites that keep creeping insistently into my consciousness. The voices want me to think about imprisoned journalists, nuclear tests, and sexual paraphilia, but Tess is trudging across the heath toward Stonehenge and I'd rather stick with her.

I haven't read a newspaper all week, although I've glanced occasionally at the New York Times online. Apparently, things have happened while I've been gone. I've read about that plane that crashed in the Atlantic but I don't know how the Cleveland Indians are doing this week and I don't know anything about those journalists in North Korea, nor am I likely to learn much more from the annoying voices yammering on the tube. Airplane terminals are bearable only if one can become as absent from them as possible--preferably by being lost in a good book. The yammering talking heads keep jerking me back into the present and trying to keep me there with constant promises of hot news after the break. The news for Tess may be bleak, but the book will eventually come to an end, unlike the teasing promises of the 24-hour news cycle. I refuse to get sucked into that black hole.

There will be time to get caught up on the real world after I get home. For now, I'd rather stick with the fictional world that awaits between the covers of a good book.

Sights and sounds

In a UVic classroom building: a sign featuring a wheelchair icon accompanied by the words "Area of Refuge." Is a wheelchair refuge like a wildlife refuge? Are wheelchairs endangered species, and if so, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

In Victoria's busy city buses: everyone says a sprightly "Thank you!" to the bus driver on leaving the bus. Everyone. Even the surly-looking goth girl who looks like she'd rather strangle her grandmother than flash a smile. My experience of commuter buses is not particularly extensive, but I've never seen this level of gratitude anywhere else.

In a restaurant called ReBar: sweet potato (roasted) and avocado (raw) in a salad. Which, by the way, was the best salad I've ever eaten, but still--sweet potato and avocado!

On Beacon Hill: the sound of waves washing the beach, dogs barking, ravens making their metallic meowing sounds--and just over the way, a fellow practicing the bagpipes in the middle of a field.

At the Inner Harbour: a street performer's polished patter, including the incomparable line,
"Of all the audiences I've ever had, you are, without a doubt, the most recent." When two white-haired, stodgily attired ladies strolled through the performance space, the juggler pointed to them and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, here are Eunice and Ingrid, my dancing girls, who will move off to the left and change before joining me here on the stage!" The audience laughed, but Eunice and Ingrid barely broke a grin between them.

In an early-morning chapel service: the Passing of the Peace followed by the Anointing with the Hand Sanitizer. At the appointed moment in the service, the congregants moved around greeting one another with handshakes and a hearty "Peace be with you!" and then moved off to several corners where bottles of hand sanitizer were stationed. If only peace, too, came in jars with handy dispensers....

Breaking fast

ASLE attendees are a friendly bunch, but you'd never know it at breakfast, where solitary ASLE-ites sit at the end of long cafeteria tables, one person per table, except for those attending with friends. On previous mornings I've made a practice of sitting opposite one of these lone diners and I've had some interesting conversations that way, but today I decided to sit first and let someone else do the seeking.

I sat facing the door so I could see each person come in and look hopefully around for a place to sit. I flashed my best smile and made eye contact as often as possible, and a few people smiled back--but they all moved on to sit elsewhere. How long would it take before some brave soul decided to break the ice and sit opposite me?

Twenty minutes is the answer. I was nearly done with breakfast but still drinking my tea when a fellow sat down, a professor at Sterling College, which has as many students as my college has faculty members. We had an interesting discussion about the challenges of interdisciplinarity on the small college campus before going our separate ways. Score one for friendliness.

Ministry of Silly Quests

I'm sitting on a bench on the wharf in Victoria surrounded by unusual performances. To my right a portly fellow plays traditional tunes on the hammer dulcimer, including that old-timey favorite "Hey Jude," while to my left a scrawny fellow juggles lit torches while riding a tall unicycle, and behind me a mime is taking a smoke break. 

But I'm immune to the excitement because I'm immersed in the opening chapters of Tony Hawks's classic tome Round Ireland with a Fridge, which I purchased today for $5.99 (Canadian) at Munro Books in downtown Victoria. The book was available in paperback for $16.99 or in slightly battered paperback for $5.99, and I wonder what sort of person pays more than twice as much for the same amount of silliness.

The silliness begins in the first chapter when Hawks succumbs to GTDSBS syndrome: Going To Do Something a Bit Silly. Hawks muses about the motivations of people who pursue outrageous acts of derring-do simply because it is there--"But so are your slippers and the TV remote," notes Hawks:

Why subject yourself to untold pain and deprivation when popping to the shops and back followed by a bit of a sit down is an option? Why explore when you can tidy? Why sail singlehandedly when you can read singlehandedly, trek when you can taxi, abseil when you can take the stairs, stand when you can sit, or listen to Neil Sedaka's Greatest Hits when you can take your own life?

Hawks's laissez-faire approach to life is a timely antidote to what I'm hearing at the ASLE conference. Last night's plenary speaker, Karsten Heuer, got a standing ovation (!) for a really marvelous presentation about his experiences following a herd of migrating caribou in the Arctic, hiking from Yellowstone to the Yukon, and canoeing across Canada, presumably without a fridge. Then this morning I heard a paper on the rhetoric of mountaineering, which made me rejoice that I'll never have the $65,000 guide fee necessary to climb Everest (where a fridge would really be redundant). 

I am delighted that many talented and dedicated people are willing to undergo hardship and danger in order to visit and write about some of the world's least habitable places, but Hawks reminds us that epic quests are available closer to home to anyone susceptible to GTDSBS syndrome. I'm no more likely to climb Everest than I am to trundle a fridge on a trolley around the perimeter of Ireland, but if others are willing to pursue these quests, I'm happy to read about the results.

The view from the top

At 10 a.m. I find myself sitting on the summit of Mount Douglas and looking out over the glassy water toward the islets and mountains in the distance. There's no one here but me and the birds and four other people: a jogger who passed me as I trudged sweatily up the steep hill, a fiftyish couple speaking French, and a lean and wiry woman walking a friendly white terrier. A gentle breeze sweeps away the sweat I worked up walking up this hill, and when the French-speakers pause, the silence is intense. 

It took quite an effort to get up here: an hour and a quarter walking from the campus to Mount Doug, all of it downhill--which means I'll walk the same route uphill on the way back, mostly through busy commercial areas. In the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood stands Mount Douglas, a dark crag that looks like a piece of the Jurassic jutting into our era. The lower slopes are covered with thick pine forest, ferns, and rhododendrons, but the terrain becomes less familiar as I move uphill. Near the summit are oak trees with shiny, curly leaves, and the rocks near the summit are studded with brilliant yellow stonecrop blossoms.  Someday I'll figure out what all this stuff is but at the moment my primary goal is to rest up for the trip back to campus and let the breeze blow the cobwebs out of my head. I'll attend a session this evening and more over the next two days, but today I decided to get away and get the view from the top.

Paradise lost

At MLA I got lost in the labyrinthine conference hotel; here, I got lost in a garden. It's not even a particularly big garden, just a small but vibrant haven of greenery on the UVic campus, a quiet place where I escaped the noon sun to sit on a bench and gather my thoughts. 

The flowers there are astounding: rhododendrons in many colors and an amazing davidia that dropped huge white petals like feathers falling from the sky. I saw some Solomon's Seal taller than I've ever seen and still blooming in June, and I heard birds that sounded entirely unfamiliar but turned out on closer inspection to be towhees. 

Then I got up to go back to the conference--no easy task, as I soon learned. The paths in Finnerty Gardens curve and twist, confusing my sense of direction, already numbed because of jet-lag. If I keep walking, I thought, eventually I'll find the way out. I could hear traffic on the far side of a hedge but I couldn't find a way through or even a signpost to point the way, and I felt a little silly about asking directions out of a place no one in her right mind would want to leave. I could stay here forever, I thought, wandering the paths and snacking on the feral bunnies that occasionally find their way through the fences. No one would ever find me and if they did, we'd never find our way back out again.

But eventually I turned a corner and saw that big davidia tree at the entrance and stepped back out of the garden into the workaday world of conference sessions, plenary speakers, and papers. Tomorrow I'll deliver a paper on the rhetoric of isolationism in paradise, so I suppose it's appropriate that yesterday I found myself isolated in paradise with not a hint of rhetoric to help me find my way.

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.