Home sweet home

My daughter and son-in-law are house-hunting, and I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around the idea that a child of mine is able to contemplate buying a house. After all, it was just six years ago this week that my husband and I finally bought our first house.

Unless you count the house we bought 25 years ago, which was not, in the strictest sense of the word, a house. It was a home--a mobile home to be precise, although both halves of that phrase are problematic.

It was a home--for the two of us and a host of other small woodland creatures. At various junctures we had chipmunks in the pantry and a rat in the bedroom, and once we came back from a vacation to find a recently deceased mouse under the sofa and a discarded snakeskin coiled around the top of the water heater in the pantry. I tried to assure myself that the snake might discourage the vermin population, but I didn't find this terribly comforting.

This "home" had started its life in 1948 as an 8x30 foot trailer, but it had long since ceased to be mobile. Decades before we bought it, someone had parked it in the back corner of a trailer park, with nothing separating the trailer from the train track but a shallow dip where people sometimes illegally dumped their trash. (Hence the rats.) Every train that passed by threatened to shake that trailer into the junkheap it was always trying to become. At some point in the past, someone had doubled the width of the trailer by adding a flimsy living room and bedroom, making our home "mobile" in name only.

"Indians came in here and did that," explained the ancient owner of the mobile home park, but I don't know what he meant by that and I'm not sure he did either. We did, however, learn some other important things about our little castle, including the fact that our trailer was at the end of the sewer line connecting a whole line of trailers, so if the line backed up anywhere along the way, it would eventually spill under our trailer.

But we had bought the place for a paltry $2500 (partly furnished) so what did we expect? We got our money's worth: we lived there for two years and when we moved out, we took with us all the furniture, including the deep-freeze we're still using today.

We sold our trailer (for $2000!) when I got pregnant because it was too small for the three of us and I didn't really want my infant child to share a bedroom with snakes, chipmunks, rats, and mice. We moved a few doors down to a bigger, newer, non-vermin-infested mobile home and sold our old one to another grad-school couple with two small children and a third one on the way.

After those early experiments in ownership, we waited two decades before finally finding ourselves in the position to buy a house, and now the child who got her start in our first mobile home is looking around for a home of her own. It know it won't be mobile and I hope it won't be infested with vermin, susceptible to sewage spills, or constantly threatening to dissolve into a junkheap--but even if it is, they'll figure out how to deal with those problems or any others that might come up.

Buying a mobile home was our way to survive as starving grad students, but it also provided a real-world education that has served us well over the years. Buying a house will be different kind of experience for my daughter, but one thing is certain: it's bound to provide an education.

It takes a village to raise a sledge-hammer

Just before the faculty meeting last night, one of my colleagues brought me a sledge-hammer. "You might want to use this if that little gavel doesn't work," he said, but I wondered: use it for what? Pounding on the table or pounding sense into people?

I thought I might need it first thing when I had to announce that the usual hot drinks would not be available during the meeting due to a tragic coffeemaker malfunction, but the faculty did not rise en masse and charge the chair to demand that Faculty Council immediately assuage their caffeine deficiencies. They just sat there and attended to business. That's my kind of meeting.

In the end I had to give the sledge-hammer back, which was more difficult than you might imagine. The person who provided the sledge-hammer disappeared before I had a chance to return it, and I wasn't about to carry it to his office because it would take two of me just to lift the thing--or better yet, it might require an entire committee, the Ad-Hoc Committee to Study the Status of Sledge-Hammer Retention. If I appoint the committee today, we might get a report offering an Action Plan by next fall, and then I'll have to appoint another committee to put the Action Plan into action.

Meanwhile, the sledge-hammer just sits there silently, awaiting further developments. Not a bad strategy if you ask me.

Try Troll-Be-Gone today!

I drove into town this morning carrying a load of glumness that sat like a lumpy and malignant troll clutching my shoulders. I've been carrying that troll around since I got back from my brief spring-break trip and started tackling the pile of detritus burying my life. I tried to wear out the troll with housework--taking down curtains, washing windows, cleaning carpets--but it just squeezed its sharp claws into my shoulders and held on.

I went for walks. I ate chocolate. I tried to write. The troll hung on.

It was still hanging on when I got to the office, unpacked my bag full of unfinished projects, booted up my computer, and started scrolling through my inbox. More work, more demands, more bleh...the troll settled in and started to grumble and groan.

Then I happened upon a batch of reading comments from my literature students, brief e-mailed responses to Grace Paley's "A Conversation with my Father" and Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon." I sighed, shifted the troll to a less dismal position, and started reading.

And smiling.

And laughing.

That's when the troll got uncomfortable. If there's one thing trolls simply can't stand, it's a good belly laugh.

Barthelme alone can make me laugh while Paley is more likely to make me cry, but my students' thoughtful responses made me eager to get back in the classroom. They apologized for not entirely understanding the stories (who does?), but then they asked terrific questions (Why store the balloon in West Virginia? Why can't Paley's narrator and the father talk about what's really bothering them?) and made some leaps toward analysis (Are these authors really writing about writing stories?).

As I read, the troll slunk down, loosened its grip, starting slipping down my back. Then a problem walked in the door, distracting me enough to allow the troll to dig its dirty claws right into my spine.

Then I went to class and started teaching--balloons and oxygen tanks, signs and stories--and as I walked around the room waving my arms, asking questions, easing students toward engagement with complex ideas, the troll slunk away so quietly that I didn't even notice until he was gone.

And he's still gone. I hope he stays gone for a while, but if the troll comes back lugging his sack of glumness, I know where to find the antidote.

A new crop

So I'm looking in the mirror and asking myself the eternal question: what shall I do with my hair? After all, not everyone gets a chance to start a whole new crop of hair from scratch. A colleague suggested that I try some Princess Leia honeybuns, but I'm wondering whether I ought to slather on the gel and spike my hair up into a faux-hawk.

First, though, it has to grow. Yesterday at lunch a friend noticed that my hair is returning and I said, "I just wish it would grow a little faster," and he said, "At least yours is coming back." He had a point. For some, baldness is forever.

Some are urging me to keep my hair short, but the problem is that my current 'do makes me think of chemotherapy, an experience I'd rather forget. So instead, I'm watching it grow and waiting until I can actually do something interesting with it.

Dreadlocks, anyone?

That deflated feeling

The first thing I noticed after I drove up the driveway yesterday afternoon was a distinctive hissing sound as of air rapidly leaving a tire, which indeed it turned out to be. I had spent four relaxing days gallivanting around the state without one squeak of complaint from my rusty Volvo, but then I hit a bit of exposed tree branch on my way up the driveway and destroyed a tire. Welcome home!

I felt similarly deflated later when I spent some time scrolling through the 72 e-mails that had piled up in my absence. The sun is shining, the snow is melting, the daffodils are emerging from their winter sleep--must I deal with this big annoying mess?

The answer is yes. Today I'm back in the office working my way through the pile one message at a time and punctuating my progress with steady sips from two barium sulfate smoothies. Yes: it's CAT-scan day! I'm happy to have a pile of messages to distract me from the taste and texture of these wretched smoothies, which are certain to deflate my sense of spring euphoria. I have a new (used) tire on my car and I'm reducing the inbox backlog, so after the CAT-scan I may take a walk in the woods if the rain holds off. Perhaps spring will pump the air back in my deflated spirits.

Let the sun shine

While my students and colleagues spend spring break in sunnier climes, I joined my daughter yesterday for a tromp through some wintry woods. The sun has been shining for three days straight, quite a treat considering our recent weather, and even though it's cold, I can feel the sunshine thawing winter out of my bones.

Today we met up with some old friends for lunch and tomorrow I'll head to Cleveland to visit a friend from grad school who now works as a grant-writer at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Yet another unexpected answer to the eternal question, What can you do with an English major?) I'm heading home on Tuesday so I can get a CAT-scan and get caught up on some work before classes start again next week. Meanwhile, I'm just soaking in the sun.

Bird on a wire

I'm up in the rec center rowing the erg to the rhythm of "Bird on a Wire" when I notice a couple of college students, a guy and a girl, down on the basketball court playing Horse. He's easily eight or ten inches taller but she's got a lot of spunk and an accurate layup, and it's clear that they've played this game before. They barely need to speak as they follow the rules we all understand. She takes a shot from behind the backboard: swish. He tries the same shot, but it rolls around the rim and bounces out. She shoots from the foul line: swish. He dribbles and shoots: air ball.

They shoot around a few times. I keep rowing. Jennifer Warnes sings:

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He called out to me, "Don't ask for so much."
And I saw a young woman leaning on her darkened door
She called out to me, "Why not ask for more?"

I wonder this week whether I've been asking for too much or too little. I'm asking for a chance to play the game in the broad daylight, to follow the rules as we all understand them, to take my turn and try my shots and do my best and then defer to my opponent in an orderly and reasonable manner.

The game goes on. She shoots. He shoots. She shoots. He misses. Game over. They laugh and walk away arm in arm.

After our game is over, can my colleagues and I walk away arm in arm? That's all I'm asking for. But am I asking too much--or too little?

Musing over an amusing moose

At an important meeting my colleague declared, "I think we all know there's an intangible dead moose in the room," and if it hadn't been totally inappropriate I would have laughed out loud, grateful that if we had to share a small conference room with a dead moose at least it was the intangible kind, because who wants to conduct faculty governance in a room suffused with the aroma of a tangible dead moose and how would you get a dead moose up to the third floor (elevator? stairwells?) or, for that matter, to southern Ohio (by boat? helicopter? pickup truck?) and would it be better to kill the moose first or ship it live and then shoot it just before the meeting? Tragically, our Faculty Manual offers no insight on these issues.

I'm afraid the dead moose issue distracted me from some important point of faculty governance, but one of my duties as Faculty Chair is to muse over any dead mooses that get dropped into my lap--and I much prefer the intangible kind because I never know how much to tip the helicopter pilot.

Doggerel day afternoon

Today I made my Creative Nonfiction students do it doggerel-style, but first I had to define for them the word "doggerel." None of them knew what it was. Kind of tragic, that. Apparently they didn't spend their lives so far scribbling limericks and other light verse characterized by loose or irregular measure--or if they did, they didn't know what to call it.

We've been looking at lyrical prose that employs some of the tools of poetry (rhythm, sound repetition, compression) while remaining prosaic (in the best sense of the word). How difficult would it be to translate "Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village, though" into prose? The problem with familiar verse is that even if we move whole phrases and revise words, we'll still here that rhythm pattern in our minds and look for it in the prose.

So I made them write their own poetry--or doggerel. It didn't have to be any good as long as it was done within ten minutes. Then students traded papers and each student had to translate a classmate's light verse into prose, maintaining a sense of poetry without resorting to formal scansion or rhyme.

It wasn't easy. Once the rhythm pattern of a limerick infects your mind, it's hard to make that doggerel play dead. But in the end they came up with some really interesting bits of writing as well as a new respect for the possibilities of poetic tools within prose.

Hearts and minds

It's only Monday and I've already fulfilled my weekly quota of people crying in my office. One of them was me. We were all crying about different things that I can't really discuss openly, but the thing that impresses me as I work with faculty members from all across campus is how much we really do care about our students' learning, how much we tend to take it personally when students screw up, how much is at stake when someone drops the ball. Some may see what we do as a cerebral exercise engaging only the intellect, but we're committed to engaging students' hearts and minds, and when they reject that engagement, it hits us where it hurts.

Fun with midterms

I'm snowed in with a pile of midterm exams, which could be drudgery--but it isn't. My students did not appear to be having much fun while writing these exams, but I'm having a lot of fun reading them. This particular exam allows students to show their understanding of particular works of literature, and some of them have some really exciting ideas.

I use this exam format about once each semester in a sophomore-level literature class, this time in my American Lit Survey. It's a one-page exam listing seven or eight bold-faced topics, with three works of literature listed beneath each topic. Student write about four topics, one that I choose and three that they choose. For instance, since this class just finished a unit on modernism, everyone had to respond to this topic:

Modernism
Jean Toomer, Cane
Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Susan Glaspell, Trifles

I'm reading a lot of responses talking about the use of fragments and various perspectives in each of these works, the primacy of the discrete image and the difficulty of developing a definitive understanding of "truth." Other topics students could select include The Human Condition (Prufrock, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and a poem from Spoon River Anthology), The Past (Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, "The Gift Outright," and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"), and the Purpose of Literature ("The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Langston Hughes's "I, Too," and Marianne Moore's "Poetry").

Students like this exam format because they can write about what they know--but they dislike it because they have to write like crazy to complete four responses in just 50 minutes. I tell them up front that I'm not looking for well-crafted essays; instead, they should do whatever it takes to demonstrate understanding of the topics and the works of literature. I'll even accept bullet points and lists as long as the meaning is clear.

It's true that students end up writing about only four topics and only twelve works of literature, but here's the glory of the format: they don't know what topics and works will be on the exam, so they have to be prepared to write about everything we've read. I give them an example of an exam from a previous year, and I tell them that the required question will concern modernism, but each year I change some of the topics and some of the works, so they have to study everything.

And here's my favorite part: instead of grading memorized mind-dumps, I'm immersed in real ideas. Some of the handwriting is pretty rough, but the ideas I'm encountering are worth the effort. They get it! They really get it! Most of the points I'm deducting are for failure to complete a topic, although there are some occasional gaps in understanding of topics or works. And occasionally I encounter an idea that makes me smile and say, "Huh. I've never thought of it that way before."

A literature exam that can teach me a thing or two--that's my idea of a good time.

Notes from my happy place

People keep asking where I spent my day off yesterday and I keep saying "In my happy place," but the truth is not really all that interesting:

I spent the morning doing some writing on a project totally unrelated to my academic life, and I got so caught up in the writing that I didn't realize it was lunchtime until my stomach started growling.

Then lunch: ramen noodles. Boring. Then I bundled up and took the dog for a long walk up the big horrible hill with the wind at our backs, which felt great until we had to turn around, when the sharp, cold wind reminded me that I'm alive.

Back in the warm house, I sat down with the hubby and watched three episodes of Numbers one after another without a break. Utterly frivolous, I realize, but much more fun than dealing with the contents of my e-mail inbox.

Which, by the way, I should have avoided all day long because every time I checked it I got more annoyed. Which is more exhausting, cancer treatment or faculty governance? I'll let you know in April.

Finally, last night I curled up on the sofa with The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a remarkable piece of reportage that grabbed me and wouldn't let me go until my eyes screamed from fatigue.

Today I'll pay the price--for walking away from class work, ignoring my inbox, losing myself in a writing project that won't feed my vita and a book I'll never teach in a class--but I hope my day of frivolity will strengthen me for the challenges to come.

If not, well, only one more week until spring break!

Taking a break from ubiquity

For the past few weeks I've been a bit ubiquitous on campus (although I know it makes no sense to modify "ubiquitous" with "a bit," because how can you be sort of everywhere?)--or maybe campus has been ubiquitous in me. I've taught classes; I've attended meetings and plays and musical events; I've dealt with hordes of people requiring my immediate assistance, and I've taken campus concerns home with me every weekend. But even Superman takes his cape off once in a while, so tomorrow Ubiquitous Girl is taking a break.

I'm calling it a Mental Health Day. I have no classes or meetings scheduled and I'm caught up on my grading (until Friday, when I'll give two midterm exams), so I intend to stay away from campus and its concerns for an entire day.

Where will I go? I don't know, but I'm accepting suggestions. I could stay home and read a good book. If the weather cooperates, I could go somewhere interesting and take a long hike with camera in hand. Tomorrow is payday, so I could even go to Columbus to shop and take myself out to lunch (although that would be more fun with company). The possibilities are endless--as long as I can get there and back in time to teach my morning classes on Friday.

The only place I refuse to visit is campus. So if you're looking for me tomorrow, you're bound to be disappointed--unless you want to flee ubiquity too. Instead of being a little bit Everywhere, we can aim directly west of Nowhere.

A PhD in Transcending Puppy Studies

This morning my creative nonfiction students convinced me that I'm in the wrong business. Several of them went on a fact-finding mission to a nearby institution of higher education: International Metaphysical University (visit here). It's not easy to tell from the web site, but IMU's headquarters are just downriver from here, although why such an institution needs a headquarters is beyond me. They ought to be able to hold all classes and meetings on a purely metaphysical plane.

IMU's home page entices students with a barrage of questions: "Have you already decided that you're not like everyone else? Are your interests great than sitting behind a desk? Do you want to create life? Do you want to own your own time?" Who could resist such an appeal? Sign me up!

IMU boasts an impressive list degrees available at the undergraduate through PhD level in programs like Shamanic Studies, Intuitive Arts, and Ufology. Tuition runs a flat $300 per credit hour, although those hours are unlikely to transfer anywhere since IMU is currently unaccredited. You could earn an Associates of Science in Galactic Shamanism with only 60 credit hours of classes with titles like "Our Purposeful Universe," "Basic Shamanic Journeying," and "Intro to Crystal Science." The Doctorate in Galactic Shamanism looks pretty intense, with courses including "Metatronis Cube Sacred Geometry" and "Becoming a Galactic Guide and Transformer."

Creating life, becoming a transformer--I never get to do this kind of stuff in my classes. I'm definitely in the wrong discipline. All I have to do is get that second PhD and then I can apply to work at IMU! A colleague asked if I would write her a letter of recommendation for IMU, and I said, "I won't need to write it. I'll just think really hard and they'll use their intuitive arts to receive it."

But alas, who has time to pursue another degree? Duty calls, sounding like a bunch of yappy little puppies that need attention. One of these days I'll learn the metaphysical art of transcending the yappy puppies, but right now I'm going to a meeting.

Dances with chickens

A week of ridiculousness reached its high (or low?) point last Thursday just before the celebration of the college's 175th birthday party. Faculty members in full regalia had already processed into the auditorium but then endured an awkward gap while awaiting the arrival of the Grand Poohbahs--the platform party and college trustees. A colleague near me began grumbling about the delay. "Someone should get up and make an announcement," she said, to which I responded, "Why don't you go up there and lead us all in the Chicken Dance?"

She didn't take me up on the offer, but the mental image of all those regalia-clad professors flapping their arms like chickens was a small point of light in a tempestuous week.

It was bad enough that I had blood tests on Monday, papers due on Wednesday, classes to prep every day, and eight different meetings throughout the week, but the presence of the college trustees combined with more bleak winter weather produced a case of the midwinter crazies all over campus. Everyone who has been nursing a gripe suddenly felt an urgent need to share it with me, either face-to-face or via e-mail. By Thursday night my inbox was seething with angst unlikely to be resolved by a few extra meetings.

Good thing the evening's speaker offered some perspective, reminding us that Abraham Lincoln weathered the Civil War with grace and integrity, characteristics we'll require if we are to endure our own campus controversies. Honest Abe never did the Chicken Dance (or if he did, why isn't it on YouTube?), but he showed us how to keep his head when all about are losing theirs. If that lesson can't lead us through the midwinter crazies, then nothing will.

Normal is my middle name

On Monday my oncologist called me normal.

Me! Normal!

I don't feel entirely normal. Maybe normal-ish. Looking in the mirror no longer gives me a fright, so I've stopped wearing scarves and hats indoors. I'm taking only one regular medication (for the numbness in my fingertips that just won't quit). I'm not in pain and I'm not anemic so my energy level is better than it's been for the past three years. I'm not spending all my spare hours hanging around the cancer center--no chemotherapy, no radiation, just occasional CAT scans and blood tests.

And the numbers on my blood tests are downright boring: normal, normal, normal. My white blood count is still a little low, but it's on the way up. "You probably just got some radiation in your bone marrow," says the oncologist. "Nothing to worry about. Perfectly normal."

All my life I've wanted to be exceptional, extraordinary, way beyond average, but these days I'm happy to aim for the mundane, the ordinary, the boring middle ground. Cancer treatment was an extraordinary experience that I hope to never repeat, and now that it's over (for now? forever? who knows?), go ahead and call me normal.

Well, maybe normal-ish.

Story of my life

teach teach breathe prep meeting meeting breathe meeting prep drive sleep
...but when am I supposed to eat?

Driver's Ed

This time of year, the key to getting over the hill separating my house from the highway is the correct combination of speed and control. The road twists uphill toward a blind curve, with a sharp dropoff on one side and a hillside on the other. When the road is covered with snow or ice (as it often is this time of year), you have to get up a pretty good head of steam going up the hill. Too little speed and you lose forward momentum and start sliding backwards, and it's not easy to control a car sliding backwards down a hill. Too much speed and you'll fishtail and skid right over the cliff or overshoot the curve at the top.

I tend to drive on the side of the road farthest from the cliff, even when that's the wrong side of the road. If a car came whipping around that blind curve we would hit head-on, but fortunately, most people have the sense to stay off my road this time of year. A few times I've started fishtailing or skidding toward the cliff, but one of the advantages of living where I live is that I've developed an amazing ability to steer out of a skid, thanks to lots of practice.

Once I get out to the highway, I face a whole new set of challenges. This morning a snowplow decided to turn right in front of me without signalling and I had to stop pretty quickly on a snowy, slushy road in a car with no anti-lock breaks. Somehow I don't recall practicing that skill back when I took Driver's Ed in Florida. Good thing I'm committed to lifelong learning.

Tenure is not the villain here

At church yesterday one of our parishioners mentioned the tragic faculty shooting in Hunstville and asked me, "You don't have any professors down at Marietta like that, do you?"

My immediate response was "No, of course not," but the problem with this kind of tragedy is that the perpetrator seems like a fairly harmless person until she suddenly starts shooting. We do have a lot of fairly harmless people here, but if I suspected any of them of being capable of committing such an act, I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. And if I thought the tenure process could bear the entire blame for transforming a fairly harmless person into a killer, I would quit my job today.

Amidst all the shrill voices eager to blame academe or the tenure process, an interesting statement caught my eye. Professor Robert O. Lawton, who chaired the committee that recommended against tenure for Amy Bishop, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that "a tenure denial is a failure for everyone involved. 'It means you screwed up a hire and you screwed up a mentoring'" (read it here).

I don't know the details of Amy Bishop's case or how Hunstville's tenure process differs from ours, but Lawton makes a good point: we hire people because we believe they are tenurable and we mentor them to help them become tenurable, so denying tenure feels like failure for all of us. I suppose there are academics out there who take pleasure in setting bars impossibly high and then laughing when their colleagues can't make the jump, but I've more often seen faculty members and administrators going the extra mile to help their colleagues succeed. We mentor, we workshop, we support research and conference travel, we welcome new faculty members into the campus community, the faculty bowling league, the faculty publishing group, and more. That's one of the reasons I love my job--I get to be part of that process.

Right now information about the Hunstville shooting is sketchy and incomplete so it would be a mistake to draw firm conclusions about what made Amy Bishop snap. The tenure process is tough all over and it would be the height of hubris to say it couldn't happen here, but I will say it shouldn't happen here. Not while we're all in this together holding out a hand to help our colleagues jump those high hurdles.

Hair update #21.3B

Okay, I'm tired of the topic too, but people keep asking when I'm going to unveil my new hairstyle, and all I can say is, "It's too stinking cold!" But I'll show you--first with scarf and then without. Please note that the expression in the "without" photo is what we in the Hogue family call "The Mom Face." It's very therapeutic. Everyone should make this face at least once a week...and then send me a photo!

Infernal argument

I spent some time in Hell this morning, taking American Lit students on a guided tour through "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and then introducing my freshman composition students to critique by means of a hellish argument:

When Princess Diana died, there was some debate in the press about whether she had gone to Heaven or Hell. One prominent authority in the Anglican church published an article claiming that because the Princess had committed sinful acts, she must be spending eternity in Hell. This was disappointing to Diana's fans, who would like to spend eternity with their idol; clearly, for those who idolizes Diana, spending eternity separated from their idol would make Heaven a sort of Hell. But how can Princess Di's fans make sure they spend eternity with their idol? Even if they perform some really immoral act--an act vile enough to get them condemned to Hell--they might eventually repent and seek forgiveness, ending up in Heaven, which for them would be hellish. The only solution is for true fans of Princess Di to commit a mortal sin and then die immediately, without hope of repentance. Therefore, anyone who truly loves Princess Di ought to commit suicide.

I have used this little argument in composition classes for years and so far I have utterly failed to persuade any of my students to commit suicide, which suggests that the argument is a failure, but on the other hand, the exercise offers students an opportunity to hone their critical thinking skills by identifying the flaws in the argument, which makes the argument a big success.

And best of all, no one has to go to Hell.

Bullet-points of unhappiness

• Twice now a student has spent the first five or ten minute of class carefully applying makeup, from foundation and blush on up to the complete glamor-girl eye treatment. Doesn't she realize that the proper time to apply mascara is while driving at rush hour with a cell phone in one hand and a latte in the other?

• People keep telling me things--interesting, instructive, even entertaining things about which I would love to blab or blog--but for various reasons I have to keep my mouth shut. Confidentiality and all that. Watch while I bite a hole in my tongue!

• Although tiny snowmen are amusing, tiny blue ice-melting pellets are not, and neither are patches of slush and ice all over campus. Thank heaven the Powers That Be have planned special informative meetings on the importance of not falling down. Next: a meeting to inform us of the dangers of sticking beans in our ears, followed by a collective chanting of the SafetyMama Mantra: "You'll shoot your eye out!"
  

I'm a stranger here myself

Last week a student e-mailed me to ask for a letter of recommendation for a campus position. She was in my freshman composition class last semester and I clearly recalled where she sat in class, what topics she wrote about, how she interacted with other students, even her final grade--but no matter how hard I tried, I could not recall what she looked like. Then today I saw her on campus and I was suddenly able to put the name to the face, but earlier, her image had utterly eluded my memory.

I've noticed that much of last semester has become a blur in my memory. This semester I learned all my students' names by the end of the second week, but last semester there were some students whose names I never learned. People ask me about classes I taught and events I know I attended, and sometimes I just come up blank. A few high points stick with me, but much of my experience last semester seems to have fallen victim to a memory-purge.

Not that that's entirely a bad thing. Frankly, I'm happy to forget parts of last semester, like the times when I felt so weak I had trouble holding my head up to follow class discussions and the late-night sessions of compulsive obsessing over whether radiation was rescuing or killing me. I'm delighted to forget the horrible way everything tasted after chemotherapy and the annoying need to know at every moment the quickest route to the nearest rest room.

But my students? Last semester I saved all my best energy for my students--planning, teaching, meeting, making their learning experience the best it could possibly be under the circumstances. My students were the center of my universe last semester, but now they're slipping right into the black hole that seems to be swallowing last semester bit by bit.

I could blame the drugs or I could blame the trauma of treatment, but what matters is the fact is that the horrors of last semester are fading from view, but they're taking the joys of last semester with them. Good thing I wrote so much of it down. One of these days the only place those memories will exist will be on this blog, and at that point I'll approach them as if they belonged to a stranger.

(Un)friendly signs

When someone asks how to find my new office, I usually say, "Second floor of the library, behind the elevator." So you get off the elevator and look around for a way to get behind it. Turn right and you find a locked door and some bathrooms. Turn left and suddenly you find a path that leads behind the elevator and into a lovely open seating area connected to two offices, a conference room, a computer lab, and a small kitchen.

Now, though, we suddenly have explanatory signage attempting to say the same thing. This sign appeared yesterday, provoking a bit of debate. You come up to the second floor and see this sign immediately in front of your face. It's telling you to turn left, then left again, and then left again and you will enter the CTE, where I have my office. This meaning is clear to anyone who takes the time to think about it.

But who takes the time to think about signs? Someone in a hurry will see the arrow pointing to the right and think, "Right! Right...that would be the right choice." And there is a door to the CTE to the right, but it's the back door and it is always kept locked. I predict an epidemic of people banging on the back door and wondering why we're so unfriendly.

Bullet-Points of Happiness

• Several dozen tiny snowmen are sitting on the benches in the outdoor amphitheater, looking eager and attentive. They make me want to go out and teach them something.

• I got most of my tax stuff together yesterday afternoon, a lousy way to spend a Sunday, but the effort will pay off when my refund arrives nice and early.

• Working out in the rec center with Michael Buble on the iPod--cry me a river, baby.

• Only seven more freshman drafts to read, and so far they're not at all awful.

• What I really love about my administrative position: putting together people who need help and the people who can help them.
  

Snow birds 'n' beasts

With thick snow covering just about everything, our birdfeeders are pretty popular today. Just a few minutes I saw eight cardinals gathered around all at once, and earlier in the day I tried to count all the birds but gave up at 30 because they just wouldn't keep still.

While the birds have no trouble getting around, our newspaper carrier never arrived and the mail was about an hour later than usual. We were expecting ice last night but instead we got thick, wet snow that piles up on trees and makes limbs fall down. Power was off in some areas, but we haven't lost ours.

Hopeful has been slithering and sliding belly-down in the snow like an otter on a slick rock. She'll pause and point and then plunge her nose into the snow, following the scent of some small creature but generally coming up empty. The snow is too wet and sticky for sledding--and besides, what fun is sledding without little kids? For now we'll settle for watching the dog and the birds.

Friday poetry challenge: singing the blues

Last night when my husband and I ran into some of my colleagues at a local Mexican restaurant, one of them predicted that I'll be snowed in all weekend. "No problem," I said. "I've got the keys to the Faculty Helicopter."

Except this morning I don't have any keys at all. House keys, car keys, office keys, mysterious keys that don't seem to belong to anything--they all spent the night back at the restaurant, no doubt whooping it up over a pitcher of margaritas. They'll be bleary-eyed by the time I get over there to retrieve them.

So here we are finishing the fourth week of the semester, and while the honeymoon is over, winter is not. We seem to be stuck in the bleak midwinter, which is the title of a hymn sitting in the Advent section of my hymnal not far from "Joy to the World" and "Angels We Have Heard on High," but no one ever wants to sing "In the Bleak Midwinter" at Christmas despite the lovely Christina Rossetti lyrics because (a) the tune is lugubrious and (b) Christmas doesn't exactly fall in the MID-winter, does it? But no one wants to sing "In the Bleak Midwinter" now that we're in the genuinely bleak midwinter because it's a Christmas song.

No, the bleak midwinter is the time to sing the blues:

Got those fourth-week-of-the-semester, just-gave-my-first-exams-back blues
Yes I've got those those fourth-week-of-the-semester, just-gave-my-first-exams-back blues
Now it's time to close the office door and kick off these dress-for-success shoes.

But I'm locked out of my office and I can't locate the key to my car
I said I'm locked out of my office and I can't locate the key to my car
And if I don't find those keys real soon I won't be getting very far.

Oh the sky is getting darker and the snow and sleet and ice arrive tonight
They say the sky is getting darker and the snow and sleet and ice arrive tonight
But you go tell the bleak midwinter I ain't giving up without a fight.

Now where's that helicopter?

Now it's your turn to sing some blues.

Who let the peeves out?

"I usually keep my pet peeves locked in a cage," I told my creative nonfiction class, "but every once in a while I have to let them out so they can run around the room yapping and chewing on your ankles."

"So you're saying your pet peeves are chihuahuas?" said one student.

"More like wolverines," I said, but another student pointed out that the wolverine is essentially a cross between a chihuahua and a piranha.

While they were debating, though, I opened the cage and let the chihuahua/piranha/wolverines ramble and scramble around the class, nipping ankles and yapping about weird things that happen to ordinary words and phrases used as adjectives.

One peeve was all worked up about the difference between "everyday" and "every day":

I pet these peeves every day.
These are my everyday peeves.

" 'Every day' tells when," explained a student, "but 'everyday' is more like an adjective."

"That's because 'everyday' IS an adjective," I pointed out. In the English language, words used as adjectives tend to cling together for dear life, as if to protect their precious nouns against an onslaught of wolverines. The same thing happens with hyphens:

That peeve is twelve years old.
He is a twelve-year-old peeve.

See how the hyphens glue the words together to form an adjective? You, too, can use hyphens to form free-range, strangers-on-a-train, never-before-combined words into fresh-from-the-factory-floor adjectives, as long as you let the hyphens fence in the nouns to protect them from the wolverines.

But who will protect our ankles from the pet peeves roaming the room? It's not so easy to persuade a pet peeve back into its cage after it has tasted ankles.

A model problem

While grading this semester's first big pile of student papers, I'm struck by a recurrent problem: students have trouble extrapolating patterns from models. I give my writing students a variety of models: sample papers to show proper MLA format, sample Works Cited listings, sample thesis statements appropriate for specific assignments, a list of the most common ways to introduce quotations with the appropriate punctuation for each. "Make it look like the model," I tell them, and some of them do it quite well, but others don't and I can't figure out why.

Suppose you want to introduce a quote and you're using a word like "said" immediately followed by the quote; you look at the model and you see a comma after "said," and you see that the quote starts with a capital letter, while a quote introduced by "said that" has no comma and no capital letter. I point out that what works for "said" works for similar verbs, and I even list some of those verbs on the handout. I give them examples in class and get them to compare the examples to the models in order to make a decision about punctuation. During the first half of the semester, I even make my composition students chant the Quotation Mantra at least once a week: "Integrate, punctuate, cite; integrate, punctuate, cite." (It probably doesn't accomplish much, but it makes me feel good.)

And then I get a pile of papers with the punctuation absent or wrong, and when I ask the student to compare her sentence with the models, I get something like, "But my sentence is different." And I hear the same thing about citations, thesis sentences, and even page numbers: some students look at the models and when they don't see an example exactly like their own, they give up.

I suppose there's some research out there showing that models are outdated and I ought to be doing something entirely different, but really: what could be easier than looking at a sample paper and saying, "Ah, that's where the page number goes!" Maybe they're not really looking. Or maybe they're looking and seeing something they don't quite understand and throwing their hands in the air. I just know that I'm seeing more and more evidence that my models aren't working, and I wish someone could tell me why.

Into the Bonus Round

It's not even noon on Monday morning and I've already met my weekly quota of mistakes. That kind of efficiency doesn't happen every day and I certainly don't intend to repeat it, although you never know.

I blame multitasking: I'm talking on the phone while attaching return-address stickers and the sticker ends up in the wrong corner of the envelope, or I'm doing Inbox Triage and I send the urgent request for help to the trash bin, the literature paper to the freshman comp folder, and the witty personal response to a colleague's entire list of advisees.

Last week I sent the entire faculty an agenda that neglected to mention the time of the meeting, and this week I sent the entire faculty an agenda that listed the wrong date. I can check those two particular errors off my Life List to make room for new types of errors in the future.

Indeed, now that I've so efficiently met this week's Error Quota so early in the week, any additional errors I make take me into the Bonus Round. If you should happen to see me fall on my face while carrying a pile of student papers and a steaming cup of tea through the quiet library, please hold your applause.

Broken links in the chain of faith

Last week the New York Times ran a series of articles (read it here) on problems arising from the growth of radiation treatments for cancer and the horrible health effects resulting from accidental overdoses. What strikes me on reading these articles is that for all its grounding in high-tech science, radiation therapy requires tremendous acts of faith from everyone involved.

Of course all medicine requires patients to exercise a certain amount of faith--in doctors, treatments, medicines--but if you go to the doctor with a migraine and he accidentally amputates your big toe, it will be immediately apparent to all involved that someone has made a terrible mistake.

Radiation, though, is invisible, and an accident won't necessarily produce visible or visceral effects right away. The patient has to trust the technicians to get her positioned in the right place and operate the equipment properly, and the technicians have to trust the radiation oncologist and medical physicist to properly plan the treatment and program the equipment, and the doctors have to trust the manufacturers and installers of radiation equipment to make the equipment operate as specified, and the general public has to trust the Powers That Be to enforce regulations promoting safety.

The Times articles explore some broken links in this chain of faith: medical personnel faked degrees, software glitches deleted essential settings, radiation technicians monitored the wrong computer screen, state and federal regulations had holes in them big enough to drive a linear accelerator through, or people trusted what the computers were telling them without using their eyes to verify that the machine was doing what it was supposed to be doing--and patients suffered horrible painful disfigurement or death.

I'm glad I didn't read these articles before undergoing radiation treatment because they would have scared the bejeebers out of me, but I'm glad they published the series because perhaps they will inspire changes in regulation and administration of radiation treatment. I have to remind myself, though, that the Times focused on a small number of horrific cases rather than on the huge number of patients who undergo radiation treatment successfully every year. Successful treatment doesn't make news--and I, for one, am delighted to be, at this point, utterly un-newsworthy.

Friday poetry challenge: literary tribute

I don't remember when I first encountered Holden Caulfield, but I suspect that he squeezed into my youthful reading somewhere between Alice and Jane Eyre. Holden may have used earthier terms than the girls but his task was similar: seeking a meaningful path through awkward or even incomprehensible circumstances.

They all had to deal with phonies and nonsense, and they all had trouble keeping their heads when all about were losing theirs. Holden could have gleaned some travel tips from Jane, and Alice could have shared some strategies for dealing with life's Tweedledees and Tweedledums. Imagine Alice, Holden, and Jane meeting in that Big Library in the Sky and continuing their journeys together--that would be a trip worth reading about.

Jane walked,
Alice ran,
and Holden took a bus.
Across a heath,
a wood, a park--
through nonsense, pain, and fuss.

With great aplomb
they wandered on
through trials I'll never face:
through reason's rhymes
and seasons' times--
they journeyed in my place.

Today's challenge: write a tribute to an author or character who carried you through difficult journeys.

Moving signs

After immersing myself in student drafts for the past three days, I finally emerged from the maelstrom, sent out my final suggestions, and fled up to the top floor of the library to clear my head. Sometimes I like to lie on my back in the middle of the floor up there and gaze up at the dome, where a big yellow light fixture hovers like the sun blazing in the midsummer sky. (I'm allowed to wax poetic--and you can too, provided you're willing to pay your fees and wait in those long lines at the Poetic License Bureau.)

But today I couldn't assume the proper contemplative posture because there's a table in the way, and I couldn't lie down on the table because a photograph was sitting on it alongside some explanatory signage. I'm generally willing to lie down on the job but not, as a rule, on explanatory signage. (Where would I get a license for that? The Explanatory Signage Bureau? I've never been able to find the place.)

So instead I wandered around and read some new explanatory signage, which has been popping up like mushrooms all over the building, including a sign informing me that on a particular date in a particular meeting "a motion was moved." It strikes me that it is in the nature of motions to be moved, and if the motion had done something other than being moved then that would surely be worthy of signage ("an irresistible motion met an immoveable force," for instance), but this particular instance of signage failed to inform me of what had happened to the motion that was moved, to wit: was it seconded, discussed, and voted upon? Or was it simply moved and left in limbo until the end of time?

That's too much information to expect from such a small smidgen of signage, so I abandoned the upper floor and returned to my office, a space still relatively free of signage. I have a meeting in an hour and some work to do, but I think I'll lie down on the floor and gaze up at the ceiling tiles and wait for the maelstrom of student prose to wash down the drain.

The open yellow wallpaper boat

My literature students are writing papers about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Stephen Crane, and somehow the authors have commingled in my mind to create a story about malignant fungoid wallpaper trapped in a small boat surrounded by malign forces. The wallpaper wonders whether it has come this far to nibble at the sacred cheese of life only to have its glue washed off in the pounding surf.

Okay, I'm losing my mind, but you would be too if you'd so mangled your syllabi that you had to read 17 freshman comp drafts on Sunday, 24 American Lit drafts on Monday, and 10 creative nonfiction drafts on Tuesday just to stay afloat. I'm stuck in a boat swamped with prose about how communication has been important to the entire human race since the beginning of time, or maybe I'm locked in an attic wallpapered with essays in which every sentence begins with "I feel," "I think," or "I believe."

But I must write coherent comments on each of these drafts, comments clearly communicating the importance (since the beginning of time) of focusing on a clear thesis statement and supporting that thesis with specific evidence conveyed in clear and understandable prose, and my comments must be direct without driving my students to the wish they could wash up lifeless in the surf (like Crane's unlucky oiler) or creep around the room babbling mindlessly (like Gilman's wallpaper woman).

After this week, I'll need a rest cure. Preferably not in a boat.

Hair apparent

Another episode in the thrilling saga of Bev's hair.

It's barely there.

Friday poetry challenge: no excuses

Last night I watched my former student perform a remarkable musical feat even though she had a perfectly good reason to back out. With so many people (and not just students!) eager to grasp any excuse to back out of commitments or do shoddy work, it's encouraging to see someone press on through difficulty and wow a demanding crowd. This week I celebrate my student's "no excuses" attitude:

My throat is sore, my roommate snores,
My uncle bought the farm.
My cat has fleas, my stomach's queasy--
Is that the smoke alarm?

My checkbook needs some money (please!).
The weather won't stop raining.
My hard drive crashed, my leg is gashed,
My brain cells are complaining.

I need a break! I just can't shake
The feeling that I'm cursed.
But I'll press on, learn my lesson:
It can't get any worse!

Now it's your turn: verse in any form celebrating a noteworthy accomplishment.

From leaner to leanee

So I'm at the rec center ready to mount the elliptical machine and when I pop in the earbuds and turn on the iPod shuffle, the first song that comes on is "Lean on Me," which makes me very happy.

I'm happy because I'm in the rec center, which I had to avoid all last semester. I'm happy because I can work out on the elliptical machine and even do some rowing on the erg without feeling as if I'm about to expire. But mostly I'm happy because the song reminds me of a time when I really needed somebody to lean on and my wonderful brother came through for me (read it here), and that reminds me of all the people I had to lean on last semester, all the members of my Cancer-Kicking Posse who picked up the slack and got me where I needed to go so that today I can walk steps to nowhere in the rec center.

But the lyrics also made me happy for another reason:

Lean on me, when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on
For it won't be long
'Til I'm gonna need
Somebody to lean on

Last semester I lived out the first part of that chorus, leaning on all kinds of people for all kinds of annoying tasks. Today I'm thinking about the other side of the story: now that my strength is restored, maybe I can provide the shoulder for someone else to lean on. I don't have to be the needy one anymore! So go ahead, lean on me! I can take it!

I can't tell you how happy this makes me.

Committees vs. cancer

Colleagues have been commiserating with me over the number of committee meetings I attend, but really, I would rather spend the afternoon at a committee meeting than in some of the places I spent my afternoons last semester--radiation, chemotherapy, various rest rooms....

Given a choice between committee meetings and cancer treatment, I'll take meetings every time. Here's why:

At committee meetings I don't have to take off my clothes. I may feel vulnerable in other ways, but at least I can keep my clothes on.

I may feel bored half to death, but a committee meeting is unlikely to produce any actual life-threatening complications

The side effects of committee meetings may be annoying (boredom, annoyance, more committee meetings) but they are generally not incapacitating.

I've mastered the lingo of committee meetings, but the language of cancer treatment still sometimes stymies me. I can't always tell my neutrophils from my neutropenia, nor do I really want to.

Statistics that get bandied about at committee meetings are often quite important (retention rates, endowment figures, faculty salaries as a percentage of budget), but they can be handled in the abstract. When my oncologist tosses a statistic at me, on the other hand, we're talking about my mortality.

At committee meetings it is possible to get stuff done: results are visible and measurable and sometimes quite satisfying, and the lack of results can stimulate us to approach the problem another way. With cancer treatment, results are often invisible and ambiguous, and even positive results may be only temporary. It's impossible to know whether the work is done; eliminate the problem in one place and it might just crop up in another.

Which, when you come to think of it, is not at all unlike committee work. But hey, at least I get to keep my clothes on.

When life and literature collide

I didn't do it on purpose, I swear. I made the syllabus ages ago. How could I have known that my students would have to read a vivid description of food poisoning in the same week many students have been stricken by a similar malady?

The only way I could have planned this unpleasant collision of reading and life would be if I had somehow caused the campus epidemic of gastrointestinal distress. What professor has that kind of power? And if I could make my students experience food poisoning while reading about food poisoning, maybe I could provoke an epidemic of malaria among my American Lit students, who are reading "Daisy Miller" for tomorrow's class, and later when we read Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" I could cause an epidemic of blindness, and then when my students are reading Toni Morrison's "Recitatif," I could make them all orphans. But then what do I do when we're discussing "The Undertaking" by Thomas Lynch? If I kill off my students, whom shall I teach?

Frankly, I would rather read about these maladies than experience them. I'm just sorry my students had to do both at once.

An epidemic of epidemics

We seem to be suffering from an epidemic of epidemics on campus. Many students are suffering from an epidemic of what some are calling "Dine Flu," which has resulted in the closing of every food-service venue except the main cafeteria, and even there all the self-serve options have been closed down. Five students were missing from my 9:00 class this morning and one at 10:00, all because of the horrible gastrointestinal symptoms of whatever this bug might be.

Meanwhile, faculty members are suffering from an epidemic of meetings. I'm on committees that meet once a week and others that meet less often, but regardless of how frequently they meet, every committee I'm on is having its first meeting of the semester this week. I also have meetings scheduled with individuals, and all told it adds up to nine hours of meetings this week. Nine hours! Last semester I would have skipped most of those so I could go to radiation or chemotherapy or go home to sleep or read or cry or whatever, but this semester I have no excuse.

Given a choice between two epidemics, I'd rather have nine hours of meetings than nine hours of Dine Flu--and having both together would be a nightmare. Fortunately, both epidemics are self-limiting, characterized by an initial onset that works its way out of the system fairly quickly. By next week we'll all be out of the woods...unless the Powers That Be decide to appoint an ad-hoc committee to study epidemics, which could make one epidemic better while making the other much, much worse.

The divine bovine

Trust me on this: you need to drop whatever you're doing right now and go read Woody Allen's story "Udder Madness" in the current New Yorker.

I don't want to ruin the ending for you, but the sentence that pushed me over the edge includes the words "lampshade" and "pustule." If you can read it without laughing, dial 911.

An ice place

A week ago I watched my dog trying to scamper across a creek covered with ice. She loves plunging into the creek in any weather, but last week's sub-freezing temperatures presented a challenge: after her paws slipped out from under her a few times, she turned back to solid ground.

Today the water flows freely, but a week ago our creek presented a nearly solid surface of snow-covered ice only occasionally interrupted by open water. Animal tracks criss-crossed the snow, showing signs of deer, dogs, and smaller beasts. The snow that a week ago blanketed our hills and fields is now muddy and melting, its loveliness preserved only in pictures.

Friday poetry challenge: on hands and poems

Dead air is anathema to radio broadcasters, but sometimes silence speaks louder than words. Yesterday an NPR reporter trying to describe the horrors of the Haitian earthquake choked up mid-sentence, resulting in a silence more expressive than any attempt to capture the disaster in nouns and verbs.

In the face of such suffering, what can poetry do? Martin Espada tackles the question in "Not Words but Hands," a poem addressed to a fellow poet grieving over the tragic loss of his partner and child. "We have no words for you," admits Espada, and this silence before suffering makes poets "prophets with tongues missing / like the clappers of empty bells." When words fail, though, "We only have our hands, to soap your shirts / or ladle soup for you, grip your shoulder / or dim the lamp."

Right now Haiti needs hands (to drive bulldozers, set broken bones, bury bodies) and those of us whose hands can't help ought to send money to empower other hands. But after describing the importance of hands, Espada concludes his poem by asserting that "this, this poem, / this is my hand."

After the bulldozers power down and the dust settles, what words will flow in to fill the silence? If a poem can place a hand on a survivor's shoulder, what poem extends your hand?

The dog ate my paper

Eons ago when I was a lowly graduate student, I buffed up a seminar paper and submitted it to an academic journal. Two years later, the editor replied with a request that I revise and resubmit, but by that time I had moved on to other projects--and besides, why would I want to do business with a journal that takes two years to reply to a submission?

Fast-forward a few years and I'm a professor interviewing candidates for a position in our department. One of the candidates notes my research interests and asks why I haven't been published in the aforementioned journal, which he serves as an editorial assistant. I tell him about my experience. He admits that there had been some problems but that the submission process has been streamlined, and he encourages me to submit again.

So I submit a new article, which is accepted immediately--but does not appear in print for two years.

Anyone involved in academic publishing can tell stories like these and others even more frustrating. Too often, submitting an article to an academic journal feels like dropping one's precious creations into a black hole. I had hoped that the proliferation of online submission procedures would alleviate this problem: I don't have to make multiple copies and then worry about whether they've been lost in transit, and it's reassuring to be able to check the status of a submission online. But when it doesn't work, an online submission system is just a more sophisticated black hole.

Case in point: about a year ago I submitted an article to a reputable academic journal through their online submission system. Within three months, I received a reply: revise and resubmit. I revised. I resubmitted before the deadline. I received an e-mail confirming that my submission had been received. I checked the status of my submission a few times over the next couple of months, but then I didn't think about it for a while. (I was distracted. You know, chemotherapy and all that.)

Eventually it occurred to me that five months is a long time to wait for a decision on a resubmitted article, so I went online to check the status. The online submission system slammed the door on my fingers: wouldn't recognize my user name or password; wouldn't send me an e-mail reminding me of my user name or password; wouldn't respond to any requests for help. After exhausting all the electronic options available, I e-mailed the managing editor. "Your dog of a computer ate my paper" is what I wanted to say, but instead I was suitably polite and deferential and non-demanding. All I wanted was some reassurance that someone was aware of the problem and seeking a solution.

What kind of reply do you think I received?

None.

Zip. Nil. Nada. Not a word for a solid month.

I realize that everyone is busy this time of year, but please: aren't academic journals in the business of communicating? Why are so many of them so bad at this simple skill?

And how am I supposed to communicate with a black hole that won't stay still?

More than I can chew

This morning I kept expecting steam to rise from my mouth, I was talking so fast. Apparently, I tried to squeeze too much material into both of my classes this morning and then had to rush to get it all in. But these are both classes I teach every year and I thought I was using the same amount of material I've always used...so I don't know why, but I'm already racing to keep up with my syllabus.

Yesterday I was racing to keep up with my Creative Nonfiction students. Everyone writes on the first day of all my classes, and this group had to write a coherent essay explaining their understanding of the phrase "Creative Nonfiction." My students used metaphors from art and math and cooking (!) to explore the paradox of creative nonfiction, while I fiddled around with a metaphor that made me happy but then kept spawning new ideas:

Clay sits in the earth dull as dirt, not yet the raw materials for art but simply raw. What transforms clay into art? First the mind of the sculptor, then the hands of the sculptor, and then the response of the audience. But after going through all these transformations, can the clay still be recognized as clay? Or has it changed so much that we must find a new label?

This is the question we face when we approach creative nonfiction. Facts sit out there in the world like clay in the earth, inert and disconnected from other facts with which they might reasonably rub shoulders in a story. The story comes into being through the agency of the writer, whose mind first seizes on a fact as a potter seizes a clump of clay, selecting this bit rather than that bit, testing each clump's suitability, tossing aside those that are flawed or don't suit the purpose. The selection process alone changes the fact because it is no longer inert and disconnected but is now part of a larger scheme, even if that scheme exists only in the mind of the writer. The act of setting a fact aside for further use takes it outside its natural realm and begins the process of transformation.

Next, the writer bends and molds the facts, kneading and shaping as the sculptor kneads and shapes the clay to conform to the contours of the imagined piece. The sculptor knows the characteristics of the clay, and if he tries to stretch it beyond its natural capabilities, to support more force than it can bear, the sculpture will be flawed or perhaps collapse. The writer, too, must know how much shaping the facts can sustain; facts stretched beyond endurance may cause the finished product to collapse, despite the writer's attempts to prop it up artificially: "But that's how I remember it!" or "No one expects creative nonfiction to be entirely true!"

And that's as far as I got. In 30 minutes! Clearly, I bit off more than I could chew. Next time, I'll choose a more manageable metaphor or break it up into bite-sized pieces. Student complaining about too much work? Let 'em eat clay.

Ladder love

So I came back to my office after class and had to squeeze past a ladder blocking my door. It's a big ladder and vividly blue, not at all appropriate with the muted earth tones in my office, so I don't intend to keep it in my office, so my colleague next door and I were discussing what to do with it: drape it with fabric and call it a sculpture? Hang plants from the rungs? Pretend it isn't there (which would be difficult considering how effectively it blocks the door)?

"Why don't we hide it?" she said. "Then when the worker comes back, we can act dumb and say, 'What ladder? I didn't see a ladder.'"

We considered it briefly, but where would we hide a ladder, and then who would replace the damaged ceiling tile?

So for the moment, I'm living with a big blue ladder. One of these days I'll teach it to do tricks.

Letting the cats out of the bag

She had a sense, when she thought about it, which she tried not to do, that everything unseen in her household had shifted its invisible place. Things had always been behind thick, felted, invisible curtains, or closed into heavy, locked, invisible boxes. She herself had hung the curtains, held the keys to the boxes, made sure that the knowable was kept from the unknown, in the minds of her children, most of all. And now she knew that grey, invisible cats had crept from their bags and were dancing and spitting on stair-corners, that curtains had been shaken, lifted, peeped behind by curious eyes, and her rooms were full of visible and invisible inhabitants dust and strange smells. She was rather pleased with all these metaphors and began to plan a story in which the gentle and innocent inhabitants of a house became aware that a dark, invisible, dangerous house stood on exactly the same plot of land, and was interwoven, interleaved with their own.

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. The "she" in the above passage is Olive Wellwood, whose expertise at stashing away the unknown keeps her burgeoning family together--and when the cats get loose and the secrets come rushing out, she responds by turning her family's chaos into metaphors and stories.

Byatt displays a remarkable ability to create a convincing world that masterfully mingles fact and fiction. The novel relies heavily on historical information about, for instance, reform movements in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it is never weighed down by that information. Further, Byatt avoids the chief flaw of historical fiction: creating characters who live in a previous era while thinking as if they live in the present. Byatt's characters belong in their era and bring to vivid life thought processes and ideas very different from those of today but still recognizable.

Creating such an immense cast of characters, however, occasionally leads to problems as some characters are less developed than others and some are lost to view for long stretches of time. However, Byatt succeeds in making these characters believable and making me care about what happens to them.

And what happens to them is pretty interesting. They get caught up in events small and large, from private theatricals to the theater of war, without always being aware of the significance of these events. Readers, though, read about a small boy's wish to become a fox living in a foxhole and know that World War I is in the offing, so the child's innocent comment mingles in the reader's mind with the horrors of trench warfare, creating a rich and complex reading experience.

Most of all, though, the book is just fun. Byatt plays with literary forms and ideas, evoking echoes of Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, J.M. Barrie, and other literary figures while also reflecting images from folk and fairy tales. Life and art intermingle in ways sometimes amusing and sometimes tragic but always interesting. The novel moves from innocence to experience, from above board to underground, through the looking-glass and back again, a long journey (675 pages!) that I would happily make again. It's a rare spectacle but well worth seeing when Byatt lets the cats out of the bag.

No worries

While my literature students studiously write brief analyses of a poem they've never seen before, I realize I'm holding in my hand a pen advertising the University of Virginia and offering me help quitting smoking. I never started smoking so I don't need help quitting, but I wish someone would help me quit worrying about teaching on the first day of class.

Today I'm worried about learning 24 names in my survey class and 18 in composition, a task complicated by the fact that two composition students share not only identical first names but nearly identical last names. I suggested that one of them should switch to a neglected name like Frieda or Helga, but they declined. Poor Frieda never gets a break.

On the first day of class, students are shy about being the first to finish the writing assignment. Finally a young man zips up his backpack and stands up to hand in his work and for the first time I notice that he's wearing shorts. Shorts! It's 14 degrees outside! At least he's not wearing flip-flops in this weather. I wanted to wear my new wool skirt for the first day of class, but cold weather and snowy sidewalks are not an appropriate environment for heels.

Now my composition students are doing their first-day-of-class writing and I notice that none of them are wearing shorts. Smart students! I asked them to respond to roll call by sharing the most interesting thing they read over break, and I was impressed by how many admitted to having read actual books. Several said they read the sports page, which is a start. The first unit in this class asks students to read, think, and write about the importance of reading in a wired world, so it's encouraging to see that reading has not dropped entirely out of their lives.

Or mine either: after class, I'll have a pile of brand-new student writing on my desk. I'm not at all worried about starting reading, but I do worry about what happens after I quit. Time to start teaching! Where do I begin?

Friday poetry challenge: weather report

After a brief but restful holiday hiatus, the Friday Poetry Challenge returns with a weather report:

Flakes falling,
cars spinning,
wind blowing--
I'm grinning.

No driving,
Slow walking,
No working--
I'm socked in!

Now it's your turn: what's the weather doing in your neck of the woods?

Decaffeinated prose

Perhaps I hadn't had enough caffeine, but this morning I was befuddled by the following sentence in a brief book review in the New Yorker:

"Slater, in this enormously detailed biography, gives a vivid sense of Dickens's quotidian existence, and when he isn't noting dates or fees sets about identifying the people and events that Dickens's 'clutching eye' transmuted into fiction."

I maneuvered the first half of the sentence readily, but then trouble hit after the third comma, when I kept wondering what to do with "sets." First I saw it as a noun, and then I tried to read "fees sets" as some sort of noun phrase, which doesn't work at all, and then when I finally realized that "sets" is the verb, I had to go back once again and figure out who was setting what where. Another set of commas would have clarified the sentence, but a sentence already burdened by three commas might be overwhelmed by more. It might be easier just to add more caffeine.

In my coffee mug, of course. Not in the sentence.

Cootie alert!

This morning I walked into a room filled with chairs set up for more than 40 people and I was delighted to see many of my colleagues clustering together to chat over coffee. What a contrast to the meeting rooms I entered last week at MLA, where the rows of chairs fill up in a distinct pattern:

The first person to enter chooses a seat at the end of a row of chairs, and so do the next few people. When each row has exactly one person sitting in it, the next people who trickle in will sit at the extreme opposite end of an already occupied row, ensuring that anyone else who wants to sit will have to climb over someone else first.

Next, the interior seats start filling in, with at least one seat left empty between any two attendees. At really popular sessions, eventually someone will have to break down and sit right next to another attendee. That's when it gets uncomfortable.

A more efficient method is for attendees to fill rows starting from the center so that those who arrive later don't have to awkwardly climb over everyone else's feet, but that would never work at MLA because we all want to sit on the end of the row so we have an escape route in case the session stinks. So I can understand the desire to colonize the end of the row, but I have never understood why so many scholars attending MLA prefer to sit next to an empty seat rather than a human being. Would it kill you to sit down next to another scholar? I mean, it's not as if we all had cooties.

The problem is that at MLA, we're all strangers--and we act as if we want to stay that way. This morning at our campus meeting, on the other hand, there wasn't a stranger in the room. Even new faculty who may have come in knowing nobody certainly did stay strangers for long. The room didn't fill up entirely, but I didn't see anyone surrounding themselves with empty chairs.

Maybe that's because at our campus, we don't have cooties.

Big Two-Hearted Wal-Mart

This is for Joy:

"Humor makes the door bigger. If you write in a comic vein, anyone can get into your story--any person, any place--whereas drop Hemingway in Wal-Mart, and what is he going to do with that material?....Gogol, on the other hand, you could put in Wal-Mart and he would do fine. Also Shakespeare, although he'd probably catch grief for the pointy shoes."
--George Saunders

I would look for Hemingway over in Sporting Goods.

Our B Side

"Wouldn't it be great to make up a syllabus featuring all the authors we never have time to teach?"

I had been complaining to my colleague about the difficulty of cutting great readings off a literature survey syllabus, and he suggested that we gather up all those neglected authors and put them on their own syllabus, a sort of B Side to the usual smash hits.

The B Side syllabus for my American Lit Survey would include the William Dean Howells story "Editha" and all the parts of Winesburg, Ohio that didn't make it into the Norton Anthology, plus a good selection of Robinson Jeffers poems and The Awakening by Kate Chopin. I would add the wonderful Philip Roth short story "Defender of the Faith" and liberal dashes of Vonnegut, DeLillo, Pynchon, and Proulx. If I wanted to go really crazy, I would assign one of Dawn Powell's novels (maybe The Locusts Have No King) and Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West. Wouldn't that be an interesting course?

Now what about you? What authors and works would be on your B-Side syllabus?

Syllabus madness!

On Monday I finished the syllabus for my Creative Nonfiction class...but then I looked more closely and noticed that I had accidentally added an extra week to the semester. "Just leave it in there--the students won't mind," urged one colleague, but something tells me that's not a viable option. Back to the drawing board.

Then yesterday I was struggling to add some extra time to focus on writing in my American Lit Survey course, a Writing Proficiency course, but I had to cut two readings to make room. What I love about the American Lit Survey is the opportunity to introduce students to a wide variety of really wonderful writers and works. What I hate is all the really wonderful writers and works I have to leave out. Which old friend will no longer be invited to the party?

I left yesterday without making a decision but this morning I had it figured out: cut out Zitkala Sa (sorry!) and one of the Charles Chesnutt stories, and then move Kate Chopin's "The Storm" to the same date as Chesnutt's "Goophered Grapevine." The Chopin and Chesnutt stories both create parallels between human emotion and forces of nature, which ought to allow for interesting discussion. Also, students often struggle with Chesnutt's dialect tales, so assigning "The Goophered Grapevine" along with Chopin's very short, highly accessible story might give students more time to focus on understanding the dialect. I hope. "The Goophered Grapevine" contains my favorite Chesnutt line, "There's plenty of room for us all," a poignant statement coming from an author whose talented tales encouraged late-nineteenth-century editors to make room in their publications for the voices of black authors.

But I wish my syllabus had room for Zitkala Sa. I love "Impressions of an Indian Girlhood" and my students usually enjoy it too, so I know she'll come back another year. My students experience the survey only once (well, most of them), but for me it's a continuing adventure, with authors and works moving in and out of the syllabus fluidly over time. One of these years I'll make someone else move over to make room for Zitkala Sa, because in the long view, there's plenty of room for us all.

Memorable

"I thought for a while that people ought to have licenses, you know, to have to be issued licenses to write memoirs. And one of the preconditions for getting a license would be to have done something in your life besides having written this stupid memoir."
--Tracy Kidder

Well seasoned

Last night while chopping hot peppers, I felt the heat in my fingertips; this morning while scraping ice off the windows, I felt the cold. This is really good news: a month ago I was still suffering from numbness in my fingers, a common side effect of chemotherapy, but now my nerves seem to be back in action.

And that's not the only improvement. Yesterday a colleague asked me to help with a problem, and I felt my creativity coming online quickly to tackle the task. I feel energetic and ready to jump back into the fray; my only concern is that I might take on too much too quickly and wear myself out.

The hot peppers and cold fingers reminded me that recovery may be accompanied by pain, but on the other hand, I prefer a life well seasoned with both fire and ice.

Energetic resolutions

The college rec center was hopping today with faculty and staff members pursuing their New Year's resolutions--walking the track, working out with weights, huffing and puffing on bikes and step machines. I watched one staff member walking the track for 30 minutes with her cell phone pressed to her ear the whole time, but what's the point of leaving the office if you have to take the office with you?

I managed some weights and 25 minutes on the elliptical machine (at the lowest setting...moving very slowly) and I feel great, ready to tackle this afternoon's challenges. This morning I finished revising the syllabus for my creative nonfiction class, and this afternoon I need to work on American Lit. Academic buildings are quiet and there were only two sandwiches on display in the library cafe at lunchtime, but classes start next Monday so I expect to see some energy buzzing through the buildings soon.

The energy level at the rec center was pretty high...let's hope we can all keep pursuing our fitness resolutions even after classes begin.

On the comeback trail

I have hair!

Sort of!

At least it's coming back!

Holiday book round-up

It heartens me to see books piled on my nightstand just waiting to be read and I always get a little antsy when the pile dwindles, but thanks to the recent round of birthdays and Christmas and discounts at the MLA book exhibit, the pile is comfortably tall. I've already read some of them but as long as there are a few more in waiting, I'm happy:

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin: A terrific collection of short stories all linked by their connection to a particular family in Pakistan. I recall being impressed by the opening story, "Nawabdin Electrician," when it appeared in The New Yorker, and the remaining stories do not disappoint. My favorite image: "The oversized head had settled heavily onto the shoulders, like a sand castle on the beach after the sea has run in over it."

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand: A thought-provoking and thorough account of the problems facing colleges and universities, especially those struggling to sustain a liberal arts emphasis. My favorite image: "if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about thirty years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since."

Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramago: The Portugese author's novels offer interesting thought experiments, but they are most successful when character development trumps the artificialities imposed by the experiment (as in Blindness and All the Names), and least successful when character development seems like an afterthought (as in Seeing). Death with Interruptions is a hybrid: the first half of the book features no fully developed characters, while the second half focuses on two (death with a small 'd' and an unnamed musician), ending just when you want to get to know them better--and ending with a sentence identical to the opening line. My favorite sentence is typical Saramago prose (and let's give a shout-out to his marvelous translator, Margaret Jull Costa):

That is her man, a musician, nothing more, like the almost one hundred other men and women seated in a semicircle around their personal shaman, the conductor, and all of whom will, one day, in some future week or month or year, receive a violet-colored letter and leave their place empty, until some other violinist, flautist or trumpeter comes to sit in the same chair, perhaps with another shaman waving a baton to conjure forth sounds, life is an orchestra which is always playing, in tune or out, a titanic that is always sinking and always rising to the surface, and it is then that it occurs to death that she would be left with nothing to do if the sunken ship never managed to rise again, singing the evocative song sung by the waters as they cascade from her decks, like the water song, dripping like a murmuring sigh over her undulating body, sung by the goddess Ampritrite at her birth, when she became she who circles the seas, for that is the meaning of the name she was given.

I have to stop and get my breath after that one.

Colors of the Mountain by Da Chen: This eye-opening tale of a village boy coming of age during China's Cultural Revolution is positively Dickensian in the amount of oppression heaped on an impressionable child, but it lacks the Dickensian depth of detail and color. But I'm only halfway through so perhaps it will improve. The writing is workmanlike except in his tender reminiscences of his grandfather: "Grandpa lived the life of a mountain cat. He rose with the moon and dozed off in his small, wooden bed when the sun came out."

Truth in Nonfiction edited by David Lazar: A collection of beautifully written essays exploring the troubled relationship between fact and fiction in creative nonfiction. I'm halfway through and already I've found many ideas worth chewing on. For instance, Vivian Gornick explains that some readers of her memoir were disappointed when they met the author or her mother outside the book. The problem, explains Gornick, is that "In our actual persons, neither Mama nor I could give satisfaction. We ourselves were just a rough draft of the written characters."

And now to the ones I haven't started yet:

Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon: I don't recognize many of the authors' names, which is as good a reason as any to read this.

The World Within: Writers Talk: This collection of interviews gleaned from the pages of Tin House focuses on authors as diverse as Sherman Alexie, Marilynne Robinson, Ken Kesey, and Lydia Davis.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt: A big fat hardback book promising the kind of Byatt complexity we saw in Possession.

Frommer's Washington State: A birthday gift from my daughter and son-in-law, who believe it's high time we took a real vacation. Books can take you places, sometimes literally.

A whole new world

I taught for more than a year through persistent pain and anemia, and then I taught for a whole semester through the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation and more anemia.

I'm starting this semester with no pain, no anemia, and no significant side effects. There's no telling what I might accomplish with all that awfulness off my back. Look out, world! Bev is back!

Well, mostly. Where's my hair?