Re-awakening

Toward the beginning of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Edna Pontellier reads a risque novel making the rounds of the summer resort, feeling compelled to "read the book in secret and solitude, though none of the others had done so--to hide it from view at the sound of approaching footsteps." That's more or less the way I read The Awakening for the first time 30 years ago: I stayed home sick from church on a Sunday morning and sat up in bed reading Chopin's novel from beginning to end without stopping (and hardly breathing!), hoping to read it undetected.

And who could object to my reading such a book? The Awakening was never on the syllabus in any of my undergraduate classes, but in one class I recall reading The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic, a novel published two years earlier than The Awakening and also involving a main character whose passions are unleashed when he listens to a talented woman playing Chopin. If Frederic's novel was not considered dangerous to impressionable young minds, why was Kate Chopin's?

Now I'm getting ready to teach The Awakening and I find that most of my students have already read it, some in high school. Once again, one generation's dangerous literature becomes the next generation's required reading. I've been trying to recapture the sense of transgression I felt on first encountering the novel, but it's hard to imagine the intensity of emotion the novel evoked in its first readers, many of them so horrified by Edna's actions that they utterly overlooked the novel's elegance of language and nuances of character development. An early reviewer condemned the novel as unhealthy because "if it points any particular moral or teaches any lesson, the fact is not apparent."

These days Edna seems downright quaint. Tomorrow in class I'll show photos of women's bathing costumes from the 1890s just to set the scene, but the women in those photos look stiff and stodgy and passionless and incapable of relishing the feeling of the warm seawater buoying up the body. I'll remind my students that The Awakening was among the earliest published novels to portray pregnancy and childbirth as natural parts of a woman's life rather than as secret and even indecent mysteries incapable of being discussed in polite company.

But I know I'll be hard pressed to help my students understand what caused all the brouhaha. It's just a simple story about a woman trying to find herself--the synopsis of a hundred hackneyed dramas on the Lifetime network. Over the next couple of days I'll work to peel away the accretions of time and interpretation to help students encounter the text as if it were hot off the presses, to awaken to the risks Chopin took and the wonders she accomplished with this slim little book. And no one will feel compelled to read it in secret.

Tight squeeze

This stone staircase twisting through a narrow passage between two immense rocks is called Fat Woman's Squeeze, but it's tight enough to squeeze even medium-sized people. We made our way down those steps yesterday during a long hike at Cantwell Cliffs in southern Ohio's scenic Hocking Hills, where we also visited Old Man's Cave and hiked from there to Cedar Falls, which was quite scenic except for the distinct lack of falls. Recent dry conditions have reduced the waterways to a mere trickle.

We hiked roughly eight miles up and down steps and rock formations striped green and orange from minerals and minute growths, and we encountered quite a few fellow hikers, many of them accompanied by really big but well-behaved dogs. Do dogs grow bigger in Hocking Hills or do owners of small dogs hike somewhere else?

We left our dog at home, where she played furiously with a discarded snakeskin and perhaps pondered the big front-page headline in our local paper: "Elderly woman injured trying to allude dogs." The online edition was corrected to "elude," but even without the puzzling headline, the article raises questions: this woman fell and was injured because two dogs escaped from their enclosure and got friendly with the elderly woman's dog, causing her to trip. What sorts of dogs were these menacing escapees? Pit bulls? Rottweilers?

Nope. Corgis.

I picture Her Majesty the Queen calling out to the royal corgis, "Come back here at once! We are not amused!"

The royal corgis were not in evidence at Hocking Hills yesterday; instead, we were politely greeted by a lovely Dalmatian, several border collies and golden retrievers, a beautiful chocolate lab, and a pair of mastiffs that looked like what you might get if you crossed a giant panda with the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Today every muscle in my body is reminding me of all those stone steps and tight squeezes, but I'm glad we took the time to get away before gearing up for the rest of the semester. We've come a long way, but I still have to lead my students down a long, steep trail studded with obstacles. I hope we'll all manage to squeeze through the tight spots. If you don't hear from us, send in the Saint Bernards.

The antithesis of frivolous

I've promised myself that I won't do anything frivolous until I'm done grading midterm exams, so now I have to rationalize blogging as a non-frivolous act, and then I'll have to rationalize my attempt to rationalize blogging, and then I'll have to rationalize my rationalization of my rationalization and so on ad infinitum. I'll never get done unless I get started, so here goes:

First, let us examine the source beloved by persons seeking to establish the seriousness of their endeavors: the Oxford English Dictionary. "Frivolous," asserts the OED, means "Of little or no weight, value, or importance; paltry, trumpery; not worthy of serious attention; having no reasonable ground or purpose."

Thus, in order to be non-frivolous, this blog post must be weighty, important, worthy of serious attention, purposeful, and whatever the opposite of "trumpery" might be. Untrumpful? Lacking in trumpitude? Further exploration reveals the following enlightening quotation under the entry for "trumpery":

"1456 Sir G. Haye Law Arms (S.T.S.) 287 For gif fulis...be sa daft that thai wage bataill for lytill, evyn as to say...that he dauncis or syngis better na he dois, or for syk maner of tromperyis."

This blog would not be so daft as to wage battle for lytill or to claim that it dauncis or syngis better na he dois; indeed, this blog rarely dauncis or syngis at all, which speaks highly of its untrumpitude.

But I digress. The OED also defines "frivolous" as "Characterized by lack of seriousness, sense, or reverence; given to trifling, silly." The OED is hardly a trifling tome--have you seen the size of that thing?--and no one would ever claim that it lacked seriousness, sense, or reverence, especially considering the worshipful responses it evokes from abecedarians and lexicographers everywhere. Since the OED itself is not characterized by frivolity, a blog post carrying the full heft of the OED can hardly be called lightweight. Q.E.D.

But wait: the OED encompasses the word "frivolous" and this blog post embraces the OED. How can I practice non-frivolity while immersing myself within the origins of the word? I find myself agreeing with a quotation the OED offers from Thomas Timme's Commentarie of Iohn Caluine upon Genesis, translated in 1578: "It is too frivolous and vaine to expound this worde." Trump that.

Fuel stop

Running on fumes today--literally. Made it to the gas station with the gas gauge pointing decisively toward "E." Filled up. Disgusted: how can gas prices possibly go up 30 cents overnight?

Arrived at campus late. Parking lot full. No energy to search for legal parking space. (Nouns either. No energy to insert subjects in sentences. Let's verb!)

Parked illegally. Fully intended to move car from two-hour space after teaching class. Waylaid by student in need. Distracted by meeting. Fumbling about in the brain for some forgotten task, which finally surges to the surface: must move car.

No ticket! Running errands--but darn, forgot to bring bank deposit from home. Checks bouncing? Possibly.

Muddled around with Moodle and Sharepoint. Wrote midterm exams. Ordered pizza. No energy to check all these tasks off my to-do list. Fall break looms like that Mobil pegasus promising fuel at the end of a long, lonesome highway. Two more days. Running on fumes.

Gateway to fun

Something amazing happened this morning: I offered my students an opportunity to do something really fun, and instead of groaning, they said, "Neat! Let's go!"

I've long since come to terms with the fact that my idea of fun does not always mesh with that of my students, so I know what to expect when I say something like "I've got a really fun group activity for your this morning" or "I've written some really fun questions for this exam." They groan. They roll their eyes. Sometimes they express heartfelt disagreement with my idea of fun.

So I was prepared this morning when I announced to my honors students that we would be leaving class 15 minutes early to go on a field trip. It's cold and damp and gloomy outside and we would be walking three or four blocks to visit a big truck parked at the edge of campus, which doesn't sound like any fun at all until you hear what was inside the truck: the Gateway to Knowledge, a traveling exhibit of facsimiles of documents that live at the Library of Congress. (Read about it here.)

We had a lot to do in class today to prepare for the midterm exam (on Thursday), but as we got closer to the time to leave, a few students started chanting, "Library of Congress! Library of Congress!" And then we trotted down there to gaze enrapt at a facsimile of Jefferson's rough draft of the Declaration of Independence ("Look! Jefferson practiced writing as a process involving drafting, feedback, and revision!") and the Waldseemuller Map ("Look! Europeans envisioned America as an island ending at the Alleghenies, which leaves Ohio under water!") and the original Spider-Man drawings ("Look! Peter Parker looks like he's trying to catch flies with those webby wingy things!"). Okay, the Spiderman art wasn't terribly relevant to a class looking at the concept of "civilization" in literature, but the rest of it was pretty interesting.

And fun! A good time was had by all. Now I want to take the class on a field trip to the actual Library of Congress! That's my idea of fun--and perhaps theirs too.

Technapocalypse Now

By the powers vested in me by nobody in particular, I hereby declare today Raincoat Appreciation Day. It's not the most rational response to the recent campus technapocalypse, but it's the best I can do.

Living without e-mail for the weekend was perhaps a bit of a blessing: for two whole days I didn't have to deal with any demands for immediate attention, and when the e-mail server came back online, I thought that's that, it's over, we can move on.

Little did I know that the e-mail problem was just the tip of the iceberg that would sink my Monday morning. The technapocalypse caused every update anyone has made to the campus website for weeks to be irretrievably lost. All our recent faculty council minutes--gone. All our documents related to faculty meetings--gone. The lists of faculty committee members, deadlines for submitting applications, updates to the faculty manual--gone. Someone will have to go through the entire site page by page to see what's missing and try to restore it.

In the face of such a titanic task, I say it's time for all good men (and women) to appreciate my new raincoat, a lovely full-length London Fog trenchcoat with a warm lining and a hood to keep the rain off my head. I've always loved trenchcoats and this one is even better because it was free, left behind in a closet by the woman who used to own my daughter's house. Yes: for the cost of dry-cleaning, I picked up three wonderful coats that look as if they've never been worn. My daughter should buy houses more often--provided that the previous owner is just my size.

So I spent a good bit of time this morning trying to cope with the aftermath of the technapocalypse, but at this point there's nothing I can do but panic and that won't work. Trust me--I've tried. So instead I plan to walk away from the computer and admire my raincoat. Neat idea, raincoats: put one on even when it's not raining and when heavy weather strikes, you'll be protected. If only someone had thought to toss a raincoat over that server....

Sweet (gum) dreams come true

Last fall I announced one Sunday that I wanted a sweet-gum tree, and my adorable spouse said, "Okay." (Read it here.) However, making my sweet-gum dream come true has not been easy.

A friend sent sweet-gum seed pods, which we planted in pots to see if they'd grow. Some woodland creature promptly knocked over the pots, disinterred the seeds, and carried them away. Perhaps they're growing, but who knows where?

In the spring we looked at trees at local nurseries. No sweet-gum trees in sight. I assumed we were out of luck.

Then last Saturday the adorable spouse came home from the Farmers' Market with a tree in the back of his van. He won't tell me where he got it, but I assume that one of his Market buddies hooked him up with a sapling just in time for fall planting. And even though the spouse was sick, he promptly dug a hole and planted our tree. I don't see a chipmunk uprooting that tree and carrying it away.

It's a petite tree with lovely star-shaped leaves. I'm rooting for growth and so is the weather, which provided plenty of water to welcome the new tree. That's what it takes to make sweet-gum dreams come true.

Direct-shuns

On the first day of the Scientific Imaging class I took two years ago, the professor wrote on the board in large print the letters "RTFD."

"This means 'Read the fine directions,'" he explained, "but some people substitute another word for fine."

Lately I find myself frequently telling students to read the friendly or ferocious or flabbergasting directions and then come back to me if they still have questions, but that doesn't mean I'm planning to sit by my computer all night eagerly awaiting that 2 a.m. e-mail from a student who can't understand the directions for an assignment due today even though he or she has had the assignment sheet for FIVE WEEKS and we have discussed it in class at least once a week. Here's a thought: how about reading the first-rate directions a little sooner next time?

A colleague told me yesterday that he never puts detailed assignments in writing but instead issues instructions orally in class. If students have questions, they have to ask him right there on the spot where everyone can hear. I suppose that's one way to deal with the problem, but then he never gets the opportunity to tell the students to read the frightful directions or read the formidable directions or read the fan-freaking-tastic directions.

From now on I'll just issue all my directions via interpretive dance. If nothing else, it will give me an opportunity to try out some new f-words: Read the flamenco directions. Read the flat-footed directions. Read the fandango directions....

Discerning "concerning"

I'm trying to discern whether I ought to be concerned about "concerning," which keeps cropping up in the form of an adjective. Note the following pairs of sentences:

A. I am very concerned about Jim's health.
B. Jim's health is very concerning.

A. I am very concerned about the state of the environment.
B. The state of the environment is very concerning.

A. I am very concerned about my student's performance.
B. My student's performance is very concerning.

I don't recall hearing the B form before a few years ago, but now I hear it all the time. Is there any real difference in meaning between A and B? I see a shift in emphasis: the A sentences express statements about my feelings, while the B sentences express a statement about Jim's health or the environment or my student's performance. In the A sentences, the concern lives within me, while in the B sentences, the adjective "concerning" applies not to me but to Jim or the environment or my student.

Taking "I" out of the picture places the emphasis firmly on the problem causing the concern, but does it also shift responsibility for the problem? Let's see what happens if we create a C pattern by adding the word "to me" at the end of each of B sentences:

A. I am very concerned about Jim's health.
B. Jim's health is very concerning.
C. Jim's health is very concerning to me.

C seems closer in meaning to A than to B, but it still places the emphasis on Jim's health rather than on my state of mind. Does this distinction matter?

This adjectival use of "concerning" grates on my ears every time I hear it, but is it more accurate to say that I am concerned about "concerning" or that I find "concerning" concerning? "To me" or not "to me"? That is the question.

Swift, saintly, sticky

Why I love about my recently refurbished office laptop computer:

1. Everything's running really quickly (perhaps because I no longer have malware constantly running in the background).

2. New operating system with pretty icons!

3. Word 2007! I love the "Review" tab, and whoever invented "insert endnotes" ought to be sainted.

4. Electronic sticky notes! On my desktop! With cool fonts! Think of the trees I'll save!

5. A fresh new supply of exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!

Amongst monsters

During this morning's class discussion of Stephen Crane's The Monster, students compared the novella to works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, and Stephen King. One student saw a precursor of Cormac McCarthy's prose in Crane's description of a fire in a lab full of colorful chemicals that burst into horrifying beauty, with flames resembling flowers and panthers and fairies until

Suddenly the glass splintered and a ruby-red snakelike thing poured its thick length out upon the top of the old desk. It coiled and hesitated, and then began to swim a langourous way down the mahogany slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down into Johnson's upturned face.

And thus evil enters the bucolic garden.

I've read The Monster perhaps a dozen times but never taught it, and after seeing my students' responses today, I wonder why this slight novella is never anthologized. Year after year I teach Crane's story "The Open Boat" because it's in the Norton anthology and provides a good introduction to naturalism as a literary movement. It's almost too obvious: four guys in a boat subject to forces outside their control! Look how small and insignificant they feel in the face of indifferent nature! Why, they don't even have names! Etc.

The Monster is longer than "The Open Boat" but not by much, and the plot moves at a much more brisk pace. Granted, "The Open Boat" struggles to recreate for the reader the deadly boredom of being stuck in a small boat on the open sea for many hours, which means that for long stretches nothing much is happening: "They sat together in the same seat, and each rowed an oar. Then the oiler took both oars; then the correspondent took both oars; then the oiler; then the correspondent. They rowed and they rowed." Again, etc.

This morning's discussion of The Monster was so engrossing that we got out of class late. There's so much more to say! The Monster defies easy categorization, starting out as in the William Dean Howells light-of-common-day realistic mode but later entering gothic and naturalistic and impressionistic territory, all while remaining entirely believable. It's a slice of small-town life at the turn of the twentieth century and a philosophical exploration of the problem of pain and the responsibility for evil, but unlike the gothic novels it echoes, The Monster offers no hope of resolution. The monster is not destroyed (and indeed may not be a monster at all!) and the evil is not vanquished, which means it's still out there--or possibly in here.

The Monster is not without its flaws; for instance, Crane's treatment of race tends toward the patronizing and stereotypical. I admire "The Open Boat," but few students share my enthusiasm so the discussion can be slow and grim. The Monster, on the other hand, lets loose ideas so monstrous they can't be contained in one hour's discussion but keep coming back begging to be fed.

And to be read! The University of Virginia's electronic text is available here. Go ahead--feed the monster!

Unenlightened

I arrived on campus this morning to find my classroom in the dark. The rest of the building had plenty of light, and the computer and projector in the classroom worked just fine, but that one room remained unillumined. The class that meets before mine was taking an exam today, so the prof had to scramble to find a clean, well-lighted place. Good thing my class was scheduled to visit Special Collections!

Do I really need light in a literature class? I could lead a class discussion in the dark, but how would students take notes? They would have to brush up their memorization skills, I suppose, or we could recreate the ambiance of an earlier time by gathering 'round a flickering candle or a whale-oil lamp, if we could find a supply of whale-oil, which is highly unlikely.

Candles might have been appropriate today. My students have been reading Kate Chopin and Stephen Crane's stories about children, so we went down to Special Collections to examine nineteenth-century children's books and magazines. It's very enlightening to read Stephen Crane's charming short story "The Angel Child" alongside illustrations of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Gaslight would be great! But of course we can't use gaslight or candles or whale-oil lamps in the library, especially in Special Collections. We could discuss literature in the dark by relying on as much of the text as we have stored in memory, but to handle the book, read the text, examine the illustrations, we need light.

And then there was light! Snuff the candles: we have illumination!

On the chopping block

Today I've put my own precious prose on the chopping block and it hurts. The conference I'm attending in Prague in November requires that a draft of the paper be submitted by this Friday, and the draft can be no longer than 2600 words. I'm cutting down a larger essay to present at the conference, but to make it fit within the limit, I'll have to cut out around 4000 words. Ouch.

Of course cutting a paper down to size is easier than expanding it, especially when I can chop out whole sections in one fell swoop. But then I discover that I've destroyed the connective tissue between ideas, so I have to add a sentence or two to tie the remaining pieces together. It's chop, add, chop, add all day long.

And then I encounter a passage I simply hate to sacrifice. It's so clever or original or perfect in context, but will it fit in the slimmed-down version of the paper or will it just sit there like a partially severed thumb dangling from the body of the piece? It's hard to say. So I keep it in, check the word count, trim it a little, check the word count, put it aside to think about later.

After I get the paper trimmed to size, I'll have to go back through and change the citation format. I generally use MLA in-text citations and a Works Cited, but this conference requires footnotes and a bibliography in Oxford style--plus British spellings throughout. Okay, I'll work on that...maybe I can find a proofreader eager to sniff out my non-British spellings.

First, though, I've got to get back to the chopping block. Caution: butcher at work. Watch your step there--you wouldn't want to slip and fall on that severed syntax all over the floor.

The little savages!

After a lengthy discussion of the first seven chapters of Things Fall Apart this morning, I asked my honors students whether they would characterize the culture Achebe describes as "civilized" or "savage." A lively debate followed, with students offering abundant evidence supporting claims on both sides.

Then I reminded them of the exercise we did last week in class: students sat in groups of four and wrote two brief descriptions of the group on the opposite side of the table, one description portraying their classmates as "civilized" and the other as "savage." For instance, one girl's necklace was described variously as "a sample of the fine art of her culture" or "an artifact seized after a bloody battle," and a male student was described as "dominating his women through superior strength." Art/artifact, wife/women: what a difference a word makes.

Judging from their ability to enter into civil debate, I would describe my students as highly civilized. Even after the fire alarm sounded, there was no every-man-for-himself scramble for the exit. No savages in my class!

I wouldn't want to speculate about yours.

Let 'em eat cake!

When life gives you egg whites, make angel-food cake. At 5:30 a.m. on a school day. Because that's when the oven is available.

Okay, I'll admit that my cake-making has gotten a little out of control, but I'm just trying to build a dike to hold back the flood of egg whites and keep the chickens from coming home to roost in my refrigerator, just to mix a few metaphors. (Would I rather mix metaphors or egg whites? Don't distract me from the issue at hand, which is what to do with these dirty beaters....)

The problem is that the resident bread-baker keeps using egg yolks and leaving the whites in little plastic quart containers in the fridge, and when the containers start stacking up, I whip up an angel-food cake. They sell well at the Farmers' Market, but I have to bake them right about the time that the oven is full of bread, which doesn't work, or else squeeze them in at unusual times like 5:30 a.m., which is what I did last Friday. And then when I explained to my students why I had been up since the crack of dawn, they said, "Bake one for us!"

Well, I've got all those egg whites, right? And I can't eat all that cake myself, right? So I baked a cake for my students. Served it with strawberries in this morning's class. They enjoyed it, but now they'll be expecting cake all the time. That's what's happened with the Farmers' markets: I started baking cakes just to clear space in the fridge, but now we have customers who complain if cake is not forthcoming.

Maybe I'll start sending the raw egg whites to the market with recipes attached. Let 'em bake cake! I'm going back to sleep.

Story as storage

From Scott Russell Sanders, two storytelling metaphors:

"Like a woven basket or a clay pot, a story is a container. It provides a shape for holding some character, some act or insight, some lesson we can't afford to lose. It stores the kernels of past experience like seeds harvested from earlier crops and carefully saved for future planting."

"By linking events, a story binds together a stretch of time and a portion of the world, something tidy enough to carry in the mind. It is a form of stored energy, like the sunlight captured in a chunk of coal, but unlike coal, which disappears in the burning, stories retain their heat and light as long as there are minds capable of understanding them."

These and other stories appear in "The Warehouse and the Wilderness," an essay in Sanders's new collection, A Conservationist Manifesto.

Looking in, looking out, looking up

I was walking up a hill near our house this morning when the call of a pileated woodpecker stopped me in my tracks. I looked up and saw a tree with yellow leaves so bright they looked electric, and nearby I saw another tree, dead and leafless but pockmarked with the distinctive oval holes drilled only by the larger woodpeckers.

By the time I heard that chattering call, I'd been walking about 40 minutes without much awareness of anything. I've been walking around that way all week, my eyes glazed and turned inward toward the big campus issue everyone's trying to talk about without quite knowing how. How did I get to this point? I remember leaving the house, seeing a heron in our creek and a deer up the road, and then nothing until the woodpecker's call.

I scanned the tree and waited a while but the call didn't repeat. I never saw the woodpecker, but I know it's out there somewhere--and the only way I'll find it is to keep looking out and up.

Friday poetry challenge: Errorless messages

If my computer insists on talking to me, I wish it would say something I'd like to hear:

File found, not corrupt
but safe and pure, complete. How
else may I serve you?

There's a message that would make my day. Or how about this one:

I found the file
you thought you lost,
un-crossed the line
you thought you'd crossed,
deleted spam,
prevented peeves.
Don't call me Mac:
my name is Jeeves.

I would never hit the "mute" button on that kind of message. How about you? Let's see some light verse conveying messages you wish your computer would send.

Possessed!

My helpful IT guys have been working on and off all week to exorcise the demons possessing my office laptop, finally declaring it cured yesterday. This morning I'm hearing voices, messages from the great beyond--snippets of music, fragments of ads, hearty voices proclaiming "You're a winner!" I don't mind being a winner except when my laptop is a loser.

So the IT guys have it and they're wiping it clean. I'm fumbling around in the computer lab, trying to get useful work done while awaiting the next incarnation of my office laptop. If the screen starts spinning around and spewing vomit, I'm outta here.

Tossing in the tiara

Sunday afternoon I made the mistake of congratulating myself for being so organized. I'm the Organization Queen, I told myself: caught up on grading, class preparation, meeting planning, working out, even laundry. Someone ought to hand me a rhinestone tiara.

Well, the Organization Queen has been deposed. I am now behind on everything--even laundry. What happened?

Grading happened. Meetings happened. Car repairs and computer problems and muscle spasms happened. The high pollen count affects my inner ear and makes my head spin. Workmen wielding power tools and ladders infested my office space with noise and clutter. My office computer is possessed by demons that resist IT's attempts to exorcise them. My car window was stuck open. I'm trying to refinance my house. Students keep completing their assignments and expecting me to grade them (of all the nerve!). And my feet hurt.

Today my schedule is pretty clear so I'll try to dig out from under the onslaught. My car window is up (and the switch disabled so I can't put it down again) and the workmen and ladders have disappeared from my office space. Rumor has it that my computer will be fixed today. And I have no meetings until next Monday.

Maybe this evening I'll do some laundry. Better toss in the tiara. It's looking a little tarnished.

Un-biting my tongue

The big news is finally public: we're getting a new provost. People keep asking me what I think of this news but I'm reluctant to open my mouth because, as I learned to my sorrow over the summer, casual comments made in social settings can get passed around as if they're pronouncements from the Great White Throne, returning to me so twisted that I don't even recognize my own words. But I will say three things:

First, I am saddened at the prospect of losing our current provost. I enjoy working with her, value her leadership, appreciate her devotion to scholarship, and admire her professionalism. I will miss her.

Second, I am relieved that the news is finally public. I'm tired of biting my tongue on the topic.

Third, I am convinced that those of us who care about the future of the college ought to work to keep the conversation civil, to squelch misinformation, and to resist the temptation toward divisiveness. It won't be easy, but if we work together, we can do it.

And that's all I'm saying.

The post-workshop workshop

A group of faculty members sit around a table sipping soft drinks, eating pizza, and sharing ideas about using rubrics to evaluate student work. The workshop is over and the presenters are packing up, but no one wants to leave when they have so many great ideas to share (or gripes to air).

This is my favorite part of our whole teaching workshop series: hearing my colleagues talk and laugh and learn even after the formal workshop is over. We've had some terrific presenters and engaging topics, but I like to see participants hanging around long after the session is over. We come here to build our own teaching skills but we're also building a community of colleagues who support and encourage one another--even when workmen crank up their power tools so we have to raise our voices to be heard.

Policing pokeweed and pawpaws

It occurs to me that if I'd been pulled over this morning on the way to work, the cop might have wondered why I was transporting baggies full of green vegetative matter. I swear, officer, they're not mine...I'm just holding them for a friend.

And besides, they're just leaves. And a little dirt. Tomato leaves and dirt from the tomato patch and two green tomatoes, plus a handful of pokeweed leaves. For a friend. A colleague, actually, a biologist who is studying manganese uptake in tomato and pokeweed plants and needs some samples. Scientific samples is what they are. Perfectly harmless. And legal.

It took us a little while to find suitable pokeweed leaves. We have plenty of pokeweed, which looks quite pretty right now with its festoons of purple berries attracting birds, but the local electric company's scorched-earth weed-eradication program has made large patches of greenery in our area shrivel and die, including everything on the hillside across the road where the trilliums bloom so abundantly in spring.

We finally found some undamaged pokeweed but in the process we also found pawpaws growing like fuzzy green lightbulbs under their canopy of donkey-ear leaves. Plenty of pawpaw trees grow on the edge of our woods, but generally the deer and raccoons get to the fruit before it's ripe enough to pick. Yesterday, though, we found one plump juicy pawpaw with those distinctive yellow speckled spots indicating ripeness and we took it up to the house to save for this morning's breakfast. It was perfect: yellow custardy flesh with a flavor I would describe as bananaesque and mangolicious.

But it's a good thing I didn't get pulled over this morning because no traffic cop would have stood still to listen to this whole unlikely tale, especially with all that plastic taped over my car window. But that's a story for another day.

The elusive allusion

My hands smell like mustard, a consequence of having eaten lunch in front of my computer while reading and trying to respond to student drafts. Probably my computer keyboard smells like mustard too. But not the drafts. They're nice drafts and I'm enjoying reading them, but I really don't want to take them home this weekend so I'm sitting here in front of my computer and responding to drafts one after another after another until they're done. Ten down, six to go. Think I can do it? The race is on!

I don't mind copying certain types of comments over and over: When you use a complete sentence to introduce a quotation, use a colon. Titles of poems should be in quotation marks, titles of books in italics. Please learn the important distinction between "then" and "than."

Today's papers, though, introduced a repeated error I've never seen before: using "eludes" where one would expect "alludes," as in "The poem eludes to Greek myth." This showed up in one-fifth of the papers I've read so far, and it made me want to compose an etude conveying the illusion of an allusion that would elude comprehension. But I'll never get out of here if I keep waxing poetic over amusing errors in student writing.

I'd like to insert a comment saying "Don't you mean Quaaludes?" But I fear that the allusion would elude my students.

Making the world safe for My Pretty Pony

Yesterday a faithful reader sent me some shocking news from our old stomping ground: an elementary school in Orange County, Florida, "was placed on lockdown Tuesday morning for more than an hour while authorities investigated a suspicious device." What manner of strange device sent Waterbridge Elementary School into a "modified code yellow lockdown"?

A stuffed pony.

Or, to be more precise, "a pony-shaped stuffed animal" that was "determined to be non-threatening after the Sheriff's Office conducted a thorough investigation." Wouldn't you like to see the notes from that investigation?

The photo accompanying the article (read it here) suggests that the threatening device was retrieved by a robot made of tinker toys, but what happened next? Did the bomb squad X-ray the device to determine whether that suspicious pony shape might be hiding something insidious within? Did Deputy Fife shine bright lights into the pony's beady little eyes and demand information about other fugitives from the law? "I've got a bullet and I know to use it," says Deputy Fife. "So cough it up, My Pretty Pony: bring me Mr. Potato Head's head on a platter."

And what of the child responsible for introducing this dangerous device to Waterbridge Elementary School? I hope they didn't send her to Guantanamo!

It's encouraging to know that the Powers That Be are equipped to handle such a threat. After the pony-shaped device was fully investigated and neutralized, the children at Waterbridge Elementary School went back to their classrooms secure in the knowledge that their little lives had escaped the depredations of My Pretty Pony.

No word on whether that tinker-toy robot is still on the loose.

Duds 'n' suds

"Boxers, Briefs, and Books," an article in yesterday's New York Times (read it here), reveals that John Grisham and I have at least one thing in common: we both hated working at Sears.

Grisham describes the long line of dead-end jobs he pursued in his youth, including spreading asphalt, laying fence, and creeping into dank, dark crawl spaces to locate plumbing problems. Retail sales caught his attention because "it was indoors, clean and air-conditioned," but the only opening he could find was in the men's underwear department at Sears, a job he found so humiliating that he tried to get fired:

"I became abrupt with customers. Sears has the nicest customers in the world, but I didn't care. I was rude and surly and I was occasionally watched by spies hired by the company to pose as shoppers. One asked to try on a pair of boxers. I said no, that it was obvious they were much too small for his rather ample rear end. I handed him an extra-large pair. I got written up. I asked for lawn care. They said no, but this time they didn't offer me a raise. I finally quit."

I never landed a retail job at Sears, but I worked at a Sears distribution center in the personnel department, where I did a lot of filing while watching a steady stream of desperate job-seekers come and go. Once a girl I knew from high school arrived for an interview wearing a tight dress slit up to there and went into the boss's office to be interviewed behind closed doors. After the applicant left, the boss (male) came out and made an announcement to the rest of the (female) staff: "I'll tell you what, ladies, we'll hire the dress and you can all take turns wearing it."

But aside from the occasional sexist comment, that part of my job was not bad: the work was easy, my co-workers were pleasant, and best of all, I was bringing in a steady paycheck, small but much appreciated.

Everything changed in the evening when the lights were turned off, all the pleasant people went home, and I was shunted over to a dark little cubicle in a huge building where the only other human beings were the security guard and the one or two other unfortunate peons stuck with the job nobody wanted: calling up customers whose Sears appliances needed work to let them know that the repair crew would be arriving on the next day.

I would start the evening with a list of names and phone numbers. That's it. The only other thing I knew about the people I was calling was that something had gone dreadfully wrong with some Sears appliance and they were eager to get some help. I was empowered to tell them that help was on the way, but I could not tell them what sort of help or how much it might cost or why help hadn't arrived sooner or exactly when help might be arriving. Everyone wanted to know when the repair crew would arrive, and I would have to admit that I had no access to that information, and they would then say something like "Well if you don't know anything, what's the point of calling?"

The point was detergent. We were told to "push the detergent," and sometimes I did. The goal was to persuade people that since our repair crew would be coming out anyway, it would be convenient for us to send along a jumbo-size box of whatever type of detergent we were trying to push at the time. I believe we were actually offered prizes based on the amount of detergent we were able to push.

I never won any prizes. My detergent-pushing skills were less than stellar. I was calling people whose washers and dryers and refrigerators and dishwashers were making horrible noises or spurting soapy water all over the floor or bursting into flames, and all I could offer to ease their pain was a good price on a jumbo box of detergent? No thanks.

I could push detergent no better than Grisham could push underwear, but the frustration of all those horrible jobs drove him to the hardest job he ever tried: writing fiction. "It was more difficult than laying asphalt, and at times more frustrating than selling underwear," he writes, "But it paid off. Eventually, I was able to leave the law and quit politics. Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had--but it's worth it."

Given the choice, I'd rather write about difficult jobs than perform difficult jobs--even if writing is the difficult job I'm trying to write about. As long as no one is asking me to push the detergent or wear a dress slit up to there, I'll take this job over any other, even when it's difficult.

A moooooving experience

We arrived home from church yesterday to find a herd of cows in our meadow and two dead kingfishers on our front porch. I can't imagine a scenario that would result in both live cows and dead kingfishers trespassing on our property, but if you can, please share.

I suspect that the kingfishers expired while trying to fly through our big front window, while the cows wandered over from the neighbors' meadow across the way. Getting rid of the kingfishers was simple enough, but getting the cows back home proved challenging. The neighbors were at the county fair all day, so it took us a while to find someone willing and able to round up the cows and lead them up the road and back home. I suppose they could have hung out in our meadow all afternoon, but we were on our way to a wedding and worried that the cows might get into our garden or wander out into the road and become ground beef. Stay home to babysit the cows or take them with us to the wedding? Even with an extra car at hand, we wouldn't have had enough seatbelts for all those cows.

The interlopers were removed. No cows attended the wedding. A good time was had by all. Except the kingfishers. By now they are the featured guests at a diet of worms.

[Hat tip to DR for the bad pun.]

Things I never thought I'd say in class

The following exchange occurred during a discussion of the Kate Chopin short story "Desiree's Baby":

Me: What do you think of Armand?

Student: He's a dick.

Me: How does he demonstrate his dickhood?

I don't know, maybe the correct term would be "dickitude" or "dickiness." I've never given much thought to the problem. It certainly never came up in any of my grad-school classes, and I don't recall encountering the term in scholarship in my field, although I would have no problem developing an extensive reading list involving such characters.

I try to keep class discussions on a certain elevated plane, but sometimes I worry that some students haven't been issued a key to the elevator. Yesterday, for instance, I asked a group of freshmen whether a certain argument was "tenable." Blank looks. Time to rephrase the question in terms they're more likely to understand...provided that one of them isn't "dickhood."

The Mad Hatter's Me Party

I have a colleague who does a terrific job working in a very specialized field and who's a ton of fun to have around, but she hates to go to faculty events. "They're always asking me to do things for them," she said. "I can't relax."

I thought she was exaggerating until I accompanied her to a few events and saw for myself. She's right: she can't relax. People treat her as if she's on duty all the time. They fill her inbox and voice mail with requests at all hours of the day and night. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that they accost her at the grocery store. Who wants to talk about the finer points of pedagogy in the toilet paper aisle?

Now I understand even more what she's going through as I once again take up the reins as Faculty Chair. Last year I sat out half of my term, and I think my colleagues cut me some slack in the spring while I was getting back on my feet. But during the summer and early fall I've seen opportunities to relax dwindling as more and more of my colleagues assume I'm on duty 24/7.

Yesterday I really really wanted to just sit and eat my lunch with a few colleagues without being assaulted by demands for information or complaints about faculty governance, but it was a vain hope. I found myself getting more silent and more angry as I ate. I know I'm faculty chair all day every day, but please can I just sit here and eat my leftovers in peace?

But then I wondered: how many times in the past have I accosted faculty leaders with requests or demands or questions at the lunch table? It's a natural place for faculty to gather and toss around ideas about whatever happens to be bugging them, and sharing those complaints at the lunch table saves them the effort of coming up to my office or sending an e-mail. (Although I get plenty of those too. You should see my inbox. Trust me: you don't want to go there.)

People talk about all the different hats I wear as a teacher and administrator and faculty leader, but sometimes I'm tempted to transform the metaphor into reality. Depending on the context and my mood, I could wear my "So you want to get on the agenda?" hat, my "I'd be happy to hear your irate monologue" hat, my "Can your complaint wait until I'm done with lunch?" hat, or my "Go away and leave me alone" hat. I would need an easy method of carrying around multiple hats and I would have to work on my quick-change skills. These days not even Superman can depend on finding a phone booth when he needs one!

I don't want to withdraw from events where I'll encounter colleagues, but sometimes I'd like to eat my lunch in peace. Is that too much to ask? Or do I need to start carrying around a hat that says "Out to Lunch"?

Hot stuff

In the spring when we're planting dozens of pepper plants, I often ask myself why we need so many. We'll never eat them all and they don't sell well at the Farmers Market; I can make salsa and hot pepper sauce and put some of the tiny hot peppers in the freezer to use all winter in sauces, but why plant so many peppers in so many different varieties?

Because they're pretty, that's why.

Right now most of my garden looks awful: corn stalks stand dry and brown and done for; tomato and squash vines are shriveling and the last beans and lettuce have gone to seed. Deer are nibbling on the okra, sweet potatoes, and beets. The cucumbers are kaput and the carrot-and-parsnip patch has been overtaken by weeds.

But the peppers are lovely, shimmering in rich shades of green, red, and orange. This year for the first time we planted lemon peppers, which start out green and then go straight to bright yellow. I haven't eaten any of them yet and I don't know how hot they are, but when I look at those bright orange habaneros, I can taste that blast of habanero heat suffused with fruitiness. Deer and other garden pests leave peppers alone. We lose one or two plants a year to some sort of pestilence, but the remaining plants just keep growing without much attention or care.

Few of my friends share my love for hot peppers, and the poor sales at the Market suggest that it's a lonely passion. But this time of year when the rest of the garden looks downright apocalyptic, I enjoy visiting that one corner of bright color where the peppers preside. They're a feast for the eyes today, the tongue tomorrow.

A commute on the Scenic Route

The traffic light in Lowell is 4.7 miles from my house by the shortest route. This morning it took me 17 minutes to get there by a route you might call "Scenic" if it weren't so foggy. The last time I had to take that route, the highway was underwater; this morning I'm not really sure what the problem was but I'm glad I found a way around it.

I knew something was wrong when I had to wait on the bridge at the end of my driveway while three cars zipped past--and then another 11 cars passed me before I got out to the highway. It's rare to encounter even one car on that mile of road, so 14 cars make a veritable parade. Why was my road suddenly so popular? 7 a.m. is a little early for a wild party.

I made it a mile or so down the highway before I saw signs of trouble: dense fog, flares in the road, a line of stopped traffic so long I couldn't even see what was causing the stoppage. Time to turn around and find another route to town.

Now my road provides an alternate route, but only a fool would call it a short cut. Scenic? On a clear day you get a panoramic view of the power plant five miles upriver. On a foggy day--best keep your eyes on the road.

I followed the Scenic Route down narrow, twisty gravel roads, up steep hills and around blind corners, and I discovered that even with new tires, my car fishtails badly going uphill on gravel. Those roads are not designed to take the kind of traffic volume they carried this morning, especially since drivers facing unexpected delays are not always known for their patience. I breathed a sigh of relief after I found myself finally in Lowell--17 minutes after I left my house.

But at least I got there! Arrive Alive has always been my motto.

Making it count

Yesterday I enjoyed discussing The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks with a group of faculty members, and today I'm wearing a bit of white gauze over the spot where a nurse drew blood during the annual Wellness Screening. I'm seeing these little patches of white gauze all over campus--call it the White Badge of Wellness.

Our campus theme this year is Health and Wellness, which explains the choice of Henrietta Lacks for our common reading. Few students attended the reading discussions, but it was great to get together with colleagues and talk about medical and journalistic ethics, informed consent, and other hot topics.

Today's hot topic is how we can get more students interested in reading and discussing books outside of classes, but I don't know how to do that without somehow making it mandatory--or making it "count," as the students say. Here's a scary fact: when I asked a group of nine junior and senior English majors what interesting thing they'd read over the summer, three were unable to come up with a title.

Can we motivate academic wellness the way we motivate physical wellness? Our wellness program requires participants to fill out a health survey and participate in a health screening every year; the college receives anonymous composite information while the specific results go only to the employee. Participants who complete the wellness screening and log at least 150 wellness points (one wellness point = one half hour of exercise or other wellness activities, such as Weight Watchers meetings or smoking cessation classes) earn a $100 bonus at the end of the year. That's just enough motivation to get a whole bunch of my colleagues off their butts and up into the rec center.

So if busy faculty members are willing to exercise because it counts for something, we ought to find a way to encourage students to read books unrelated to classes by making it count. But how? That's the question many of us are discussing today.

Friday poetry challenge: small annoyances

Here's the miscreant that caused all the trouble in my Volvo last week (read it here). This little bolt was flipping around the flywheel, making my car scream and clatter like the end of the world. My mechanic couldn't find a place where this loose bolt might belong, and there's not much point in taking the entire engine apart when it's running just fine right now. So we've decided to leave it alone and see what happens.

It astounds me that such an insignificant item could bring my car, my household, and my entire week to a screeching halt, but isn't that the way life works? Many small things can make big trouble: a pebble in your shoe, a microorganism in your breakfast egg, a missing bolt on a bridge. What else? Your challenge today is to make poetry out of the small things that make big trouble in your life. I'll start:

Bitty bolt, flywheel
flusterer, screech and clatter
til all systems stop.

A detour into doggerel

I've always wanted an excuse to make students read James Whitcomb Riley's execrable poem "The Happy Little Cripple," and I finally found it. This semester I'm teaching an upper-level literature class called Representative American Writers focusing on the works of Stephen Crane and Kate Chopin, and I want my students to get a taste of American literary culture of the late 19th and early 20th century.

So I assembled a list of works representing a wide variety of genres and styles: Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick, a few Whitman war poems, "To Build a Fire" by Jack London, A Country Doctor by Sara Orne Jewett, Old Creole Days by George Washington Cable, a few of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus tales, Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, and, of course, some James Whitcomb Riley poems. I included some familiar authors' less familiar works (Pauline's Passion and Punishment by Louisa May Alcott) as well as works that were influential at the time but have since fallen out of favor (Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives). All the texts are readily available online (many at Project Gutenberg).

On the first day of class (Monday), each student selected one work from the list; by Thursday evening, each student had to write a brief summary of the work and draw conclusions about what it suggests about literary tastes of the time. Students reading long works are expected to read a few chapters--enough to get a sense of the whole without slogging through, for instance, 300 pages of Dreiser's deathless prose.

By this morning, four students had already posted their summaries online and were responding to each others' posts. I expect to see the rest by the end of the day, and tomorrow in class we'll discuss what we've learned and draw some larger conclusions about the era.

I hope someone will volunteer to do a dramatic reading of "The Happy Little Cripple." We may be devoting our semester to studying Serious Literature, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the occasional detour into doggerel.

Fine. And you?

A year ago I complained about how my cancer diagnosis made it difficult to respond to simply questions like "What's new?" and "How are you?" (Read it here.) This year I'm enjoying the luxury of mindlessly responding, "I'm fine. And you?"

Except occasionally that's not enough. Today I went through the usual fine-and-you script with a colleague, who then stopped me and said, "No, I mean how are you really?" That one little word makes a big difference, transforming the conventional scripted exchange into a moment of compassion and connection.

"I'm fine," I said, and I really am, as far as I know. I feel great. My hair is back and bushy and about ready for a cut. I don't mind the gray. I earned that gray! My next round of testing is scheduled for October but so far every test has come back normal. So really, I'm fine, as far as I know.

But thanks for asking!

What's in your backpack?

My Honors Literature students set out this morning to save civilization. The class is a Learning Community linked with an honors section of World Civilization, so all the readings in my class focus on the concept of civilization. We'll start of by reading some Rousseau and Thoreau, move on to some Romantic poetry, tackle Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and A.S. Byatt's Morpho Eugenia (the basis for the film Angels and Insects, which we'll watch), and then after midterm we'll look at some postcolonial poetry and drama before finishing up the semester with Art Spiegelman's Maus (so we can consider how our awareness of human horrors affects our understanding of civilization).

Today, though, we're just trying to save civilization. Here is the writing prompt I gave my honors students this morning:

Survivor Marietta A devastating virus is sweeping over the planet, threatening to destroy the entire human race. Fortunately, some wealthy alumni have offered to move Marietta College employees and students to a remote island free of the virus. The island is entirely undeveloped, with no dwellings, no infrastructure, and no electricity, and no one knows what sorts of wildlife might live there. Space is tight, so students are allowed to take only what they can stuff into a backpack. You will remain on the island for four years, after which time the virus will have died out and you will return home to a place devoid of human life. Your goal is nothing less than the survival of civilization. What will you take with you? How will you spend the next four years? What do you need to do in order to assure that human civilization will not perish? Write an essay explaining what part you will play in preserving human civilization.

What do my students want to put in their backpacks? Many offered practical suggestions--water purifier, first-aid kit, seeds, tools, bleach--but others want books (and not just survival manuals). They want math and science textbooks, the poems of Robert Frost, all the Harry Potter books, and the complete Sherlock Holmes. One student wants to pack a copy of the United States Constitution, while another insists on Stephen Colbert's I Am America, and You Can Too! One wants a graphing calculator and 24 batteries, while others want rope, blankets, or a collection of personal photographs.

How do they expect to spend their time? One student imagines himself as a hunter-gatherer, and another thinks it would be a great idea to dig wells and latrines. Most mentioned the need for organization, government, and a code of ethics, and several mentioned the need to keep history, art, and literature alive. "Civilization needs imaginative people, out-of-the-box thinkers," wrote a student who wants to create art on the island, and another wants to keep a written record of the group's experience. One wants to spend her time serving as a peace-maker, and another wants to organize frequent celebrations to provide hope and remind people of their purpose.

They all want to learn--from books, from each other, from their environment. That's a great way to approach education, whether on a remote island or in the middle of Marietta. Now it's up to them to figure out how to survive 15 weeks in my class!

It's all one

It's always 1 in my daughter's Nissan. I'm driving her car while mine is in the shop, and I've noticed that every time I get in the car, the dashboard clock starts at 1. It might move on to 1:06 or 1:22 or even 1:47, but I've never seen it switch to 2 or 3 or any other number.

This gives my daily commute a timeless feeling enhanced by the lack of a working radio. Shut in the car with no clock reminding me of the passage of time and no NPR news to remind me that the outside world is still turning, I feel as if I'm adrift outside time and all its demands and I achieve a sort of car nirvana.

I was enjoying the oneness this morning when I arrived on campus, opened the car door, and stepped out into a puddle of vomit. Farewell, nirvana! It's time for Real World 101.

Shut up or sue

What happens after doctors make mistakes? An article in the New York Times examines the importance of communication between doctors and patients even after mistakes have been made, noting that keeping communication open can reduce the threat of litigation. One expert on the subject said,"Everyone loathes litigation, but it's the only alternative we've ever given anybody."

Not long ago I made an attempt to re-open communication with my family doctor, writing a letter explaining why I am considering switching to a different practice. It was a calm and friendly letter and I specified right up front that I am not at all interested in litigation; instead, I wanted to express my concerns and hear his responses. So far, I have had no reply. Perhaps I'm expecting too much.

For the past year, all my medical needs have been cared for at the Cancer Center, but if I should develop, say, an ear infection or a bad bout of pain in my arthritic hip, the oncologist is the wrong person to call. I need a family doctor for that, but I'm reluctant to return to the practice of a doctor whose only response to my symptoms year after year after year was "you ought to lose some weight" or "that's a natural part of the aging process" or "you ought to just tough it out until menopause."

I explained my concerns to my (ex?)doctor, but I'm not sure what I want in return. I'm not asking for an apology ("Oops, guess we missed your cancer! Sorry!") and I'm not interested in lawsuits or compensation. What I would really like is for the doctor to say something like, "You know, you're right: we could have taken your concerns more seriously and we'll try to do better in the future."

But I know why he won't reply: because any admission that mistakes were made could be used as evidence in a lawsuit. The fear of litigation shuts down communication, so I'm left dangling out here with no way to find closure except to shut up or sue. Neither option appeals to me, but what else can I do?

Just-in-time service

Late this afternoon I found myself stranded in the parking lot at a Marathon station with a river of trucks zooming past on one side and the Little Kanawha river easing past on the other, when suddenly a tow truck drove by pulling a Frontier Communications repair truck. "Ha!" I thought, "Now we're in the same boat!"

Those who have been closely following my attempts to persuade Frontier to restore telephone service to my home will be pleased to know that our phone was fixed this afternoon, just in time to allow me to phone home to tell my husband that I was stranded near Mineral Wells, West Virginia. I wasn't planning to be in West Virginia today, but I had to put out a fire.

It was just a little fire sparking from the heating element in our oven while my husband was baking bread to take to the Farmers Market in Cambridge tomorrow. (Have I lost you yet? It gets complicated.) He called all over creation to find a replacement part and located one in South Parkersburg, which is not the easiest place to get to from our house. Or from anywhere, for that matter. If you ever need to get there, I recommend teleporting.

I was pretty exhausted and I really wanted to stay in all evening, but my husband had to shuttle bread pans over to the tiny oven in the apartment above the garage so I left the house at 4 p.m. to try to get to the appliance store before it closed at 5. Even though I don't have a teleporter, I made it with two minutes to spare. (Again, just-in-time service!)

But by then, traffic was outrageous and I had trouble turning left, so I made a right turn and hoped to find a better way, which is how I ended up in Mineral Wells, a great place to go if you have time to stop at the Coldwater Creek outlet store but not when the bread dough is rising and the oven is awaiting its element. So I got on the interstate and drove north.

"At this pace, I'll be home by 6," I told myself just before the engine starting losing power in the middle of a construction zone with nowhere to pull off. My Volvo limped to the nearest exit. As I pulled into the Marathon station, the engine began to scream.

I checked the oil: fine. I checked the belts: all present and accounted for. Having run through my entire repertoire of car-diagnosis options, I put a few quarters in the pay phone and phoned home. And it worked! First time I've been able to call my own number all week, but I had only three dollars in cash on me so I had to keep the long-distance calls short and sweet.

A very helpful FedEx employee came over and looked at my engine, but he couldn't find anything obvious wrong either--but he did let me use his cell phone to call AAA for a tow truck. I had a hard time making the AAA person understand me with all the trucks roaring by, but in less time that it would take to translate the Volvo owner's manual into Esperanto, she promised to send a tow truck "soon."

So I thanked the helpful FedEx guy and gave him a hand-written coupon good for free bread from our booth at the Farmers' Market, and then I settled in to wait. In the heat. With the interstate on one side and the river on the other and nothing to do but stare into space.

Which is what I was doing when the Frontier truck went tootling by behind a tow truck. If I have to be stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but wait to see what AAA means by "soon," it's comforting to know I'm not the only one.

I wonder whether Frontier's tow truck arrived just in time? Mine did. The car is in the shop, the bread is in the oven with the new element, and I am at home. Just in time.

Call waiting (and waiting)

Poor Angie and Josh! I don't even know them, but for the past week we've been receiving all their phone calls. Somehow the lines got crossed so that calls to our home number go off into a black hole somewhere but anyone who dials Angie and Josh's home number gets us.

I've spoken to a number of Angie and Josh's friends and family members, sometimes several times a day, and they regard us with some suspicion, as if we are guilty of skullduggery involving the kidnapping of telephone lines. I keep telling them to call Frontier. Why not? The more, the merrier!

Calling Frontier has not worked well for me. I have been told at various times that someone would be out before 8 a.m. yesterday, by midafternoon yesterday, before 8 p.m. yesterday, before 9 a.m. this morning, and before 8:46 p.m. today. The specificity of that last promise encouraged me to hope, but alas, no one has been out to untangle the mess.

Frontier's hold music brings back memories of the "Small World" ride at Disney, with all those smiley plastic dolls singing the same perky tune over and over and over and over until you really wish you'd brought along a blowtorch. Everyone I've spoken to at has been polite and pleasant, and they've all ended the conversation with the same sentence: "Is there anything else we can do for you?" "Fix my phone" is what I tell them, but apparently they mean "anything but that."

At one point I suggested that perhaps my next call should be to the Public Utilities Commission, which got me connected to a supervisor who made yet another promise that my phone line would be functioning by the end of the day. Ten minutes after he hung up, I received a recorded message informing me that due to high demand, my service call had been rescheduled for tomorrow, and I should make sure a responsible adult is available at home between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.

But I think I'll be irresponsible and go to work. If they need me, they can call me.

Copy that

At 2:30 p.m. I find myself sitting in a comfy chair in the administration building while a photocopier runs off a pile of copies for me--and frankly, at this point, I welcome the opportunity to be a little mindless.

All day I've been tweaking syllabi, writing paper prompts, responding to e-mail messages, trying to get my home phone fixed, and meeting with budget people to work out the costs for a spring break class trip to San Francisco (strictly for educational purposes, of course--it's a course on California Literature).

My mind has been going in too many different directions at once, so it's good to sit and let it gel while the photocopier spits out the copies one after another. The gentle rhythm of the rolling drum is soothing, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if my eyes were to shut.

All these people are rushing past moving boxes and computers back into freshly painted offices...if I fall asleep, surely one of them will wake me before my 3:00 meeting, right? If not, I may have to find a new job as a photocopy attendant so I can listen to those copies slide out all day long.

Just Moodling around

Here I am at 4:03 Tuesday morning, wide awake and aware that classes begin next Monday. I'm feeling refreshed after a long weekend with family, but having done no work in the past three days, I'm feeling a bit frantic about everything I need to do this week, especially Moodling.

We've switched our campus course management system from WebCT to Moodle, so I've gone to some training sessions on the new system and last week I started putting a bunch of course material online. So far, I find Moodle much more intuitive than WebCT and much more fun, but on the other hand, I've also been finding the wrong way to do just about everything. I know it'll get easier as we go along, but right now, Moodle seethes just below the surface of awareness and occasionally rises to rudely awaken me.

The irony, of course, is that I can't even work on Moodle from home because it would take forever to load on my slow dial-up connection. Do I dare go in to my office this early in the morning? I could go back to bed, but it's hard to sleep when my brain won't stop Moodling around.

Maybe drugs would help. Where do I find anti-Moodling meds?

Going the distance

What separates me from my son? 881.6 miles right now--but that distance will be reduced considerably tomorrow when he flies from Texas to Columbus, where we will pick him up and drive up to our daughter and son-in-law's house for a fun family weekend.

But what separates me from going to Columbus tomorrow is a pile of work I really need to finish so I can relax and enjoy my family time. I've had meetings all week and the evening weather has not been conducive to outdoor labor, so I haven't been in the garden since last Saturday. I need to pinch off the basil buds and pick tomatoes, cucumbers, swiss chard, peppers, okra, squash, beets, and a cabbage the size of a basketball, and don't even ask me where I'm planning to store a cabbage that big.

I'll have to clean the catbox, fill the birdfeeders, and clean the bread-making mess in the kitchen, and I should probably take a glance at my son's room and make sure it hasn't been colonized by dust mice the size of labrador retrievers. If they attack, I'll toss 'em a cabbage.

Laundry? Probably. I need to pay some bills too and pack some clothes. And some vegetables. I worked like a maniac today so I can take Monday off, and I'll have to work like a maniac tomorrow before I can get out of the house. But that's okay. Each task I check off the to-do list brings me one step closer to seeing my son.

Besides, it could be worse--at least my to-do list is not 881.6 miles long.

Doing the lockdown lockstep

My wonderful colleague took this photo today as I was explaining some important matter during our New Faculty Orientation.

"You're dancing!" she said.

No, I'm teaching. Not that there's much difference between the two.

After spending the better part of two days interacting with the new hires, I'm delighted with the energy and talent they bring to the college, but I'm also worn out. The schedule had to be shuffled this morning when the entire campus was placed on lockdown after a crime spree broke out very close to campus. At first we heard that someone had robbed the local dry-cleaner and was heading toward campus, which made me wonder whether we should be on the lookout for a miscreant loaded down with freshly pressed shirts. Later, we learned that he had robbed a drugstore at gunpoint and could be anywhere.

But he didn't come here. The lockdown was cancelled just before noon, which was good because we thought we might need a police escort just to get out to lunch. All the new hires have now been thoroughly oriented and are ready to go and face the world of teaching.

Or dancing, as the case may be.

Walk on

Three cheers for my new shoes! They're cute and comfortable and appropriate for the classroom, and my colleague says they make my big boat feet look smaller. But best of all, I've been walking around in them all morning and my feet don't hurt. Not one bit. I even brought a back-up pair of shoes to campus today because it generally hurts to break in a new pair of shoes, but so far, no pain.

That kind of performance deserves some applause!

The season of excess

Too many tomatoes.
Not enough refrigerator space.

Too many meetings.
Not enough time.

Too much heat, haze, humidity.
Too little energy.

Too much flesh.
Not enough fabric.

Too much too much.
Enough.

To the colleague in whose office I accidentally left my gym bag:

Don't look in the bag. Trust me, there's nothing in there you need--unless you've been concealing a serious sweat-sock fetish. I had a really good workout this afternoon, so everything in that bag is saturated with sweat and whatever my towel soaked up when I dropped it on the shower-room floor.

I wish I could drop by and pick up my gym bag this evening, but I didn't realize it was missing until I got home and found myself wondering why I was standing in the laundry room gazing at the gaping mouth of the laundry hamper but unable to feed it. What's missing from this picture? Gym clothes, which are in the gym bag, which, for some unknown reason, is not in my hand.

I mentally retraced my steps to try to track down the bag: did I leave it in the parking lot? In my office? Somewhere in between? That's when I remembered that I had stopped by your office to ask a burning question regarding faculty governance just before leaving campus. I recall setting my gym bag down on the chair and then moving it to the floor, where it's probably still sitting.

Left unattended, my dirty sweaty stinky gym clothes will eventually evolve into a festering mass of disgustingness and stink, creating its own ecosystem and manufacturing disease spores by the millions. Here's my advice: step away from the gym bag, moving slowly so as not to alarm the incipient microorganisms that dwell within. Place the oxygen mask firmly over your own face before assisting other passengers with their masks. Do not--repeat, NOT--open the bag.

Unless you're doing laundry tonight anyway, in which case, it's all yours.

Stop me before I click again!

After spending most of the day getting caught up on all manner of piddly little problems, I am now a lean, mean clicking machine.

A transfer student wants to major in English and needs to register for classes: I click my way through the online course catalog in search of classes that still have space (very few) and then click on through the registration process to get her a meaningful schedule of classes.

My son needs his student loan cosigned for fall semester--his penultimate semester in college! I click my way through the Wells-Fargo site, wondering how long it will take them to insist that I fax them a recent pay stub to verify my income. How many times have I answered these same questions and faxed the same supporting documents? Don't think about it--just keep clicking.

My proposal to present a paper at a conference in Prague in November was accepted, so I clicked my way through a travel site to book a flight, clicked through another site to book lodging at the conference hotel, clicked through the process of paying the conference fee online, and then clicked open the application for a travel grant to cover all these expenses. I won't learn whether the travel grant is approved until October at the earliest, but the conference deadlines are much sooner than that and the airfare will just increase the longer I wait, so I'm booking everything now and trusting that the college isn't planning to drastically cut travel funds this fall.

And I clicked my way through a deluge of e-mail that piled up after I took Friday off. How much e-mail can pile up on one business day? Enough to fill my morning with clicking and typing, clicking and typing.

Now I've finally run out of stuff to click on and I'm ready for a break. The Annual Autumn Many-Meeting Marathon begins tomorrow. If any of my meetings includes a clicking contest, the smart money is on me.

A Bimbo breakfast

Today's New York Times features an article about English muffins--not a particularly sexy topic, and yet it requires references to "a Bimbo vice president" and "a Bimbo spokesman" and "Bimbo employees" and even "the nook and cranny cognoscenti." There's a reference to "muffin culture" and an attempt to break "Thomas' English muffin code," which makes me wonder what's going on in the pantry when no one is looking.

All of this silliness is presented without a wink or a nudge from the journalist, one William Neuman, who should get a prize for his ability to write deadpan business prose about all those Bimbos. I'll never again eat an English muffin without thinking about the nook and cranny cognoscenti. Thank you, William Neuman, for contributing Bimbos to this complete breakfast.

Ten lashes with a poisonous tentacle

Last spring I put a lot of effort into convincing myself and others that I was perfectly fine with the idea of staying home all summer, not taking a vacation (except a few days to visit my daughter), not doing much beyond the usual round of gardening, writing, reading, preparing for classes. I need some down time, I told myself. I had too much excitement in my life last summer and I need to be still and recover.

Ha!

The lady doth protest too much. Making virtue of necessity is like making bricks without straw: it wears you out and all you have to show for your labor is a pile of bricks.

Now the summer is essentially over and my colleagues are returning refreshed and reinvigorated and ready to chatter about their vacations in exotic places, but I have little to add to the conversation: I weeded the garden, planned teaching workshops, submitted articles to journals. And I went to Akron--twice!

My besetting sin of envy threatened to get the upper hand earlier this week when a colleague kept sending me e-mail messages urging me to perform a particular task that I was unable to perform without first obtaining some essential information from people who were not available because they're out of town at the moment. I decided to try to calm down the frantic e-mailer with a personal visit, but when I went to the appropriate office, I discovered that the colleague in question has not yet returned from a certain tropical isle.

Anyone who wants to crack the whip at me while comfortably ensconced on a tropical island can just go jump in the ocean, preferably while it's infested with stinging jellyfish.

Okay, that's just mean. I clearly need a vacation. Even a mental vacation would help. I'm taking the day off tomorrow: what can I do on a limited budget in one day that will make up for not having a vacation all summer long?

Performing the authentic self

Two days ago I wrote about the much-forwarded New York Times article on the problem of plagiarism (read it here), but I get a little nervous about commenting on an article that's commenting on a book that I haven't read. So yesterday morning I e-mailed our library director and suggested that he order Susan Blum's book My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture, and an hour later the book was in my hands. Note to self: next time, check the library catalog first.

So I've been reading My Word, which is simultaneously interesting and infuriating. Blum takes an anthropological approach to college student culture, seeking data through interviews conducted with students over several years. The interviews offer a rare look inside the minds of college students at a selective private college, but they are studded with unexplained ellipses, leading me to wonder what has been deleted. Still, the students' words provide insight into attitudes that often puzzle me when I encounter them in the classroom.

Surely be the most controversial part of Blum's book is her assertion that today's students experience selfhood differently from their forebears. She distinguishes between two types of selves, "the authentic self" and the "performance self":

"The authentic self celebrates uniqueness, individual contribution, essence, fixity, and authorship. It is inner-directed. Its words are its own, and are always meant and sincerely believed. The performance self celebrates collaboration, incorporation, fluidity, and appearance. It is goal-oriented. Its words are derived from many different sources and may be spoken or written in earnest or in jest, with conviction or just to get along" (61).

The academy, says Blum, cherishes the authentic self, while the "performance self, however, is more likely to regard boundaries between its own and others' contributions as permeable, to focus on accomplishing goals by any means necessary, and to regard the origins of textual material as unimportant" (61). Blum admits that students might possess a mixture of these two types of selves, but "[t]o the extent that students share the values of the performance self, they are more likely to regard both cheating and intertextual plagiarism as valid strategies, to juggle outward appearances and behavior to fit others' expectations, and to incorporate texts casually in all aspects of their self-expression" (61).

Here is my question: if today's students are so adept at performing selves to meet the demands of various environments, why can't they create a convincing performance of an authentic self? If the academy promotes and rewards the characteristics of the authentic self, why not perform those characteristics, adopting, if only for a limited time, a concern for originality in written expression and proper citation of others' ideas? Blum justly applauds students' abilities to step into various personas online and in real life (whatever that is these days), but why can't one of those personas be the "authentic self" avatar?

Suppose a student gives me a paper that presents original ideas in the student's own words and properly credits sources: would I have any way of knowing whether the paper is a product of an authentic self or a performance self temporarily adopting the characteristics of authenticity? Would it matter? I hope I'm not in the business of grading a student's sense of selfhood; like my colleagues, I evaluate students based on what they produce, how they perform required tasks. Blum seems to be arguing that "the performance self" makes it more difficult for students to fulfill these tasks without cheating, but an ability to perform various roles in response to changing conditions ought to make students more, not less, adept at producing honest work, or at least the semblance of honest work.

I believe in authenticity and integrity and wholeness and all those quaint values Blum believes are dying out, and I'm not ready to applaud cheating as evidence of the creativity of the performance self. A self that wants my applause just needs to perform the traits of academic integrity. A temporary performance of academic integrity will get the same A as genuine integrity, and the "performance self" just might find integrity addictive.

Taking flight

My teeny-tiny infant boy turns 21 today and I've been wavering between feeling mushily nostalgic and just feeling old. The first thing the obstetrician said on delivering Steve was "We have a scrawny boy!", but he's not scrawny now and he hasn't been for a long time. He's tall and clever and witty, a college senior this fall, and he just earned his commercial pilot's license a few weeks ago.

He's working in Texas this summer but he'll be home in a few weeks for a brief visit, so we'll celebrate his birthday then with a family trip to see a Cleveland Indians game. He hasn't been home since Christmas and every time we see him he seems to have grown a foot taller, or maybe I've shrunk, or maybe my perspective has shifted a bit, or maybe he's just acting his age.

Which is 21 today. Woo-hoo. The last of the fledglings has left the nest and appears to have landed safely. Here's to many more safe landings!

A pastiche of personas

By the time I got to the office this morning, three different people had already e-mailed me the link to a New York Times article on plagiarism (read it here). The article indulges in the usual hand-wringing about the ease of copying from the Internet, but it also suggests a connection between a rise in plagiarism and a change in the concept of personal identity.

The article quotes Susan D. Blum, an anthropologist a the University of Notre Dame, whose research among undergraduate college students led her to conclude that "student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today--TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs."

Let's just overlook the fact that pastiche has been driving "creative endeavors" longer than television has existed--witness, for instance, James Joyce or Jean Toomer. More interesting is Blum's assertion about the decline of unitary identity. According to the article, Blum said "the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual," while "undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity...than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking."

Blum seems to be saying that our students live in a multiple-choice world in which "all of the above" is always a viable option; they need not limit themselves to one identity each, and "If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it's O.K. if you say other people's words, it's O.K. if you say things you don't believe, it's O.K. if you write papers you couldn't care less about because you accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade."

Blum wants us to recognize that our "notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning," but authorship is not giving up without a fight and neither is the notion of integrity--a word, the OED reminds us, that springs from the Latin "integer" and suggests a sense of being whole, undivided, sound and complete.

Can integrity spring from a pastiche of personas?

Where does a person devoted to improvising new identities from a pastiche of fragments experience wholeness?

And what happens when the pastiche identity encounters an academic culture devoted to integrity?

I don't know the answers but those of us involved in teaching writing had better be thinking about the questions.