Acknowledged

I was just looking over a sample textbook that arrived in the mail when I happened upon my name. There I am on page xli nestled amidst the Acknowledgments section that thanks a long list of faculty who "gave generously of their time when asked to review the text." That's not quite true, though: I didn't exactly give my time but rather sold it in exchange for a nice little check. That's the way it works: I read the draft textbook and respond in detail to a long list of pesky questions about content and format, and in exchange I receive a tidy sum and a listing in the acknowledgments.

Will I use this textbook? Possibly, but one place I won't use it is on my vita. I've always felt that there's something a little cheesy about listing textbook reviews on a vita, as if being paid to offer suggestions on someone else's work were equivalent to publishing a journal article.

(What about encyclopedia articles? I would feel a little better about putting those on a vita because they are my original work and they require some research, but I wouldn't put them up in neon lights.)

I realize that there's some disagreement about this and I'm probably wrong and insensitive and hopelessly elitist, so feel free to correct me. Still, I've done one or two textbook reviews each year for eight or ten years but I don't intend to list them my vita. I did the work, received my pay, and appreciate the acknowledgment, but that's really all I expect from the endeavor.

Cutting remarks

This morning I chatted with a former student of mine who is just about done with her Physician's Assistant degree and has received offers to work in pediatrics or obstetrics/gynecology. I asked which one she would prefer and she chose the latter because, she explained, "I like surgery."

She seemed sober and sane when she said it so I'm sure it's true, but I still find her statement puzzling--because, frankly, I don't like surgery. I don't like undergoing surgery or observing surgery and I can't imagine liking performing surgery. When I was a kid watching MASH on TV with the family, I always had to close my eyes or turn away whenever they showed the surgery scenes. I don't even like watching people get poked with needles. Heck, I don't watch when I'm being poked with needles--I show the nurse the best spot to poke and then I turn away and think about oceans or trees or anything other than needles.

It's not the pain that bothers me. If pain were the problem, then I would have no problem watching other people get poked with needles. I just suffer from a deep, visceral conviction that the appropriate place for blood is inside one's arteries and I find it disconcerting when it escapes.

I've just read David Denby's New Yorker review of the film 127 Hours, in which rock-climber Aron Ralston amputates his own arm to escape a tight space, and I can promise that the closest I'll get to that film is David Denby's review. He concludes with two pieces of advice: "First, be sure to sharpen your knife before you go on a solo hiking trip, in case you have to cut your arm off. Second, always call your mom back."

If I'm ever in a situation requiring amputating my own arm, I'll ignore his first piece of advice because it doesn't matter how sharp my knife is if I'm too squeamish to take the first cut. But I will call my mom. She spent many years as a nurse and I have no doubt that if her daughter were in danger, she would know where to cut.

Or I might call my former student who likes surgery. As long as the world contains people like me, I have to be grateful for people like her.

The red badge of normal

Twelve months after my final round of chemotherapy, I've just received results of my recent follow-up medical tests: blood tests normal; chest x-ray normal; CT scan normal. Normal normal normal. Sounds really good, doesn't it?

I had the tests last Wednesday morning just after my American Lit class, so I had to lead a discussion of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage without the benefit of caffeine or breakfast, and then I had to drink an entire bottle of that wretched barium sulfate smoothie in the middle of class. It's difficult to devote full attention to the plight of poor Henry Fleming while one's entire being revolts against the glue-like texture of that drink. I wanted to follow Henry in running screaming from the battlefield, but even he eventually had to turn around and run back.

So I took my medicine, submitted my body to the medical machines, and came away wearing a band-aid--but at the time I didn't know what my little red badge represented. For a week I've been wondering what the tests would reveal and struggling (not always successfully) to keep the chattering monkeys of fear locked in their cages. Now the results are in and I'm proudly carrying around the red badge of normal. Normal normal normal. Lovely ring, that word. I think I'll say it again.

Freeze-face strikes again!

I was sitting in a meeting earlier this week when I suddenly heard my mother's voice giving that familiar warning, "You'd better watch out or your face will freeze like that."

Like what? I wouldn't want my face to freeze the way it looks when I'm sitting silently in a meeting that's going on too long without getting anywhere, or the way it looks when I'm glued to my computer screen sorting through message after message after message, or the way it looks when I've been reading too many student drafts one after another without a break.

When I sit too long, I need to get up and stretch my legs; when my face gets plastered into one unpleasant look for too long, I need to give it some exercise. That's when it's time to laugh. There's nothing like a deep-down belly laugh to wipe that dreadful look off my face.

It's easy enough to find an excuse to laugh when I'm in my office; I just have to browse the titles on my humor shelf or click on a link (like this one that one my daughter send me today, which offers an amusing variation on the "I Before E" spelling rule). But I can't break out YouTube in the middle of a meeting with my colleagues or whip out a little P.G. Wodehouse while conferring with the college trustees, can I? "Excuse me, I know this whole budget thing is kind of important, but my facial muscles require a brief respite so would you mind if I were to read aloud the passage where Edwin the Boy Scout wallops Bertie Wooster over the head with a hockey stick?"

No, sometimes laughter is not the best medicine. Those situations call for a different prescription, an alternative method to fight frozen-face syndrome--but what other exercise would stretch the facial muscles far outside their normal confines?

Excuse me, but this post is so boring I just can't stop yawning.

Tuesday's child--or Wednesday's, as the case may be

I was talking to a colleague when we were interrupted by a gaggle of students trying to sign up for advising appointments on the schedule posted on his office door. Suddenly my colleague called out, 'That's yesterday! You all signed up for yesterday!"

Yesterday one of my advisees showed up for an appointment scheduled for next Monday, and last Friday an advisee, apparently suffering from the delusion that the weekend had already started, missed an appointment entirely.

At least I'm not the only one who can't always remember what day it is! I stand in a Tuesday/Thursday class telling them that a particular assignment is due on Friday, and they remind me that we don't have class on Friday. "If today is Tuesday, then the assignment is due on Thursday," I explain, "but if today is Wednesday, I'm in the wrong class."

I've been assuming that my difficulty in keeping track of the days of the week is a sign of aging, so I find recent encounters with confused students reassuring. If young people in the prime of life lose track of the day of the week, then perhaps age is not the issue here. Maybe we're all just trying to do too many things and moving so quickly we can't keep up with ourselves.

Or maybe it really is Wednesday. If so, I'm going to stop worrying about my Tuesday committee meeting because it's already over. I wonder what we did? I would ask my colleagues, but they're so busy trying to teach their advisees the days of the week that they probably wouldn't remember.

Time bandits

In my younger days when I could see well enough to thread a needle, I used to spend a lot of time doing cross-stitch. When you visit my house, you will note a number of my cross-stitch pieces gracing the walls, each one testifying to many hours of painstaking labor.

No one ever asked me, "Why do you waste so much time doing cross-stitch when you could be doing something more important?" Similarly, it would never occur to me to ask my colleagues on the faculty bowling team, "Why do you waste so much time bowling when you could be doing something more important?" Or to ask my colleague with the impressive collection of antique bottles, "Why do you waste so much time scouring flea markets and sales when you could be doing something more important?"

So it always startles me when someone asks, "Why do you waste so much time blogging when you could be doing something more important?" I get defensive. I splutter: "It's not that much time! Thirty minutes a day, tops!" But they shake their heads and gripe, "But that's thirty minutes you could spend grading papers or preparing classes."

Which is true, but it's also thirty minutes I'm not spending bowling or collecting bottles or kayaking or golfing or playing Farmville or trying to organize a faculty paintball team. I don't play sports and I don't collect stuff and I don't play games on Facebook and my eyes won't let me cross stitch anymore, but I like to play with words. It makes me happy. What other reason do I need?

Tales from the crypt

Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary over why we never sit around telling ghost stories anymore, suddenly I sat surrounded in the stacks! Poe's verses pounded from my lips as guests, astounded, leaned and listened as of yore. In the crypt-like stacks they leaned and listened as of yore--only this, and nothing more.

Sorry about that, folks. Poe seems to have taken up residence in my skull since last night's Ghost Stories from the Stacks event, where I read "The Raven" to a hushed crowd intent upon capturing every word of Poe's galloping and alliterative verse. Students, staff, faculty members, and even a few college trustees chatted over cookies and cider before gathering in the dimly lit library basement to listen to ghost stories long into the night.

The library staff outdid themselves preparing for this first-ever event: backlit skeleton silhouettes hung from the library windows; visitors entered the library through a mist of faux fog and were greeted by librarians who looked as if they'd stepped out of a Charles Addams drawing. They had set up chairs for 25 or 30 people, but 60 showed up for the first reading at 10:00 and more for the second reading at 11. The staff brought more chairs, but even so, some students sat on the floor in the flickering light and eagerly listened to tales from the crypt.

Several of the ghost stories were set in southern Ohio or West Virginia, but a few old classics from elsewhere crept in as well: "The Monkey's Paw," "The Golden Arm," and, of course, "The Raven." A mixed group of students, faculty, and staff read the stories from a throne-like chair, introduced by the library director swathed in a black cape. From the chair I could see the faces of only those students sitting on the floor; the rest of the crowd disappeared into the darkness while the stacks loomed behind them. The crowd didn't mutter or shuffle or fiddle with cell phones; they simply leaned forward intently, listening enrapt as scary stories unfolded in the flickering light.

Given the success of last night's event, will Ghost Stories from the Stacks return another year? Quoth the librarian, "Evermore!"

My dream student

A correspondent wants to know what I wish students would learn in high school so they would be prepared for my classes at Marietta. That's a difficult question because high school is simply too late for students to learn many of the things I'd like them to know.

I would be delighted, for instance, if all my students arrived on campus with a passion for reading, but who is responsible for instilling that passion? A particularly scintillating high school English teacher can inspire or nurture her students' love of literature, but it's difficult to quantify that passion on standardized tests or justify its inclusion in the curriculum. Further, if the student's family or peer groups and popular culture disdain reading, who will help that love of reading grow?

Likewise critical thinking: high school classes can certainly introduce critical thinking skills and employ methods that encourage critical thinking, but at some point the student has to take responsibility for his own thought processes. (Or, as Dorothy Parker is reputed to have stated, "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.")

But I suspect my correspondent wants more practical suggestions. What should students know before they get to my class? Here are the top five items on my wish list, in no particular order:

1. The ability to adapt writing style to the needs of various contexts and audiences. (To U or not to U? That is the question.)

2. The ability to evaluate the reliability of various types of sources. Some days I'd be happy if students demonstrated an awareness that there's more to research than Google and Wikipedia.

3. The ability to locate answers to questions about grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style. I don't expect students to have memorized the MLA handbook, but if they're uncertain about whether a title should be underlined or placed in quotation marks, I'd like them to know how to find the answer for themselves.

4. The ability to write a clear, straightforward thesis statement that's not hedged about with qualifiers and weasel-words like "I feel" or "I think" or "It seems to me" or "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion so who am I to say?"

5. The ability to draw on prior knowledge combined with the willingness to put aside every pettifogging grammar peeve, every SparkNote-worthy interpretation, and every prefabricated argument in order to tackle a reading or writing task from a fresh perspective.

Sure, it would be great if all my students could spell and use semicolons and properly employ the subjunctive mood, but if all my students came to me with the five characteristics above, I'd be happy.

How about you?

History on the Midway

Today I experienced a harmonic convergence of concepts from two very different classes. My American literature class is immersed in the literature and culture of the 1890s while my honors literature class is discussing the Holocaust as portrayed in Art Speigelman's Maus. What could these two classes possibly have in common?

The honors class today began with an excerpt from Theda Purdue's book Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895 describing the "Old Plantation" section of the Midway, where visitors were invited to experience an "authentic" display of slave life: happy slaves singing, dancing, cracking wise. Purdue explains, "The depiction of slavery at the Old Plantation resonated with northern as well as southern whites, since both had been schooled in the sentimentality of Negro spirituals, antics of minstrel shows, and stereotypes of coon songs. Slavery, in their minds, had not been so bad."

As I often point out in my American literature classes, this nostalgia for the Old Plantation was quite common in the 1890s and early 20th century, when minstrel shows abounded and fairs all over the country put re-enactments of slavery on display (for an example and photos from Buffalo, New York, in 1901, click here). But if portrayals of slavery as a benevolent institution were so common 100 years ago, why don't we see an Old Plantation display at Epcot? Why doesn't Disney World have an "Escape from the Old Plantation" thrill ride? Why has the Old Plantation booth disappeared from the Midway?

My students have no problem coming up with answers for these questions: slavery meant more than spirituals and cake walks; the Old Plantation myth sanitized and suppressed the messy, painful parts of history. We know better now.

And then we get to the Holocaust. Maus asks us to consider how "survivors" are marked by history, whether it's acceptable to profit from the pain of others, and how art and literature can represent history too horrible to comprehend. In the 1890s, some Americans sanitized slavery and contained it safely in easily digestible form for fair-goers; Spiegelman, on the other hand, repeatedly emphasizes the messiness of history, its resistance to control, its insistence on spilling outside the bounds of his comic-strip panels. His story is never slick and tidy like a theme park but instead fragmentary and incomplete, pockmarked with ugly facts and details that seem to shift shape at will.

The most interesting parts of the story are simply gone--the mother's journals burned, the fate of many characters unknown. About one character Vladek explains, "He got killed. Or he died. I know they finished him." In the next panel he suggests one possible narrative: "Maybe on the walk to work, a guard grabbed his cap away. So what could he do? He ran to pick it up. And the guard shot on him for trying to escape." But in the next panel he adds, "I don't know if this was how it was with Mandelbaum-only that very often they did so."

The Midway version of history has no room for "maybe" and the Theme Park no space for details that don't fit into tidy boxes. Everyone's smiling on the Midway, even President Grover Cleveland, who visited the Old Plantation display at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895 and found it quite entertaining. Why couldn't fair-goers in 1895 see through that slick, smiling, one-sided portrayal of history? Why did they accept the artificial image instead of demanding the whole messy story?

And are we doing any better today?

Elemental

Many people (two) have asked about my brief illustrious career as cobalt.


Not that kind of cobalt.



Not that kind either. Nor was I an element in the "so-called Cobalt real estate scam" in which three men were "convicted of defrauding more than 250 people of $23 million" (read it here).

No, I was a different kind of element--the cobalt that appears on the Periodic Table at number 27.



Yes, that kind of cobalt. In the inaugural 6K Mole Day Fun Run (and walk) last Saturday, an event sponsored by the college's Chemistry Club to raise funds for student scholarships in honor of a retired professor, participants were labeled not with numbers but with elements from the Periodic Table. I proudly represented cobalt, fending off advances from a retired professor who lusted after my label. He had spent his entire career studying cobalt but carried the carbon card in the race. (An inorganic chemist representing carbon--just a little chemical humor there.)

I gave him my cobalt card after I completed the race. At that point I was so relieved at finishing the course that I no longer cared what element I carried--carbon, cobalt, carborundum, whatever. I'm pleased to report that I didn't come in dead last. A few emeritus faculty members and a mother pushing a stroller ambled in behind me.

But winning wasn't the object (for me, anyway--some of those race-walkers looked like they were taking the event pretty seriously). They tell me that cobalt appears naturally only in combination with other chemicals, so I followed cobalt's example and mingled with other elements to see what sort of reaction might occur. We shared some conversation, honored a retired colleague, and raised a nice little pile of money. See what nice things can happen when elements work together?

Poetry lessons

Every poet and every student of poetry and everyone who reads or writes or thinks about poetry ought to read The Poetry Lesson by Andrei Codrescu, a fanciful and cynical and altogether exhilarating description of the first class session in an Introduction to Poetry class and a brief book ranging widely through the author's encounters with poets living and dead. How is it possible for a dead poet to shoot a gun at a living devotee of poetry? You'll have to read the book to learn the answer to that question, as well as others:

On whether poetry is teachable: "Unfortunately, poetry was exceedingly teachable. One reached for the end of any thread in the tangled ball of yarn of what we know and pulled: the thing unraveled and that was poetry. I had trained thousands to pull a thread from this ball of life-yarn, and now they trail strings wherever they walk, true kittens of capitalism."

On the difference between professors and poets: "The professors are not afflicted by the identity crisis that is my only subject. They go about in the certainty of their well-cultivated fields and keep adding what they can to the antheap of text before them. My job, I think, is to burn all that came before me--by handing my predecessors to the students to misunderstand, if it comes to that, which it obviously does."

On why American students seem so much younger than Europeans: "the right to a prolonged childhood was hard fought-for and laboriously won by generation after generation, wherever and whenever. The long, physical strain of standing and fighting only to earn the right to lie down and dream was humanity's story."

On what a poet needs: "Every poet worth his or her salt, and, trust me, this is the only reward we get for the hard work we do, and in this sense we are still one with the ancient Romans who valued salt above all else, as does, I'm sure, the Borden family, whose cows, no matter what their level of culture, still require their salt licks, every salty poet, then, had a good fountain pen."

That's a sentence I would give my eye-teeth to have written, but if I couldn't write it, I can at least enjoy the experience of encountering it in print.

Another reason to love where I live

The thermometer read 30 degrees under overcast skies when I left this morning to walk the inaugural Mole Day Fun Run, but by the time I got home and did some house-cleaning, the temperature had risen to 70 degrees and the sun was shining. I hauled a comfy chair out into the sunniest spot in the backyard and settled in to relax with a book, a cup of hot tea, and a stinky dog. The gentle sound of dry leaves rustling in the breeze could have sent me straight to sleep if it hadn't been for the shots.

Target practice or fireworks? The nearest neighbors are hosting a wedding this weekend and the sharp sounds issued from the former cow pasture where the groom recently built his house; given the number of pickup trucks parked up there, I suspect bachelor-party hijinks. Hopeful abandoned me to cower under the deck, but I stayed where I was. The shots and occasional hoots and hollers seemed an appropriate backdrop to the Stephen Crane war stories I was reading, and I wanted to spend time with the lovely yellow trees before all the leaves fall off and it gets too cold to enjoy them.

After a while the shots ceased and all the pickup trucks went racing down the road and out of my life (for now). Hopeful came out from under the deck and sat in front of me with an expression that seemed to ask what all the fuss was about, but before I could answer, she went bounding down the hill to investigate something more interesting. I went back to my book.

The trees just stood there.

Astute and helpful sub

When the HMS Astute, a nuclear submarine touted as Britain's stealthiest, gets stuck in the mud off the Isle of Skye (read it here), a number of questions come to mind: What was the sub scouting for in that particular spot? Wasn't anyone minding the periscope? Can sonar detect mud?

One question no one seems to be asking, though, is this: Where's Winnie-the-Pooh when you need him?

I find it impossible to hear the word "astute" without thinking immediately of the situation described in chapter 8 of The House at Pooh Corner: venturing out on a windy day to wish his friend Owl a Very Happy Thursday, Pooh finds himself, not unlike the HMS Astute, stuck--not not in the mud but beneath an arm-chair after the wind knocks over Owl's house. After Owl and Piglet release Pooh, the intrepid friends consider how to get out of the house when the front door has been inconveniently relocated to the ceiling.

No need to call in the tugboats when Pooh gives his mind to the problem:

Pooh's mind had gone back to the day when he had saved Piglet from the flood, and everybody had admired him so much; and as that didn't often happen, he thought he would like it to happen again. And suddenly, just as it had come before, an idea came to him.

"Owl," said Pooh. "I thought of something."

"Astute and Helpful Bear," said Owl."

Pooh looked proud at being called a stout and helpful bear, and said modestly that he just happened to think of it....

If you don't know what Pooh happened to think of, you'll have to go read the book yourself. When I read this as a very small child I marveled over Owl's impressive vocabulary, but I even then I knew that "Astute" and "stout" were not at all the same thing. The word "astute" arises rarely but when it does, I think of Pooh--and I'm probably not the only one. Has a Winnie-the-Pooh fan insinuated himself into the process of naming British nuclear subs?

I have no doubt Pooh could solve the problem of dislodging the HMS Astute, and afterward he would commemorate the feat by composing a hum. Sing ho for the life of a sub! And then let's all sit down amongst the honey-pots for a little smackerel of something.

Funky skunky

Hopeful looks about the same as she always does as she bounds toward me eager to play, but if she were a cartoon dog, her body would be surrounded by powerful aroma rays.

She had tangled with a skunk.

So that's what all that night-time barking was about! In the past I've tried to maintain ignorance of Hopeful's solitary activities. I turn a blind eye to the treasures she brings home, the chunks of deer carcass and the occasional dead possum, but there's no ignoring the smell of skunk.

She doesn't seem at all bothered by her funky smell; in fact, she seems downright proud. She's an outdoor dog who never comes inside and she's free to roam our woods without fear of encountering anyone likely to be offended by the smell of skunk, so I'm inclined to just let her stink. She can splash in the creek and roll in pine needles and eventually the reek will diminish.

Meanwhile, I'll just have to endure the aroma rays--and hold her at arm's length when she runs up to play.

Minutes and memory

Midway through my life's journey through a dark wood of minutes from past faculty meetings, I stumbled on something remarkable: myself. I was trying to figure out when a particular change had been made in the faculty handbook but I had absolutely no memory of the matter, so I was delighted when a prior faculty chair directed me to the appropriate minutes from 2006--and there I was. According to the minutes, a younger me made a motion that the older me can't even recall.

I do, however, recall yesterday afternoon, when Faculty Council approved a method to consider faculty members' advising activities in annual evaluations and tenure reviews. Several of us have encountered various incarnations of this proposal on different committees over the years, but how long has this idea been bouncing around? In another foray into minute-mania, I stumbled upon the fact that Faculty Council had discussed the need to find a way to evaluate advising way back in 2001. Nine years later, we can put a fork in it and call it done.

How long will it take this action to delete itself from memory? We'd better pat ourselves on the back right away before we forget everything we've accomplished!

Tragic flaws

Midway through Scarlett Thomas's novel Our Tragic Universe, the main character lists the problems with her novel-in-progress: "It is boring; it has no focus; it is self-indulgent; I hate the central character; it's too depressing; no one wants anything; no one does anything; there are no questions to be resolved; there is too much narration." Tragically, this same list could apply to Our Tragic Universe.

Soon after this passage, the main character (whose name I've already forgotten even though I just finished the novel yesterday) actually starts wanting and doing, but by then I don't care. She is an annoying character in an unbelievable relationship with an impossible person in a novel full of characters who can't basic conversations without launching into earnest speeches about any number of arcane topics vaguely related to the plot of the novel.

Plot? What plot? Annoying woman asks the universe for wonderful things which the universe then helpfully provides, enabling her to finally break free of the unbelievable relationship with the impossible person while making a lot of rambling speeches about arcane topics.

Thomas's earlier novel, The End of Mr. Y, also features impossible relationships and characters who make speeches instead of conversing, but The End of Mr. Y is more entertaining than Our Tragic Universe and comes equipped with a plot that creates some real suspense, while Our Tragic Universe is less compelling. It is boring. It has no focus. It is self-indulgent. How helpful of the author to have included in the novel this handy list of its faults!

Synonymously yours

Yesterday at a meeting I heard someone say, "If you populate the synonym, you can leave everything else blank." In context, it made perfect sense. I know how to populate the synonym! I do it all the time! Well, not all the time, but several times a year during course registration season. Anyone who uses this particular online registration system quickly learns that populating the synonym is an essential skill.

Recently I received in the mail a review copy of a textbook that's just a little out of date. How can I tell? Here is a representative passage from the chapter on online research:

Don't get scared away by all the techno-jargon. The way most of these gizmos work is that you sit down at a keyboard in the library and choose from an on-screen 'menu'--a selection of choices. Each choice produces a new menu, until you narrow your search to exactly what you want. Then by pushing a button--usually marked 'print'--you print out what you see on the screen. So you leave the library with a printed 'hard copy' of the information you need...

Remember, this textbook is intended for American college students, who are unlikely to be "scared away" by such "techno-jargon" as "menu" and "hard copy." The book was published in 1996, which doesn't feel all that long ago, but its solicitous explanations of how to use the Internet as a helpful research tool feel downright quaint. "Nowadays," we're told, "even inexpensive computers come with modems, meaning you can work in the most remote locations and still have at your desk a very sophisticated reference library." Right. The book even tells us how to locate an internet service provider by looking in the yellow pages under "Internet services." The one term in this entire chapter that students might find unfamiliar is "yellow pages."

Which goes to show, I suppose, that today's techno-jargon is tomorrow's quaint throwback to a simpler time. Ah, how young and innocent we all once were, back when the yellow pages were a book and the card catalog was a great big piece of furniture! One of these days we'll be tottering around the nursing home fondly recalling that primitive time when populating the synonym was pretty hot stuff, and the young folks will pat our hands patronizingly and say, "She's raving again, poor thing."

So we'd better enjoy our opportunities to wield techno-jargon while we can. Populate that synonym--before it's too late!

Kafkaesque

A few updates:

My on-again, off-again romance with the mortgage lenders of America is on again as I seem to have located a loan officer who thinks we might be worthy of trust. "Let's just ignore your husband's income," he said. "That'll make it easier on all of us." Of course he demanded more documents, more signatures, more data. Story of my life!

I've finished editing my paper for the November conference in Prague and I'm awaiting word on whether I'll have funding, which hasn't stopped me from thinking about packing for the trip. What sort of reading matter will get me through an all-night flight through three international airports? Kafka would be appropriate but I'd like to stay sane--at least until I've delivered my paper.

And our long hike in Hocking Hills last week left me feeling refreshed and invigorated but also stiff and sore. After a few more outings on our local hills, I've decided to blame my decrepit hiking shoes. But who has time to shop? I'm too busy rounding up documents.

Tater tots

Growing sweet potatoes is an act of faith: they spend the summer spreading lovely deep green vines and leaves all over the garden, but you never know what the harvest will look like until you start digging. Last year we had a decent number of small-to-middling sweet potatoes, but today we kept pulling up bundles of potatoes that looked as if they were pumped up on steroids. I'd never seen a sweet potato this big--until we pulled up an even bigger one a few minutes later. I guess we're all set for Thanksgiving!

A kick in the asterisk

Ever since we started trying to refinance our mortgage, people have been telling me what a terrific time this is to refinance and what a difference refinancing made for them: "We'll have our house paid off in 15 years instead of 30!" "Our monthly payments were reduced by 30 percent!" "Our new interest rate is so low the bank sends us money every month!" Okay, I made up that last one, but it captures the tone of my colleagues' comments.

Our experience has been different. I don't want to go into a lot of painful details about a process that continues to drag on into its fourth heart-wrenching week, but we've run into a few snags, not the least being that my husband's income does not fit neatly into the kinds of little electronic boxes loan officers like to fill up with honking big numbers. Everything about our financial situation seems to require an asterisk. We're just not normal, which shouldn't surprise any regular readers of this site but seems to have utterly befuddled our loan officers.

The whole process has been a huge burden and a distraction and a pain in the brain and we don't seem to be any closer to a final answer than we were a month ago, but we have to keep pushing on or face Dire Consequences. So when I ought to be preparing for classes or doing committee work or writing clever blog posts or editing conference papers, I'm tracking down documents to explain those annoying asterisks next to all those little boxes on loan forms or I'm meeting with loan officers who have never encountered our kind of weirdness before and don't know how to deal with it. This makes me want to go home and pull the covers over my head.

But I go on, wending my way through the asterisks armed only with a pen and a sheaf of documents. I'm trying not to think about that miserable Dickensian character--is it in Bleak House?--whose life withers away while she waves sheaves of documents in the faces of powerful people who can't (or won't) try to understand them. Instead, I'm trying to cherish my asterisks. We are so very unusual that the banks don't know what to do with us! I feel so special I could just scream!

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.