Assessing a flawed assignment

Last day of classes! Time to reflect on what went well, what didn't, and why.

Rarely do I teach a class without wishing I had done something differently, but I have no regrets whatsoever about this semester's Honors Literature class. I could have added one more reading assignment in the final week just to keep students on their toes, but at that point my students were so involved in final projects for all their classes that they couldn't complain about the lack of additional reading in mine. Terrific students, interesting material, engaging assignments--it's all good.

The Representative American Writers class was another story, but the problems with that class were mostly of my own making. I need to think about whether to institute an attendance policy in upper-level literature classes, and I probably should have required an annotated bibliography to get students engaged in their final research projects at an earlier point in the semester. The biggest problem, though, arose when my attempt to solve one problem created several others.

In an upper-level literature course, I expect students to become acquainted with the scholarly conversation on the literature under discussion, which requires reading theoretical and analytical articles from books and academic journals. In the past, I would assign certain articles to the entire class so we could discuss them together. This, however, offered students a very limited window into the scholarly conversation, so I began selecting a wider variety of articles and assigning them to individual students, who had to summarize the articles for the rest of the class.

At first students presented their summaries to the class orally, which failed to inspire in-depth discussion, perhaps because of performance anxiety or perhaps because the students did not have time to cogitate over the ideas they were being asked to discuss. So a few years ago I moved the discussion online, which worked better: about once a week, two or three students would post 500-word summaries of scholarly articles, and the rest of the class would post responses. This method produced much more depth of discussion and made it easier to incorporate the ideas into in-class discussions and writing assignments.

But there was one problem: students summarized articles I had located and selected, so they missed out on a valuable opportunity to use research databases to locate appropriate articles on their own. This semester I tried to remedy that by requiring students to find their own articles to summarize and discuss. I provided a few guidelines and limitations on databases and types of material, and then I set them loose to explore the scholarly conversation about Stephen Crane and Kate Chopin.

You've probably already figured out the problems I did not anticipate: First, the temptation to select the shortest and most superficial article available was almost overwhelming, and second, I had set up no system to prevent multiple students from summarizing the same article. Frankly, no one needs to read three different summaries of the same lame article.

Results were disappointing. Even when the summaries presented interesting ideas and sparked lively online discussion, the ideas in the articles rarely migrated into class or into the students' writing assignments. By the time I realized that the system was flawed, we were too far into the semester to make changes.

What have I learned from my mistakes? If I use this assignment again, I'll require students to first submit to me a list of articles for my approval, and I'll let them know which ones to summarize. This ought to prevent duplication and allow me to guide students toward more compelling material.

I'm not teaching an upper-level literature class next semester so I've got plenty of time to rethink this assignment--too late for this semester's class, unfortunately, but it's not too late for me to learn from my mistakes.

Grammar: the greatest gift of all!

Anyone who cares about words and language needs to see the remarkable video posted on Language Log today (click here). Trust me on this. You've got to see it.

Neigh? Nay!

In August of 1828, the frontier settlement along the banks of Leatherwood Creek in Guernsey County, Ohio, was making good progress toward civilizing the wilderness when suddenly life was disrupted by the intrusion of a mysterious stranger named Joseph Dylks, a black-eyed man who appeared in the middle of the congregation at a church service and interrupted the sermon by snorting and neighing like a horse.

Well, what would you do?

According to R.H. Taneyhill, "Some of the men jumped to their feet, others bounced in their seats, women shrieked aloud, and every cheek blanched." Dylks repeated this performance at other religious meetings in the area, and an eyewitness insisted that the stranger's peculiar noises "carried with them, right through you, a thrill like that felt when greatly scared in the dark, and a dread similar to that experienced when we think of dying instantly."

In fact, Dylks's performances filled listeners with such "awe and fear" that within three weeks he had convinced a great number of settlers that he was God.

Of course there's more to the story. A mysterious light hovers over Dylks's head. Satan makes a brief appearance. Miracles are promised. The essence of the story, though, is that an entire community was swept into religious mania on the basis of a stranger's remarkable ability to neigh like a horse.

Taneyhill wrote his history some years after the event, drawing on eyewitness accounts, and decades later William Dean Howells wrote a fictionalized version (The Leatherwood God, 1916). Taneyhill's account is more credulous than Howells's, but both attempt to examine how a stranger could convince an entire community that he was God.

Now if a man appeared in my church and started snorting like a horse, I might think he was congested or crazy, but God? I'd sooner believe he was a horse. I've never heard a man neigh like a horse in a way that made me bounce in my seat or jump over chairs or think about death.

And in fact the settlers along Leatherwood Creek couldn't maintain their credulity for long. Dylks arrived, swept the community into a religious fervor, promised certain specific miracles, and was eventually run out of town when he was unable to deliver. The community was disrupted and some followers went to their graves believing Dylks was God, but over time, the Leatherwood God became just another of those peculiar stories hiding in dusty tomes down in Special Collections.

Until someone comes along and digs them up. But now that I've got the story, what am I going to do with it?

The test that transports

I just wrote an essay question so cool that I wish I could shout it to the world, but I need to keep it under wraps until next week. It does everything I could ever ask of an essay question except mow the grass--and when I figure out how to make a string of words mow the grass, I'll definitely shout it to the world. I don't want to give away the farm in case any students happen upon this space, but this question puts me in mind of the best essay question I ever encountered as a student.

"For your Fulbright semester in Europe," began the question, and let's just stop right there and relish the moment. Imagine being a grad student facing the comprehensive exams that will stretch your body, mind, and soul to the breaking point over the next 24 hours, a grad student surrounded by stacks of dusty library books so tall that you can't see across the room much less across the ocean, and suddenly an essay question transports you to Europe for a whole semester as a Fulbright professor. My, that sounds nice.

But then there's the rest of the question: "For your Fulbright semester in Europe, you have been asked to teach a graduate course on African-American literature. Propose a reading list for the course, providing a rationale for the works you select."

Consider the skills this question required me to demonstrate: the ability to formulate meaningful connections among works, to understand an entire genre and its historical context, to argue effectively for the pedagogical importance of specific works as opposed to others. For years my professors had been telling me what to read and why, and now they were handing over the keys to the car and letting me drive. To Europe. As a Fulbright scholar.

Well, who wouldn't want to answer a question like that?

The essay question I just wrote isn't quite that comprehensive but it's a doozy. I hope my students enjoy responding to it as much as I enjoyed writing it. In fact, I'm sure they're already bubbling with excitement! Or something.

House of voices

A colleague was explaining why he's not interested in blogging: "I could never put all my private thoughts out there for everyone to read," he said. "It's too personal."

So I explained that what he sees on my blog is a public persona that may not be exactly identical to my private self.

"I wouldn't want to have a public self and a private self," he said, "because one of them would have to be fake."

Fake? Maybe "partial" is a better word. The essence of me sits ensconced in layers of personae--the teacher who wanders around the classroom waving her arms, the scholar who hunts down obscure references to forgotten authors, the mom who checks to see if her son's car got fixed and commends her daughter on her custard pies, the blogger who tries to twist the chaos of daily life into coherent and entertaining prose. They're all me, or pieces of me, but some of these personae eagerly come out in public and play while others prefer to hide under the bed and whimper.

I'm reminded of the Billy Collins poem "The Night House" (read it here), which imagines the body sleeping soundly in the bedroom while its restless heart goes to the kitchen for some warm milk, the mind grabs a cigarette and studies engineering, the conscience "awakens / and roams from room to room in the dark, / darting away from every mirror like a strange fish" while the soul "is up on the roof / in her nightdress, straddling the ridge, / singing a song about the wildness of the sea." Daylight brings all the parts back to the sleeping body, "that house of voices," which sometimes pauses "to listen to all its names being called / before bending again to its labor."

In this space my public personae can hear their names being called and put their restless energy to creative use, allowing my private personae a few moments of peace so I can bend again to my labor.

Percussive prose

"I had a traditional musical education, in a provincial English cathedral town," begins James Wood in "The Fun Stuff" in the Nov. 29 New Yorker, and he follows with a sentence that makes me smile all over:

I was sent off to an ancient piano teacher with the requisite halitosis, who lashed with a ruler at my knuckles as if they were wasps; I added the trumpet a few years later, and had lessons with a younger, cheerier man, who told me that the best way to make the instrument 'sound' was to imagine spitting paper pellets down the mouthpiece at the school bully.

I relish the specificity of the nouns (halitosis, wasps, paper pellets, bully) and the vividness of the verbs (lashed, spitting), but most of all I love Wood's careful attention to sound and rhythm. Listen to the hissing sibilants from "requisite halitosis" through "wasps"; hear the rhythmic slapping of ruler on wrists in "who lashed with a ruler at my knuckles as if they were wasps."

This passage appears at the beginning of an essay (subtitle: "My Life as Keith Moon") in which Wood examines the seductive draw of the drums: "Noise, speed, rebellion: everyone secretly wants to play the drums, because hitting things, like yelling, returns us to the innocent violence of childhood," and Keith Moon was "pure, irresponsible, restless childishness." Wood analyzes Moon's drumming with all the rigor and insight he usually applies to great literature, concluding that Moon was "the drummer of enjambment." Wood explains the connection between drumming and writing:

For me, this playing is like an ideal sentence, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to do: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong. Such a sentence would be a breaking out, an escape. And drumming has always represented for me that dream of escape, when the body surrenders its awful self-consciousness.

I don't know about you, but reading James Wood's sentences really makes me want to hand him a drum kit and see what he can do.

The poet of a thousand (lying) voices

On Monday morning I'll be tempted to lead my Representative American Writers class in a rousing chorus of the hymn by Charles Wesley that has appeared at the beginning of the Methodist hymnal since the founding of Methodism:

O, for a thousand tongues to sing
My great redeemer's praise!
The glories of my God and King,
The triumph of His grace!

It's true that Wesley spent a few months in St. Simon's Island, Georgia, in 1736, but that hardly justifies importing his hymn into a Representative American Writers class--unless one of those writers was the son of a renowned Methodist minister and grew up in an environment steeped in pious Methodism. Early in his collection "The Black Riders and Other Lines," Stephen Crane offers this brief stanza:

Yes, I have a thousand tongues,
And nine and ninety-nine lie.
Though I strive to use the one,
It will make no melody at my will,
But is dead in my mouth.

Here we see the young poet thumbing his nose at Charles Wesley along with, perhaps, his parents, their church, and their god. Or perhaps not. In "The Black Riders" Crane is a poet of a thousand voices, but if 999 of them lie and the thousandth one is dead in his mouth, where should the reader seek the poet's true voice?

I've read a few of Crane's poems to students over the years but I've never before attempted to pay any sustained attention to them in class. In Monday morning's class we will try to sift through the many voices in Crane's poetry, but I warned my students in advance that these aren't the sorts of poems they'd want to read to the family over Thanksgiving dinner. Some of the poems resemble Zen koans in their pithiness:

A man feared he might find an assassin;
Another that he might find a victim.
One was more wise than the other.

The sound you now hear is that of one hand, clapping.

Many of Crane's poems feature antagonists circling one another, tossing out taunts and throwing down gauntlets but never coming to any resolution, as in this little snippet from "War Is Kind":

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
"A sense of obligation."

The most interesting thing I've learned about Crane's poetry is that he insisted on calling his poems "Lines" and printing them in all caps so they resembled the stacked headlines commonly used in newspapers in the 1890s. Here, such treatment would suggest that a man's search for meaning is front-page news--unlike in my local paper, which today offers a front-page headline touting the challenges and rewards of shopping on Black Friday. In his fiction, Stephen Crane employed the conventions of popular journalism and genre fiction to sell stories to a reading public for whom his stories conveyed a thinly veiled contempt, but he knew his poems would never sell. Why, then, format them like popular newspaper headlines?

Perhaps because the human search for meaning was always news to Crane, the biggest news of all. In his poems, Crane's men (always men, never women) cry out to big-G God, little-g gods, the universe, and various sages without ever finding definitive answers to their questions. The many-voiced poet suggests that men who believe in God are fools and men who deny God are fools and gods who believe in men are the biggest fools of all. In one poem, God meticulously crafts the universe to exacting specifications but then, in a moment of inattention, it slips out of his grasp and straight into trouble.

Crane's tiny stanzas are so pithy and self-contained that it is tempting to grasp at one or another and assume it represents the poet's big-v Voice, but the poet keeps slipping out of our grasp with every turn of the page. "The Black Riders and Other Lines" thumbs its nose so persistently at all kinds of beliefs that eventually it sounds as if the poet doth protest too much, but then the collection ends on a peculiar note. In the final poem, a spirit speeds through the entire universe calling out for God and finding only silence, until

Eventually, then, he screamed,
Mad in denial,
"Ah, there is no God!"
A swift hand,
A sword from the sky,
Smote him,
And he was dead.

If the poet has at his disposal 999 lying voices and one dead tongue, which voice is that? The sound you now hear is one poet, lying. Or not.

A Thanksgiving staple

My copy of the Greene on Greens cookbook by the late lamented Bert Greene falls naturally open at page 329 to a recipe that's flour-dusted and spotted with dried brown stuff even though I use it only once a year. How many years? I don't know, but when Thanksgiving rolls around, I'm making Bert Greene's Pumpkin Rolls.

Now this is not the dessert treat made of moist pumpkin cake rolled around rich cream-cheese filling. No, this is a recipe for savory pumpkin yeast rolls perfect to serve alongside the Thanksgiving turkey and ideal for making turkey sandwiches with the leftovers--if you have any leftovers. These rolls tend to get gobbled down pretty quickly.

First Bert Greene's recipe:

Take 1 1/2 tsp dry yeast and combine it with 1 tsp sugar and 1/4 cup lukewarm water; let stand 5 minutes until it starts to bubble. Stir in 1/2 cup all-purpose flour. Cover and let rise one hour.

Melt 2 tablespoons butter and pour it in a medium bowl. Beat in 2 tablespoons brown sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 cup pureed pumpkin, 1 egg, 1/4 cup maple syrup, and 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon. Add this mixture to the risen roll base. Beat until smooth. Add 1 cup whole-wheat flour and enough all-purpose flour, about 2 1/2 cups, to make a firm dough. Knead it briefly in the bowl. Cover and let rise for two hours.

Punch the dough down and transfer it to a floured board. Knead briefly and roll out until about 1/2 inch thick. Cut into one-inch circles. Place them on flour-rubbed baking sheets, cover with flour-rubbed tea towels, and let rise for one hour.

Preheat the oven to 425. Melt 1 1/2 tablespoons butter and brush the rolls with it. Bake 15 minutes. Makes about 2 dozen rolls.

Now my comments: I always double the recipe because if you're going to go to all that trouble you may as well make a bunch of 'em. Yes, you do have to use real butter and real maple syrup--no substitutions. I always increase the cinnamon. This year I'm using home-made pumpkin puree, but canned pumpkin is fine as long as it's just pumpkin and not "pumpkin pie filling" or "pumpkin pie mix." Bert calls for all-purpose flour but bread flour works just fine as well. One-inch circles are cute, but I make them bigger so they'll serve well with leftovers.

I'll serve these later at my in-laws' Thanksgiving gathering and everyone will ooh and ahh as they do every year. That's the sound I'm waiting for, the sound that gets us up early to start the dough rising every year, the sound that inspires another round of splotches on page 329 in the cookbook. Just thinking about it makes me thankful.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Excelsior

Of course I wouldn't want to imply that anyone reading this blog is an idiot--in fact, one could argue that reading this blog is proof of genius. Nevertheless, recent publicity has resulted in a flood of new visitors who don't know the password or the secret handshake and are likely to stumble about bumping into furniture and stumbling into oubliettes unless they get some guidance.

Thus, this:

If you want to know why it's called Excelsior, click here. If you want to know why and when I abandoned the cloak of anonymity and put my name on the blog, click here and here.

If you want to read about cancer, go to the labels list over on the lower right and click on The New Normal. It's all there. If you really really want to read the very long post about a day in the life of a chemotherapy patient trying to teach a humor class while hooked up to an IV drip, click here.

If you're interested in the very dull life I lead out in the woods with the birds and the dog and the turnips, click on the label Life in the Slow Lane. If you're interested in seeing me fumbling for the lightswitch and trying to find my way around in the dark, click on The Perils of Being Me. If you want to see pictures of birds or trees or garden vegetables, click on Birds or Nature or Garden. (Pay attention! All this will be on the test!)

And if you want to see what happens when I'm involved in a whole lot of stuff I can't discuss in public so I press it down and hush it up and squeeze it into the inaccessible oubliette of state secrets where it ferments and combines with other unspeakable stories to create an utterly new and unrecognizable version of actual events, click here. If nothing else, this post provides evidence of the direct correlation between repression and humor.

Everything is an argument (NOT)

I will be immensely thankful when Thursday arrives not just because thankfulness is the order of the day but because by Thursday I will be done reading and responding to the latest pile of student drafts. Many of them are quite good and even the mediocre ones have luminous moments, but every semester at about this time I find myself wondering where I have gone wrong. Why do I have so much trouble getting students to write arguable thesis statements?

The concept is simple enough: if the thesis is arguable, that means it must be possible for someone to disagree. "Herman Melville wrote about Ahab's quest for the white whale" is about as obvious an insipid a statement as can possibly be made about Moby Dick, but it fails as a thesis primarily because it is not arguable. How could anyone disagree? "No he didn't! Melville wasn't writing about Ahab's quest for the whale at all!" (That might make an interesting paper, actually.)

Adding the phrase "I believe" to the beginning of the sentence makes it even worse: "I believe that Herman Melville wrote about Ahab's quest for the white whale." How would you argue with that? "No you don't! I know for a fact that you're just pretending to believe it so you can pass the class! You haven't even read the book!"

Even worse is adding the phrase "I argue" to a point that argues nothing: "In this essay, I argue that Herman Melville wrote about Ahab's quest for the white whale." That's like saying, "I argue that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen" or "I argue that two plus two equals four." Where is the argument? I'd be more interesting in hearing the opposing view!

A popular composition textbook is titled Everything's an Argument, and of course I see the point: content, genre, format, structure, and many other elements contribute to the rhetorical effectiveness of any text, written or otherwise. No argument with that. However, when I ask for an arguable thesis, I'd like to see a thesis that actually argues. Adding "I argue" to a statement so obvious only a cretin (or certain kinds of genius) would disagree cannot rescue an insipid thesis.

That's my story and I'm sticking with it. Feel free to disagree.

Befogged

When Carl Sandburg asserted that "the fog comes in on little cat feet," he clearly wasn't referring to a November morning fog in an Ohio river valley. This morning's fog is far too cold and wet to resemble a cat in any way, and neither would I compare it to pea soup. Soup is warm and soothing; this morning's fog slaps you in the face and makes you wish for a wetsuit and snorkel.

Driving in this fog is an act of faith. The road ahead could dump you off the edge of the known world into the mouth of a dragon or a maelstrom worthy of Poe, but by the time you realized the danger, it would be too late to brake.

I sit now in my warm, dry office with my back to the window and I know that the fog is dissipating even as I write. Soon it will exist only in memory and metaphor--if only I could find the metaphor to do it justice. This fog is neither cat nor soup--and now that I look out the window, it's nothing at all.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Profsquawk

My freshman honors students this morning were comparing the obstacles that separate them from winter break:

"Only three more class sessions before finals!"

"Only two more papers!"

"Only one more lab report!"

Yes, they have measured out their lives in lab reports, papers, and class sessions. Meanwhile, I'm measuring mine in committee meetings to attend (one more!), student drafts to read (26!), and final exams to write and grade (just one but it's a doozy!).

I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the visage of a prof who has sold her soul for the promise of the occasional student who recognizes an allusion to T.S. Eliot.

Collecting myself

I've had a parade of students in and out of my office this morning needing help with various projects, and I'm happy to help them. Mostly, though, I'm happy that they didn't stop by yesterday.

Yesterday was a mess. I woke up ready to seize the day at 3:30 a.m.--long before the day was ready to be seized--and I couldn't get back to sleep. "You look tired," people told me all day long. "Maybe you should go home and take a nap." But I had classes and meetings and other commitments all day long so I just pushed on stubbornly. If a student had stopped by to ask how to order an article through interlibrary loan or how to quote an indirect source, I would have had to crawl under my desk in shame.

Last night I slept like a normal person and woke up at a normal hour and today no one has urged me to go home and rest. I'm thinking clearly (I think?) and I'm capable of forming coherent prose (I hope?) and I'm coming up with (allegedly) helpful answers for my students. Since Sunday some of my brain cells have been loitering in the "unclaimed baggage" area, but today they all seem to have arrived back home, slightly battered from the trip but ready to be put to use.

Spare change

Spare change jingles in my pocket, heavy foreign coins that won't spend in Ohio. I carried little Czech currency with me on my trip and tried to spend the last straggling bits at the airport, but how many bookmarks and magnets can one person take home? In New York I tried to transform my last remaining wad of Czech money into dollars, but the currency exchange won't take Czech coins so I have a few left jingling about uselessly in my pocket.

They're not worth much but they're impressively heavy, weightier by far than an American quarter. They're too fat to fit in a vending machine and too pretty to throw away. I would gladly contribute my change to some kid's coin collection if I had a kid at home. Instead, I think I'll save them in a porcelain bowl in the china cabinet, a little piece of Prague to serve as a promise that I'll return them home someday.

Not home yet

First thing this morning I took a long walk up a hill to a genuine castle; now I'm sitting in the terminal at Kennedy airport sitting out a three-hour layover. On any trip, I always welcome reaching the point where I can say, "If I break down here, I can walk the rest of the way." I'm not there yet.

I didn't break down walking up to the castle this morning but I did feel a bit lost a few times. I found it almost impossible to remember names of streets in Prague, including the name of the street where I stayed, but I maintained a pretty complex internal map of little bits of English I found scattered around the area. I always found it encouraging to pass the graffiti proclaiming "Twin Pigs Mafia," but I knew that if I got lost, it would be useless to ask for directions to the Twin Pigs Mafia graffiti. Note to self: next time, write down the hotel's address. And carry a map. Now there's a thought. Why didn't I carry a map?

Now that I'm back on home ground I ought to spend my three hours reading student papers and getting caught up on all the news I missed while I was gone, but most of my brain cells are still circling on the baggage carousel. If I grade papers this evening, I'll have to go back and double-check all of them tomorrow to make sure the grades aren't suffering from altitude sickness. And my eyes hurt. A trip to snoozeland would be great!

As long as I can find my way back.

Culture shock

I'm just back from a long walk around Prague's Old City, where I watched the astronomical clock chime the hour while I sipped the thickest, velvetiest mug of hot chocolate I've ever encountered. By night, Prague's distinctive and ornate archictecture is lit up in brilliant colors reminiscent of Disney World, which borrowed much of its aesthetic from European cities like Prague. The Old City is a labyrinth of narrow, winding cobblestone streets lined with tiny shops selling overpriced tchotchkes--sort of like Disney World with head shops.

Walking on uneven pavement fatigues my ankles beyond bearing, so after a few hours I came back to my room to prop up my feet and chill out before the next adventure. Let's just turn on the television and see what's on offer: a report on flooding somewhere in Germany, an ad in which the only word I recognize is "Donkey Kong," some sort of dance competition involving stripper poles, and what's this? The Simpsons in Czech!

Bart seems to be on a ship swabbing the deck--and now they're singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." In English. And now Bart's making a speech in Czech except for the word "Sayonara." Now there are penguins. And now the penguins and the ships are gone and the whole Simpson family is sitting around a table in a restaurant...and suddenly some smarmy band is singing disco tunes on a cruise ship. Wait, why is she singing "The Morning After"? I don't understand this at all.

I understood most of the papers at the conference, although several of them made me work pretty hard to make out the meaning. Only one paper was a total mystery to me: the reader spoke too softly in a room with poor acoustics, but she was talking about Judith Butler so hearing would not guarantee comprehension.

I'm only beginning to find my way around Prague and it's nearly time to leave. Tomorrow morning I'll be packing my bag and heading back home, but not before uttering the traditional parting phrase I picked up this evening on Czech television: Sayonara, baby!

Making sense of making sense of suffering

I suppose it's appropriate to hear a paper on Kafka while in Prague at a conference called "Making Sense of Suffering." One scholar this morning mentioned that she had a sore throat and thought it appropriate to suffer pain while reading a paper about pain, but I would hate to have to suffer as Kafka did in order to write a paper about Kafka.

At any rate I'm not doing any suffering at the conference. This evening I joined several other attendees for some traditional Czech fare followed by a stroll through the labyrinth of the old city, and my only moment of discomfort arrived when I realized that I had been admiring the buildings so much that I had no idea how to get back to my hotel.

But here I am, safely ensconced in a hotel redolent of--well, it's hard to tell what it's redolent of. It smells like bacon fat but let's call it Old-World Charm. I went with the budget hotel located half a block from the conference site, and when people ask me how I like the hotel, I say, "It has character." Its character takes the form of faux-medieval gewgaws: vaulted ceilings in the dining room, suits of armor in odd nooks, and stenciling on the walls. A small door in the corner of the lobby looks as if it might lead to a torture chamber, but open it up and step into an elevator the size of a phone booth.

My room is a little bigger than the elevator. The only usable power outlet in the entire room is high on the wall in the bathroom, so if I want to plug in my laptop to charge up the battery, I have to leave it in the sink or on the bathroom floor. And the mirror in the bathroom is so high on the wall that it captures my reflection from chin up.

But these are minor privations considering the thought-provoking conversations taking place at the conference, the wonderful meals we are sharing, and the beauty of the city itself. We're not required to do any actual suffering at a conference on suffering; we're just trying to make a little sense.

If it's such a small world, why does the flight take so long?

Today in Prague I chatted with a scholar from San Francisco who served as the best man in the wedding of another scholar whom I once babysat back when we were all much younger. That's probably the oddest thing I've learned so far, although I've learned a number of odd things.

I've been in Prague for less than a day and I've learned already that some shoes simply don't work well on cobblestones and that it is possible for a stylish woman to go out in public with a functioning timepiece dangling from her ear.

I've learned that French babies sound distinctly French when they cry. I base that conclusion on a fairly small sample (two babies), but they were crying for a very long time on the flight from New York to Paris. I thought of those French babies this afternoon as I struggled to remain alert through the first two sessions of the conference I'm attending. The one closest to my seat on the plane finally fell into a deep sleep just as we were taxiing up to the terminal.

I've learned an awful lot more about Charles de Gaulle airport than I ever wanted to know. First I walked for what seemed like miles and then they put me on a bus for more miles out to the plane and then the plane taxied so long I thought Air France had given up on the idea of flight altogether. The flight home on Sunday goes straight from Prague to New York, so I'll have one less connection to make and one less opportunity to go through security. Tragic, that.

Perhaps the oddest thing I've learned is that academics from 16 different countries and many different disciplines can sit around discussing profound ideas without all that posturing and posing and hierarchical hoo-hah that goes on at some academic conferences. Better keep it under your hat, though--if word gets out about how good this conference is, everyone will want to come.

Minutes of the previous meeting

Welcome to this week's meeting of the Task Force on Selecting a Special Committee to Study the Impact of the Profusion of Task Forces, Committees, and Working Groups on Campus (TFSSCSIPTFCWGC). I'd like to call this meeting to order, except someone stole the gavel so I'll just pound on the table with my colleague's cranium.

First order of business: minutes of the previous meeting. Do I hear a motion to approve? Yes, Norton, we've all heard your argument that minutes are an arbitrary human construct, but at the moment we have no procedure for faculty members to declare themselves "conscientious objectors" to the taking of minutes, so unless you'd like to form a subcommittee to study the possibility of formulating such a procedure, it's a moot point.

What's that? You'd be happy to form such a subcommittee? But where would the Subcommittee to Study the Possibility of Formulating a Procedure for Declaring One's Conscientious Objection to Minutes (SSPFPDOCOM) fit into our established committee structure? We'd better send that proposal over to the Special Working Group on Study the Structure and Function of Campus Committees (SWGSSFCC).

Now back to the minutes: Do I hear a motion to approve? No, Thom, you can't propose an amendment until the motion is seconded. Do I heard a second? Thank you, Thom, and now what's your problem with the minutes? Item three? Well you may claim that item three misrepresents your comments at the previous meeting, but it sounds accurate enough to me. I have reason to recall your describing the Chair of this committee as a "noddle-headed wombat," which struck me at the time as a serious redundancy verging upon solecism. No, I reject your move to strike the word "solecism" from the secretary's notes; "noddle" clearly refers to the back of the head, so "noddle-headed" is redundant, and if you don't believe me, let us adjourn to the library to consult the Oxford English Dictionary.

Very well then, if you insist: a motion has been moved and seconded to amend the minutes of last week's meeting to replace the phrase "noddle-headed wombat" with "mistaken," which doesn't even work grammatically but let that go. All in favor say aye. All opposed same sign.

A tie! How rarely chairs are permitted to exercise the right to cast the deciding vote! I vote against the amendment. Noddle-headed wombat remains.

Any further discussion of the minutes? Yes, Steffi, we did discuss the proposal to reduce class time by fourteen minutes per credit hour in order to open up more time for committee meetings, but as you will recall, there was some debate about whether 14 minutes would make enough of a difference. As the minutes reflect, Norton issued his usual objection to the hegemonic imposition of anthropocentric measurements of time and Greg pounded the table and insisted upon 17 minutes, but no, we did not vote down the proposal but agreed to send it for further study to the--wait, there's an error here: the minutes say we sent it to the Task Force on Saving Time in a Bottle (TFSTB), but I'm certain we sent it to the For Every Thing There Is A Season Working Group (FETTIASWG).

Do I hear a motion to amend? What's that, Norton? Time is up? I thought you didn't believe in time? What, faculty happy hour begins in five minutes?

Meeting adjourned!

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.