Dream trip

I show up on campus on the morning I'm supposed to fly to Prague and all I have to do is teach one class, grab my passport, itinerary, and computer bag, and hightail it down to the airport--but power is out all over campus and the card-readers won't work so I can't get into my building to get my passport. Trip cancelled.

Relax: it's just a nightmare. I had no problem preparing for my trip or getting into my building, and my passport is now safely tucked into my bag so all I have to do is read some drafts and teach my class and I'll be on my way to Prague.

For weeks people have been asking whether I'm excited about my trip, and I've been saying yes even when it's not remotely true. I do the same thing when they ask about my sabbatical, but the fact is that I can't allow myself to get excited about an event that I can't quite believe is actually going to happen.  It's a flaw in my emotional makeup: possible disasters, no matter how unlikely, are always more real to me than probable blessings.

I booked my flight to Prague, wrote my paper, and reserved hotel rooms while suffering from the constant fear that something disastrous would occur to prevent the trip: my travel grant request would be rejected (it wasn't); my parents' health would take a downward turn (it didn't); the Occupy people would swarm the conference venue (they haven't). Not until last Friday did I allow myself to start thinking about the people I'll see in Prague and how I'll spend my free time.


Am I excited? You bet I am. Once again, the disaster I've been preparing for has remained imprisoned within my nightmares, and I couldn't be more delighted.

Just don't ask about my sabbatical. A lot of things can happen between now and January!

Creative Nonwriting

I just heard a student accidentally refer to my nonfiction class as "Creative Nonwriting,"  but trust me on this: we won't be developing a major in Creative Nonwriting any time soon, despite its potential popularity.

Many students arrive on campus as highly accomplished nonwriters and devote four years to further developing their Creative Nonwriting skills. Some are talented enough to tackle a PhD in Creative Nonwriting. In fact, much of a PhD's process depends upon the ability to come up with creative reasons to not write, so perhaps many of my colleagues have made careers out of Creative Nonwriting.

I suppose we could design a major in Creative Nonwriting, with Intro to Excuse-Making serving as the prerequisite for Survey of Procrastination I and II, Research/Shmesearch, Technology for Nonwriting, Nonreading for Nonwriters, Nontheory of Nonwriting, and so on. Such an unusual major would sell itself (negating any need to do any advertising nonwriting), but one big obstacle stands in the way of implementing a successful Creative Nonwriting program: Who will write the course proposal?

An educated adjective

Yesterday I saw a letter (from someone smart enough to know better) that included the phrase "an educated populous." An educated populace ought to know the difference between populous (an adjective) and populace (a noun), even though they are indistinguishable when spoken: A populous city has a large populace. See? Easy.

More writers might be aware of the distinction if the words were used more frequently in writing, but the Google N-Gram Viewer indicates that the use of the words in books has declined steadily in the past two centuries

Of course, both words appear in such a teeny percentage of printed texts that the difference is not as dramatic as it might look. And of course this chart does not indicate whether the words are used correctly; for that, let's see how many times these phrases appear in a basic Google search:

an educated populous: 33,300 hits
an educated populace: 505,000 hits

So the general populace seems to be getting it right most of the time, but those 33,300 hits disturb me. Who are these people? The first hit led to an article with the phrase an educated populace in the title, so why did it show up at the top of the list for an educated populous?

Then I looked at the web address. Bingo: an educated populous was part of the url. Who got it wrong: the original author, the headline writer, or the tech person?

Many of the hits under "an educated populous" came from blogs, which is not surprising (and new searches will lead to this one as well!), but I was a little surprised to see an educated populous in this official statement on the site of a teachers' association: "Public education benefits all of us, from the children whose lives it enriches, to the rest of us, who, though out of school, reap the benefits of an educated populous."

Except for those whose education fails to introduce the difference between populous and populace. Time to go reap some more benefits of education, people! Let's not be part of the 33,300!

Follow the breadcrumbs

At a teaching workshop this morning, a colleague inspired an idea for an assignment in an upper-level literature class: Follow the Breadcrumbs. Make students read an academic journal article and choose a source cited in that article; read the cited source and choose another source it cites; follow the breadcrumbs back through five or six sources and then write some kind of short paper analyzing the scholarly conversation. Would this work? Would students simply select the shortest/easiest sources or would they engage deeply with challenging ideas? I'm accepting suggestions.

A time to tweak

Every time I mention this particular project, someone wants to tweak it some more. Frankly, I'm tired of tweaking. There's a time to tweak and there's a time to be done tweaking, and I am done.

Ecclesiastes tells us that for everything there is a season--a time to be born and a time to die, a time to sow and a time to reap, a time to mourn and a time to dance--but it doesn't say anything about tweaking or other important activities:

A time to tweak and a time to be done tweaking.

A time to speak and a time to speak a little louder.


A season for keeping the snow shovel by the front door and a season wherein the snow shovel should be kept out of sight. 

A time to fidget and a time to sit on your hands.

A time to change the channel and a time to hide the remote.

A week to relax and a year to pay for all the relaxing.


A time for keeping something yummy bubbling in the crock-pot all day long and a time for stashing the crock-pot in the closet.

A time to write blog posts about times and seasons and a time to close the computer and go home to enjoy whatever's bubbling in the crock-pot.

Thank Q

A colleague has decided to stop writing comments on paper in cursive because her students can't read her writing. Nothing wrong with her handwriting--it's neat and regular enough to earn high marks from my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Davis, who walked up and down the rows with her white hair piled high and a white handkerchief up her sleeve as she drilled her students relentlessly in the correct way to make loops of uniform height and tilt. My colleague can do that; her problem is that her students never learned to write in cursive and have little experience reading it.

I suppose it had to happen eventually, but already? As we move inexorably toward the day when texts written in cursive will be legible only to those with special training, let us pause to celebrate the moments those who don't learn cursive are cursed to never know:

As a child I had struggled to get the loops of the lower-case f to go the right way, but what a thrill it was to master the upper-case Q with its big loose swirl. Uniformity was the goal: Mrs. Davis frowned upon teetering cross-ties on the lower-case t and roundly condemned dotting an i with an open loop. But even the Palmer Method cannot hog-tie the personality forever; by junior high my friends and I were vying to create distinctive handwriting--dotting i's with bubbles or hearts or varying the way I wrote the capital Z to display varying levels of formality and flair.

Journalism killed my handwriting. I always took copious notes very quickly, but those hasty scribbles had a very short shelf-life: if I didn't transcribe my notes within 24 hours, they became about as legible as the Thorkelin transcripts of Beowulf.

These days my handwriting is hopeless. I think back to the first day of tenth-grade biology class when Mr. Hatcher told us students to go to the blackboard and write a word indicating something we valued, and amidst all the adolescent scrawls one girl I didn't know (yet!) wrote "Intelligence" in a cursive script so perfect it made the rest of the words on the board look lazy, unpolished, and stupid. Today all my handwriting looks that way, so I write comments on student papers electronically, thereby enabling students to forget that cursive writing ever existed.

The language of classification of ancient handwriting is almost hypnotic: insular half uncial, Merovingian minuscule, prescissa, curialis, cursiva Anglicana--words to conjure by or curse. How will future generations classify twentieth-century American cursive hands? Cursiva Mrs-Davisana, bubble-i totter-t, journoscrawl? It won't be long now before the experts unleash their vocabulary, tack a name to every departure from the Palmer Method, and direct disseration research projects on deciphering immense corpora of hand-written postcards and thank-you notes.

They won't find my thank-you note to Mrs. Davis because I never wrote it, so I'll write it here: Thanks, Mrs. Davis, for forcing me to master a skill that flourished for a while and served me well but will soon become a lost art.  

Singing the Special-Case Blues

I know the deadline's 9 a.m.
but I need an extension:
my goldfish died, my laptop fried,
and in case I haven't mentioned--

I'm special!
So special!
You can't expect a guy like me,
so special and extraordin'ry,
to follow rules so arbitrary
because you see:
I'm special.

I know it's Sunday afternoon
and you enjoy relaxing,
but I need you to hop right to
my project--and I'm asking

Because:
I'm special!
So special!
You can't expect a prof like me,
so special and extraordin'ry,
to follow rules so arbitrary
because you see:
I'm special.

There's a very special prize in store to the first person who sets this to music and sends me a recording!

Hot hot hot (and cold)

I admit it: I gave up on our pepper patch way back in September. Fortunately, it didn't give up on me.

I would blame the weather, but I'm not sure which weather to blame: the cold, wet spring; the hot, dry summer; the incessantly soggy fall; or the warm days and pleasant nights extending well into October. The peppers grew slowly and ripened late; we've had some nice hot chilis and poblano peppers on and off, but those twentysomething pimento pepper plants produced maybe one edible specimen all season long.

I gave up picking peppers after school started and I haven't really thought about them since, but the peppers kept growing. This afternoon the temperature dipped into the 40s and the forecast calls for several cold nights, so any pepper that remains on the plant will soon freeze and rot.

This evening during a break in the rain I sloshed on down to the pepper patch to pick anything still worth picking: a few underripe habaneros, a handful of jalapenos, two (!) green pimentos, a pile of lovely red and green chilis, and about a dozen of the prettiest poblano peppers you've ever seen--small, yes, but deep green and glossy enough to hang from a Christmas wreath.

About halfway through the pepper patch I found some plants still covered in blossoms. My hands were numb with cold and tingling from touching capsicum oils, but the pepper plants were still devoted to producing new fruit. I'm afraid the next few nights will put an end to their endeavors.

Now I have this big pile of peppers in my kitchen. The weather outside may have turned wintry, but inside I've got poblanos to keep me warm.

Shopping 101

It's the end of a hectic and confusing day full of many commitments and minor catastrophes and you find yourself standing in line at the grocery store trying to buy a gallon of milk before you can finally get in the car and drive home and get some supper and put up your feet and let your neck muscles begin to un-knot themselves, and the only thing standing between you and escape is the woman in front of you in line, who, despite her youth and apparent alertness, has somehow reached full adulthood without knowing how to shop.

How can this be?

How can any reasonably intelligent human being stand for eight or ten minutes in a checkout line without making any effort to locate her billfold and count her cash? With all those exhausted shoppers behind her, why does she wait until the cashier tells her the total and only then open up her immense purse and begin a desultory search through random detritus before finally happening upon her billfold? And then why does she peel off the bills as if in slow motion and dump all her change on the counter so she can count out dimes, nickels, and pennies to provide exact change?

Nothing against exact change--it's always a pleasure to get rid of the loose bits of currency clogging up purses and pockets. But if you're planning to hold up a whole line full of shoppers while you count out coins, then it might be a good idea to locate your money while the cashier is scanning your groceries. In fact, finding your money would be a great way to entertain yourself while waiting your turn in line. What else are you going to do--read soap-opera magazines? That way lies madness.

But madness also lies in trying to re-educate total strangers who have never learned how to shop in a busy store without making other shoppers so angry they're tempted to reach out and grab a soap-opera magazine so they can roll it up and batter the thoughtless shopper mercilessly about the head and shoulders. Bad shopper! Bad bad bad!

But we don't do that, do we? We stand there stoically gritting our teeth and biting our tongues and waiting patiently to pay for our purchases. We use our time well: we find our money and hold it tightly in our hands. Very tightly. Don't loosen your grip for a moment or that hand will reach for a magazine and start rolling it up.

Doomed to Dune

Learning works both ways: I teach students and students teach me. Sometimes their papers remind me of pleasures I've long forgotten, like playing jacks at recess or watching Scooby-Doo on Saturday morning, and sometimes they inspire me to read something I've never read. A few years ago a capstone student wrote a paper on House of Leaves and I felt obliged to read it so I could offer appropriate guidance, an experience I've never regretted. One of my current capstone students introduced me to Poe's Journal of Julius Rodman, which I look forward to reading if only to see how Poe plays with the conventions of the travel narrative.

And then there's Dune.

Yes, one of my students is writing about the Frank Herbert novel full of sand and spice and great big worms. I've read it before, possibly during my adolescent science-fiction phase or as an assignment in the science fiction class I took in grad school. I have a sort of love-hate relationship with science fiction, but rereading Dune is pushing me closer to the hate end of the continuum.

There is no denying that Dune is ripe for an ecocritical reading and I have no doubt that my student will produce a brilliant essay, but I don't find it fun reading--and not just because you can't even get to the first chapter without first wading through a thick glossary of names and nouns and references to historical events.

I skipped the glossary. I just don't have the energy to learn a whole new language right now.

And I'm tired of The Chosen One. Why does every science-fiction universe have to feature a Chosen One whose coming has been foretold through countless eons? And why does he have to be a raw adolescent with understanding beyond his years? And why does he have to have a half-dozen different names? The Desert Mouse, the Duke of Earl, the Dumpster-Diving Dynamo of Doom--can't anyone just call a hero Eric?

What irks me most in Dune, though, is the constant ominous tone. Every idle conversation hides a hidden meaning that may spell doom--DOOM!--for poor old Eric and his ilk. (Er, make that Paul.) Every breath our hero breathes might mean The End of the World As We Know It. If there's never a dull moment, then all moments are equally charged with potential disaster, which gets tedious. I keep wanting to grab Our Hero by the shoulders and tell him to for heaven's sake lighten up a little. Kurt Vonnegut knew how to infuse playfulness and humor into the bleakest science-fiction scenario, but Frank Herbert seems to have suffered from a severe deficiency of fun.

Unless you consider worm-riding fun. I'll admit that the giant worms are a nice touch. I just wish one of them would come along and swallow up the book so I won't have to finish reading it. I wouldn't even mind paying the library fine.

Shades of gray

I walked to the upper meadow yesterday to see some fall color before everything turns dull and brown, and there I saw deer tracks, a roly-poly groundhog scuttling off into the underbrush, and this bird. It's a juvenile woodpecker of some sort, about the size of a hairy woodpecker but fluffier and with just a hint of red on the forehead and chin. Its dull gray plumage blends right in with the gray tree bark, and every time I stepped closer, it would scoot around to the other side of the tree or fly to another branch. A pretty boring way to spend a lovely afternoon, but I've been struggling with a sinus infection and that's about all the excitement I could handle.

Missing the mark

Every once in a while I like to show my students a draft of my dissertation all marked up with comments from readers. I repeatedly subjected individual chapters to rigorous proofreading, seeking and receiving substantive feedback from my committee chair and several friends who make their living writing and editing, and I revised extensively until I was certain that everything was perfect--but the penultimate draft still ended up with a word containing the letter L three times in a row.

If multiple careful readers equipped with advanced degrees can't catch an errant L, who can hope to produce error-free prose? Why do I keep encouraging students to aim for perfection if it's virtually impossible to hit the target?

Because if they can't hit the bullseye every time, I would like them to at least be allowed to stay in the contest.

Much as we'd like to deny it, much of academic life is contest: we compete for the approval of hiring committees, tenure committees, editors, grant institutions, and others with the power to make our lives wonderful or miserable. It's a bad idea to hand those readers easy reasons to reject our ideas, and if they're distracted by our inability to distinguish between its and it's, they're unlikely to be wowed by our brilliance.

Which is why I'm returning a set of sloppy papers without comments and offering students 24 hours to revise and resubmit. They probably won't see this opportunity as the gift it really is, but I'll achieve my goal if they move their writing a little closer to the target.

Safari day

When bad winter weather causes schools to close, students know how to enjoy their snow day--but how will students around Zanesville, Ohio, spend their Lions-and-Tigers-and-Bears Day?

The hunt is on for exotic animals on the loose just 45 miles north of here after officers found a wild-animal collector dead and his animals set free last night (read about it here). Several school districts in the area cancelled classes and the sheriff urged people to stay indoors while officers search for more than 40 animals, including lions, tigers, wolves, black bears (which are native to Ohio), and grizzly bears (which are not).

Right now we have more questions than answers about this incident: How did the owner die? Who opened all the animals' cages? How many animals were released? Will the remaining animals be captured or will they all be destroyed? Which poses a greater danger: a fleeing cheetah or the armed men in hot pursuit?

The sheriff urged residents to stay home and leave the big-game hunting to the experts, and I sincerely hope all those idle schoolchildren will take that advice to heart--or if they can't resist the desire to go on safari, this would be a good day to explore the wonders of the imagination.

Accounts receivable

This morning a student brought me a draft of a research proposal featuring an interesting and original thesis, well organized ideas, and a firm grasp of relevant theory, so it really doesn't matter that the draft was written on the back of a bundle of wrinkled receipts.

"I was at work," he explained. "I didn't have anything else to write on."

This morning my creative nonfiction students were chatting about what tools we need to work as writers: pens, pencils, and paper or computers, recorders, and iPads? Stacks of receipts didn't even enter the discussion, but I admire the dedication that inspires a student to lean on the counter at a retail store and scribble sophisticated ideas on whatever scraps of paper happen to be lying around.

"Of course I'll turn in the finished paper in the usual way," he said, but I'm not complaining. His unusual method reminded me that any hack with a word-processor can make vapid ideas look professional. Real writers, on the other hand, can transform mundane materials into writing that matters.

50/50 Update

In the past two months I have thrown a paper airplane at a faculty meeting, stood in the cold rain listening to music that's not at all my style, played a Monty Python clip in a literature class, worn blue sparkly nail polish to the office, attended my first-ever college football game (which we won, suggesting that I ought to attend more often), and stolen an umbrella.

Borrowed. I borrowed the umbrella, and I am fully prepared to return it as soon as the person who left it behind at a Board of Trustees committee meeting steps forward and demands that I hand it over. 


I have now reached number 20 on my 50/50 Challenge: 50 unusual, unexpected, or outrageous things to do the year I turn 50 (read about it here). I have broken no laws (unless someone gets really picky about that abandoned umbrella) and so far I haven't done anything that demands much preparation or funding, but a few of the more complicated items on my list are waiting for January, when my sabbatical begins.

Best of all, I have made some people really happy. Including me, which is sort of the point.

Autumn glow

 The setting sun provides backlighting for colorful autumn leaves, making them glow as if lit from within. Yellow dominates right now but splotches of red are beginning to appear on the hillsides. Soon the leaves will fall and merge into brown mush, but today the hills are aglow with the colors of autumn.

Lyrical list

In Don Lee’s novel Wrack and Ruin, artist/welder/Brussels sprouts farmer Lyndon Song confesses to his masseuse that he stays awake nights thinking about things. 

What things? These things:

 

His life, money, weeds and aphids, sparks and puddles and slag, sex, his aloneness, cormorants and least terns, reality TV, blue elderberries and flannel bush and cellulose and lamina and the transparency of shed snakeskin, the fetch of wind swells, pecorino cheese, the cholo in the low-rider who had nodded and let him go through the intersection first, X-ray machines, global destruction. A few other things.

Last night I stayed awake far too long thinking not about these things but about the throbbing pain in my right foot caused by an unfortunate dishwasher-related incident. (Hint: don't dash across the kitchen with an armload of dishes without first ascertaining whether the door of the dishwasher is blocking your path.)

But at least I didn't have to think about pecorino cheese! It's amazing how a little pain can push all other worries right out of the bed.

Sink or swim

When the chips are down and we're stuck between a rock and a hard place in a situation that separates the men from the boys, who will step up to the plate and take one for the team?

Scratch that. In some situations, cliches simply don't help. The question at hand is this: under what circumstances am I willing to make a significant sacrifice? I would give up my place in line at the grocery store to an exhausted mom shopping with three screaming brats and I would give up a kidney to save the life of someone I love, but what about situations that fall between the two extremes?

I am willing to make sacrifices

• that benefit people I care about
• to achieve goals I believe in
• to follow leaders I trust
• to work together with others toward a common goal.

The more of these conditions are present, the larger the sacrifice I'm willing to make; likewise, my willingness to sacrifice diminishes with each bullet-point that's missing. And if the sacrifice is not voluntary but forced--well, that just makes it feel like punishment.

Which is why no one celebrates a salary freeze.

But at least we're all in the same boat.

With the water rising and boulders in the way.

Heading straight for a waterfall.

Just call me Miss Quotation

A few years ago a colleague got angry when the student newspaper published a fairly innocuous quotation in which my colleague, who has never committed a colloquialism since emerging from the womb, allegedly said that something "needs done."

"I would never say that," she insisted, and she was right but I didn't see the point in having hysterics about such a small thing--until a hack misquoted me as saying that a certain software system provides a convenient method of "distributing information out."

I would never say that! The phrase is so ugly it's polluting my page! It doesn't even sound like me! (I hope!)

But that raises the question: what do I sound like? This week I'll introduce my creative nonfiction students to voice, tone, and lyricism, elements of style that defy easy definition. We all have distinctive voices and sometimes like to play with other voices, but how do we pin down just what we mean by "voice"? We can speak with a high pitch or an angry tone or a playful mood, but how do we translate those voices to the written word without resorting to emoticons?

Word choice plays a part but it's not everything. Here is a word cloud formed from my recent blog posts. I see that I've been writing about my daughter and water and readers and the calming autumn colors suggest a peaceful walk through the woods, but the same word cloud could have been generated if I'd written a shrill rant about first wanting my daughter to drown readers in water and then going back to impact students with balloons.


But I wouldn't write that. The words are mine, but voice is made up of far more than just words. The question is, how do I communicate the concept of voice to people who think it would be perfectly normal for me to say "distribute information out"?

Breaking away

Within the first five minutes after I arrived on campus this morning, three different people asked me what I'm doing here during four-day break (which really ought to be called "extra-long weekend"--but don't get me started). Here's what I did during the first half of my so-called four-day break: 

Traveled across the state, chatted with my son, played Bananagrams (repeatedly), giggled at Galaxy Quest, rambled in the woods with my adorable daughter, photographed mushrooms and milkweed and purple asters, helped my daughter shop for an interview suit, watched my daughter and son-in-law cook, ate really good pancakes, washed dishes, enjoyed an exhilarating worship service, graded midterm exams, leaned back in a lawn chair admiring yellow leaves while composing haiku, finished reading a very long book that would have been just as tedious at half the length, allowed my daughter to paint my fingernails sparkly blue, watched some random guy photograph some random girl who was wearing a long white dress and buried in colorful leaves, drank my very first (and probably last) pumpkin spice latte, and traveled back home again.

That's enough excitement for one weekend. I need a break! Time to get back to work.

Duly noted

Why should finding my name in an endnote give me so much pleasure? Few readers will ever notice me nestled amongst all that small print in the back of the book, and the reference to my work is so brief that it's unlikely to result in a flood of new readers. Nevertheless, seeing my name pop unexpectedly from the punultimate endnote produced a little frisson of delight, a reminder that an article I wrote eight years ago and published six years ago was actually read by a scholar and made an impact on his thinking, no matter how small.

A butcher, a baker, a museum curator

What is a writer? Today my creative nonfiction students discussed essays suggesting that the writer is like a museum curator, a spelunker exploring an unknown cave, a prophet, or a healer, and we tried to develop our own brief metaphors for the writer's task: an explorer, a problem-solver, an advocate for social change. One student suggested that the writer is like a timepiece always reminding readers of the passage of time, ticking the moments from present to past as we hurry toward the future.

It wasn't an easy exercise. "Writers do too many things to fit into one sentence," said one student, while others struggled to find original ways to sum up the writer's task without resorting to cliches. I rejected my first attempt because it was too obviously stolen from a poem, and my two next efforts didn't quite satisfy me but when time was up I shared them anyway. Six writers sitting in a classroom struggling to write a single sentence crystallizing the role of the writer...this is who we are. This is what we do.

And you?

Just don't let an anvil fall on my head

Imagine that you're walking down the road and someone tosses a red water balloon straight at your face. Pretty powerful: you would not fail to notice the impact of the balloon.

But then imagine that you are walking down the road and suddenly people start throwing all kinds of things all around you: cell phones and sofas, cream pies and basketballs, water balloons, watermelons, wisteria vines, and widgets. Suddenly, that red water balloon blends in with the chaos and becomes invisible.

This, I explain to my students, is why one really vivid metaphor can be more powerful than a dozen colorful images all vying for attention. Go ahead and smack readers in the face with an effective metaphor, but if the projectiles keep coming, don't be surprised when readers run away.

Wrack, hacks, and inky courage

I griped about the quality of the AWP Writer's Chronicle last month, so it's only fair that I should applaud the current issue, which includes a bunch of interesting stuff:

1. An author interview that actually made me want to read something new. I've never read anything by Don Lee, but the interview inspired me to order his novel Wrack and Ruin. The main character raises brussels sprouts. I'm trying to remember the last time I encountered a brussels sprout farmer in a book and I'm drawing a blank.

2. A passionate essay by poet Martin Espada, who thinks poets should be less precious and more political. Commenting on Shelley's claim that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Espada writes,

Poets should have no trouble identifying with being 'unacknowledged.' They grouse about being ignored, about paltry attendance at readings and royalty statements that would cause most novelists to jump off a bridge. Yet poets also contribute to their marginalization by producing hermetic verse and living insular lives, confined to the academy or to circles of other poets, by mocking themselves as childish and unworldly, by refusing to embrace their role as unacknowledged legislators. The only antidote to irrelevancy is relevancy. The British poet Adrian Mitchell famously said: 'Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.'

3. A helpful article by Brenda Miller, "The Case Against Courage in Creative Nonfiction." She argues that the way to be courageous in creative nonfiction is not simply to let one's inner pain bleed all over the page but to focus on form. Caustic contents require sturdy containers; "For some writers," she says, "the conscious use of form can sometimes be the only way certain kinds of truths can be approached at all. Since these truths need to be contained more forcefully, form essentially becomes the writer's inky courage." She appreciates the "inadvertent revelations" that occur when "the essay now seems to be reveal information about the writer, rather than the writer revealing these tidbits directly to the reader." That's a fine line, but Miller provides some concrete examples and methods to help students achieve this kind of "inky courage."

Three good articles and a book full of brussels sprouts winging its way to my office. What's not to love?

The comma fairy would be appalled

William Bartram never met a comma he didn't like. The eighteenth-century American botanist and explorer of Florida tosses commas in the air and wherever they land, there they lie. At first I found his prose annoying, but after a while it grows almost hypnotic, as here:

I had the good fortune to collect together a sufficiency of sticks, to keep up a light and smoke, which I laid by me, and then spread my skins and blankets upon the ground, kindled up a little fire and supped before it was quite dark. The evening was however, extremely pleasant, a brisk cool breeze sprang up, and the skies were perfectly serene, the stars twinkling with uncommon brilliancy. I stretched myself along before my fire; having the river, my little harbour and the stern of my vessel in view, and now through fatigue and weariness I fell asleep, but this happy temporary release from cares and troubles I enjoyed but a few moments, when I was awakened and greatly surprised, by the terrifying screams of Owls in the deep swamps around me, and what encreased my extreme misery was the difficulty of getting quite awake, and yet hearing at the same time such screaming and shouting, which increased and spread every way for miles around, in dreadful peals vibrating through the dark extensive forests, meadows and lakes, I could not after this surprise recover the former peaceable state and tranquility of mind and repose, during the long night, and I believe it was happy for me that I was awakened, for at that moment the crocodile was dashing my canoe against the roots of the tree, endeavouring to get into her for the fish, which I however prevented.

I could quibble about just about every comma in that passage but I won't. I find myself more and more eschewing commas where formerly I would have inserted them; future readers (if there are any left) will no doubt look over my prose and gasp over the commas I've omitted, but my defense is simple: I gave my share to William Bartram.

A dose of my own medicine

When I observe a colleague's teaching in the classroom, I always give the same glib advice: "Just be yourself and pretend I'm not there."

Ha!

This morning four strangers observed my classroom teaching in order to judge my worthiness for a teaching prize, and I can tell you that (1) it is impossible to overlook the presence of four extra people and a video camera in an already crowded classroom and (2) the self I can be while being observed by strangers in charge of awarding a large prize is not exactly the same as my everyday self.

For one thing, my everyday self sleeps a little better, while my observed-by-strangers self suffers from nightmares--and not just the usual first-day nightmares about arriving in class late, unprepared, naked, and with my teeth falling out, but nightmares about (shudder!) chairs. Inadequate chairs, insufficient chairs, chairs with the backs falling off, trick chairs that tip as soon as someone tries to sit in them--such are the horrors of my visitation-eve nightmares.

I taught today's class a dozen times in my dreams, all of them disastrously, but the reality was, I guess, okay. Good enough. Maybe not my best work but probably the best I could do under the circumstances.

And best of all, no chairs were injured in the teaching of this class.

Quarterly report

Last night poet James Harms explained why he wrote a series of third-person poems for his 2001 collection Quarters: "I had gotten too conversant with the first person and I was getting lazy," he said. "I thought I should learn something new about writing."

I learned something new about reading over the summer when I read four poetry collections searching for poems to use in my fall classes so my students would have some familiarity with the poems before the poet visited campus. I read quickly, seeking content appropriate for each class, and I had forged ahead five or six poems into Quarters before I noticed some spare change jangling around in each poem, and then I had to go back to the beginning to confirm my suspicion: yes, in a collection of 25 poems titled Quarters, each poem contains the 25-cent coin.

My obliviousness suggests that I ought to have been reading more carefully, but it also indicates how subtly Harms drops the quarters into the poems. Harms gave himself a very strict set of limits, from the number of poems (25) to the point of view (third person) to the number of words in the titles (one) to the necessity of including quarters in the poems, but none of the poems feel forced or artificial. The quarters appear in ordinary places--in a jukebox, on a sidewalk, under a girl's pillow after she loses a tooth--but the anticipation leads us to receive each quarter as a gift, a sparkling coin plinking down on the counter before our eyes.

My favorite Harms poems come from other collections, particularly Freeways and Aqueducts, in which "Elegy as Evening, as Exodus" reminds us that "The Pacific is nothing like its name. / For one thing, there are no silences, / despite the palm trees leaning into stillness." Halfway through that poem an ineffable silence utters itself in the blank space between stanzas when "I heard a name escape its word, // the wind between waves," a moment that takes my breath away to breathe the unspeakable silence.

But despite that, I find myself recommending Quarters to anyone seeking an introduction to Harms. All of his collections are good (and the cumulative effect is greater than the sum of its parts), but reading Quarters is like finding money on the street--no matter how smudged and battered the coin, it's impossible to resist bending over and picking it up.

Surprising the fibers

"This little move will really sculpt your deltoids," says the exercise guru, and I can feel the chisel--right there.

"You'll feel this tomorrow," she says, but I feel it today--and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

"We're trying to surprise the fibers in your biceps," she explains, but my biceps do not experience that surprise alone. I am surprised to deepest fiber of my being every time I walk into the gym for my exercise class and even more surprised when the class is over.

"See you next time!" she calls out--and you know, I think she's right

Better or bitter?

I have always believed that trial by fire refines character, that surviving adversity makes people better, but what if instead it makes us bitter and brittle? (Bittle? Britter?)

Since my brush with death two years ago I have watched myself becoming both more and less patient: more patient with struggling students, less patient with colleagues behaving badly; more willing to speak up compassionately when someone needs help, less willing to bite my tongue when nonsense gets bruited about in meetings.

Surviving the fire made me more open to new experiences (hey, let's take a bunch of students to California!) but less willing to waste time slogging through mediocre fiction or hollow scholarship.  Life is too short to spend long hours in the company of Jude the Obscure.


Today I work harder and I demand more of myself than ever, but if I occasionally feel the need to watch an episode of The Office on my office computer, I make no excuses. I say No more often and stand up for my rights more firmly, and just today I demanded a well-deserved apology from someone who would have intimidated me into silence before.


I sort of like the new me but I wouldn't claim that I'm a better person. Bitter, yes: I struggle to keep the anger from bubbling over and poisoning my environment, but I'm always aware of the potent brew simmering away beneath the brittle surface. I may have survived my trial by fire, but deep inside the coals are still burning.

Earth and sky

Turkey vultures are not attractive up close, whether they're tearing bloody chunks from road-killed critters or perching buzzard-like on tree limbs. When they first return from their winter homes in early March, we see sometimes 10 or 20 at a time swirling overhead, and down below we remind ourselves to keep moving and look alive. We see a few throughout the summer but now they're massing up again to travel south, and in the air they look magnificent, their six-foot wingspans describing slow circles over our meadows. Watching a red-tailed hawk and three turkey vultures swirl and swoop overhead was a Saturday treat for those of us who are not road kill.
 
Down below the wet season has produced more earthbound treats--or perhaps tricks: an abundance of mushrooms and toadstools of greater variety than we've seen here before. Our lawn is dotted with fungi in marshmallow white, lemon yellow, and chocolate brown, but we don't know enough about mushrooms to risk eating them. Instead, we feasted last night on chestnuts picked up from the ground and roasted in the oven. I hover buzzard-like over the pan waiting for the earthy nuts to be cool enough to peel, awaiting the moment when the flavor will make my taste buds soar.

.

On and off the pedestal

The first time Hopeful met our neighbors' new dog, I thought I was seeing an encounter between the Dionysian and Apollonian worldviews--and not just because the neighbors named their new dog Apollo.

Hopeful the plump, cheerful mutt who loves rolling in the mud, splashing in the creek, and gobbling down any tasty treat that comes her way (from dead groundhogs to chunks of ripe deer carcass the mold-encrusted wad of sofa cushion she found in the woods last week) gambols up the road to encounter a dog that looks like a statue standing on a plinth, with lordly mien surveying his vast domain.

Apollo is tall and lean with clean, crisp lines and pointy teeth; if he had come running toward me unencumbered by his master, I would surely have run screaming for the woods. He looks like a king of the dog world, a stern, godlike figure of power and self-control.

But then Hopeful bounces up with her girls-just-wanna-have-fun attitude and issues an invitation to play, and Apollo comes down from the plinth. It took two strong adults to remove Apollo from the muddy Dionysian revels and restore him to his place of stern dignity.

That was two weeks ago and I haven't seen Apollo outside his house again. Sometimes when we walk by we hear him barking as if begging to come out and play, but he remains behind closed doors safely separated from mud and mold and road kill. I hope he's happy there, but Hopeful shows no desire to join him. Why live on a pedestal when you can roll in the mud?

Stupid is as stupid does

Further evidence that sometimes doing something really stupid can make you feel really good:

Yesterday the department secretary sent out a note reminding everyone to check the spring semester course schedule to make sure everything was correct, so I dutifully walked over to the office to look at the schedule and see whether all my classes are listed with the correct times, classrooms, and caps.

Only after I had the schedule in my hands did it occur to me that I don't have any classes on the schedule next semester because I'LL BE ON SABBATICAL.

Happy dance! Right there in the office!

Rethinking grading methods (again)

Coming up for air after completing one paper-grading frenzy and before beginning the next, I encounter yet another reason to reconsider the way I grade papers. For a few years now I've been collecting drafts, suggesting changes, and grading essays electronically, but now a post over at Quackademic makes me wonder whether I need to rethink the whole process.

I know why I started commenting and grading electronically: because I can type faster than I can write and students can't read my handwriting. (Not that I blame them--half the time I can't read my own handwriting.) When I write out comments longhand, I spend a lot of time outside of class interpreting those comments for my befuddled students, explaining, for instance, that the word that looks like "vile" is actually "nice."

But maybe that's not a bad thing. As Quack points out, an important element of writing instruction is "having meaningful discussion about their writing and the writing process." Am I missing out on opportunities for face-to-face discussion when I insert comments into Word documents and send them back via e-mail?

Quackademic also raises another important question: are students reading our comments? Sometimes I'll write up extensive comments suggesting that a draft needs major revision--when a student misunderstands the assignment, doesn't know the difference between summary and analysis, is ignorant of MLA citation, or has butchered the draft so badly that not much can be salvaged--and then the student fails to read my comments until the paper is just about due. I get these frantic e-mails saying "I can't possibly do this much work on my paper before tomorrow morning!"

Of course the obvious response is, "Then you should have started last week when I sent you my suggestions." I wonder, though, whether it's easier for a student to ignore comments received electronically than those that appear hand-written in bold red ink in a paper shoved right in front of the student's face in class. Or, better yet, make students pick up their papers in person in my office and discuss their revision strategies face-to-face.

Electronic comments are just a whole lot easier--for me. But are they better for my students? Are they the best way to engage students in learning?

I don't know...and right now I don't have time to think about it because that big pile of papers isn't going to grade itself.

Spidey 'n' me

It's not every day that I compare myself to Spider-Man in class, but this morning I found myself explaining to students that "with great power comes great responsibility." Spider-Man never asked for the ability to swing from webs and I never asked for an extraordinary capability to write very bad prose, but like Spiderman, I dedicate myself to employing my superpowers for the good of all. 

This may or may not explain why I make my writing students revise passages like this one:

If they cut out all those repetitive, redundant, bland, colorless, unnecessary adjectives, they would have less words and write bad. On the other hand, if they use few adjectives but only, like, make them really incredibly wonderfully awesome, then they will have esoteric, poignant, and just plain neat prose that marvelously overshadows all that high-falutin' gussied-up bullcrap.

Or this:

Them professors are too demanding; whomever teaches a class should think more about the needs of the students. They should not give students assignments every day; instead, they should give he or she a few days off during the week, especially if him or her has to work to earn money for tuition.

Or, heaven help us, this:

One of the best ways for maximum effect to be created in sentences is for interesting verbs to be used. The reason being is that verbs actionify nouns, making static sentences seem as if they are being more movement-oriented.

I can't help it: once my writey-senses start tingling, sentences like these just pour out. It's a gift, but whatever you do, don't let these sentences loose on the general public. You wouldn't want a power like this to spread to people who don't know how to use it responsibly.

The wrong stuff

I stopped by the grocery store in the way to campus this morning to pick up a birthday card for a colleague and what song did I hear coming from the speakers but the theme song from The Poseidon Adventure. When I'm still feeling my way around on a dark, dank, dreary morning, the last thing I want to hear is Maureen McGovern wailing about the morning after. What a pill.

"1972," I told the cashier. She looked puzzled. I'm sure she's an expert at blocking out the music that loops endlessly through the system at the store, and besides, she's far too young to have had her youthful psyche permanently warped by repeated viewings of The Poseidon Adventure. If Shelley Winters stood before her in a dripping swimsuit and said "In the water I'm a very skinny lady," she would probably faint dead away. (Which would be appropriate, since Shelley Winters has been dead since 2006.)

Which reminds me of my creative nonfiction students, who will discuss in today's class an excerpt from The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, whose name no one in the class confessed to recognizing when I mentioned it last week, and when I followed up by asking if they'd heard of Chuck Yeager, they all said no even though THERE'S AN AIRPORT NAMED IN HIS HONOR JUST DOWN THE INTERSTATE. For today's writing students, The New Journalism has become old hat.

1979. That's when The Right Stuff was published. Back in my youth when dinosaurs roamed the earth.


After this kind of morning, my only hope is that there's got to be a morning after.

When life gives you groundhogs...

Today's well-dressed hound accessorizes with a groundhog carcass draped tastefully across the incisors. She turns and struts and shows her stuff, but don't try to get too close! She is fiercely protective of her new fashion statement.

Times like these I'm really glad Hopeful is an outdoor dog. We already have enough wildlife inside the house, what with giant spiders and crickets that jump at you when you  least expect it and mice in the kitchen and fruit flies in the tomatoes. The cat has been gone for two weeks but I'm still finding hidden deposits of cat hair stashed beneath the sofa, and what's this? Mold? Last week's plumbing catastrophe will be haunting our house for a while.

But at least I don't have to contend with dead groundhogs. Hopeful stashed her treasure beneath a big pine tree, pantry to the great outdoors, so I hope I won't have to see it again. I appreciate her prowess in hunting down the groundhogs that nibble on our garden plants, but that doesn't mean I intend to socialize with the carcass.  

Circling the C

Sometimes a work of literature is so strange and powerful and mysterious that the best I can do is put it in the middle of the classroom and lead my students as we circle it in wonder. That's what happened this morning when my Concepts of Nature class discussed Ernest Hemingway's short story "Indian Camp."

We've just been talking about poets who guide readers toward a particular element of nature in order to extract moral lessons. Hemingway's story also provides a nature guide: the father who leads his very young son into the woods to expose him to one of the wonders of nature, except instead of having a kum ba yah moment or joining hands to sing about the circle of life, the boy watches his father using a jack-knife and fishing line to perform a Caesarian section without anesthesia.

"Her screams are not important," says the father. "I don't hear them because they are not important."

The boy hears the screams and sees the blood and gore and he does what any small boy would do: he looks away, refuses the knowledge of messy natural processes, but he can't avoiding seeing the corpse of the man who slits his own throat rather than endure the woman's screams.

(Cue "The Circle of Life.")

Birth and death are part of the same cycle, so why does the father want to show his son one natural process but shield him from the other? What kind of father takes his small son to observe a C-section performed without anesthesia? How did the mother feel about having a boy in the audience? And what possible lesson did the father hope to teach his son?

At the end the boy joins his father in a canoe on the lake, with the sun coming up and the fish jumping and the water warming the boy's cold hand, and "he felt quite sure that he would never die." Probably not the lesson the father intended.

And what about us? We circle the story; we hear the screams; we see what we can see, but then we turn away, some in wonder, some in disgust, unsure of exactly what we have just witnessed. The circle of life may be amazing, but sometimes it just ain't pretty.

Breathe two three four!

"Feet on the floor. Hands behind your head. Contract that T-A muscle. Big breath! Exhale as you lift! And hold! Chin off your chest! Keep that muscle contracted! And don't forget to breathe!"

I'm pretty good at following directions but all I can think of is: at least she's not asking me to smile. You know how professional photographers like to twist us up in knots--"Right shoulder down, left shoulder up, chin left, eyes right, elbow forward, knees back"--and then insist that we smile? I don't know about you, but by the time I make all my body parts toe the line, I'm in no mood for smiling.

My exercise class instructor does not insist that I smile while contorting my body, but the class makes me smile anyway. Not at first: at first it makes me grimace and grunt and feel like a fool as I try to stand on one foot without falling over sideways or try to contract the right muscle and point my toes and relax my fingers and keep my neck relaxed AND breathe.

Breathing can be a problem. I don't exactly forget to breathe, but I get distracted and sort of postpone breathing while I'm focusing on more immediate matters: Which knee am I supposed to bend? When do I contract that muscle? Oops, I'm falling over again! Then when I do remember to breathe, I'm always exhaling when I'm supposed to inhale or vice versa.


I often feel clumsy and lumpy and dense in my exercise class until the end when we lie on our mats and the music mellows out and I mindlessly follow directions with my eyes closed (so the ceiling fans won't make me dizzy--because it would be just too humiliating to fall over while lying on my back on the floor!). Sometimes I remember to breathe but even when I don't I always end up feeling like smiling.

Stirring up the hornets' nest

Am I getting too cynical for all this?

The question arises in relation to my Concepts of Nature class, which today discussed three typical examples of nineteenth-century American nature poetry: "To a Waterfowl" and "To the Fringed Gentian" by William Cullen Bryant and Longfellow's "The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz" (links here, here, and here). Students' responses were mixed: some complained that the poems were "dry" and full of "Old English language" (ha!) and they didn't know whether "fringed gentian" might refer to a space alien or an obscure nautical tool, but others found the poems more inspiring and exhilarating than anything else we've read this semester.

I brought them down to earth with a thud when I asked, "If nature serves as such a wonderful nurse-maid, providing nurture and care and moral uplift to those brave enough to follow her untrodden paths, why don't we send out all our infants to be raised by wolves?"

Pause.

"And come to think of it, if we're looking for moral lessons in nature, why focus on the fringed gentian or the lovely lone waterfowl instead of, say, the slime mold or the parasitic wasp?"

Ruined the moment. Killed it. Stomped right down on that exhilaration and uplift. I mean, here we all are oohing and ahhing over Bryant and Longfellow's raptures over nature and I have to stir up a hornet's nest.

Don't worry: they're non-lethal hornets. If you ignore them, they will go away, but you may find them again next time you look behind a fringed gentian.

Insert clever title here

Today's the day! The honeymoon's over! This is where the rubber meets the road: all my students are turning in some sort of writing this week, so I will get a good look at their writing skills and they will see my responses to their writing and get an inkling of how much work lies ahead.

And how much is that? I've just briefly glanced at a few dozen drafts and I am pleased to note that most of them follow the format guidelines pretty well and only a few have titles like "Essay 1" or "My Draft." I tell students that the reason I insist upon a good title is that it makes them think about how to appeal to reluctant readers, but the fact is that I just don't ever again need to see another essay called "Essay 1" or "My Draft." At this point I'm amused by the essays called "Insert Clever Title Here" because at least those students are aware of the need to write a title, but occasionally a student fails to follow up and I end up with a final paper called "Insert Clever Title Here." It might have been clever the first dozen times I saw it, but eventually the cleverness wears off.

Imagine that!

I told my senior capstone students this week that "academic writing" need not be dull or dry or incomprehensible but can in fact convey sophisticated ideas with sparkling clarity, but sometimes I wonder. All week I've been trudging dutifully through a new and possibly important work of literary scholarship, but I'm about ready to toss it out the window.

Early on I decided to grit my teeth and overlook the occasional bits of tortured syntax and mangled idioms, and I refrained from tearing out my eyeballs when I reached the line about the "global chickens...coming home to roost." I read that "it is for the first time since World War II that critics may have to consider resetting the boundaries of the present" and I wasted only a few moments wondering, "what is the 'it' that is?"

I even resolved to put aside my prejudice against the use of "imaginary" as a noun, and I was doing pretty well until I got to this passage: "In approaching the cosmodern predominantly as an imaginary configuration--in canvassing the cosmodern imaginary--I insist, then, on the ontological inscription of an imaginary that captures objects and facts undoubtedly 'real,' 'out there.' As it does so, this imaginary imagines, gives them imaginal bodies but does not quite make them up."

Thirty-nine pages into the book and I'm ready to conduct a non-imaginary defenestration. If you happen to be walking past my office window--duck!

And let's not even mention Sisyphus

On two separate occasions this week I've found myself stuck in one of those endless-loop conversations I thought I'd left behind in grade school: "Oh no you can't / oh yes I can / oh no you can't / oh yes I can" ad infinitum. I had this conversation once with a pair of persistent students and once with an administrator, and it's frustrating regardless of which side of the power differential I'm standing on. I caved in to the administrator's demands, but with the students I stood my ground but still didn't feel like king of the hill (or queen of the hill or even princess; more like paper-pusher of the hill).

That conversation is never fun no matter which side of the hill I'm standing on, which is why I was thrilled to create a conversation that leveled that hill entirely. Our first pedagogy workshop of the year brought together a mix of lively colleagues from all over campus to talk about understanding and responding to students' nonverbal communications, and as I sat at the table enjoying my colleagues' contributions, I gave myself a little invisible pat on the back. I didn't preside or present or take center stage in any way, but my administrative skills brought that group together so the magic could happen.

Can one wonderful hour of synergy and serendipity counteract the ill effects of two dead-end king-of-the-hill conversations? I hope so, because I don't want to climb that hill again.

Follow that pencil!

Follow the scrawl of mangled handwriting from the top of page one to the bottom of page three and you'll move from a description of pretty yellow butterflies to a suggestion that Disney princesses need group therapy. How could such a short piece of writing carry readers such a distance?

The writing was mine, produced during a series of free-writing exercises in my creative nonfiction class. We had read and discussed Joni Tevis's essay "In the County of Rent and Tatter," which creates a rich mental map of a place by quilting together colorful fragments of meaning. I asked my students to think about an incident in their own lives that they could associate with a particular color, and then I set them loose to free-write: Write as fast as you can. Don't stop until I tell you. Follow the pencil wherever it leads.

I decided to write along with my students. I started by describing a moment in the meadow with yellow butterflies hovering over goldenrod, but then the dog barged into the scene and reminded me of my encounter with mud-wallowing butterflies who rose and scattered and swirled around me like airborne bits of gold, and then it occurred to me that if I were a Disney princess, those butterflies would have settled on my hair like a coronet.

I had reached that point when it was time to stop writing. I told my students how I had followed my pencil into ideas I wasn't even aware I possessed, and I asked them whether their pencils had led them into surprising territory. A few shared the unexpected turns their writing had taken, and then I asked each student to underline just one interesting sentence or idea from their free-writing and use that as the start of another round.

So I started with the Disney princess crowned by butterflies and wrote about the number of princesses who rely on help from woodland creatures (Snow White), creatures from the sea (Ariel), or even household appliances (Belle). Why, I wonder, do so many Disney princesses depend upon assistance from unexpected quarters? Why do they need butterflies and bunnies and crabs and clocks to ease their path through life? Maybe they need to take a good, old-fashioned Home Ec class or join a support group for codependent princesses.

Time's up. Stop writing. No really, I mean it, stop writing! I can tell it's going to be a fun class when my students don't want to stop writing--and neither do I. I need to figure out what group therapy for princesses might look like, but the only way to find out is to keep following that pencil wherever it leads.

A sabbatical to die for

Ever since Stephen Kinzey's name entered the news last week, academics everywhere have been wondering how he managed to maintain a double life: associate professor of kinesiology at Cal State and leader of an outlaw biker gang/drug ring. I mean, just the photocopying alone would be outrageous. However, an article in Inside Higher Ed (read it here) offers some insight for academics interested in moonlighting:

1. Forsake spelling. His biker gang was called the Devil's Diciples, which makes me cringe and reach for the white-out every time I see it. But just think of all the time Kinzey saved by leaving the s out of disciples! Just select a common letter to systematically omit from your writing and you, too, can earn millions of dollars a year on top of your professorial salary!

2. Focus on the money. Kinzey earned $70,000 a year teaching kinesiology, but experts estimate that leading an outlaw biker gang might have boosted his income into the low seven figures. That extra million would provide ample motivation any time he felt like skipping a committee meeting.

3. Delegate. Tom Barker, a criminal justice professor whom Inside Higher Ed describes as a "leading scholar on outlaw biker gangs," points out that the leader of the gang wouldn't do the actual leg-work like delivering drugs and keeping the books and general office tasks (so, no photocopying!). He would have people for that. Diciples, in fact, although it might be more fun to call them henchmen. Think how much time you could open up in your busy teaching schedule if you had a few henchmen to lean on the dean so he'll excuse you from attending faculty meetings!

4. Slack off in the classroom. Who needs to be SuperProf when you can make a million dollars outside the classroom? Inside Higher Ed reports that students gave Kinzey high ratings on RateMyProfessors.com until recently. Students commented that "the professor sucks, he comes in late and doesn't care, if he try's to help you he'll end up rambling about himself" and he "lost his focus & passion for teaching." For ordinary profs this kind of burnout can be treated by a timely sabbatical, but Kinzey chose an alternate route: life on the lam with his names in the headlines.

The rest of us can only dream about that kind of sabbatical.

A Walt by any other name

"I think I could turn and live with animals," wrote Walt Whitman, offering a number of compelling reasons: "They do not sweat and whine about their condition, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins," nor are they "demented with the mania of owning things." If I were writing the poem today, I would add to Whitman's list:

Animals don't worry about plumbing. Wombats are utterly unconcerned about leaky pipes or black mold growing on the ceiling tiles, and they never leave a nest of power tools near gaping holes in the ceiling.  If they wake up in the morning and discover that there's no running water in the bathroom, they just shrug it off. To the wombat, bathrooms are irrelevant.

They don't keep pets. Elephants might mourn the loss of family members but you don't see them crying over the deaths of wildebeests or putting leashes on them to lead them around the neighborhood while carrying little baggies to pick up the wildebeest poop.

They get their exercise au naturel, so they have no need of gym bags or locker rooms, and if an alpaca happens to walk right into, say, the Women's Faculty Locker Room unaware that it is temporarily being used by a group of adolescent male soccer players, she (the alpaca) isn't suddenly so overwhelmed by vivid memories of locker-room trauma and humiliation that she has to flee the building.

They don't worry about keeping pests out of the house. You never see a hyena having hysterics just because a spider the size of Zimbabwe happens to come waltzing up the hall, even if he's barefoot. (The hyena, not the spider, although I suppose the spider could be barefoot as well. And there's another advantage: no tight shoes.) And if a barefoot hyena notices a gigantic spider waltzing (or even doing the Macarena) up the hall, the hyena just moseys on by rather than, say, grabbing the nearest bottle of spray-cleaner, spraying the spider mercilessly until it shrivels up and dies, and then slipping and falling on the slick floor and smashing some vital joints.

They don't have to deal with contractors. If, for instance, the front porch slab suddenly splits and crumbles away from a fox's den, he can just move out and find another den or, better yet, curl up on a bed of soft leaves in the woods. The fox doesn't even consider grabbing a flashlight and venturing into the crawl-space beneath the house to determine whether the damage extends to the foundation, and neither does it scour the yellow pages for a reputable contractor while trying to suppress memories of previous disastrous encounters with dishonest contractors.

Animals don't feel any need to process traumatic experiences by transforming them into blog posts or fiction or poetry. I think that's why Whitman ultimately decided against turning to live with animals: "Leaves of Grass" couldn't have been written by Walt Wombat or Walt Wildebeest or Walt Earthworm. If bad plumbing, falling porches, pain, and humiliation are the price we have to pay for poetry, then I think I could not turn and live with animals. I'll call a contractor instead.

Curiosity and the cat

A photo on the wall at home shows my son sprawled on the floor reading the Sunday comics while the cat stands beside him looking curious. 

That was back when Whiskers could see well enough to take an interest in the world around her. She used to perch by the big front window watching birds fluttering and frolicking out at the feeders, but for a while now she hasn't even noticed birds--or anything else. Somewhere along the way she got wobbly, stopped jumping up on the furniture and going down the steps.

On Monday she stopped walking altogether. For a few days my husband kept carrying Whiskers to her food dish and the litter box, and in the evenings he sat with the cat in his lap just petting and soothing her for an hour at a time. Yesterday he took her on that last lonely visit to the vet, driving with the cat in his lap because he didn't want to let her go one minute too soon.

She always preferred the men in the family, and now I think the men will miss her most. These last days have been unpleasant for all of us, so I prefer to think of Whiskers curled up beside my sleeping son as if to protect him from intruders, or standing by his side as he reads the comics. Curiosity didn't kill this cat, but when she lost her curiosity, a little something died inside all of us.