Bigger on the inside

As much as I hate the thought of packing up all my books and saying goodbye to my beautiful big windows and sage-green walls, I'm getting ready to move to a new office. My three-year term in the Worthington Center is coming to a close so at some point this summer I'll invite all my friends to a moving party so we can shift all my stuff across campus.


My new office is in an older building--built the year I was born, so I wouldn't call it decrepit. Seasoned, yes; a bit eccentric in spots, certainly; but not exactly an antique. The best office available is oddly shaped: taller than it is wide, with a window set so high in the wall that you'd have to climb up the bookshelves to get a good look out, and then you'd just see the feet of passersby. It's a basement office, but it's in a great neighborhood, surrounded by friendly and interesting people.

To make the room less cramped and dungeon-like, I'll paint the walls a sunshiny shade, bring in a colorful rug, and get rid of any excess furniture. (Four filing cabinets? Who needs four filing cabinets?) I'd like to ask the physical plant to blast out a big part of the outer wall, shove the dirt to the side, and install a walk-out porch--or wait, the ceiling is surely high enough to allow the installation of a loft!

I'm dreaming, of course--but wouldn't it be great to find a way to make my office bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? Sort of like a Tardis--which would also simplify the task of moving all those books. Where's Doctor Who when I need him?

News of the world

This morning I saw the first trilliums of the season. Also Dutchman's Breeches. Also kingfishers, which come out of hiding only when I'm not carrying a camera. (My question: how do they know?)

I walked out early and found the road near the creek dotted with dead frogs plus, for variety, a dead spider big enough to qualify as roadkill. Also a spotted slug the size of Schenectady. Experts predict a banner year for all the creepy-crawlies, thanks to a warm, wet winter and early spring.

And speaking of creepy-crawlies: what's spotted like a brown spotted slug but much skinnier and moves like a tiny snake? Don't know? Neither do I, but whatever it was, it was crawling across my road toward the creek. Some sort of legless lizard or a tiny baby snake of a species I don't recognize? Just when I think I've figured out what sorts of creatures share my environment, along comes something I've never seen before.

Next time I'm taking the camera. But don't bother warning the kingfishers because I'm sure they already know.

The picture of health

It's been weeks now but I'm still startled every time I open the college's web site and see my own face smiling back at me. Who is that woman and what is she grinning about? The photo is attached to a story about my recent teaching prize, but the photo was actually taken in spring of 2009 to illustrate a different story about cross-disciplinary learning. I generally dislike photos of myself but I like this one because it makes me look like I'm in on a very happy secret.

I did have a secret in spring of 2009--a secret so deep even I didn't know it. When this photo was taken, I was just weeks away from being diagnosed with stage 3 endometrial cancer. I may look like the picture of health, but deep down inside I'm being eaten alive by a pestilent scourge of out-of-control cells. Chances are good that I was in pain when this photo was taken, but I had grown accustomed to dismissing my pain. "Just a natural part of the aging process," they told me. "At your age, you may as well tough it out until menopause."

I'm glad I finally found a doctor who would take my pain seriously and unearth that hidden secret, but I still wonder: how could I have looked so healthy when I was so very very sick? This is the face of cancer--I just didn't know it at the time. 

In the glomming

I found out today that I've been using the word glom incorrectly--maybe. I would have to go back to campus to find out for sure, but I'm trying to avoid campus not because I'm unfriendly but because of what I'm calling the sabbatical effect. If I were on campus every day, all the gossip and negative vibes and bad karma and generally icky gunk that grows in the darker corners of academe would waft my way gradually, a bit at a time, but now that I'm visiting campus rarely, all that gunk gloms onto me all at once in a big goopy lump.

See that? I used glom onto as if I were a magnet and all that campus gunk were iron, or as if I were a spoon sliding through a pot of honey. I just can't stop all that stuff from sticking to me.

But that's wrong, or it may be wrong, depending on what dictionary you look at. Dictionary.com suggests that the word springs from the Scots glaum or glahm "to snatch at" or "to steal."  (No relation to gloaming, which comes to us from Old English glom meaning twilight.)

All the definitions I found allow glom to be used alone transitively meaning to steal, to grab or catch, even (colloquially) to arrest. The Dictionary of American Slang offers the following sentence: "He gloms just about everything he needs."

I don't know about you, but if I wanted to snatch a word to use in that sort of sentence, I would never glom glom. (Except I just did it. Doesn't it sound odd?) But perhaps glom agglomerates different meanings when it becomes glom onto.

Um, no. Here is the full entry:

glom onto: to take hold or possession of: He wanted to glom onto some of that money.

Sure, but if our nameless hero succeeds in snatching some cash, does the money glom onto him? If I accumulate campus gunk, does it glom onto me or do I glom onto it?

I suppose the OED would provide enlightenment, but I would have to venture out and drive to campus and use the online OED database, which I can't access from home. The very thought of driving out in the gloaming to explore the roots of glom makes me gloomy--but does gloom glom onto me? I wish I knew.

Book-order blues

Book order deadlines are no respecter of sabbaticals, so here I sit searching for a reader for my fall freshman composition class. Easy, right? The options are endless, and creating a custom reader gets easier all the time (although no less expensive). So what's my problem?

My fall section of freshman composition is a learning community linked with an introductory biology class, so I'll need to introduce students to two different citation styles AND I need very focused readings. No problem finding essays offering a variety of perspectives on, say, biofuels, but where do I find really cutting-edge readings on photosynthesis?

I've found a number of anthologies on contemporary issues in biology, some published as recently as 1981 (!) and some priced under $120 (for a paperback), except for the one that lists the hardback price at $139.99 and the paperback at $912.18. (Surely that's a typo, right? Who pays close to a thousand dollars for a paperback book?)

Maybe it's time to explore a custom reader. The last custom reader I ordered was a disaster--late, incomplete, and outrageously expensive (with no secondary market, so no buybacks)--but that was before the online era. Today's it's a breeze to assemble a custom reader: just click to select essays, study questions, rhetorical apparatus. It's like online shopping: before you know it, your virtual shopping cart bulges with great deals that add up to $912.18. (Maybe that's not a typo....)

For years I've wondered what it would be like to teach a composition class with no reader at all, relying entirely on readings available online or (drum roll, please) in the library. Maybe this would be a good time to find out--from others who have tried it. A little help?

Argh! Now it turns out custom readers have to be ordered in quantities higher than the course cap (18). What next?

Time to crash the peeper party

The raucous party ran on past midnight last night so I couldn't quite believe it when I heard the first shrill suggestion that it might begin again before dawn. After all that racket last night, I thought, they can't possibly have any energy left to start partying again at 5:57 a.m. But they do and they did.

I'm not sure how long this party has been going on, but I know this is the first time since we moved to the woods that the weather has been warm enough this early in the season to allow open windows all night long. Probably the party has been cranked up full blast every year at this time but we slept right through it. This spring, though, we can't ignore the mating call of the frog.

What kind of frog? I wish I could tell you. I know three things about them: they are abundant, persistent, and very, very loud.

I also know that the insistent spring call comes from male frogs hoping to attract mates, who are hopelessly attracted to the piercing peeps. If you stood in a singles bar and honked an air horn over and over all night long you wouldn't expect to find women lining up to have your babies, but apparently frogs think differently. If they think at all.

I think I'd like to see the creatures that have been disturbing the peace for the past week, so I spent an hour or so tromping around the woods along our creek. I saw plenty of signs of spring--daffodils and forsythia blooming, towhees in the trees and a great blue heron flying overhead, green buds on the trees and green shoots popping up in the woods, and up near the house more towhees and bluejays and Carolina wrens and a lone cowbird poking its head out from behind a feeder, but I didn't see a single frog.

Judging by the sound, we could have a veritable Mormon Tabernacle Choir of frogs singing their fool heads off out there, but during the day they may as well be invisible. Maybe I need to do my frog-hunting while the party is in full swing. I've never received an invitation, but I intend to crash this peeping party--as soon as I find a reliable flashlight.

Springtime, green slime

You wake up on a lazy Saturday to find the weather warm, sunny, and springlike, and while a nagging voice in the back of the mind whines, "Don't enjoy it! You can't have weather this nice so early in the year without paying for it down the road!", your pale, pasty, northern winter skin begs to be taken outside into the sunshine.

So you head for the deck to sit with your feet up and read your newspaper to the sound of birds in the trees heralding spring, except all the deck furniture looks as if it's been living in the bottom of an aquarium that hasn't been cleaned in a decade. What is that green slime? Algae? It coats the table and chairs, discolors the shady parts of the deck and even the siding. Who wants to sit on green slime?

So you fetch a bucket and a pile of rags and some Pine-Sol and you start scrubbing, shoving furniture around and turning it over to get to the really yucky spots, and before you know it sweat pours down your face and neck and back and combines with Pine-Sol to produce a vile odor that sticks with you, repelling all living beings that come close enough to sniff it, but the hard work pays off and in less time than it takes to wallpaper the Parthenon the deck and its furniture are sparkling clean.

You have vanquished the green slime! You deserve a rousing round of applause, but what you really want is a chance to sit in the sun, put your feet up, and welcome spring.

As soon as everything dries off.

Swamp fever

At first glance, the swamp looks useless. You can't plow it, fence it, or build on it, and it's likely to breed mosquitoes and other pests--in fact, early settlers unaware of the mosquito's role in the spread of malaria believed the swamp air alone caused disease. This fear of the "miasma" caused settlers to either avoid swamps altogether or drain them dry.

Some years ago we lived in the middle of what was once northwest Ohio's Great Black Swamp, long drained to make room for corn, wheat, and soybeans--and roads, houses, schools, and factories. You could live there a long time without ever thinking about the swamp, but every once in a while the land remembers its origins. In wet seasons, crawdads colonized the low spots on our lawn and waterfowl dabbled in the ditch. Once I found one of our foster children throwing stones at a heron. "It's just a bird," he said.

We saw many "just a birds" today on a visit to Killbuck Marsh, Ohio's largest inland marsh and a popular stopping-over point for migrating waterfowl. We were chasing rumors of sandhill cranes but saw instead great blue herons, Canada geese, some ducks too distant to be reliably identified, and red-winged blackbirds by the thousands. At one point we were looking through a dense tangle of waterlogged undergrowth when a mass of brilliant white floated into view: a pair of swans.

 We saw signs warning hunters not to shoot the swans, but the most interesting sign we saw was being eaten by a tree. We mark our territory, post our signs, and build our fences, but sometimes nature has the last word.

 

The eagles have landed

I'm sitting in my car in the parking lot of a church waiting for my husband to get done with choir practice so we can drive a few hours north to visit family, but I've got my laptop in the car AND I just got some slightly better photos of the resident eagles this morning AND I've found a very fast wi-fi hotspot nearby AND it's unsecured, so why not upload some photos?

Some days I just love technology.

This is the only photo that shows both birds. They were sitting back-to-back above the river, one looking upstream and one looking downstream.

Even sabbaticophiles need a break

What does Spring Break mean to the prof who's on sabbatical?

It means there's no point in going to campus because everyone I'd like to see is either off gallivanting somewhere interesting or, more likely, hunkering down at home with a pile of midterms to grade. I'm tempted to call them all up and sing the "I'm on sabbatical and you're not!" song, but that would be wrong.

Really wrong.

So don't even think about it.

Maybe I'll just stand outside their windows and hum it softly.

For the sabbaticaler (sabbaticalizer? sabbaticalitioner? sabbaticationist?), Spring Break resembles the rest of the semester, only lonelier because of the aforementioned absent colleagues. I could just stay home and continue working on my research project, which, frankly, has gotten a little unwieldy. It's time to close the books on reading and note-taking and start doing some serious writing.

First, though, I think I'll take a break. Tomorrow I'll drive up to my daughter and son-in-law's house to spend a few days helping my daughter celebrate her grad-school Spring Break, although I wish I'd reminded her earlier that the word "Break" is strictly metaphorical and does not mandate the breaking of limbs or the spraining of ankles. Can a musical grad student go canoeing on crutches? We're about to find out!

If nothing else, we can spend some time writing new verses to the "I'm on sabbatical and you're not!" song. One of these days I may even get the courage to sing it.

Stumbling sentences, dancing prose

Quick! Who wrote this:

"Mamma," John began slowly, "it hurts me to see you so troubled over my going away; but I feel that I must go. I'm stagnating here. This indolent atmosphere will stifle every bit of ambition that's in me....I want to do something worthy of a strong man. I have done nothing so far but look to you and papa for everything. Let me learn to strive and think--in short, be a man."

And how about this:

"High John de Conquer came to be a man, and a mighty man at that. But he was not a natural man in the beginning. First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world in a low but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing-drum."

The second passage might be more recognizable: the lyrical language, careful control of rhythm, and love for African American folklore point clearly to Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote this description in "High John De Conquer" (1943).

But what about the first passage? Stilted dialogue, melodramatic pauses, lack of attention to rhythm and sound--just try saying out loud "This indolent atmosphere will stifle every bit of ambition that's in me." It sounds like a very bad soap opera, but no: it comes from "John Redding Goes to Sea," a short story written in 1921 by Zora Neale Hurston.

"John Redding" is a very odd short story that follows the nineteenth-century convention requiring the hero to speak in standard English even if everyone around him speaks in dialect. John's mother says, "Ah nevah wuz happy an' nevah specks tuh be," and his father says things like "we mus' let John hoe his own row. If it's travlin' twon't be foh long. He'll come back to us bettah than when he went off. What do you say, son?"

What John says is the first passage above, and it's just as ridiculous in context as out.


The remarkable thing here is not so much that Hurston was capable of writing bad sentences, but that she could so completely leave behind the stilted sentiments of John Redding's speech as she gained control over rhythm and sound. "High John De Conquer" is a minor work, loosely structured and lacking the impact of frequently anthologized short stories like "Sweat" and "The Gilded Six-Bits," but look at this sentence: "First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song." The sibilants shuffle through the sentence while the Ws carry us forward in a rhythm that feels loose but controlled. You can't pronounce that sentence quickly.

You can't say John Redding's sentences quickly either, but that's because they're constructed for the eye rather than the tongue. No one outside of melodrama ever said "Let me learn to strive and think--in short, be a man," but it's easy to imagine a front-porch storyteller leaning forward in a rocking chair to say, "High John de Conquer came to be a man, and a mighty man at that. But he was not a natural man in the beginning."

Zora Neale Hurston came to be a writer, and a mighty writer at that, but these passages suggest that she had to work really hard to develop the style that sounds so natural. But here's the question: how did she make it look so easy?

When did Ohio become a verb?

Sometimes the best part of voting is getting the little sticker. This year, though, the sticker is nearly as incomprehensible as the ballot.

If you squint, you can just about make that the red Ohio looks sort of vaguely like a lopsided angular warped heart, which makes this "I Heart Voting." But if your eyes are worn out from trying to make sense of the ballot, the sticker looks like "I Ohio Voting," which makes sense as long as Ohio is a verb, or "I Lopsided Angular Warped Heart Voting," which makes no sense at all.

Who came up with this idea? Exhaustive research (of the first Google entry that popped up) reveals that this sticker design was the result of a statewide contest, earning 38 percent of the vote--and the first runner-up received 37 percent (see all the contenders here). The Ohio Secretary of State thinks all Ohioans should wear the sticker as a "badge of honor," but you'll notice he didn't call it a badge of grammar or logic or comprehensibility.

But okay: I'll wear my sticker as a badge of honor even if today I didn't particularly heart voting. This election season has been making my heart feel squeezed and stomped on and warped into lopsided shapes, and if that's what the sticker is trying to say, I'm all for it.

The search of my nightmares

In my dream I'm serving on a search committee trying to sort through 30,000 applicant files. Thirty thousand! I've served on some difficult searches but never one that reached nightmare proportions.

Everyone complains about sorting through hundreds of applicant files, but trust me: it's better to have too many applicants than too few. I've served on both kinds of searches and there's nothing more disheartening than an applicant pool too shallow to drown a doubt.

Over the past decade, I've served on search committees almost every year, some inside my department and some outside. When I look around campus and consider the people I've had a hand in hiring, I feel pretty good: I've hired some fun and intelligent and amazing people and only one outright disaster, and Dr. Disaster has long since left the building.  

What stands out from all those searches?

Worst question from an applicant: "How often do you get to Cleveland to go clubbing?" (Um, it's three hours away....are you sure you want to live in Appalachia?)

Second-worst question from an applicant: "How much did you pay for your house?" (Go ahead and ask me about housing prices in the area, but my house? Are you kidding me?)

Worst question I received while being interviewed by a member of the search committee that hired me: "Do you believe in Satan? Because [name redacted] is the spawn of Satan!"

Worst response from an applicant I was interviewing: "I don't know if you know anything about American Literature, but...."

Worst weather-related search committee disaster: the finalist arrives in town just before the blizzard strikes, but only one member of the search committee can get to campus (on foot!) for the interview because the roads are closed and the rest of us are hopelessly snowed in. By the time the roads clear, the applicant has left town.

Worst dining behavior by an applicant: while eating a meal at a very nice restaurant, the applicant picks up the linen napkin, blows her nose on it, and then smooths the napkin down in her lap, only to repeat the process multiple times throughout the meal.  

Second-worst dining behavior: talking interminably about Foucault while the restaurant is emptying out because everyone wants to get home to watch the Superbowl.

Longest time served on a search committee: two and a half years--and the result was Dr. Disaster.

Which is worse, hiring the wrong person or hiring no one? I served on a search committee that resulted in no hire, which is generally referred to as a "failed" search. But honestly: would you prefer that we hired another Dr. Disaster? Sometimes the best thing to do is call it a day and go to Plan B.

And if Plan B attracts 30,000 applicants--please don't appoint me to the search committee!

Like a rolling stone

Moss is easy.
Eagles are hard.

Moss sits there like a bump on a log, a bright patch of green in a the drab winter woods.

Eagles soar--you never know where--and they blend with the trees where they perch.

You can walk right up to patch of moss and it'll sit there and pose as long as you like.

Just try sneaking up on an eagle. They don't call 'em "eagle eyes" for nothing.

I've seen this pair of eagles perched on trees along the Muskingum not five miles from my house twice now in the past week, but I didn't have the camera with me. Today I was determined to get a good shot.

First I had to find the eagles. We found one just about where we'd seen it this morning, but we were driving on a busy state highway and the eagle was at the top of a tree on the other side of the river. Quick--make a U-turn and park sort of illegally on a side road, then dash across traffic to squeeze into the thin space between the road's edge and the guardrail to get a distant blurry photo.

How to get closer? Stumble down the slope into a field, pass a passel of "No Trespassing" signs, get right down on the muddy bank that was underwater just last week and lift the camera just as the eagle spreads its wings to soar downstream. It's a wonder to watch--but the photos show a mere speck of white above the brown river.

Back in the car. Drive downstream and find the eagle perched on another tree. Pull off on the shoulder, lean on the guardrail, and lift the camera only to see the eagle take off upstream again.

The sight of that eagle swooping above the river will feed my spirit for days to come, but the photos? Meh. Too distant for clarity, too mobile for good composition. If I could only get the eagles to sit still like a bump on a log long enough to let me walk right up and focus, I might get a good shot.


But what would you call an eagle that acted like moss? It certainly wouldn't be an eagle.