Yesterday was my last day of classes, and, unsurprisingly, nearly ten students decided that THAT WAS THE DAY to perform their extra-credit poem memorization--an opportunity that has been open to them for two months. It was actually rather nice, though: I had the chance to chat with some students whom I'd never really gotten to know outside their contributions to class discussion.

Here are some of the more unusual conversations I had:

Student #1 recited Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 and did a very good job. I chatted with him about it for a few minutes afterwards, and when I asked him why he'd chosen that one, he said that, well, he was basically an optimist, and although he really liked all of the sonnets we'd read, many of them had a bleaker outlook about the passage of time and so on. He hastened to explain that he recognized the darker side of life, and could appreciate literature that dealt with it, but he wanted to focus on something more positive. "What I really like, in poetry, is work that focuses on the individual, and the dignity of the human person."

Great, I said. I can appreciate that. Are there any poets that you're thinking of. . . ?

"Well, see, actually who I really like--and most people don't know this about him, but--did you know that John Paul II was a poet?"

Really!

"Yeah! He's got this great poem about a quarry worker--he worked in a quarry when he was a young man--and it's all about the nobility and dignity of the laborer. Also, like Blake? His poem about the chimney sweep? I really like that."

All I could think to do was to suggest that he go read Whitman.


Student #2 recited her poem, and after we'd chatted about it she shyly mentioned that she was taking a creative writing class over the summer, and did I think that that was a good idea?

She's pretty smart and her papers have been solid Bs, but they haven't exactly afforded me the opportunity to see her fiction-writing skills on display. Sure! I said. I mean, I don't know what your creative work looks like, but go for it.

"Well, I really liked that Spenserian assignment you gave us, and I was wondering what you thought about mine." Whereupon she produced from her bag the 9-line stanza she'd written four or six weeks ago, and which I'd given a check-plus to (a rare grade from me for a homework assignment).

I reviewed it and said, yes, this is very good. I mean, it's not fiction, but you seem to have a good ear--and if writing is something you want to do, and you're a good and careful reader, the craft will come.

She went away happy, and I was pleased, but also a little puzzled and a little sad that I--the instructor for her lit survey, who didn't at all know her or her work (we'd only ever had one previous conversation, as she was working on her last paper) was apparently the only person she had to ask for advice about her potential as a writer.


Student #3 didn't have her poem (also a Shakespeare sonnet) fully memorized when she showed up at my office--at FIVE-THIRTY P.M., mind you, shortly before I was planning on leaving--so I told her to go out into the exterior portion of the module, take 10 minutes, and then come back.

I was working away at email when she popped her head back in. "See, it's just these two lines I can't remember! And I can't remember them because I can't understand them. What do they mean?" She passed the book over to me.

Well, uh--he's asking Time to not mark his lover's face . . . what part, exactly, don't you get?

"This 'him'! Who's 'him'?"

Uh, the lover. From the previous line.

"His lover is a MAN?! Wait--was Shakespeare GAY?!!"

Well, we know that most of these poems were written to a man. . .

"Oh wait. Oh, yeah. You said that in class." Pause. "Wow. That's just so funny! So but, some are to a woman. So he was bisexual?"

Finally I got her to refocus on the poem, gave her another five minutes to practice, and then called her in: now or never; I have a train to catch.

And of course, she couldn't get past line three, even with prompts.

And of course, I gave her a break and said that she could try again the day of the final. Sucker.

Okay, okay! Jumping on the bandwagon, here, albeit belatedly.

Accent: I don't really have one, although the regionalisms I've picked up in the last 13 years and the fact that I speak very fast would probably peg me as an East Coaster. (I've also been told, on a couple of occasions, that I have unusual enunciation and delivery patterns--but I have no idea what these people are talking about.)

Booze: My favorite cocktail is the Sidecar, followed closely by the Gimlet and the Martini. My preferred liquors are gin (Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray) or Scotch or Irish whiskey (Dewar's or Jameson's).

Chore I Hate: Cleaning the shower/bathtub.

Dog or Cat: Cats, although I don't have one and I'm allergic.

Essential Electronics: Laptop and cell phone.

Favorite Cologne(s): Chanel, Coco or Allure.

Gold or Silver: I usually wear silver, but I think gold actually looks better on me.

Hometown: Northwest City.

Insomnia: Generally I go to bed late enough (and during the academic term I'm sleep-deprived enough) that I fall asleep immediately.

Job Title: Currently a lecturer, soon to be assistant professor.

Kids: I can barely take care of myself.

Living arrangements: Studio apartment.

Most admirable trait: I think I'm very good at seeing things from other people's perspectives and devining motives and intent. In general, I'm a good reader of character.

Number of sexual partners: Enough.

Overnight hospital stays: Not since I was born.

Phobias: When I get home, I tend to check all the closets and large cupboards for axe-murderers.

Quote: "Not a shred of evidence exists that life is serious, though it is often hard and even terrible. And saying that, I am prepared to add what follows from it: that since everything ends badly for us, in the inescapable catastrophe of death, it seems obvious that the first rule of life is to have a good time." Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker.

Religion: Practicing (albeit liberal/progressive) Catholic.

Siblings: One younger brother.

Time I wake up: I consider anything before 7 a.m. to be the absolute middle of the night (even though this year I've been getting up at 5 or 6 on the days I teach). On the days I'm not teaching, I usually get up between 9.30 and 11.

Unusual talent or skill: I can write backwards rapidly (or upside-down, slightly less rapidly).

Vegetable I refuse to eat: I don't like asparagus, but I'll eat it.

Worst habit: I get cross easily and I'm impatient. And no, I don't think this cancels out item "M," above. You got a problem with that?

X-rays: Foot/ankle. And teeth, of course.

Yummy foods I make: I don't cook much, but I make some mean devilled eggs.

Zodiac sign: I'm precisely on the cusp between Aquarius and Pisces, but I self-identify as an Aquarius.

I’m poking my head out of Grading Jail* just long enough to make these observations:

1. Contrary to my expectations, I’m pretty sure that I’m grading much more slowly this semester—and that I’ve been grading even more slowly with each new set of papers—even though I now have more students than I’ve ever had.

Last term, I had 76 students (which was 58 more students than I’d ever before had in a single semester), and my paper grading efficiency rose to about 25-30 minutes per 5-6 page paper. This term I started out with 112 students, which I’ve since whittled down to 99, and I was convinced that I’d soon hit the magic rate of 20 min/paper—but that hasn’t happened. Instead, I’m d-r-a-g-g-i-n-g myself through each one.

I’m also having an unexpected crisis of faith about my abilities, not so much as a grader (it’s pretty easy to distinguish an A- from a B+, a B+ from a B, and all the way down on just a quick read-through), but as a commenter. I’m just not sure, any more, that my feedback is actually helpful. When I’m confronted with a paragraph, I often find myself paralyzed: okay, so the sentences are inelegant and have usage and word choice errors. The paragraph as a whole is disorganized, with an idea down here that really belongs up there, and the same idea expressed three times in three different ways. Oh, and the argumentation is flawed—the author has ignored a really obvious counterargument here and is making a bogus claim there. So, where to begin? I know that I can’t and shouldn’t deal with all of it, and that my students need to have the Big Things highlighted and not a lot of minutiae—but what does that actually mean, on a given paper? I used to think I knew, but now I appear to have lost that knowledge.

2. Pursuant to item #1, I’m going to rethink how I deal with writing in my literature classes for next year. First of all, I clearly need to set aside more class time to deal with it, even if it’s only ten minutes here and ten minutes there. Second, in my survey-level classes (where I only assign two papers, since the class also has a midterm and a final), I may require that students come to my office hours at least once, either to go over my comments right after I’ve returned their first set of papers or to review those comments as they work on their second papers.

Even though I use a grading rubric that breaks down my comments and their grade into five separate categories—thesis, argumentation/structure, textual support, introduction and conclusion, writing/mechanics--I’m just not convinced that my students are deriving (or even know how to derive) general principles from the feedback that they get on an individual paper; I sure didn’t make that leap when I was an undergraduate. It might be good for me actually to show them how to do this.

3. On a more positive note: I’ve become an expert subway paper-grader, and I actually really like grading on the subway; grading a couple of papers in transit allows me to rationalize an afternoon or evening out, and I’m always more productive in a time- and spatially limited environment. As long as I can get a seat, I’m golden: I’ve got my legal pad to use as a desk and I’ve perfected a grip and penmanship style that allows me to weather sudden stops and jolts. The only negative is that the people around me always seem fascinated: looking over my shoulder or continually casting sidelong glances my way. I sometimes wonder what the content of those looks is. Is it admiring?--“Damn! What a way to be productive!” Or is it critical?--“Shit, I hope my teachers treated my work with a little more attention and respect!”

4. And on the most positive note of all: 12 more papers to grade from my survey sections, then 21 research papers from my seminar (which I haven’t received yet)~~and then I’m free!

*I believe Lisa holds the trademark to this term. But boy, do I love it!

Whenever I read student papers I learn new things about some very familiar texts; that's a given. However, what I learn is usually something small: the significance of a single image here or of a particular word choice there--and these insights can be buried in the midst of papers that are otherwise entirely uninspired. When I'm having a particularly bad run of papers, I may encounter a new idea only once every ten papers. I'm not criticizing my students for this, necessarily--part of writing a paper is learning how to write a paper, and even summarizing and paraphrasing can be a step toward that--but grading a lot of bad papers in a row sometimes makes me feel that I'm losing brain cells along the way.

But just now? I read a student essay that made me SMARTER. It was the fourth close-reading I'd read in a row, all on the same Shakespearean sonnet, and it was amazing; it's the best paper I've read all year (the student in question is very sharp, but her elegant first essay was pretty empty at its core); indeed, it's among the best I've read ever.

Thank God for papers like this. Even if they only come once a year, they're worth it.

Today in my survey classes I began by having my students work through the single sexiest poem of the entire period we're covering. I'd never actually taught this poem before, as it's just a bit long for a day when we're trying to cover a lot of ground, but today it seemed irresistible: it's rather lewd, tremendously funny, but also quite beautiful.

My morning class? Loved it. They succeeded in making the poem even dirtier than I'd originally believed it to be (in two cases they were actually misreading it, but in the third they were absolutely right: I'd missed a very salacious double-entendre), worked through some tough passages like champs, and I think learned a lot. We concluded our discussion, God help us, by considering what the poet himself might have looked like naked. Much merriment, much jollity.

My afternoon class? Eh. They got it--they just weren't particularly interested in it.

People, it's SEX! Naked people! And in an era where, apparently, you all believe that premarital sex was "absolutely forbidden" and that "just writing about it might have gotten him put in prison" (sadly, those are direct quotations from a paper I recently received).

I mean really. If sex doesn't sell, what's this world coming to?

As I'm looking ahead to my move to Medium-Sized City this summer, I'm starting to wonder/worry about how I'm going to make friends and establish a sense of community there. The city itself seems like it has the potential to be cool--it's bigger than Grad School City (where I was very happy living), and has even more in the way of dining, arts, and entertainment options. I'm also looking forward to living in a large, beautiful apartment for not much more than I paid for my tiny grad school studio (and certainly less than I'm paying now!). But this will be the first move I've made since coming East for college where I haven't had pre-existing friends either in the exact location that I'm moving to or no more than an hour or two away. This time, my closest friend will be a five or six hour drive away.

And. . . how does one make new friends, anyway? There are one's colleagues, of course, and I'm excited that there are so many young ones at DRU--but although all the recent hires seem like a lot of fun, most a) don't live in Medium-Sized City itself, and b) don't necessarily seem like people I'd be close to outside of work, even if they were excellent work friends. I got a good vibe from one of them, whom I'm hopeful about, and I know that there will be all the other new-new hires starting in the fall--but one doesn't want to be purely dependant on one's colleagues for one's social life.

However, apart from them, I'm going to know exactly one person in MSC: a fellow INRU grad student, from a different department, just got a job at the local research university. I think we've only actually spoken once, but we know each other by sight and we know a few people in common, so I went ahead and emailed her to say, "Hey! We barely know each other! But I bet you don't know anyone else in MSC, either--let's trade contact information and totally be BFF!" (Fortunately, she wasn't freaked out by this.)

I'm also a little anxious about the scholarly community. The department at DRU seems great, but there's only one other person in my field. Maybe there's a regional, subfield-specific reading group? I know that many of the DRU faculty in different fields belong to reading and support groups that draw from a variety of local universities. If there isn't one, I guess I could try to start one. (You know, with all those connections I have in the area.)

But as worry-making as some of this is, and as torn as I am about leaving my friends, this city, and my life here (my favorite bar! my fabulous hairdresser!), some of it is exciting, too. I already know the frequency of the NPR affiliates, the admission prices and membership rates at the museums and the art-house cinema, and I've been trying to figure out the metropolitan bus routes. The region is also heavily Catholic, so I'm hopeful that, in a city with several colleges and universities, I'll also be able to find the perfect convergence of the liberal, the religious, and the intellectual.

So, you tell me: am I freaked out about moving? Excited? Really, I can't tell.

Although it hardly feels like it, the semester is indeed nearly over. As of today, I have:

• 2 more weeks of classes
• 4 more days of teaching
• 22 hours of teaching
• 12 hours participating in/supervising a "fun" extra-credit project--on a Saturday (what was I thinking?)
• 44 papers left to grade from my survey classes
  
• 21 research papers to grade from my seminar on Author #1
• 3 final exams to devise
• 2 days of exams to sit through
  
• 77 final exams to grade
• 98 course grades to compute

But by May 12, it will all be over!

The fabulous
I went to the noon mass today, took a leisurely hour or two to grab some coffee, read the paper, and window-shop, and then I headed home. I walked the last few blocks slowly, enjoying the 80-degree weather and all the Easter finery on display. There's always a fair amount of dressing up for church here in Historically Black Neighborhood, but of course nothing compares to Easter: oversized hats on the women, panamas and fedoras on the men, suits on churchgoers of both sexes, girls in frilly dresses, and whole families strolling up and down and greeting their neighbors.

Amidst all this display some people still manage to stand out--the woman in the stunning fushia skirt suit; the man in pinstripes carrying a polished walking stick--but one sight almost stopped me dead. Accompanied by their more conventionally dressed family members were two teenaged boys: one in a fire-engine-red four-button suit and matching fedora, the other in a shiny gold checkerboard-pattern suit and two-tone shoes.

Big Easter pimpin'!

The flabbergasting
Ever since I moved here three years ago, a freshly renovated building on my corner has appeared just on the verge of opening. It's an unusually-shaped building, and I've long wondered who had bought it and what it was going to become. But although workmen occasionally came and went and a few of the upstairs windows indicated the presence of a handful of apartments and new residents, no one seemed in a real hurry to install a retail tenant in the handsome street-level space. In the last two months, though, there's been more activity--lighting fixtures going up, a deli case being carted in--and today I finally saw a sign out front. Aha! I thought. At last! So I walked over to take a look.

And whaddaya think it is? Why, a caviar and champagne bar and catering service! Yes, in the heart of HBN. I mean, I get ghetto-fabulous, people, and I like my champagne as much as the next lush--but there are only a few real restaurants and one decent grocery store for blocks. Maybe you could go for something that's both upscale AND a little more useful?

The other day I took down from one of my bookcases a volume of Ezra Pound's poems, looking for his translations from the Anglo-Saxon. I only found one (I'd thought there were more), but as I was flipping through the book a sales slip fell out from against the back binding. Even without seeing the receipt I remembered perfectly well where and when I'd bought the volume, a first edition of the 1926 complete-poems Personae: it was in my first year of grad school, shortly after taking a a course on high modern poetry, that I'd come across the book in my favorite used bookstore. But opening up the handwritten sales slip and looking at the store name stamped across the top, I started thinking about how much I loved that store, and how much I regret its closing.

It's not just this one store, of course--an amazing used bookstore in Quaint Smallish City closed less than a year after George Washington Boyfriend started working there; a dusty hole-in-the-wall near my current apartment has moved most of its scholarly stock into an off-site warehouse so that it can fill its shelves with more "popular" volumes--but this particular used bookstore was one of my first and best experiences with the genre. I discovered it just after my sophomore year of college, when I was hanging around town for a summer internship and subletting an apartment that just happened to be right around the corner from the bookstore. It wasn't near my dorm or any university buildings that I visited regularly, but after that first summer I made it a habit to trek out there every few months. After I graduated, I returned nearly every time I was in town--and when I moved back for grad school I resumed my semi-regular visits.

The entire last year and a half that I was living in Grad School City, the store had a massive sale going on (I think 30-35%), and every time I stopped in I asked the owner, anxiously, if this meant that he was closing. "No, no," he said: he was just weeding out the stock. But it wasn't true; by March 2003 the store had closed.

Thinking about the bookstore got me perusing my shelves and wondering what, if anything, the particular books I bought there say about me, my evolving interests, or about the store's particular strengths. Here, then, is an annotated list, in approximately chronological order by purchase date:

• Oscar Wilde, De Profundis. I was very into Wilde the summer I lived near the bookstore.
• Evelyn Waugh, Diaries of Evelyn Waugh and The End of Battle (first edition). Ditto Waugh, though this interest has lasted longer and goes much deeper than my interest in Wilde.
• A 1965 edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. I also bought this that first summer, and although it's turned out to be useful, I don't think I used it much until grad school. The one time I remember using it in college was when HK and I were having a phone conversation in which we were trying to understand the difference between metonymy and synecdoche. After we'd gotten off the phone I went off to dinner, and when I came back there was a message from her on my machine saying, in her trademarked faux-naive voice, "So, LL, if I just heard a girl say that she gave her boyfriend head last night--is "giving head" an example of metonymy, or synecdoche?" I called back and we argued about it for 30 minutes. (You wanna know what I was like in college? That's what I was like in college.)
• A flimsy paperback copy of E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational. I bought this because a T.A. of mine kept mentioning it. I believe that I read it. I remember nothing about it.
• A 1966 edition of Sylvia Plath, Ariel. Does this item need annotating? I was a 22-year old woman. Of course I bought this book.
• A monumental, Heritage Society 3-volume edition of Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I have not read this. But I had good intentions when I shelled out the $65 for it early in grad school.
• Ezra Pound, Personae.
• Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope (first edition) and Not so Deep as a Well. My copy of Enough Rope, which is Parker's first volume of poems, has this inscription: "To Helene--with good intentions. From 'Shup.'" What does that mean? What does it MEAN? I puzzle over this every time I open the volume.
• A Compact Oxford English Dictionary from the 1970s, complete with case and magnifying glass. This was one of my greatest coups, purchased for about $75 during that prolonged period where the bookstore was running its sale. I found the volume on a grey afternoon shortly after GWB and I had started dating. We'd had a nice lunch at a clubby little. . . well, club near campus and then had gone our separate ways. I was still wearing a skirt and heels, and I lugged the set, wrapped in plastic against the drizzle, back the 20-minute crosstown walk by myself.
• A pristine set of the 10-volume Complete [Genre] Works of [Major Author]. This is really my prized purchase. The set is the standard critical edition of works that I expect to be studying for the rest of my career, but it's long out of print and impossible to find even through the used book network (two or three of the less-popular volumes show up occasionally, but not the ones that I really need). I'd been trying to get my hands on at least the most relevant volumes for years, checking ABE nearly every week, when this essentially untouched set showed up at the bookstore just a day or two before one of my periodic visits. The owner ran a quick internet search and then quoted me a price of $300. I took a deep breath and whipped out my plastic. I'm quite sure he could have gotten $1,000 from an internet buyer within weeks, but perhaps he was just trying to move stock. Apparently, it was only a month later that he closed up shop.

I admit that these days I buy most of my used books from ABE, where I can be reasonably sure of getting what I need and where I can comparison shop for prices. But I miss the serendipity of the used bookstore, and I particularly miss THIS bookstore. I'm pleased, though, to learn that there are some reputedly good used bookstores in the city and the region that I'll be moving to this summer.