La Lecturess

Happy blogiversary to me

2006-05-27T15:14:00.000-04:00

Today marks the one-year anniversary of this blog, and also its--I don't want to say "conclusion," but let's say--"transition" into a new space and a slightly different form. It's probably true that it takes a while for any writer to get comfortable with a new genre, and I'm a little embarrassed to read back over my earliest posts--but I'm generally satisfied with the shape of this blog and the voice I've developed. I wish sometimes that I were a different kind of blogger (more on that in an upcoming post in my new space), but I'm just not, at least not right now.

I'm moving, then, not because I want to change anything significant about this blog, but because the title I've given myself and my blog will soon no longer be applicable. However, I'd also like to branch out a little bit in my new space, dealing more explicitly, at least occasionally, with subfield-specific issues. We'll see how that goes.

For now, what I really want to say is a big THANK YOU to all my readers, who number more than I ever would have expected and who have become, in many cases, friends. At my commencement activities last weekend I often caught myself telling my grad school colleagues about various "friends" who had had this or that experience in teaching or going up for tenure--and only belatedly relizing that I didn't know many of those people in real life, or in some cases even their names! And yet it's absolutely true that many of you ARE my friends, and I'm so pleased that I've had the opportunity to get to know all of you and to receive such frequently overwhelming support and encouragement as I've moved from thinking of myself as a grad student to assuming a new identity as a professor.

So consider this an open invitation to come on over and party with me at my new place, Ferule & Fescue. See you on the flip side.

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Vital stats for La Lecturess

Days of existence: 366
Number of posts: 324
Number of site visits: just over 36,000

Commencement

2006-05-25T09:46:00.000-04:00

Best news: it didn't rain!

Is anyone surprised that my advisor didn't show up? I know that I shouldn't be, but I still am, kinda. GWB's advisor, however, stood in for her in the photo below (those are his hand and ear):

[Image redacted]

A totally spurious contemplative moment:

[Image redacted]

Updated to add: Sorry to those who missed the photos...

Service announcements

2006-05-20T11:42:00.000-04:00

Limited blogging ahead: George Washington Boyfriend and I are off to spend the next few days in INRU-land for commencement, partying down with assorted members of my family and his family--it'll be the first time that our parents will have met, so. . . wish us luck with that. And pray for dry weather, while you're at it.

After that, I'll be hanging with my folks for a day or two here in the city, and then I'm off to New City to apartment hunt. If you're lucky, somewhere in the midst of it all I might post a photo of myself in my regalia, at least for a few hours.

Impending relocation: What with my rapidly-approaching 1-year bloggiversary and my graduation and new job and title and all the rest, I'll be moving to a new blog-home and taking on a different pseudonym by the end of the month. I expect to leave this blog up, however, and you may expect clear and easy directions to the housewarming party at my new place. BYOB.

A query

2006-05-19T20:38:00.000-04:00

Am I the only person who, when reading a journal article, writes in the margins things like, "so WHAT?" "this is totally bogus" and, "yeah, no shit"? Or is it just a sign of my immaturity and inability to respond in some more profound and scholarly way?*

Just wondering.

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*Immature or not, I do take unkind satisfaction from the fact that this particular article is such bullshit, given that the woman who wrote it is apparently working on a book project that overlaps with my own.

Sign of the times

2006-05-19T12:06:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading a famous work of literary criticism. It's some 35 years old and still brilliant, but one thing really irritated me about it.

Every time the author refers to the works of another male scholar, he refers to said scholar as, simply, Lastname (e.g., Smith, rather than Mr. or Dr. or Professor Smith). On the relatively rare occasions on which he has occasion to refer to a female scholar, she is always Miss Lastname or (still more rarely) Mrs. Lastname.

I'm sure this was standard in the late 1960s, and it may even have been the publisher's house style rather than the author's own preference. But my God, it's annoying, and such a surprising reminder of how few women there once were in the academy--or in professional positions, period.

I'm not sure what the rationale behind this formula was: was it considered impolite to refer to a woman simply by her last name? Was the name, taken alone, seen as rightfully belonging to her husband or father (and thus the title situates her in relation to him)?

Whatever the reasoning, what a practical nightmare that must have been. Imagine: every time you wanted to quote a female scholar, you had to go find out whether or not she was married, so you could refer to her properly! And how demeaning for the woman to have that be the first and most pressing inquiry made about her: not what else she's written or where she teaches, but what her marital status is.

And here's the thing: this book was reissued by the publisher just a few years ago, in a new edition (properly speaking, the only thing new about it is the introduction--the rest of the volume looks as though it was set by simply photographing the original pages), and I'm sure it's still a good seller. Without an electronic file, going back and eliminating those titles would be expensive and time-consuming for the publisher, I know--but leaving them in dates the work in really unattractive ways.

Course design and the writing process

2006-05-18T14:47:00.000-04:00

This fall I'll be teaching three courses, all of which I've already taught some version of. (The schedule was set up long before I even interviewed with DRU, with the intention that, whoever the department wound up hiring, they'd be able to slide into these classes with ease): Period Survey, Author Survey, and a composition seminar. The comp class will require the most revision, since I'm adapting the course that I taught at INRU two years ago, parts of which were designed to take advantage of the fact that 2004 was a presidential-election year. However, I'm switching some texts around in my other courses and generally trying to learn from my teaching experiences these past few semesters.

And it occurs to me that my approach to course design, or at any rate lesson planning, is weirdly similar to my approach to writing. As I've discussed, I'm a drafter. I write draft after draft after draft, usually into the double digits, of everything I write. I used to find this exasperating about myself--why can't I just call it done? Why can't I be faster at this?--but I've come to accept and often even to enjoy my own rhythms; in a way, it takes the pressure off to know that, okay, I'm going to have to be writing nearly every day for a month rather than screaming through a project in a week and a half--but on any given day I don't have to produce something brilliant, or even produce that much. I just have to plug away (at least until the end, when I do get truly crazy and obsessive).

I think I've now come to have a similar attitude toward teaching, born more of necessity than of nature. Teaching a 3/4 load this year was a shock, especially since each semester involved two new preps and I was on the market and I was still finishing my dissertation in the fall. So after the first few weeks of overpreparing, I learned the value of "prepared enough." I'd do the readings, type up any handouts or quizzes the night before, and then do all my lesson planning on the train into campus, scratching out big themes, lines of questioning, and important passages on a legal pad. To my surprise, this worked really well in the classroom, although I did always feel that I was perched on the edge of total disaster and might tumble into it at any moment.

In my period survey this spring, in the interests of time, I mostly just adapted or outright repeated what I'd done in the same class in the fall--sometimes using the exact same handwritten notes. I didn't love the straight repetition (one feels rather like a jukebox spitting out the same old tune), but I liked it when I had the time to think through a slightly different classroom strategy or to build on what I'd noticed from the previous semester. I also started occasionally scratching notes in the margins of my lesson plans as I was teaching, indicating things that worked well; things that needed more time; things to be scrapped.

Now that the term is over and I'm looking ahead to the fall, when I'll be teaching two of these same classes all over again, I'm also in the process of typing up my lesson plans based on these handwritten ones. My intention is to create a Word file for every text I teach, which I'll adapt and add to each year. Any given semester, I'll print out the document and then mark it up by hand: yes to this, this, and that part; skip that bit; try something else here.

We'll see how it plays out in practice, but I really like this as a way of thinking about teaching a given text or a given course: as a process with many stages and many drafts, and always with the potential for one more round of revisions.

And when I teach two brand-new classes in Spring 2007? Yeah, I'll put plenty of time into designing the syllabi and doing background reading--but the actual lesson plans will, I expect, be scratched out on legal pads the night before.

Convergence

2006-05-16T19:03:00.000-04:00

This afternoon I finally received the three bound copies of my dissertation that I'd ordered from UMI.

This morning I called up Sallie Mae to consolidate all my student loans. Given that I owe well over $60,000, I'm projected to be in repayment for the next 25 years.

Talk about your vanity projects.

Interpretative Dance Theocrats

2006-05-15T15:18:00.000-04:00

Check out this "crib sheet for Christianity" (more additions in the comments section, so scroll down).

Here's a taste:

The Protestant Reformation
This is the name historians give to a major labor dispute that erupted in Germany in 1517 when a group of monks hammered a proposed union contract to the door of the pope's house, requesting a 95 percent pay raise. The pope refused to negotiate with the monks union until it agreed to pay to have the door fixed, and the result was the world's longest-running strike. For nearly 500 years, a huge portion of Christians have been on strike from being Catholic. . . . Currently, the matter is in arbitration.

Calvinism
This theory was worked out by the French theologian and fashion designer John Calvin Klein, who argued that some people are predestined to be glamorous while others are doomed to be plain. America was founded by Calvinists, who sought to establish a country where they could pursue their belief that buckled hats were fashionable.

Unfortunately for the author, it's not just the non-religious who know fuck-all about Christianity--it's Christians themselves. Many of them my students.

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(Link wantonly stolen from my brother's blog. Thanks, bro!)

Belated but appropriate Friday poetry blogging

2006-05-15T11:19:00.000-04:00

Westron wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.

Après le déluge. . . we shop!

2006-05-11T22:15:00.000-04:00

After a manic 48 hours of grading, I finally finished up around noon today and ran down to FedEx to send in the course grades for my last two classes (they're due by 10 a.m. tomorrow, and I was damned if I was going to make the trip to deliver them in person). Then I spent the next few hours wandering slowly back in the direction of home, ducking into nearly every enticing shop along the way.

Like Ragey, I believe in rewarding myself for tasks accomplished. Unlike Ragey, I don't tend to plan ahead, and so these treats are not necessarily in the budget even if they're relatively inconsequential. And it must be said that I tend to believe that I deserve such treats rather often.

Here's how I spent my money today:

Designer sunglasses (purchased at a discount department store, thus a mere $19.99)

Lingerie (purchased at the same location, thus 50% off retail)

A huge vintage cocktail ring--sterling silver, nearly an inch in diameter, and with a big blue topaz in the center.

A bottle of Campari. Because as much as I love the gin and as much as I love the whiskey, summer just isn't summer without Campari.

So as that list may suggest, I've decided to give in and just go ahead and declare the rest of May a holiday. I have a few scholarly books that I plan on reading, and I'll probably work on updating my syllabi and transferring my (handwritten) lesson plans from this past year to computer files--but if I don't, I don't, and I'm not even going to pretend to do any research until June 1.

What will I be doing instead? Well, I'm hoping that this past week--minus that whole grading interlude--will provide a template: in addition to the poker party and the housewarming party previously mentioned, I've also done some more afternoon drinking with Bert (a five-hour stretch at that same bar, which included several impromptu dance breaks on the bar itself); I've had a lovely dinner with an old college friend who lives in the metropolis that surrounds Big Urban; and then this weekend several of us are trekking out to the Château Fergusberg for one last bash before they sell the place and move north. Oh, and I also have a ton of cleaning to do.

Laissez les bons temps roulez!

Objects in the mirror may be cooler than they appear

2006-05-09T13:30:00.000-04:00

So it's the end of the term, and amidst the various dirty or hostile looks I've received upon returning papers, passing out exams, and the like (and I've received plenty), I've also received two touching and unexpected affirmations from students in my seminar on Author #1.

One of them--a highly participatory but sometimes wide-of-the-mark graduating senior who'd done abysmally on his first paper--sent me a long, thoughtful email in which he said the class had been one of the best he'd taken in his four years at Big Urban. He's a journalism major, and he wrote that he'd been very nervous about the nature of the material we were covering and had worried that he'd never live up to my expectations, but that in fact he'd learned more and been more challenged than in almost any other course he'd taken.

And as if that weren't awesome enough, it looks like he'll be working at a certain storied men's magazine after graduation. Yes, the one with the rabbit ears. So I can say that I taught someone there everything he knows about [dead white male author]!

The other affirmer was one of my two punk/metal band kids. These two always arrived together (and always 5-10 minutes late), and when one wasn't there, the other wasn't there. One of them talked in class while the other rarely said a word, but as a unit they were hard to read: they'd sit there in the back of the class, in their fingerless black gloves and ripped jackets, occasionally exchanging amused glances, and I always had a sneaking suspicion that they found both me and the class to be a complete joke.

But in fact one of them (the talker, who also happens to be an extremely talented comic writer) wound up emailing me about this and that, and in the course of doing so asked if it was true that I'd be teaching one of the courses on Author #2 in the fall: "I really should take that class, but I've already had to drop it twice due to serious lack of interest in the instructor. [Other metal kid] and I would totally take it if you're teaching it."

When I told him that I'd love to have them in my class, but that unfortunately I wouldn't be at Big Urban in the fall, he wrote back, "That sucks that you're leaving! You're an awesome teacher. [Other kid] and I loved this class. Hey, I even did the reading for it!"

Now, some of his enjoyment was surely based on the content of the course (if you know which one I'm talking about you can imagine that both the author and one character in particular might appeal to a rebellious late adolescent), but I was still touched and absurdly flattered by his correspondence.

I mean, hey: not only did they like my class, but they apparently thought that I was COOL.

Listen up, world.

Disconnected, end-of-semester wrap-up

2006-05-07T11:43:00.000-04:00

It's been a busy week and a half. I was in Quaint Smallish City for the six days between the end of classes and my first exam, grading and writing finals and trying to catch up on my magazines and professional journals. George Washington Boyfriend and I went over to Dr. Fun's place one night for a poker party with some of the other junior or otherwise cool faculty at Atypical College, where we drank bourbon, toasted Fun's achievement of tenure and his partner's new job with Important Book Review, and talked shit about everyone who wasn't there. We also got together with one of my favorite academic bloggers and said blogger's partner for dinner and a leisurely few cups of tea and conversation afterwards--all in all, a week of just the right mix of work and fun.

And then--and then it was a mad scramble to campus for my exams (the first two of which were scheduled for 8.30 a.m. and 4 p.m., on the same day--whose idea was that?), while trying to finish up a paper proposal for Big Deal conference. Friday I ran off to get a fabulous haircut, donned my long lanky pink trousers, and set off for a housewarming party at Lulu's. When I first arrived the bartender hadn't yet shown up (and yes, they're the kind of people who hire a bartender), so Bert took over that job temporarily, mixing the mojitos and foisting Tequila shots on everyone, but mostly on himself, when he wasn't somehow both insulting and endearing himself to the guests by making what might otherwise be considered offensive racial and ethnic remarks. (Bert can get away with it because he's Bert.)

And then it was 6-something a.m. on Saturday and I had to make myself look presentable for the last day of a conference some distance away about which I had all kinds of social anxiety; it didn't help that I was still half-drunk when I woke up and that I retained a nice little headache right in the center of my forehead until well into the afternoon. However, I put in the necessary face-time, reconnected with some people I genuinely like, and made some small but useful professional contacts. I didn't get introduced to the Vortex of Evil (Sfragett, you know who I mean), but I chatted up a different big-name critic who immediately asked me to review for his journal--starting with a book on Neglected Author that I really want to read but for which I've so far been unwilling to shell out $60--and was told by the editor of Big Journal in My Field how much they'd loved my recent article and how much they hoped I'd send any future work their way.

So, it was all a bit more of a love-fest than I expected, even if I was completely cold-shouldered by someone I considered a friend in grad school. Nothing has happened between us--she just doesn't, apparently, consider me important enough to waste five minutes of conversation on. Ah, academic politics.

And now it's the homestretch: my last exam is on Tuesday, followed by a quick pack-up of my office, and dinner in the city with an old college friend. Grading grading grading for the next two days--and everything should be done by Thursday.

After which, it'll be time to get serious.

Classroom space, take two

2006-05-04T15:06:00.000-04:00

In response to my previous post, a reader-friend emailed me these comments:

I thought you were going to go in a very different direction. I completely agree with you when you write: "What I'm interested in here is not whether my classroom space this semester provided an adequate learning environment, since it was more than adequate; rather, what I'm interested in is the effect that classroom space has on students' perception of their learning." But from my perspective, the issue is not how wonderful or how burnished [INRU] has become. Rather, my interest is in how the functional, if barely, classrooms affect your present students. Or the filthy, disgusting, airless, windowless classrooms affect mine. My point is that when you are in a classroom like the one you reproduce at [INRU], sure, you feel the luxury, but you also feel that you matter, and the material you are talking about matters (I had similar classrooms at [School 1] and [School 2]). But at present, my students are in classrooms that scream at them that they don't matter. Consider the effect of a classroom with a gaping hole in the wall, a hole that is never repaired, has on them, and on their sense of importance. I don't mind the patina of luxury at [INRU], because [INRU] still deeply values its faculty, and its students. It's the places like [my current school] that drive me up a wall, because they don't.

I wrote back briefly, but he makes some good points that I'd like to explore further--and I'd be interested in engaging anyone else who might be interested as well.

My first thought is that, yes, classroom space does send a message to students about themselves and their worth and the worth of the educational enterprise; the rooms my reader describes sound appalling, and whatever message students might take away about themselves from such a room, they're probably not leaving with the impression that learning, in and of itself, has great social worth.

However, my rooms at Big Urban really don't meet that description (the hole in the wall, by the way, was repaired a month into the semester, although the patch itself--more than two feet square--remains entirely and glaringly visible). The worst rooms I've taught in aren't much worse than simply a neutral backdrop against which to stage whatever it is that's being taught, and I don't have a problem with that: it's a big public school, but it's also an R1 with a good faculty and a diverse and pretty smart student population--they're paying much less than students pay at INRU, is what I'm saying, but I don't think that the quality of the education they're getting is significantly less, although it's necessarily patchier.

I also wrote my previous post in part because, as a student at INRU, I always did feel that the rich facilities were somehow a tribute to the learning experience itself. Many's the time I'd sit in a graduate seminar in that renovated building, on an upper floor, with a view of trees and sky and faraway spires through the leaded glass windows--and then I'd look around the room full of handsome faux antique chairs bearing the university crest (chairs that retail for more than $300 each), lovely wood panelling, earnest students, and think, "Ah! The intellectual life! This is what it's like!"

And yes: in part the university spends money on its facilities because it genuinely values its teachers, its students, and the life of the mind. But I've gotten more cynical as I've gotten older, and as I've begun to compare the gloss of the new facilities and their insane expense with the old facilities (not to mention when I compare these expenditures with the way the university treats its workers--but that's a whole 'nother post), it's hard not to feel that there's an excessiveness there that's all about trading on the school's name and reputation and constructing a movie-set version of the college experience, the better to reel in well-heeled suburban students who might be scared off if the campus didn't match their Dead Poets' Society fantasies.

But laying all the variables aside, and if it were just a matter of the facilities--wouldn't I myself rather teach in a room like the one pictured in my first photo?

Of course. But that doesn't mean that I'm not a little disgusted with myself for it.

Classroom space

2006-05-02T15:28:00.000-04:00

A month or two ago, after a visit to Grad School City, I promised a post on classroom space and our attitudes toward and understanding of the educational experience itself.

Below is the first room in which I taught at INRU, and which is entirely typical of the classrooms for most seminar-size classes or discussion sections; typically the classes in such a room would number around 18, but the room could seat 25 in a pinch. Notice the big windows (which go up nearly to the ceiling), the rich woodworking, warm-neutral paint colors, and the simple but handsome (and probably very expensive) chairs and table:

Below is the classroom at Big Urban in which I taught my seminar on Author #1; the room is also identical to that in which I taught my two survey sections (it's the same room, just on a different floor):

The photo makes the space look nicer than it actually is--you can't see the big gaping hole in the wall beneath the whiteboard behind the instructor's desk, or how truly battered the tablet desks are; it's also hard to tell how small the room is. Once upon a time, it was a seminar room with a single big table in the middle, and now there are 30 desks crammed in there (the space is actually only slightly larger than the room pictured above).

Nevertheless, the differences between the two are apparent, and I'm quite sure that the latter room would not appear in a college viewbook (unless it were full of smiling, engaged students of all races). It's not at all a bad room--except for the hole in the wall--and indeed in many ways I preferred having my 30-person surveys in a fairly tight space rather than in the much wider and deeper rooms in better repair in which I taught the same class last semester: in those rooms I felt more removed from the class, and the silent students at the back of the class could sometimes drop off my radar screen in a way that simply wasn't possible in this tiny room, where the front row of desks was three feet from the front of my instructor's desk. This semester, we made jokes about the room; the students got to know their neighbors well (because they were always, literally, rubbing shoulders with them); and I could easily tell who was paying attention and who needed to be brought back into the discussion.

What I'm interested in here is not whether my classroom space this semester provided an adequate learning environment, since it was more than adequate; rather, what I'm interested in is the effect that classroom space has on students' perception of their learning. Wandering around the INRU campus the last time I was in town, I was struck all over again by how picture-postcard-y the place is. When I was an undergraduate, the place had a lovely luster, but was actually rather dingy around the edges: the classroom building that houses the room from that first photo is one of the oldest buildings on campus, and when I was in college it hadn't yet been renovated. Aside from the gawdawful fluorescent lights that had been installed at some point along the way, the building probably hadn't had a thing done to it in a century: the tables and chairs were hideously beat up and scarred with generations' worth of graffiti; the radiators hissed and clanked aggressively all winter long; the treads on the marble interior staircases were worn down, unevenly, like the stones at Canterbury, making for treacherous climbing. Sure, there were some new buildings, and some slow renovations going on, but the campus as a whole was shabby-genteel in a way that, after a while, made the place feel authentic in some way. No fancy new high-tech, wall-to-wall-carpeted buildings here! Save that for you Johnny-come-lately universities with parking lots.

This was, of course, a delusion (most of the buildings on campus were actually only some 60 or 70 years old--they just hadn't had anything done to them since), but there seemed to be virtue as well as snobbery in our affection for the pretty but crumbling structures around us.

I don't know what the living conditions are like now, and I'm sure that the dorm room are still too small, that they occasionally have mice, and that many of them are still saunas in the winter. However, nearly all the classroom buildings have been renovated along the lines of the room you see above; the campus has been sculpted and landscaped with new paving stones, pretty fences and benches, and fresh sod in the springtime to replace the barren patches in the grass. The dorms and libraries are also getting drop-dead-gorgeous makeovers: burnished woodwork, wrought iron gates; the whole nine. It's probably prettier than the campus ever was, even back in the patrician days that the makeover is clearly meant to evoke.

And that's the thing: if the campus was always a movie-set fantasy of what the Hallowed Halls of Academe look like, and of course it was, it was something one could ignore when the facilities actually looked as though they might well BE 500 years old. But now, as truly gorgeous as every corner of campus seems to be, there's such a stink of money and privilege about it that I find myself deeply conflicted even while, as a (somewhat) loyal alumna, I'm pleased to see the place doing well. (It's possible that that stink was always there, but that I was less sensitive to it when I was trying to be worthy of it.)

Walking around campus now, I'm aware of what a luxury good the place is marketing itself as. It's not just the World! Class! Education! that's being promised, but the appearance and the trappings of that education. The students and their parents are sophisticated enough consumers to know that what they want isn't just a four-year degree, but a liberal arts education. Anyone can go to college and then to business or law school, but if you want to move in the right circles, you want to be the kind of person who has season tickets to the opera and subscribes to The New Yorker and who can talk about The Waste Land and Salman Rushdie at company dinners or when wooing European clients.

And of course, I'm torn by this. I do think that the education that INRU provides is a great one, and that its students are usually genuinely excited by the intellectual life; sure, some of them are careerist, and will fuss about their B-pluses, but those same students are usually at the same time really engaged by the ideas that they encounter and really want the kind of education they're receiving; they want to be challenged to some degree, even if they also want their work to be validated with an A at the end of it all.

But I hate the fact that this education is being sold as an ultra-exclusive product that students get--along with those hushed stone passageways and vaulted ceilings--because they're in the know in one way or another: either they were born into a life of privilege (monetary or intellectual), or they've been tapped by their high school teachers and the admissions committee as worthy of entering that life of privilege because they have the right interests and talents.

And I hate the fact that this is what a liberal arts education has in many ways become, whether it's at a school like INRU or in the honors program at a big state school: a luxury. Everyone else gets pre-professional or glorified vocational training--since that is, in fact, what many students and their parents want. I'm not blaming students for the fact that most jobs now require a four-year college degree, and that their friends and family members tend to regard a degree in accounting as a more sensible project than a degree in English. And I'm not saying that I don't understand that the pressures on many students are acute. But when we talk about consumerism in higher education we're not just talking about students treating their instructors like service providers, demanding results (i.e., good grades) for their money, and attempting to dictate the terms of their education. We're also talking about the prestige economy that such a situation creates, in which some students not only get to show off more exclusive labels on their car bumpers or workout gear, but also get a different kind of education.

No one needs a well-appointed seminar room in a building with leaded glass windows and marble staircases to get a liberal arts education. Frankly, I prefer teaching students like those I've had a Big Urban, who don't come to my classes with a reflexive respect for the dead white males I teach. It's much more satisfying, and I think more valuable, to catch students by surprise, and to see them develop both analytical skills and aesthetic pleasures they didn't anticipate deriving from the stuff they "have" to study because they're English or Education majors--or because, if they're non-humanities majors, they took a flier on a class that met at the right time and fulfilled a distribution requirement.

But I worry that, increasingly, this kind of broad-ranging education, where the student is given the leisure to discover his or her own interests serendipitously, to debate ideas passionately, and draw connections across a disparate range of subjects, is coming to be seen as the province of those who can, in both sense of the word, "afford" it. And if they can afford this kind of education, well, it had better look the part while they're getting it.

(Sort of) Friday poetry blogging

2006-04-28T14:18:00.000-04:00

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.

ABC meme

2006-04-25T22:17:00.000-04:00

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.

It's never going to end. But it will end.

2006-04-24T12:48:00.000-04:00

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!

Learning from my students

2006-04-19T18:44:00.000-04:00

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.

Just sayin'

2006-04-18T23:22:00.000-04:00

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?

Community

2006-04-18T14:27:00.000-04:00

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.

End-of-semester countdown

2006-04-16T21:35:00.000-04:00

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 and the flabbergasting

2006-04-16T14:38:00.000-04:00

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?

Used books, used bookstores

2006-04-14T20:26:00.000-04:00

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.

Good Friday poetry blogging: John Donne

2006-04-14T10:28:00.000-04:00

This is an entirely predictable choice, but I do love this poem.

Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward

Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motions, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirled by it.
Hence is't that I am carried towards the West
This day, when my soul's form bends towards the East.
There I should see a Sun, by rising, set,
And by that setting endless day beget:
But that Christ on this cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees God's face, that is self life, must die;
What a death were it then to see God die?
It made his owne lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made his footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands which span the poles,
And tune all spheres at once, peirced with those holes?
Could I behold that endless height which is
Zenith to us, and t'our antipodes,
Humbled below us? Or that blood which is
The seat of all our souls, if not of his,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God, for his apparel, ragg'd and torn?
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was God's partner here, and furnished thus
Half of that sacrifice, which ransomed us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them, and thou look'st towards me,
O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree.
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O think me worth thine anger, punish me;
Burn off my rusts and my deformity;
Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know me, and I'll turn my face.

Teaching mystery #724

2006-04-13T23:51:00.000-04:00

Why is it that today, when I had a terrible head cold, had bumbled my way through my first three classes, and was fully prepared to let my fourth class go early--why did THAT class, typically the weakest of my four, the one with apathetic non-majors, at a terrible time of day, on a subject and genre in which I'm not an expert--go just truly and amazingly well? So well that I left the room energized (which I never am at 5.30 p.m. after being up for twelve hours, teaching for six, and facing a long train ride home)?

[The ride home was still excruciating, but at least the day didn't feel like a total waste.]

A letter to my student who can't be bothered

2006-04-11T22:34:00.000-04:00

Dear [Student],

I'm not sure whether it has come to your attention that you are failing my class. This is something that you might have realized if you had ever bothered to collect your midterm (on which you got a 39%--with the curve); if you had taken a moment to calculate your quiz average (which is about a 4 out of 10); or if it had occured to you that, in reading your latest paper, I might notice that you had obviously never read the text that you purported to analyze--and that, moreover, your entire essay appeared to have been written in 20 minutes.

I'm wondering whether you remember that ass-whipping I gave you in February, when you turned in your first paper six days late and casually announced that you were taking your free extension for that paper. Do you remember that you got a 54 on that essay, that you learned to address me as "Doctor" or "Professor" rather than by my first name, and that you pledged you would "turn things around" for the rest of the semester?

Maybe you do, because you DO now speak in class, and quite a lot--but only when you're IN class, which is approximately every third class meeting. And it's also true that, after that first paper, you have turned all your assignments in on time. However, had you been in class today, you would have discovered that your on-time essay still merited an F.

Maybe you're taking this class credit/fail, or maybe you're figuring that no one ever gets a grade lower than a C in an English class. I assure you, however, that I have given students far more conscientious than you a D as a course grade. I will not regret failing you for the semester.

This is what I WILL regret: that I won't be at Big Urban long enough to develop a reputation sufficient to keep assholes like you out of my classes.

Cordially,
LL

So beautiful and yet so stupid

2006-04-10T12:38:00.000-04:00

It's always tragic to have a student who's as dumb as a stone, but somehow it seems particularly tragic when he or she is also gorgeous (. . . and sweet-tempered; it probably wouldn't be so tragic if the gorgeous student in question went around kicking puppies or pushing small children into traffic).

The student I'm thinking of is in my class on Author #1, and he's model-beautiful. And not generic, J. Crew-model-beautiful, either, but arrestingly, unexpectedly striking: fine features, very fair skin, dark wavy hair about chin length, and blue eyes. Not especially tall or especially buff, but very fit. He totally belongs in a period drama as the poetic nobleman.

The only problem is, if he were cast in such a drama, he'd never remember his lines. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, one of the thicker human beings I've yet encountered. I've been gradually coming to this conclusion based on his first paper and the infrequent, head-scratching contributions that he makes to our class discussions, but I just finished his second paper and it's head-against-the-desk-bangingly bad.

Ah, well. Dame Fortune has only so many gifts for each of us.

Administrative matters

2006-04-10T12:14:00.000-04:00

It has come to my attention that there are great, gaping holes in my blogroll. I recently discovered that ABD Mom, whom I've been reading and loving for months, was not up there, and now I note that the fabulous Oso Raro isn't, either, which is a criminal oversight. No slights are intended, I assure you--since I read my subscriptions through Bloglines, the public blogroll has fallen into neglect and disrepair.

So, taking a page from Dr. Crazy: please drop me a note if you want to be added to the blogroll. Chances are that I'm already reading your blog, but if not, I'd be delighted to know about it.

Negotiation/celebration

2006-04-09T15:53:00.000-04:00

Negotiation
Well, this didn't get very far. I asked the dean for an additional $4K in salary, on the grounds that a) I've never owned a car, so purchasing one would represent a significant start-up expense, and b) since my partner lives in X location, I'd be spending Y amount each month on airfare to see him (many thanks to Hieronimo for suggesting this line of argument). I also pointed out that my salary next year at Big Urban would only be $6K less than the salary DRU was offering me, and that there I wouldn't need a car and would be closer to George Washington Boyfriend, so it was really a wash (if you ignore the lack of job security, the higher cost of living, heavier teaching load, etc., which I was willing to do for the sake of the argument).

But no dice: the English department is making several hires this year, of which I'm the last, and they apparently want everyone to start at the same salary. As for the other stuff: I asked for $5,500 in start-up funds and got $4,000; I'm getting up to $3,000 in moving expenses; and I confirmed that my computer and printer will be new and of my own choosing. Course reductions and pre-tenure leave weren't on the table.

I'm a little vexed that I couldn't maneouver my salary up by even $1,000, but on the whole I'm quite pleased with the package. The cost of living in the area is pretty low, so what money I make will probably go further than I expect after having spent most of my adult life in big, expensive cities.

Celebration
I've been in Quaint Smallish City with GWB for the last few days and will be here until early Tuesday. We've been having a fine old time watching the final season of Six Feet Under, drinking the better part of a bottle of Jameson's, going out for a celebratory sushi dinner, grading papers. . . . Well, okay, so it would have been much more of a party without that last item, but it wouldn't be April without a sudden crush of work.

If I get through my quota today, though, we'll be going out for drinks with Dr. Fun, who just got tenure at Atypical College. So much to celebrate!

Bizarro world

2006-04-08T13:38:00.002-04:00

I think I've fallen into some kind of parallel universe.

On Thursday, after getting the offer from the dean of Decent Regional U., I emailed my advisor with the news. She wrote back almost immediately with a message that I can only describe as bubbly, telling me how marvelous this was, asking me a million questions about the institution, and concluding by telling me that she had no advice (I'd told her I welcomed it), other than to be happy and to do whatever made me happy.

This, you might say, is to be expected from an advisor--but it isn't at all what *I* expected. When I'd mentioned the phone interview to her during our meeting two weeks ago, she'd been pleased, but had said things that led me to believe that getting an offer from DRU would be good mainly because it might give me leverage with Big Urban (which is very short-handed in my field and which we'd speculated must be hiring for a ladder position soon). I've long felt that Advisor expected me to get an R1 job--partly, I'm sure, because she believes in my work, but at least partly because she seems firmly to believe that a research position is the only kind of success that matters, and because she likes to be associated with success. Frankly, I was worried that she wouldn't be very impressed with my getting a job at a school she'd never heard of.

But the craziest and the sweetest part of Advisor's email was when she mentioned a previous, pretty hapless advisee now teaching at a vocational college, the Ivy-ensconced Elder Sister (remember her?), and me, all in the same breath, as people who were doing really well and making her so proud and restoring a bit of her faith in the profession. This suggestion that our successes were on the same order is probably the most generous thing I've ever heard her say, and it reminds me that, despite all of the traumatizing things that Advisor did and said in the early years of our working together (and okay, despite the rather traumatizing thing she said to me just two weeks ago), it's true that she's also capable of extraordinary generosity and that she can be strongly--if weirdly and disconcertingly--maternal at unexpected moments.

So I think that now it's time for me to officially Get Over my advisor complex. I've got the degree, I've got the job, and she's professed herself very excited to talk about and look over a new article-length project I'm considering (as well as to remain in dialogue about the dissertation/book manuscript as I revise it)--so it's time for me to see that our relationship has definitively changed and that she truly has faith in me; it's time for me to stop dwelling on the things that she did in the past and looking for signs that she's going to do them again.

So, bloggy peeps, hold me to my word on that one.

Really dead women writers

2006-04-08T12:43:00.000-04:00

Bardiac started assembling this list of really dead women writers as a way of expanding the boundaries of the women-writers meme that Mon began--and since then a few other bloggers have pitched in.

As many of you know, I do not work on women writers. Nor do I work on anything that could remotely be considered to touch on issues of sex or gender. Nevertheless, and partly because I've been trying hard to teach a version of my period survey class that isn't ONLY full of the usual suspects, I've recently been thinking more about older female writers and I'm delighted that Bardiac got the ball rolling on this one.

As it stands when last I saw it, here's the list as assembled by Bardiac, Dr. Virago, and Amanda. Bolded are the ones I've read myself (in whole or in part); my additions follow.

The (draft) REALLY DEAD WOMEN WRITERS meme

Aphra Behn - Oroonoko
Anne Bradstreet - Collected Poems
Anonymous - The Floure and the Leafe (Dr. V explains her reasoning on her blog)
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Fama y obras póstumas
Christine de Pisan (aka Pizan) - The Book of the City of Ladies
Julian of Norwich - Revelations of Divine Love
Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
Lanyer, Aemilia - Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Anne Locke (aka Ane Lok, etc) - A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner
Marie de France - The Lais of Marie de France
The Paston Women - The Paston Letters
Lady Mary Wroth - Poems

My contributions:

Anne Askew - The Examinations of Anne Askew
Mary Sidney - Psalms
Anne Finch - Poems
Katherine Phillips - Poems
Teresa of Avila - Life

If you've got more to add, drop Bardiac a line when you do so, so she can keep track of the list.

Offer! Offer!

2006-04-06T13:50:00.000-04:00

That's right, dudes and dudettes, I just heard from the dean at Decent Regional U, making me a job offer. On the tenure track. At a place where I think I'd be pretty happy. What the hell?

But now I need your help, dear readers. I need to do this whole "negotiating" thing for my salary and start-up funds, and I'm not sure how to go about it. I've been emailed a copy of the terms that the dean outlined over the phone, but in our conversation he did not indicate that anything was negotiable except the amount of my start-up money (which would be determined based upon the specific needs I outline when I get back to him).

So. . . does that mean that salary ISN'T negotiable, or just that one has to ask? (At Small College, by contrast, the President said straight-out that there could be some wiggle room on salary if I were made an offer.) My instinct is to go ahead and ask for $4-5K more than the figure the dean gave me, but I want to make sure that I'm not committing a horrible faux pas by doing so. And does it matter whether these negotiations are conducted over the phone or via email?

Finally, what the hell is a reasonable amount for start-up funds in the humanities? My job placement officer at INRU helpfully outlined a normal range for new hires at INRU. . . but what's normal there is, uh, in the five figures. I'm kinda thinking that a public comprehensive school is not working in that range. On the other hand, I do genuinely need to spend some time in the UK for at least the next two summers, and that gets expensive fast.

Any thoughts welcome--especially from those of you who I know have just gone through this process!

Huh?

2006-04-05T21:33:00.000-04:00

The weirdest search string, so far, that has brought someone to this blog:

please teach me how to draft and cut skirts

Aside from the fact that I absolutely cannot assist this person--and that this fact should have been clear from the blog excerpt that Google provided, without her actually having to click through--who puts "please" in a search string? Whom does this hapless, ill-skirted person think she's addressing?

Regalia

2006-04-05T16:18:00.000-04:00

My doctoral robes just arrived this afternoon, and they're the most beauteous things you've ever seen, in one of my favorite shades of my favorite color. (Smart work on my part, attending a school whose colors are in such harmony with my own tastes.)

Most of my readers know what a complicated relationship I have with INRU, but I have to say that, laying out these robes, I got such a rush of affection for the institution that I almost teared up. Now, I'm not going to go crazy and start donating large sums of money, or even any money, any time soon--my alumni fund officer is a friend of mine, and each year I have to patiently remind her why I stopped giving to INRU--but it's funny what power the good memories have to overwhelm the bad ones, and how the viewbook version of the campus comes to seem like the one I actually inhabited, while the real one (the one in which we had mice in our freshman dorm, where the grass never grew over a large portion of the quad, and the radiators in some classrooms clanked so loudly that it was hard to hear the lecturers) recedes from view.

On my campus visit last week, one of the recent hires asked me, over dinner, whether I wanted to go back to INRU eventually--which is something I get asked all the damn time, presumably because I got all my degrees from the same place, and why would one do that if she didn't just love it?--and I said, well, certainly not any time in the next 15 years; junior faculty there don't have a very good life. And the fact is that I don't think I'd want to be a senior faculty member, either, at a place where the junior faculty were seen as so temporary that it really wasn't considered worthwhile to get to know them.

Sometimes I truly believe, with the partisanship of the alumna, that there's no better university on the planet. Other times I think that the place has permanently damaged me and warped my understanding of the profession.

Most often, I believe both to be true.

Sometimes I love my students

2006-04-04T13:36:00.000-04:00

Item the first: in my survey class, I give my students extra credit if they memorize a lyric poem of at least 14 lines by an author we've read. The deal is that they make an appointment with me and come to my office to recite it--with feeling! I've had good results in the past, but today two of my best students, who are close friends, proposed a slightly altered version: they'd both memorize two consecutive sonnets from a series, but recite them by delivering alternate lines: "You know," said one, "like a rap. We're thinking Beastie Boys, here."

I told them that was the awesomest thing I'd heard all day.

Item the second: I just Googled myself, and I found myself mentioned on a blog belonging to a student whom I taught last semester. He was laying out his projected course schedule for the fall, among which was listed Author Survey, with my name next to it and the comment "I love her!"

Awww.

...but I know this makes me a bad person

2006-04-03T11:07:00.000-04:00

I missed mass yesterday--and I try never to miss mass during Lent--because I was out drinking. In the afternoon.

I'd gotten up early enough to make the noon mass, even with that damn daylight-savings nonsense, but then I frittered away the time until I was just barely able to meet Lulu for our planned 1.30 brunch. No problem, I thought: I'd make the 5.30 service. What are the chances that we'll be together for more than four hours?

Very high, as it turns out, on a gorgeous day close to 80 degrees, with everything in bloom and everybody out on the streets throwing off their coats and blinking in astonishment at the sunlight. We had a fabulous meal with terrible service, in the course of which we ran into a couple who looked strangely familiar--and who we finally concluded were the crazy roommate we had in our summer sublet in the city six years ago (the summer after my first year in grad school and Lulu's second year in law school) and said roommate's then-boyfriend, now-husband. We spent the whole meal staring at them in the mirror behind our table, trying to get a positive ID, and laughing about what a toilet-paper-hoarding control freak she was.

From thence we wandered over to the flea market on the next block, which was a mob scene but as wacky and compelling as usual. I got a call from Bert, who was rambling bored around his neighborhood and looking for something to do. I told him to come uptown and join us, and he did. Lulu and Bert have long been my closest friends in the city, and the three of us used to hang out all the time--but what with Bert's several-year withdrawal into his own little world, I don't think he and Lulu had seen each other in four or five years, and it seemed high time to effect a reunion.

Then, after some time prowling through the stalls, playing with sock puppets, and chatting up the guy who rewires vintage toasters, we decided that we needed a drink. It was after four, but I still figured that I could make mass--my church was only a 16-block walk away--but of course by then it was a losing cause. We found a dive bar with $2.50 beers, plunked ourselves down on a few bar stools, and had two or three beers apiece. Oh, and two rounds of shots. As Lulu said, with enthusiasm, "I'd forgotten about afternoon drinking! How could I forget?"

So, actually, I refuse to feel too bad about this. Sometimes reaffirming friendships with people I now see too infrequently, and whom I'll be moving away from soon, seems like the best possible use of my time.

Does this make me a bad person?

2006-04-02T11:17:00.000-04:00

I know someone from grad school who has a blog. She's a luminous, shiny superstar of a scholar (not in my field, thank God!), who I doubt actually knows my name and who I'm quite sure does not read my blog. I don't usually read hers, either, as her blog voice irritates me--but every couple of months I run into her in the comments sections of other people's blogs, usually in long, well-intentioned remarks where she's nevertheless totally misread the problem or opinion expressed by the blogger and jumped in with advice inappropriate to the blogger's actual circumstances.

But here's the thing: she hasn't protected her Sitemeter. So whenever I venture over there I can't help but check out her hits--how many, where they come from, etc. (Her blog, which is very focused in its subject matter, is pretty well-known in the circles relevant to it; although she has few commenters, she's got approximately 60% more hits per day than I do.)

I'm not sure why I find snooping around in her blog so compelling, though it's true that I AM a zealous amateur detective--I just like to know things! I like to have information! Maybe I shouldn't tell my blog audience this, but I've figured out, sometimes with considerable effort, the identities of many of the bloggers I read, simply because I can't not know who some of my favorites are. I don't actually do anything with this information, rest assured--I just like to be able to put names and locations to the personalities I encounter. (And should anyone care to do the same with me, they certainly could, as I'm too lazy or too indifferent to protect my pseudonymity with any real diligence.)

What's odd about this is that I'm not the kind of person who snoops around in my host's medicine cabinets or dresser drawers when I visit, and I'm not even that much of a gossip. . . but I guess that I AM a researcher and a puzzle-solver by temperament. Partial information is just too tempting for me to pass by. I want all the details--preferrably, a full file drawer's worth of them!

Interview recap

2006-04-01T16:28:00.000-05:00

Short version: the whole shebang seemed to go off pretty well, and I came away impressed by the university and the surrounding area.

Highlights:

The faculty laughed, a lot, during my job talk (which was of the reading-off-notes variety, not the formal, reading-a-40-minute-paper variety), and I was told by several members that it was one of the best/most interesting job talks they'd heard.

The English department is in a gorgeous building with great facilities, and all the offices have windows.

The department is very young (after a wave of retirements, they've been doing A LOT of hiring) and mostly populated with faculty members from very good Ph.D. programs doing interesting work.

Although the university is largely a teaching school (3/3 load), there's lots of support for research, and all the tenured faculty have a couple of books to their names.

English is one of the largest majors, and the majors I met were fun and engaged.

Real estate is dirt cheap.

The location is in/near a medium-sized city with a good airport and a good arts scene.

Start-up funds!

So, we'll see if they liked me as well as I liked them. It must be said that the location isn't entirely ideal (it's the better part of a day's drive to anyone I care about; I'd need a car to get around; the area is famous for a particular kind of weather that I could do without), but it's certainly not unappealing. It might not be someplace I'd stay forever, but it seems as though it would be a warm and nurturing place to start out. And dammit, I deserve some nurturing for a change!*

*A couple of the recent hires know my advisor, and so over drinks I had to bust out my stories of early trauma at her hands. They were gratifyingly appalled.

You just haven't earned it yet, baby

2006-03-27T21:35:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm breaking my Blogger fast to make this observation:

I've been listening to The Smiths tonight for the first time in a very long while (I used to love the Smiths), when the song that gives this post its title came on.

I'd think that my CD player was trying to tell me something about my career--or, really, about any one of a number of other things--but given that my other options include, "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," "Panic," "These Things Take Time," "I Started Something I Couldn't Finish," "I Know It's Over," and "Nowhere Fast," I'm probably playing with a stacked deck.

You just haven't earned it yet, baby
You just haven't earned it, son
You just haven't earned it yet, baby
You must suffer and cry for a longer time
You just haven't earned it yet, Baby
And I'm telling you now ...
I'll tell you why
I'll tell you why

Teaching demonstration

2006-03-27T15:11:00.000-05:00

Blogging will be light or nonexistant for the next several days as I prepare for my campus visit later this week: Decent Regional U wants me to do both a teaching demonstration and a job talk (and all the usual individual and committee interviews), and so far I've done next to nothing on either.

I'm nervous about both, in the way that I'm nervous before I put together any performance (whether it's a conference paper or a class discussion), but I know that once I have a plan sketched out this anxiety will lift. And I have to say that if I can pull off my teaching demo, it's going to totally rock. I'm not teaching a full class, but rather am charged with taking half or two-thirds of the period to introduce the students to something a) relevant to my research interests, and b) relevant to their class (but which need not have anything to do with what they're reading for the day).

The class in question is the course that people in my field teach year after year, and that I'm teaching myself right now at Big Urban. As some of you know, however, my scholarship involves neither this author nor this genre, so when I received my instructions, I had a moment of panic. The work they're currently reading does touch on some political issues that interest me, but it does so mostly in difficult, obscure passages that aren't likely to set a room of undergraduates on fire, if you know what I'm saying.

Instead, I've come up with a very interactive, very show-and-tell-y presentation that I think--hope!--will be engaging and accessible while adding some new and important dimensions to the work they've done so far. The only problem? I've been madly flagging pages to photocopy and downloading images from the internet, and I fear I'm going to wind up with a thousand and one handouts.

Actually, there's another problem: as cool as I think this project is, I'm embarrassed that I haven't covered this same material (except very briefly) with my own students. I guess this just goes to show how cool a teacher I could be, if only I always had this much lead time and this much at stake.

Anniversary-ish post

2006-03-26T16:33:00.000-05:00

Some time this past week George Washington Boyfriend and I hit our five-year anniversary. As much of a historian of my own life as I am, I don't know the exact date. I think it's safe to say that neither one of us expected, at the time, that we'd still be dating even one year later, so we didn't get into the habit of noticing and celebrating anniversaries--the three-month! the six-month!--with the frightening regularity that my undergraduates bring to the enterprise.

In lieu of a narrative account, I present for your enjoyment some relationship trivia:

Our first real conversation was about Colly Cibber. I knew then and I continue to know nothing about Colly Cibber, but I was long convinced that this meaningful exchange was what inspired GWB to ask me out. Turns out that he has no memory of this conversation.

In fact, he had apparently been contemplating asking me out for some while, but was hemming and hawing over it because, among other reasons, he thought I was "one of those New York girls." A mutual friend finally said, "that's stupid--and besides, she's not even from New York; she's from, like, [Northwest City]." This apparently made him comfortable enough to call me up.

I still laugh when I think about that.

Our first date was on Ash Wednesday.

On our first date, I surprised him by ordering Scotch and by knowing quite a lot about Springsteen and the Stones (any first date where you have the, "okay! so what's the single WORST line in any Springsteen song?" conversation is necessarily a good one).

He surprised me by being not only an extremely funny raconteur, but also a very good and thoughtful listener. Those two things do not always go together.

Shortly after we started dating, we rented Clueless. I made a completely incoherent remark about the movie's use of slang, and he paused, thought for a moment, and agreed with my statement while at the same time rephrasing it into something rather profound. That was when I realized what it meant to be a good teacher.

Nearly four years of our relationship have been long-distance.

He's probably the reason I didn't drop out of grad school. It's not that the relationship was so amazing in its early months--it's that I finally had someone to talk to about what I was reading and thinking.

He's an extrovert who doesn't have any problem staying at home or being alone for days. I'm an introvert who likes to go out and do things. It works well.

We go through periods of quoting Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to each other compulsively. Some people find this disturbing.

I AM older than he (by six months), although I do not in fact have more teeth.

More trivia about GWB himself:

He's six-foot-four.

He went straight from college to graduate school, where he finished his degree and got a tenure-track job in five years. Because he has a late-summer birthday, this means that he was hired for his current job when he was 26.

He's a first-generation college student, from a blue-collar family and town.

His entire life, GWB wanted to go to Harvard. His family and everyone at his high school expected him to go to Harvard. He got into Harvard. He visited it and didn't like it. Instead, he went to a liberal-arts college (and not one of those in the Northeast).

I didn't learn this until months after we'd been dating, but when I did, I knew that he was the guy for me.

When we first started dating, GWB was pretty conservative, politically. I think he now hates George Bush and the Republican party even more than I do.

Part of this is because he's a libertarian (and has always been socially progressive).

Part of it is because he's an atheist.

But most of it is that he's entirely intellectually honest. He's sure of his own ethical principles, and applies them consistently, even when they don't favor his preferred party or preconceptions.

That's why I most love the Harvard story: to me, it's all about the fact that he doesn't make decisions based upon what other people say or what he thinks he's supposed to like. (I like to think that I don't, either, but I'm not always so sure.)

He has an amazing voice.

Because he's tall and has a commanding voice, people often assume that he's an authoritarian hard-ass. Actually, he's extremely empathetic and even sentimental.

He has a very close relationship with his family.

He can do just about anything while simultaneously watching nine straight hours of televised sporting events: grade papers, read a book, revise an article.

I'm quite sure that he will be famous (by the modest standards of academia) before he's 45.

He makes me happy, even when I do not wish to be happy.

Happy anniversary, darling. I love you.

Because someone STILL hasn't bought any vermouth

2006-03-25T00:07:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting here on Friday night drinking straight gin. Following Sfragett (and Winston Churchill)'s excellent advice, I decided that a damn martini didn't really need any damn vermouth, so long as the whole damn thing was ice-cold.

(It does have olives, though, because I'm the kind of girl whose refrigerator is never without a jar of cocktail olives--and a bunch of other things.)

Any bets on how many sets of reading responses I'll get through before calling it quits?

In praise of Planned Parenthood

2006-03-24T21:25:00.000-05:00

Those of you who haven't seen Bitch Ph.D.'s post on the awesome proposal of Cecilia Fire Thunder, the President of the Oglala Sioux, to build a Planned Parenthood clinic on tribal land in South Dakota, beyond the jurisdiction of the state and its new anti-abortion laws, should check it out immediately. If reproductive rights are something that you care about, please consider making a donation.

I myself went to Planned Parenthood for the first time today, as my prescription for the pill is about to run out and I'm between doctors. I'd continued to see my old gynecologist in Grad School City after moving here three years ago, but as of January I'm no longer enrolled as a student; moreover, since I'm going to be moving again this summer, it just didn't make sense to try to find a new doctor locally. A birth-control consultation at Planned Parenthood is good for a six-month prescription (after which a full exam would be necessary), and it runs $40--more than a doctor's visit under my insurance plan, but only slightly more than train fare to Grad School City and much less time-intensive.

The facility that I went to, named after a famous early feminist, was busy when I arrived at 3 p.m.; nearly every chair in the outer waiting room was full (friends and family members can remain there after their loved ones have gone through the "patients only" door into other, much quieter waiting rooms). About a third of the patients were white, a third African-American, and a third Hispanic, and I was struck by how young everyone seemed--virtually no one looked to be much older than I, and most were probably in their early twenties. There was a pair of women with sweatshirts from the prestiguous university uptown and a woman with a massive psychology textbook propped up on her knees. Most of the patients had carefully blank expressions and were occupying themselves by reading magazines or sending text messages, but some looked anxious. The one older woman I saw--probably in her mid-forties, with a no-nonsense haircut and sensible shoes--looked as if she'd been crying for days.

I've always had a reflexive respect for Planned Parenthood and I've always been pro-choice (even if I have some uneasiness about abortion itself), but it wasn't until seeing a clinic in action and looking at the population that it served that I realized how vital an institution it really is, and how much I've taken my own access to reproductive care for granted. You'd better believe that it's going to be high on my list of charities in the years to come.

Friday Poetry Blogging: Dorothy Parker

2006-03-24T18:55:00.000-05:00

It's high time that I threw a female writer into the mix around these parts, and if Dorothy Parker's poetry is not All-Enduring Art, it's still criminally underrated.

Here, then, are three (I'm seemingly unable to read one Parker poem without reading all of them--they're best devoured in big gulps).

Song of One of the Girls

Here in my heart I am Helen;
I'm Aspasia and Hero, at least.
I'm Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Stael;
I'm Salome, moon of the East.

Here in my soul I am Sappho;
Lady Hamilton am I, as well.
In me Recamier vies with Kitty O'Shea,
With Dido, and Eve, and poor Nell.

I'm one of the glamorous ladies
At whose beckoning history shook.
But you are a man, and see only my pan,
So I stay at home with a book.

Faute de Mieux

Travel, trouble, music, art,
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme--
I never said they feed my heart,
But still they pass the time.

Frustration

If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;

Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.

But I have no lethal weapon--
Thus does Fate our pleasures step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell.

You're kidding me, right?

2006-03-23T10:02:00.000-05:00

Believe it or not, I have ANOTHER plagiarist.

Different class, better paper, but same M.O.: take a bunch of stuff from Cliff's Notes (a change! My students generally seem to prefer Sparknotes), swirl it around, and make a paper out of it. The reliance is too extensive and too unusual (the kid keeps describing one character with a couple of terms that s/he never defines, explains, or seems to understand & which it's highly unlikely s/he knew on her or his own) for me to write it off as merely relying improperly on an outside source and failing to acknowledge it.

However, since this one was dumb enough to lift one entire sentence in addition to numerous paraphrased ones, s/he's totally going down.

Enjoy your time with the disciplinary committee, kiddo.

To those who fell along the way

2006-03-22T15:25:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking lately about all the people who don't make it through grad school and into the profession, particularly those I've known personally. I'm not talking about people who are kicked out of their programs after their comps (which is awful, but which didn't happen in my program because entering class size is so small and our funding uniform), but all the other casualties, of whom there are so many.

George Washington Boyfriend and I were two years apart in grad school, and we were both in extremely uncohesive cohorts; the joke was that the admissions committee got it right every OTHER year, but on the in-between years, they inevitably fucked up. Fucked up, how? Well, entering classes usually number around 10. From GWB's year, he's one of exactly TWO people who both a) finished his Ph.D., and b) got a full-time teaching job. No one else is even still in the profession.

As for my cohort, 10 people began my program not quite seven years ago:

1 person left after one year, came back for a year, and then left permanently
1 person left after two years to go to professional school
2 people left after two years, came back for a year, and then left permanently
1 person finished the Ph.D., went on the job market once, then went to professional school

The rest of us are doing okay--we're all done with our degrees, two are already on the tenure-track, and the other three have full-time jobs for next year, whether on the t-t or in good visiting positions. But we lost 50% of our already small entering class, none of them for financial or family reasons. Two of them were even, I'd say, among the three smartest and coolest of us all, and one of them is the child of academics. I mention these things because it's absolutely true that minority graduate students, as well as the more socially and economically disadvantaged, drop out more often than others; I've seen the studies, and I've seen it happen among my friends in other departments. But even with their advantages, the five people we lost in my year left (with one exception) simply because they were deeply and profoundly unhappy. Yes, they were doing what they'd always thought they wanted to do. And yes, they truly loved what they were reading and teaching and researching. And yet, they were so unhappy that they couldn't function.

It's hard to explain this to someone who hasn't been through grad school, but of course most of my readership probably knows what I'm talking about; I myself was so depressed my second year of grad school that the only way I got through many days was by telling myself that I could drop out in May, after I'd gotten the M.A. I think, in fact, that part of what makes grad school so hard is that when you're unhappy doing what you love, you look at yourself and think, "what else is there? if I'm not good at this one thing that really matters to me, what am I good at?"

I'm sure that many of the people who left are now happy doing whatever they're doing; I hear about some of them through various chanels, and they're at least in no worse shape than anyone else who's still trying to find his or her calling. And of course, with the job market what it is, it's probably just as well (for them and for the rest of us) that they're pursuing other paths. But I just keep thinking about that last conversation I had with my one friend before he left, or the last time I saw another friend before she did, and how empty they both looked. Neither one had any plans; neither had any idea what he or she was going to do; and both spoke and acted as if they were failures and embarrassments to the rest of us. (Embarrassments, maybe, because they reminded us of how close to the same failure we all were.)

And what of those who actually finish the degree? One of the people from GWB's cohort--widely acknowledged to be brilliant, with teaching awards, good one-year appointments, and all the rest--finally left the profession after striking out on the job market three years running; her last year on the market she had exactly ONE interview at the MLA.

Not every cohort is like this. In the class between mine and GWB's, no one took time off and 10 out of the 11 are done and in full-time jobs--most of them at extremely good institutions. It's easy to focus on those students and to say, well, most candidates make it through. But what is this "most"? We're looking at maybe 60% of my program's entering graduate students staying in the profession, and this at a place where the funding is good (relatively speaking), the teaching load light, and the name on the degree has long-term value.

That's really not good.

Update

2006-03-21T13:50:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to say that you guys all rock, and that I'm feeling much better today; your comments have been really helpful--if in part because now I know that I'm not the only one with an inappropriate advisor.

[Sticking fingers in ears: "La la la la la, I can't hear you...!"]

All kinds of anxious

2006-03-20T16:29:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the light and erratic posting of late. GWB was in town this weekend; I've got a fresh stack of papers to grade; I'm a little anxious about this campus interview; and I've been obsessing over something that my advisor said when I met with her last week.

I don't want to go into details, but suffice it to say that it has nothing to do with my scholarship (she was in fact extremely helpful and encouraging in that area), but rather with a matter of self-presentation. It's something that I'm sure she's right about, but that I can't exactly fix, or at least not in the near future. As an analogy: let's say that your advisor told you that you were overweight, and that you'd really look better if you weren't--and how hard could it be to lose some of those pounds?

In such a case, the comment might have been well-intentioned (at least deep down there somewhere), but it's a) not really the advice-giver's business, b) probably something that the advice-receiver already knows or fears, but that is c) quite likely out of her immediate control, whether for medical, personal, psychological, or a variety of other reasons.

But although I can't fix this problem, I also, now, can't stop thinking about it.

I wish I never had to leave my apartment again.

Casting out the phone interview demon

2006-03-18T11:23:00.000-05:00

Forgot to say that my phone interview earlier this week went very well. I was, I think, genuinely more at ease on the phone than I had been in my first phone interview, but it's also the case that the committee in question was much better at the process than the earlier one.

And that was really what I cared about most: having a comfortable interview, so that I wouldn't be paralyzed with anxiety if and when I had to set up any phone interviews next year. But~~they want me to come to campus!

So, maybe my job search isn't yet completely dead in the water.

Pre-teaching exercises

2006-03-17T23:51:00.000-05:00

Now, I realize that not everyone out there in the blogosphere teaches four hour-and-twenty-minute classes in seven and a half hours, as I do, which is indeed something of an endurance test, but as this semester enters its second half I've become aware of the various exercises and preparations that I go through on my teaching days--and I'm curious whether anyone else has any of their own.

Before my first class:

I limber up with arm, neck, and back stretches (I teach all my classes standing). Depending on what I'm wearing, I may swing my arms around and make more extravagent movements, but I always roll my shoulders and neck and bend forward and back several times.

Before every class:

I pop some peppermint gum (Dentyne Ice) to get rid of nasty coffee or lunch breath,
Fix my lipstick and make sure there's nothing in my teeth,
Pat my face with tissue to get rid of excess oil,
Refill my water bottle.

In addition, during my longish mid-day break:

I take off my shoes and stretch my toes and feet and roll my ankles. I also tend to do leg and back stretches during this time, and I often suck on a throat lozenge or two.

I've never acted or played a sport, but I'm struck by the way that teaching a full courseload has got me thinking of my body and its care and capabilities as a performer would. Not just, "what persona do I need to project?", but, "what do I need to do to allow me to project that persona? And how can I keep all of my parts in good working order?"

Things that enrage, vex, or otherwise irritate me (a partial listing)

2006-03-14T22:50:00.000-05:00

1. This article from last week's New Yorker. I'm so infuriated that I can't do more than link to it.

2. The fact that when I borded my train this morning there was a large, bulky duffel bag sitting in the overhead rack with absolutely no one anywhere near it. When I snagged the conductor and asked her if she knew whom it belonged to, she gestured vaguely toward some passengers many rows away--who had in fact borded the train AFTER me--and said, oh, it probably belonged to one of them. And then she wandered off. Ooh, way to instill me with confidence in our rail security! (I got up and moved to the extreme end of the car.)

3. The loud and minimally talented female musician in the apartment below mine caterwauling at this very moment.

4. Blogger's refusal to load some lovely photos that I took yesterday of the sun streaming in through my windows.

5. The dangerous state of my liquor cabinet. I have nearly three liters of Bombay Sapphire, but I've suddenly run out of all of the following: dry vermouth, lime juice, and tonic. I'm also clean out of both scotch and vodka. I may be forced to concoct a drink out of some combination of these unappetizing elements: sweet vermouth, pear brandy, creme de menthe, Khalua, Cointreau.

Now this is unexpected

2006-03-10T23:33:00.000-05:00

I spent most of the day in Grad School City, returning tonight to find a message on my machine from the department chair of Decent Regional U. They want me to do a phone interview.

Now, I did indeed apply to DRU, way back in the mists of time when I was still teaching in sleeveless tops and didn't know how to put my books on reserve at the library at Big Urban. But I haven't heard from them since I got my thanks-for-your-application letter back in October. I know, however, that they interviewed candidates at the MLA, and I even know that they recently brought candidates to campus. (I know these things almost entirely through the magic of the MLA wiki--no one I know actually had an interview with them.)

So. . . what's this all about? Are you telling me that ALL FOURTEEN (or twelve, or however many) of your MLA interviewees got jobs elsewhere--or sucked so violently--that you're now desperately combing through vitae and writing samples that are practically yellowed with age?

Regardless. I'm pleased to be contacted, although my crappy performance on that other phone interview doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

Friday poetry blogging: John Hollander

2006-03-10T23:09:00.000-05:00

Science and Human Behavior

(for B. F. Skinner)

Feeling that it is vaguely undignified
To win someone else's bet for him by choosing
The quiet girl in the corner, not refusing
But simply not preferring the other one;
Abashed by having it known that we decide
To save the icing on the chocolate bun
Until the last, that we prefer to ride
Next to the window always; more than afraid
Of knowing that They know what sends us screaming
Out of the movie; even shocked by the dreaming
Our friends do about us, we vainly hope
That certain predictions never can be made,
That the mind can never spin the Golden Rope
By which we feel bound, determined, and betrayed;

But rather, if such a thing exists at all,
Three nasty Thingummies should hold it, twisting
Strand onto endless strand, always resisting
Our own old impulse to pull the string and see
Just what would happen, or to feel the small
But tingling tug upon the line, to free
The captives so that we might watch them crawl
Back into deeper water again. It is well
To leave such matters in their power, trusting
To the blase discretion of disgusting
Things like the Two who spin and measure, and
The Third and surely The Most Horrible,
Whom we'd best forget, within whose bony hand
Lies crumpled the Secret she will never tell.

Which Secret concerns the nature of the string
That all Three tend, and whether it be the wire
Designed to receive the message or to fire
The tiny initial relay. In the end,
The question is whether merely Determining
Or really Knowing is what we most pretend
To honor because it seems most frightening
Or worship because we hold it most to blame.
I once saw Dr. Johnson in a vision:
His hat was on his hand, and a decision
Of import on his lips. "Our will," he said,
"Is free, and there's an end on't." All the same,
Atropos and her sisters, overhead,
Grinned at this invocation of their name.

Best academic game EVER

2006-03-10T00:46:00.000-05:00

(With apologies to Lucyrain, who's posted some fine ones of her own over the last few days.)

George Washington Boyfriend and I were on the phone earlier tonight when for some reason we started trying to cast the movie version of The Wizard of Oz using INRU English department senior faculty. At first we were just trying to identify the four main characters, but by the end we'd come up with Toto, the public Oz and the real Oz, Glenda, the Wicked Witch of the West, and the Munchkin Mayor. (We never quite got to the flying monkeys, but I'm working on them.)

Sample conversation:

GWB: So [faculty member] is TOTALLY Toto! He's small, he's yappy.

LL: Ohmigod, yes! But wait: who IS Toto? I mean, he's yappy, and he gets stuffed into a basket and carried around and shit--but isn't he also kind of the movie's truthteller? You know: he's the one who reveals the real Oz, and he gets all up in the face of the Wicked Witch. . .

GWB: So what you're saying is, there's no analogue at INRU.

Play amongst yourselves, and let me know how it goes.

Mr. Taxman

2006-03-08T20:47:00.000-05:00

I'm so confused.

I've been working on my taxes since getting back home from Quaint Smallish City a few hours ago, and in that time I've gone from delighted ("this Turbo Tax thing is so easy! and I'm totally getting tons of money back!") to deeply worried.

Here's the deal: I need to file taxes in three states this year: Grad School State, Residency State, and Big Urban State. As if that weren't bad enough, there are these complicating factors:

Each of the last two years I've mis-filed my taxes in Residency State, calculating that I owed X amount but in fact winding up getting 70% of that money BACK a month or two later when someone in the state capital figured it out. (I really thought that I was filing all the right forms, but I guess I wasn't sufficiently communicating the fact that most of my income was earned in a different state.)

For the first time, I've been saving receipts so that I could deduct business expenses--most specifically, for commuting and job-searching.

I've been having laaarge amounts of money withheld from my BUU paycheque for federal taxes, for reasons that I can't figure out.

I received a research fellowship over the summer on which no taxes were assessed.

So, given my proven incompetence in these matters, I knew that this year I needed to turn to a higher power--which is to say, Turbo Tax. Everything went beautifully through the federal section, even if I was bummed out to realize that the lack of withholdings on my fellowship cut my return in half, to less than $400.

But the state sections seem flat wrong to me: I OWE $153 in Grad School State (I've never owed money in this state--I usually get back about $100), and I'm only getting back $143 from Big Urban State.

But the biggest shocker is that. . . wait for it. . . I supposedly owe ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-ODD DOLLARS to Residency State.

People, my income for 2005 was about what you'd expect for someone who was a grad student for half the year and a decently-compensated lecturer for the other half. Who owes twelve hundred dollars in taxes, other than freelancers and the self-employed? Moreover, who owes that kind of money to a single state when she doesn't owe it to the others--and when she is in fact getting several hundred dollars BACK from the Feds?

I'm really not sure what to do. I'm convinced that this is wrong, but I've had so little success in the past in finding the right forms and instructions to prove this that it doesn't seem likely I'll be able to do it this time--and I don't exactly have a thousand dollars to send to the state capital until they figure it out for me.

Anyone have a CPA friend they want to loan out for a day?

Typo of the week

2006-03-05T15:25:00.000-05:00

Grading midterms (and bear in mind that these are in-class midterms, so we can't blame spellcheck), I just came across a reference to that famous Shakespearian character, Skylark.

You know: the one who demanded that pound of flesh? Yeah, him.

Manuscript/microfilm question

2006-03-04T02:16:00.000-05:00

[This one's probably primarily for the medievalists in the house.]

So, there are two manuscripts in the U.K. that I really need to spend more time with, one at the BL and one at Oxford. I was initially hoping to get over there this summer, but what with one thing and another (not getting a tenure-track job; currently holding a position that pays out over 10 months rather than 12), I'm not sure that I'll be able to do so. Whether I go or whether I don't, though, I'd like to have these documents reproduced since I'm not confident of my ability to transcribe everything perfectly on the first go--and since God knows when I'll have the kind of institutional support that would allow me to party with these particular manuscripts on a yearly basis.

I'm thinking, then, about putting in a couple of microfilm requests. I suspect this would be easy at the BL, but perhaps harder at Oxford (the MS in question isn't at the Bodley, but in the dinky little library of one of the colleges). So my first question is, has anyone tangled with this at either the BL or at institutions that may not be as prepared to handle such requests? Are there secret procedures or passwords I ought to know? Would it be better if I went over and handled it in person? (I've worked with the Oxford MS in the past, but the obliging college librarian who helped me out has since moved on and I have no relationship with her replacement.)

My second question is: what on earth do I do with the microfilm once I get it? Can I purchase a reader (and would it be insanely expensive)? Can one bring one's own microfilm to a public or university library and use their readers? Or should I just go ahead and get a photo-positive made from the film, as one experienced textual editor suggested?

Any and all advice appreciated!

Defeated

2006-03-03T22:13:00.000-05:00

I'm one full day into my spring break, but even after a full night's sleep, a day of cleaning, and a lovely evening of cocktails with one of my oldest friends at Big Metropolitan Museum, I'm still not sure that this vacation is going to be long enough or profound enough to bring me back to life for the rest of the semester.

This was a terrible week, teaching-wise, and although I know that my students bear a large part of the responsibility (it WAS the week before spring break, after all, and I had a high rate of absenteeism), I can't help but worry that it's my fault and a sign of the utter deterioration of my pedagogy.

Exhibit A: on Tuesday, I was still finishing the reading for my class on Author #2 on the train into campus.

Exhibit B: on Thursday, I had not, in fact, done ANY of the reading for my survey classes. (In my defense I'll say that it's a work I know well, one that I just taught in the fall, and one that, in any event, I knew we wouldn't get more than three pages into before the end of the class period.)

I really love all of my classes, but this four-classes, two-new-preps thing is really wearing on me and I don't feel that I'm able to give my students everything they deserve. (Once in a while it occurs to me that it's really Big Urban that, by relying so heavily on lecturers and adjuncts, isn't giving them what they deserve--but even when I know that grading 110 papers in four weeks is insane and inhumane, it's hard not to beat myself up for the distractions and oversights that such a heavy load occasionally produces.)

I feel as though I'm half-assing everything, and the parts that I think I'm actually doing pretty well--the grading and commenting on papers, for example--are the ones that I'm getting shit for. Yesterday one of my more talented students asked me, in front of the entire class, whether it was, in fact, possible to get a good grade in my class. I gave her a very polite and encouraging response, but what I wanted to say was: "I gave your paper a B because you're smart and you're a good writer, but your ideas were based on a completely tendentious and superficial reading of the text. I gave your best friend a C+ because she can't write, she didn't seem to understand the work in question, and her paper had no thesis. In both cases, I gave you better grades than you deserved. You wanna try to convince me otherwise?"

I also got a rejection letter today from Small College, the school with which I had my lone on-campus interview. This isn't crushing, but it is disappointing. I liked the school, the faculty, and the students, and I could have seen being happy there, at least for the next several years; it's also relatively close to Atypical College, where George Washington Boyfriend teaches.

On the other hand, I'm reasonably happy at Big Urban, and (assuming that I get reappointed), I'll probably be able to get much more scholarship done there than I would in my first year at SC. When I look at myself realistically, I know that I'm a strong candidate and likely to get a good job eventually--I have a number of significant articles either in print or forthcoming; I've got both a solid book manuscript and an edition in progress; I'm working up a good stable of courses in my field; I have a degree from a top school--but it's still disheartening to feel that all I'm doing is treading water, and it's hard not to second-guess oneself and wonder whether one IS, after all, such a worthwhile candidate. Maybe this is as good as it gets for me.

I also know that it's probably just as well that GWB and I aren't going to be in the same place: he's going up for tenure next year and plans to go on the job market, so the fact that I won't be starting a new job gives him the freedom to look further afield; it also raises the possibility of our doing a joint search.

I know all of these things, as I say, and I even believe them--but sometimes it's still hard not to feel demoralized.

Ash Wednesday II*

2006-03-01T15:25:00.000-05:00

All this "whoo-hoo, Lent!" attitude notwithstanding, I'm glad that I'm not teaching today. Even if I could have gotten to a service with my current class schedule, I would be extremely reluctant to teach classes or even wander the halls wearing ashes. I did do it last year, when I was teaching at INRU and the only service I could get to was the noon one at my old church, and it was fine--my students mostly politely pretended not to notice, the one exception being a very young Muslim woman who wore hijab: she seemed visibly excited, possibly at no longer being the only person in the room wearing her religion, as it were, on her head.

However, last spring I was teaching an intro-to-the-novel course. A course with pretty much zero religious content. These days? Well, I wind up talking about religion quite a lot in three of my four classes, and I think that the way I pull it off is by being rigorously fair: I'll explain the relevant side thoroughly, and the reasons behind some of its beliefs, but then I'll immediately explain its potential shortcoming and what people on the other side might say. I also speak as informally as I can, saying things like, "And what's [this character] trying not to do? He's trying not to piss off the Big G."

So, I think I strike a good balance between respectfulness and irreverence, and it seems to me extremely unlikely that my students have any real idea whether I'm a secularist or whether I have some particular religious identity. (My last name IS recognizably ethnic-Catholic, but so are the names of many of my students, and that doesn't say a thing about their actual religious beliefs.)

I like it that way. I think I'd lose a lot of credibility if I tipped my hand, at least in my lower-level classes. My more secular students, I know, are already overwhelmed by the religious content of the works we're reading in my survey, and I want them to understand me as a guide through what is genuinely foreign material. I don't want them to think that I have some secret agenda, or that I'm proselytizing when all I'm actually doing is outlining a belief system (one that does not, in fact, match up with my own, even if both are broadly "Christian").

I think that all of this makes sense, but whenever I think about the degree to which I exclude the autobiographic from my classroom persona, I get a little nervous. Is such a project doomed from the start--since we can't escape our own biases? Am I eliding information that my students actually have a right to know? And is this behavior in any way gender-specific?

Except for the last one (to which I answer a resounding, "yes!"), I'm really not sure. I'm big on the biographic and autobiographic, I love the personal and the particular, and I think they're crucial interpretive tools. On the other hand, when I'm teaching a survey course, most of what I'm providing is back-fill. My students need some basic historical, political, and religious information in order to ground their analysis of a given text. I do try hard to show that our understanding of history is not fixed, and that people of the same religious persuasion could have completely different philosophies, but at the same time, my students need to perceive me as an impartial and final authority, someone who's telling them FACTS. Someone who has no dog in any given fight.

I mean, when I was an undergraduate, did I want to know more about my professor's personal lives (at least in some cases)? Yes. Did my friends and I speculate wildly about some of them? Of course. But would it have improved my educational experience if I had known that Professor X was in the process of a messy divorce, or had five cats, or was a member of the John Birch Society? Uh, no. I'm not sure that I could have separated that out from the subject of the class or from their pedagogy; too much background noise.

I think that the same thing applies here, but I still wonder, sometimes, whether I'm operating in bad faith (pun not intended, but let's go with it).

*Doesn't this sound like the sequel to a particularly ill-conceived horror movie?

Ash Wednesday

2006-03-01T13:49:00.000-05:00

I just got back from mass, rather hungry (it's a fast day) and appropriately be-ashed. The ashes themselves I can take or leave--there's something rather ostentatious about wandering around with this mark on one's forehead, as if to say, "hey! I went to church! and what have YOU been doing, sinner?"--but I have to admit that I really dig on Lent.

Lent is, in fact, my favorite part of the liturgical year, and the part that most appealed to me when I started gradually gravitating back to the church a number of years ago. I suspect that this is because, growing up, the version of Christianity that I saw in my hometown and my high school was so smug and self-satisfied and suburban and Jesus-loves-you, full of bland music and back-lit paintings and group hugs. Lent, then, to me, represents the more serious and introspective side of the faith. It's a time in which to take stock of oneself and and think about the places where changes need to be made.

I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do over the next six weeks, although I'm thinking about trying to finally get through the Life of Teresa of Avila, which I began a long time ago and never finished. And I'll go to the usual services and avoid meat on Fridays and all that good stuff. But I also want to really create some space in which to think, and I'd like to come out the other side having figured out ways to be more involved in the causes and charities that I believe in. Giving money is all well and good, and I do give modest sums to a variety of organizations--but I want to start devoting some volunteer time as well.

(Oh, and if I needed any further proof that I've escaped those churches of my youth? Last Sunday, the priest who delivered the homily quoted from--and explicated--T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday." Word up, Fr. Dominic!)

We are not amused

2006-02-28T14:00:00.000-05:00

Today should have been a good day.

First of all, this morning was the first morning of the semester in which it was actually LIGHT outside when I left my apartment--streetlights off and everything! It's also the day on which I returned the last of those 110 papers. Even better than that? It's midterm day in my survey classes, so I had one less prep.

What could ruin such a day?

My downstairs neighbors, that's what. I may have mentioned that my downstairs neighbors (and my next-door neighbor, but I've never had any problems with him) are rock musicians, and I may further have mentioned that they occasionally do REALLY ANNOYING THINGS like decide to start mixing bass tracks at 2 a.m.

But last night took the cake. I went to bed around 1 a.m.--much too late, already, for the time at which I had to get up today--and I could hear their music softly wafting up from the floor beneath my bed. In fact, I really couldn't hear the music at all, but I could hear the bass line. It wasn't all that heavy, but it was heavy enough and variable enough (they must have had multiple CDs in the changer) that I couldn't relax and fall asleep; I just keep feeling that beat in place of my heartbeat.

Well, I thought, they'll stop soon. They usually do.

But they didn't stop.

Okay, I thought, I'll pound on the floor.

I did this a few times, and usually that has the desired effect--but this time it didn't.

Instead, I lay in bed for hours, occasionally starting to doze, but never for long. Then I tried sleeping on the floor in another part of my apartment, but that was even worse: closer to the noise. Finally, I dragged a blanket and pillows into the bathroom, which juts off away from the main room, and I finally managed to sleep in two installments for a total of perhaps an hour.

When I left my apartment after 6 a.m., the bass was still going.

You'd better believe I left a note on the fuckers' door when I left.

Photoblogging: A Tale of Two Coats

2006-02-27T21:50:00.000-05:00

No, I haven't died--I've just been trying to work my way out from under the remains of those 110 papers, write a couple of midterms, reapply for this lectureship for next year, and accomplish a whole bunch of other things that I've already forgotten about.

George Washington Boyfriend was also in town over the weekend, and we celebrated my birthday, belatedly, by going to see a most excellent production of All's Well That Ends Well, grabbing brunch with Def & Stave, and then going almost to the ends of the earth for someone else's birthday party, for which we were amply rewarded with Prohibition-era cocktails (minus the bathtub hootch), two disdainful cats, and one woman with a fake but compelling Israeli accent.

Anyway, here are a couple of photos from the weekend, featuring first my fabulous mink coat* and then (along with the lovely h.k.) the almost equally fabulous peacock-blue one that I bought on sale last fall. Since when did I become all about the coats? Couldn't tell you. But they're lovely, no?

[Image redacted]

*As I mentioned in an earlier post, I inherited this coat, gratis, from a coworker of my mother's, and it's at least 40 years old. In other words, those animals have been dead for longer than I've been alive.

[Image redacted]

(These photos will self-destruct in approximately 24 hours, but I wanted to take this opportunity to give y'all a completely false impression of my life and the glamorousness thereof.)

Friday poetry blogging: Mark Strand

2006-02-24T23:48:00.000-05:00

Ooh, I'm getting this one in just under the wire. Another poem I've loved for ages.

The Continuous Life

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children crouched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? Oh parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost--a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

[UPDATE: This is most odd, but I was just catching up on my Bloglines subscriptions and I noticed that Scrivener posted the exact same poem earlier today. Apologies for the duplication!]

Why yes: I AM originally from the West Coast

2006-02-23T22:52:00.000-05:00

The latest example of my eloquent and inspiring classroom manner:

"Yes, you're right! It's TOTALLY homoerotic! But this character's so not getting it--he's just not feeling the vibeage."

Goddammit

2006-02-22T17:50:00.000-05:00

I just found a plagiarist. A smart plagiarist, but still, a plagiarist. S/he's taken material from Sparknotes, completely rewritten it, and then worked that material into her/his own text. There aren't any identical sentences, but there are a number of eeriely similar paragraphs that make observations I doubt the student could come up with on her/his own. Oh, and the material that does not appear to owe anything to Sparknotes? Pretty bad.

So depressing. What's most depressing is the fact that I'm sure there are others out there that I'm just not catching--searching the internet is so time-consuming! In fact, the only reason that I caught this one was because s/he made one interesting and rather unusual observation that was oddly like an observation made in another student's paper on the same subject. The papers are otherwise quite different, but the coincidence made me wonder whether they'd been reading the same source somewhere. . . and thus, Sparknotes.

I'm sure most of the academics out there in the blogosphere have dealt with plagiarists many a time, but this is my first unambiguous case--and it's sad- and angry-making at the same time.

[UPDATE: I talked to our DUS today, laid out the case and my proposed plan of action, and had it enthusiastically seconded. Love the DUS! So when I returned papers at the end of class today, I gave this student back her/his essay, to which I'd paperclipped the Sparknotes printout with all the relevant paragraphs highlighted and labeled with the corresponding essay page numbers--it was really a damning document by the time I worked my way through it. I also included a copy of my plagiarism policy from my syllabus, and wrote a short note informing the student that I was failing the paper, and s/he should be glad I wasn't failing her/him for the course and reporting this incident to the disciplinary committee (which is my official policy).

When the student came up to collect her/his paper, I just said, briefly, "If you have any questions, Student, you may email me." Student looked a little puzzled, but said, "uh, okay." And so far, nothing.]

Evaluations: post-script

2006-02-22T15:15:00.000-05:00

A few other random things from my evaluations:

1. My students appear to like group work--quite a few of them mentioned it, and they all had positive things to say about it. My INRU students hated group work, and I pretty much hated group work when I was in college too--but then again, the classes I teach have 30 students, not 15, so maybe that accounts for the difference.

2. Big Urban's form has one write-in question that deals specifically with the instructor's sensitivity toward the diversity of the students (race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability). Many of my students just didn't answer this question, or said, "fine," but several wrote in pretty funny responses, along the lines of, "Hey, she wasn't a racist! That was neat!"

3. A small but noticeable handful of students in one--but only one--of my survey classes commented negatively on the religious content of the course. Now, most of you know what survey I teach, which means that you know that 80% of the major works written during this period have SOME religious content. So, um, I can't really "include more secular stuff," or "can the religious crap," as one evaluator so eloquently put it. But a couple of students made remarks along the lines of, "instructor seemed to expect a thorough knowledge of the Old and New Testament," or, "discussion was dominated by religiously-educated people." I don't think either of these remarks is remotely true--it's useful to have some students in the room who know the major biblical stories, and can spot an allusion when they see it, but the number of times that I asked whether a particular story rang any bells was quite small--but I wonder if I should be more up-front this semester in saying, "look, these are religious works, and we have to have some understanding of the context of these works, but a religious background is not a prerequisite to understanding them. I value the insights that those of you who are members of a particular faith might be able to bring to them, but I also want to point out that the religious culture of these periods was, in fact, usually EXTREMELY different from both contemporary Protestantism and contemporary Catholicism. We need to accept it on its own terms, and both those of you who are secularists and those of you who are religious have useful perspectives to offer." Or am I just fretting about nothing?

4. A large number of students mentioned how excited I was about the material and how funny and fun my "lectures" were (I rarely lecture, but I guess that's what they call my talking about something for five minutes in the midst of a class discussion). This pleases me extremely.

5. Returning to the issue of paper-grading: when I went back and looked at the evaluations carefully, there were actually only a couple of students who used the terms "condescending" or "unprofessional," though there were certainly others who said that they wanted more praise or that they felt demoralized reading my comments. So I think I'll definitely work on incorporating more positive comments in my grading, but I may mostly ignore any worries about colloquialisms and the like.

6. Four or five students described my expectations for papers as "graduate-level work." Duuude. Now that shit's funny.

Evaluations

2006-02-21T22:17:00.000-05:00

Glory be! I finally got my evaluations today. Yes, from last semester. Yes, that semester that ended, like, two months ago.

Short version: on a cursory look, they actually seem pretty good--or at any rate, better than I expected. My assessment of them may be skewed, though, by the fact that so much time has now passed & I'm no longer particularly emotionally invested in these classes, or perhaps by the fact that I'm teaching WAY more students than I ever have before (which means that the bad evals don't stand out as much), or possibly by the fact that I'm more psychologically and pedagogically secure than I used to be (that last one seems unlikely, but let's keep the dream alive).

The way that Big Urban presents the information from the evals may also be affecting my sense of their content: the evaluations are, primarily, Scantron forms with about 20 questions on them that ask students to respond with, "strongly agree," "agree," "neutral," "disagree," or "strongly disagree." Then the back of the forms have five or six questions to which students can write in comments. When I receive this information, the Scantron scores are consolidated, so I see each individual question, and then both the number of students and the percentage of students who gave each answer. To my mind, it's MUCH easier not to obsess over the smaller number of negative reactions when one can say, "Hey! 80% of the class agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, 'this instructor taught this course well'! And 65% said that they learned how to better analyze and critically evaluate arguments!" And to hell with the 10 or 20% who responded negatively.

That may not be the best response, but it's the easy one, allowing me to feel that I'm doing, basically, okay. The write-in portion of the evaluations was much more informative, even though only some 2/3 of my students bothered to complete them--and there are things in there that I need to think seriously about.

I've already gotten past the two evals that described me as pretentious, the one that said, "she went to INRU and she needs to realize that the standards she has for INRU students are beyond us" (which frankly rather pained me), and the usual handful of completely contradictory responses (e.g., coupla kids said that discussion wasn't useful and there should have been more lecturing, coupla kids said that there was too much lecturing and there should have been more discussion). But two negative comments kept resurfacing: my students disliked the reading quizzes and they thought that I was really, really mean on their papers.

And, okay: reading quizzes suck, but I'm not getting rid of them. Maybe I'll reduce the number to 8 per semester rather than 10, but I think they serve several very useful purposes--giving diligent kids who aren't great writers a chance to improve their grades; ensuring attendance; and letting me know who's keeping up with the reading.

As for the paper grading: I don't care if my students think I'm too hard on their papers; I don't believe that I am, and it's not my problem, really, if they've been coddled by their other instructors. I also got very high marks for accessibility and availability outside of class, and I think that my positive overall evaluations suggests that, whatever they think of me as a paper grader, it didn't completely tank their impression of the class as a whole.

BUT. One remark that came up in many of those grading complaints was that my comments on papers were "rude," "condescending," and "unprofessional." This does concern me, quite a bit. However, I'm not entirely sure to what these remarks refer. I do have a tendency to write, "Huh?" in the margin when I get completely lost, and if a paper is really a disaster I might say, "I have no idea what you're talking about!" Or, "This is a total cop-out." That's not typical of my paper comments, by any means, but they're there. Are colloquialisms unprofessional? Or expressions of exasperation? Well, maybe I need to cut them out.

I also suspect that I need to work harder on emphasizing the positive--as someone (Bardiac?) recently observed, when we write comments on papers, we often think of them as our justification for giving a low grade, rather than as useful and constructive advice. I happen to think that all my criticisms are BOTH, but I can appreciate that it may not seem that way, especially now that I use a grading rubric for my final comments. This rubric is a form with five categories (thesis, argumentation/structure, use of evidence, introduction & conclusion, and writing/mechanics), next to each of which I've provided a short explanation for what a sucessful paper does in that category. In the space below each category I write specific, brief comments by hand. I think this demystifies the grading process and provides essential information laid out in a helpful way--but I suspect that it may be true that, when I get, let's say, a B-minus paper, the comments sometimes range from the negative to the lukewarm. When I used to type up my comments in the form of a short letter I always led with the positive (even if the best I could do was saying, "you've chosen a really important topic to write on"), but the rubric format doesn't lend itself to that very well. Maybe I should write a final sentence, next to the grade, saying something along those lines? Or "don't be discouraged! you have really good ideas, and you just need to express them more clearly"?

Sigh. I wish I hadn't just returned a set of papers today.

Not as young as I used to be

2006-02-20T16:57:00.000-05:00

But, sometimes, I can still put on a good show for an evening.

Because of my conference, George Washington Boyfriend and I had agreed that we'd celebrate my birthday next weekend, when he'd be coming into town. But I wanted to do something on the day itself, so Bert and I were planning on getting together and grabbing drinks or dinner. But then he came up with a better idea: dance party!

For a time, Bert was a serious partier, and we used to go out dancing almost every time I visited him, but now he goes out less frequently and mostly to smaller events and/or ones where he knows & likes the DJ; the last couple of times he's invited me I haven't been able to make it, and it's been probably close to two years since we went out dancing together. And how fantastic it was to do it again!

The party in question was a medium-sized event, not exactly private, but mostly spread by word-of-mouth. The organizers had rented out a most excellent space--a turn-of-the-century bank building that now houses a bar and club--and the DJ was quite good, playing happy, lively stuff, just the thing for the cold, bleak middle of February. It was a queer crowd, of course, which was great. I really dislike the scene at straight clubs (the drunk and borderline belligerent guys, the feeling of being perpetually on display), and gay clubs allow me to just do my own thing, enjoy the music, dress to dance (i.e., wear sneakers), and be pleasantly disregarded by everyone except my friends and my friends' friends. But, wouldn't you know it: possibly the only straight guy in the entire place managed to find me! Friendly and harmless, though, and he left me alone after a bit--whether because he concluded that I wasn't interested or because Bert's other closest friend, Maria, and her girlfriend soon showed up and I was kissing them hello and dancing with them; I suspect he may have come to the conclusion that I wasn't oriented in his direction.

Many of Bert's fanning friends were there, and I brought the lovely fans that he made me for my birthday several years back:

(For those of you completely flummoxed, here's an article on fanning that contains a few action shots.)

I definitely don't have the partying stamina that I once had, though, and between my having been up since 4 a.m. and Bert's buying all my drinks (which meant that he bought me a drink every time he bought himself one; he has, shall we say, recently rediscovered the joys of alcohol now that he's no longer using other things), I was a bit of a mess by the time I left. This morning was also pretty unpleasant, but I've since rallied. Haven't yet turned to the papers, but they're lying in wait.

Oh, and that picture above? Brought to you courtesy of my birthday present from my parents: a digital camera! Expect frequent photoblogging from here on out.

So all in all, a great birthday, and more good times to come this weekend, if I can make it there.

This is just to say

2006-02-19T14:16:00.000-05:00

That I'm back home now, after a stupidly early flight, far too little sleep, and far too much to drink last night. But! I didn't die in a fiery explosion, so I can go out tonight to celebrate my thirty-first year of life on this earth.

The conference was great, as usual, and despite my concern about my paper--which came from material I'd thrown into my dissertation last summer and really hadn't looked at since then--it went over very well and led to some useful discussions; two (senior) scholars even asked for copies so that they could cite or refer to it in their own work--which has to be a good sign! I was also nominated & appointed to a position within the organization, which I'm equally psyched about. It's a group that I love, and it's nice to think that I'll have some small hand in helping to run it and some say in how it approaches its next few years of existence. (I'm also relieved to have a good reason to keep attending this conference, since I'm not sure how much, if any, new scholarship I'll be doing in this particular area in the next year or two.)

Now, if only I didn't still have 44 papers left to grade. . .

Early Friday poetry blogging: Thomas Nashe

2006-02-16T08:07:00.000-05:00

I expect I'll be away from my blog for the next several days (although there IS a free business center in the hotel, so if anything crucial happens--or if I've just had too much wine--it's possible you'll get a mid-conference update), but I wanted to post this before I left.

As I've mentioned, although I rather like flying, I'm always half-convinced that I'm going to die in a fiery explosion every time I do so. There's a poem that I sometimes take with me when I fly and that involves travelling and the fear of death--but unfortunately I can't post it, since it's weirdly related to the conference I'm about to attend. So here's a second best, by my boy Tommy N.

A Litany in Time of Plague

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss,
This world uncertain is;
Fond are life's lustful joys,
Death proves them all but toys,
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade,
All things to end are made.
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,
Worms feed on Hector brave;
Swords must not fight with fate,
Earth still holds ope her gate.
"Come, come!" the bells do cry.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death's bitterness;
Hell's executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny;
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player's stage;
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Like a prom dress

2006-02-15T11:22:00.000-05:00

I'm off tomorrow to a conference. Although it's hard to imagine that it could surpass that October conference (it certainly can't beat its location), this one is always a ton of fun and I'm really looking forward to it.

This particular conference was the first that I attended as a graduate student, and it was nothing like what I had expected. I had expected to be ill at ease the entire time: no one to talk to at the receptions, peppered with impossible questions after my paper, and generally disregarded as all the real scholars hung out with the other real scholars. I was also irrationally afraid that my advisor--who wasn't going that year, but who knew many of the attendees--was going to hear about whatever horribly embarrassing thing I wound up doing.

Instead, I met some of the most passionate, enthusiastic, and unjaded scholars I've yet to encounter--people generous of their time, eager to see each other, sure, but also eager to meet anyone new working on their subject. At the very first reception one long-time member of the organization wandered over with her glass of wine and said, "So, how ARE you?" with such ease that I was convinced she had me mistaken for someone she actually knew. The entire conference was like that: lots of papers, lots of enthusiastic discussion of those papers, but an almost equal amount of socializing, silliness, singing, and drinking. It was, in many ways, like the very best parts of grad school.

It was also the first intimation that I'd had that academia might be something other than the competitive and hierarchical place it seemed to me from my years at INRU. These scholars were not, in many cases, at the most impressive institutions--and those who were at name-brand schools weren't condescending to those who weren't--but they had good lives. They'd written books I'd read and admired. They took everyone seriously, even lowly grad student me. I left the conference feeling loved--and feeling equally certain that I had to go back.

And I have, every year.

A compliment

2006-02-12T12:33:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to see Jonesy's latest show, an awesome Shaw production. Afterwards, as it was closing night, I hung out with her and the rest of the cast downstairs over pizza and Champagne. One of the older company members, upon being introduced to me, shook hands and said, "Lecturess, good to meet you. And what do you DO with that voice?"

To which I replied, of course, that I used it in the service of lecturing the unwilling and the ungrateful about lit-raht-chure. But his remark made me think, not for the first time, that I'd like to take voice lessons. I have a fairly low voice, which I use forcefully when I teach--but I find that in everyday conversation, and even to a degree in the classroom, I often wind up speaking in my higher and weaker register (what I believe professionals refer to as the "head" voice). I don't know if this is a subconscious attempt to sound more feminine, or just a lack of diaphragm training, but I'd like to make better use of my voice. In its proper register it can indeed be very sultry and sexy--but the real benefit, I imagine, of learning to speak with more diaphragm support, would be that it would relieve some of pressure on my vocal chords and lessen the likelihood of my growing hoarse at the end of a long day of teaching.

And hey: if this whole academia thing didn't work out, I could always go into radio.

[UPDATE: So in my ongoing attempt to avoid grading my current set of papers, I surfed around the internet for a while and finally ordered this book. I'll let you know if it in fact changes my life.]

Oh yes: the job market

2006-02-11T15:12:00.000-05:00

Some small number of my readers--most likely those who are on the job market themselves or those who know me in real life but who haven't had a personal communication from me in ages (yeah, sorry about that!)--may be wondering what's up with my job search.

Short answer: who knows?

Longer answer: who really cares?

I am, I guess, still waiting. Of the six schools with which I had first-round interviews, I've had, so far, one campus visit and one definite rejection. Of the other four, there are two or maybe three that might plausibly still call me if their top candidates don't work out. (Small College, where I interviewed, is still bringing people out to campus, so I haven't had reason to hear back from them yet.)

And in some ways I don't even care any more about hearing back from those four schools. I'd eagerly take a campus visit from any one of them, don't get me wrong--but they all have their drawbacks (over here we've got a quite good school in a bad location; there an almost-as-good school in an even worse location; and far over on that side an okay school in an okay location--but whose hiring committee I didn't like). It would be a nice ego validation, and it would make me feel as though my odds of getting a tenure-track job somewhere were higher. . . but it's just hard for me to get myself all worked up about what this says about my worth as a scholar, or to go around thinking that I just suck for not being someone's top candidate as opposed to their fourth or fifth.

Maybe it's that I've successfully internalized the message that the job market is a crap-shoot, and that plenty of good candidates don't get jobs their first couple of times out--or maybe it's that I have a good fall-back. I didn't, initially, want to be at Big Urban for more than a year, but all in all I've been fairly happy. Moreover, I already know what my fall schedule would be, and it's pretty sweet: just three classes (freshman composition, Author #2, and Advanced Author #2), two of which I've already taught, for a maximum of 60 total students. With no service expectations and no getting-to-know-the-ropes, I'd probably have quite bit of time to work on my scholarship; I'd be getting a raise; and if I move to be closer to Big Urban, I could participate in the colloquium in my field.

Or maybe it's just that I know that life is very long, and that our beginnings never do know our ends. Most of the faculty I most admired at INRU didn't start out there, or at an equivalent institution--they served long years at West Podunk State or Winding Stream College for Girls until their first--or sometimes second or third--book made them a hot item. You never really know who's got staying power, or who's still developing, or for that matter where you yourself will be most happy: some of the most productive scholars I know, who have published the definitive work on X or Y or Z, are at what most people would consider to be no-name institutions.

That, then, is where my real anxiety resides. I'm not especially worried about whether I land a tenure-track job this year or next year. I AM worried, sometimes very seriously, about whether I'm actually going anywhere as a scholar: whether I'm going to be able to turn this dissertation into a book in a reasonable period of time, whether I have good ideas (and enough of them)--whether *I* have staying power.

But that's not a worry, frankly, that would be eased by getting a fancy research job.

Friday poetry blogging: George Bradley

2006-02-10T15:57:00.000-05:00

Following the example of Jo(e), Crazy, Scrivener, and others, I'm honoring this new holiday by posting a poem by George Bradley that I've loved since college.

E Pur Si Muove

Of course it had been madness even to bring it up,
Sheer madness, like the sighting of sea serpents
Or the discovery of strange lights in the sky;
And plainly it had been worse than madness to insist,
To devote entire treatises and a lifetime to the subject,
To a thing of great implication but no immediate use,
A thing that could not be conceived without study,
Without years of training and the aid of instruments,
And especially the delicate instrument of an open mind;
It had been stubbornness, foolishness, you see that now,
And so when the time comes you are ready to acquiesce,
When you have had your say, told the truth one last time,
You are ready to give the matter over and say no more.
When the time comes, you will take back your words,
But not because you fear the consequences of refusal
(Who looks into the night sky and imagines a new order
Has already seen the instruments of torture many times),
Though this is the conclusion your inquisitors will draw
And it is true you are not what is called a brave man;
And not because you are made indifferent in your contempt
(You take their point, agree with it even, that there is
Nothing so dangerous as a new way of seeing the world);
Rather, you accept the conditions lightly, the recantation,
Lightly you accept their offer of a villa with a view,
Because you have grown old and contention makes you weary,
Because you like the idea of raising vines and tomatoes,
And because, whatever you might have said or suffered,
It is in motion still, cutting a great arc through nothingness,
Sweeping through space according to a design so grand
It remains, just as they would have it, a matter of faith,
Because, whether you say yea, whether you say nay,
Nevertheless it moves.

Ruling through fear

2006-02-09T23:34:00.000-05:00

So, I think I'm generally a fairly warm and encouraging teacher: intense about the material, sure, but also smiley and energetic and inclined to wacky irreverence. I like this persona, and for the most part, I think my students groove on it.

But I have to admit that I really love doing the sudden switch-up when it's time to let a class know that they're fucking up and I'm pissed. I love that deader-than-dead silence that fills the room when they hear a hard-edged tone they've never heard from me before. When I put on that just-barely-tolerant, "many people in this room appear to be under some misapprehensions about my course policies" voice, with just the barest flicker of a smile at the corners of my mouth--is it derision? Is it a hint of warmth?--ooh, that's grand.

I think this is because, as imperious and bitchy as I can occasionally be in my everyday life, it's usually at some remove: I may gripe to a friend about what I really think or what I'd really like to say to so-and-so, but, even when I'm having an argument with someone, I'm unlikely to take on a particularly commanding attitude. For one thing, I'm never 100% certain that I'm right, and for another, I'd far rather persuade than bully someone. I also don't really like confrontation. But in the classroom? I'm the fucking divinely-appointed, unimpeachable monarch, and every once in a while it's nice to remind myself and my students of this fact.

So today in my class on Author #1--the home of the crappy close-readings--I gave my students a completely unexpected quiz, covering the last few weeks of reading. It was quite doable, dealing almost entirely with things we had discussed in some way in class, but I had a hunch that many of my students would bomb it. Quite a few looked worried as they passed them in. Then I told them I didn't want to give them quizzes, had not planned on giving them quizzes, and found the exercise very high-school--but I felt strongly that not everyone was doing the reading. Then I gave them the, well! let-us-review-the-policies-for-this-course speech.

Much nervous stirring. Someone asked about the quiz.

"I don't know what I'm going to do with the quiz," I said. "I may keep it, I may curve it, I may throw it out. It's partly a diagnostic so I can assess where everyone is. But it's also to put you on notice that you will be having quizzes occasionally from now on, and you will need to be taking notes and doing the readings."

They started to relax.

"So. Are we clear on the expectations for this class? I realize that some of the material we've been reading these first few weeks can be hard to get your head around, and you may find it less interesting than what we'll be reading for most of the rest of the semester. But I really care about the works I've assigned you, and I really believe they're worthwhile and interesting. I expect you to read them carefully, to come with questions, and to at least make a show of enthusiasm occasionally." Then I smiled. "It doesn't have to be REAL enthusiasm, mind you. I'll be satisfied with a convincing imitation."

They giggled.

"So. Can we be enthusiastic? Or pretend to be? Good!"

And we proceeded to have an awesome class.

Ohhh, I'm ready for a drink. Or four.

2006-02-07T23:03:00.001-05:00

It's time to stop grading for the night. How do I know this? I know this because I'm now evaluating the projectile properties of the objects nearest at hand: weighty enough to travel some distance, and capable of making a really loud noise? light enough actually to heft? Relatively unbreakable (or, failing that, relatively unvaluable)?

These papers are awful. It's the worst collection of papers I've seen since starting teaching here. I have to keep reminding myself that, as New Kid wrote some months ago, my students aren't actually writing bad papers just to piss me off, and that I perhaps bear some blame for not preparing my students adequately for the assignment--but, nevertheless, I'm filled with rage.

These are close-reading papers. Take a short poem (or part of a longer poem), and analyze it in detail: word choice, imagery, poetic devices, etc., and construct an argument that discusses how these features affect the meaning of the poem.

Now, I didn't expect them to be great, and I did expect some complete disasters, but I'm getting a LOT of disasters, and I'm at a loss as to how I might have better prepared my students for this assignment. Does anyone have any advice? (Or want to tell me that my students are just idiots? Because I'd take that, too!)

Here's the deal. This is a 200-level seminar, all English majors, mostly upperclassmen and -women. I went in with the assumption that nearly all the students taking the class would already have taken the relevant period survey class, and this turned out not to be the case. Nevertheless, they've certainly all taken a number of English classes, including the intro-to-the-English-major course that deals with, you know, examining texts, and they're pretty much as smart, collectively, as any other group of majors that I've had at Big Urban.

But I know that close readings can seem scary and unfamiliar (like poetry itself, to many students), and I didn't assume that my students had necessarily retained more than perhaps a few poetic terms from some intro class. I definitely didn't assume that they could do a close-reading on their own.

So: in one class, I introduced them to the basic terminology that I thought they'd need, discussed the effects that various poetic devices have or might have, and then we spent the rest of the period working through a sonnet together: we read it, we paraphrased it, we talked about its meaning, and then we brainstormed, collectively, all the "interesting things" we saw: image patterns, word choices, particular examples of alliteration, emjambment, etc., and discussed how these might affect the meaning of the poem. We found patterns among these interesting things, and then talked about plausible theses that might emerge from this work.

In the next class period, I had them do the same kind of work in groups on a second poem, and on a third day (we were doing other things for half of the period on the second and third day, so it wasn't All Close Reading, All the Time) we regrouped to discuss their findings collectively and weigh in on which theses seemed most promising.

I also posted a sample close-reading paper on Blackboard, and provided my students with a list of three things that I felt made the paper successful, and what general principles they should derive from those things.

But. . . I still have papers, many papers, that don't really look at their particular poem, at all. And you know, if someone even did a competant, thorough paraphrase, one that identified shifts in tone or perspective, and maybe briefly discussed one key metaphor or a word with a double meaning? That would be a B. Possibly a B+. (I do, actually, have a couple of papers like this, but only a couple.)

Instead, what I have for the most part are, "This poem is about ________," followed by vague, usually flagrantly wrong statements about what the author means, and what he's trying to do, with perhaps a reference in passing to the rhyme scheme "that gives a soothing flow" to the author's [incorrectly identified] sentiments. Or the alliteration "that highlights an important [unspecified] idea."

Partly I'm just complaining, here, but I really do want ideas for how to get better papers out of my students. I never received any instruction in close-reading in college (I was just expected to do it, and I did it terribly), and I was very uncertain about my powers of poetic analysis for a long time, so I'm sympathetic to my students; I think that I approach the subject as someone who really does regard poetic analysis as a set of skills--not as a native talent or something intuitive--that can be enumerated and learned. I also, of course, think that it's an incredibly important set of skills, one that really opens up entirely new literary worlds, and one that my students need to have some practice with before they can be let loose on a thematic paper topic (lest they go crazy with broad generalizations and superficial discussions of key passages).

If I don't have any control over their intro-to-the-major courses, is there anything I can do at this stage? Without using up any more class time? (Or running up a serious bar tab?)

Advice welcomed, and needed.

UPDATE 2/9: For those of you interested in the final results: I had a decent number of B range grades for this class in the end, which I was happy about, given that none of them appeared to have done a close reading before. Eight or nine students had C-minuses or below, however (some of this was just due to idiocy; one student turned in a two-page paper, which of course I failed). So, I announced that anyone with a C-minus or below would be permitted to revise, but that I'd average their two paper grades. And I've already had some nice conversations with some of those students who seem rather stunned, but also really committed to learning how to do this whole close reading thing. Too bad they're all seniors--but, we get them when we can, I guess.

Slowly sinking

2006-02-06T17:33:00.000-05:00

Last Thursday, I received 23 papers from my class on Author #1. So far, I've graded six, but I think I can get them done in the next couple of days--I'd sure better, because...

This Thursday, I will be receiving 27 papers from my class on Author #2.

And the following Thursday I will be receiving 60 papers from Surveys 1 & 2.

And about the time that I'm finishing up those survey papers? I'll receive 87 midterms. And then 23 new papers on Author #1.

God help me.

More Starlet Star!

2006-02-05T14:11:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went to see a terrible movie with Bert and George Washington Boyfriend. We knew it was going to be terrible and it was terrible, but we voluntarily paid $10 apiece anyway, all for the actor herein known as Starlet Star.

You may or may not have heard of her. On one of my first dates with George Washington Boyfriend, he mentioned, all faux-causually, "so, after four years here, I finally had my first brush with INRU fame: last semester, I taught Starlet Star."

And I said, "who?"

I Googled her when I went home, found her to be beautiful but to have acted in a few extremely unremarkable movies, and forgot about her.

Then, the next semester, I had her in one of my sections. And the following year I had her in another section. And she is possibly the most gorgeous human being I have ever laid eyes on--but also very smart, very conscientious, and sweet in a shy and almost goofily awkward way. I completely fell in love with her, and also became convinced that she had real acting chops: when we were reading drama, she could take a complicated part in difficult language totally cold, and just nail it.

About the time that I was teaching her for the second time, GWB and I decided that we had to see what she was all about, professionally, so we rented a recent movie in which she had a supporting part. She did a creditable job, but the movie was damn bad. After suffering through to the credits, one of us turned to the other, brow furrowed, and said, mock-earnestly, "You know what that movie needed? More Starlet Star." The phrase stuck: now, after a bad movie, a painful conference panel, or a mediocre meal, the solution, obviously, would have been--"More Starlet Star!"

So now she's in her biggest Hollywood role to date, in a movie that, bizarrely, is set somewhere GWB knows extremely well, and we just couldn't not go (Bert had other motives for going, which those who know him in real life will instantly recognize). The three of us howled through most of the movie, it was so bad--but the good news is that Starlet Star gets a lot of screen time and does the most that can be done with a poorly written part.

And I hope this portends good things for her. She's smart, she's talented, and she obviously took some career hits in favor of finishing her degree (in English, no less!). Someone with her substance and her skills deserves to do well, even in the superficial world of Hollywood.

Say it with me: more Starlet Star!

All hail, Bitch, Ph.D.

2006-02-03T19:54:00.000-05:00

[Note: my male readers may wish to skip this post. Or perhaps not.]

Today, following the advice of Bitch, Ph.D., I finally had a professional bra fitting. And verily: it was a revelation.

If it hadn't been for the Bitch, it probably never would have occured to me that I might be wearing the wrong size. I've been wearing the same size bra since I was 16 or 18, and I've never been aware of any problems. I mean, if it fits, you know it, right? And these seemed to fit. But after the Bitch's lengthy post on bra sizing and the apparently 85% of women who are in fact wearing the wrong size, I started to scrutinize my lingerie collection and to wonder.

Then a week or two ago the New York Times published its own article about bra sizing, wherein the journalist discovered that both she and her mother were wearing--and had been wearing for decades--dramatically incorrect sizes.

So today I went to a fabulous, family-owned lingerie shop not too far away, and got fitted. And? Turns out I'm one band size smaller and one cup size bigger than what I've been wearing for years. (In the unsupportive, frilly, demi-cup jobbies that I never wear, I'm actually TWO cup sizes bigger.) I wouldn't have guessed that wearing the proper size would actually make that much difference--better for one's back, maybe, and giving a nicer line under sweaters--but damned if I wasn't wrong there, too. I've always worn a larger-than-average size, but now, I have to say, va-va-voom!

(Anyone who's interested, and who lives in my city or expects to be visiting in the near future, lemme know. I'll hook you up with THE BEST lingerie fitters in town.)

. . . but here's something that makes up for those complaints

2006-02-02T22:14:00.000-05:00

Three of my four classes kicked ass today. And I mean: they seriously rocked.

This is good, because on Tuesday three of my four classes were abysmal, and I spent the train ride home depressed and convinced that I just didn't have the time, energy, or possibly the ability to teach these classes--whether because I'm teaching so many of them, or because two of them are entirely new, or because I'm just not a very talented teacher after all.

I made some strategic policy changes in one class, and announced those changes--making clear the responsibilities they placed on my students, and my irritation with them for requiring me to mandate these changes--and they seemed to have an instant effect. In the other two classes, though, I didn't do anything differently. The students were just on today, and seemed to be interested in the texts we were reading (in one case, this came as a total surprise--it's a tough and bizarre work, and one they were completely uninterested in on Tuesday).

And the class that didn't go quite as well? It was the class that did go well on Tuesday.

Maybe I'll make it through the semester after all.

Oh, and another complaint

2006-02-02T22:05:00.000-05:00

The bathrooms on my floor (and all the floors that contain more offices than classrooms) are always kept locked. Faculty and graduate students have keys, but undergrads do not.

I gather that it's for security reasons, but I've always thought it was stupid: every floor has classrooms on it, and what are students supposed to do? Take the elevator down to the first floor (the building has more than 10) and then come back up?

Well, I now think it's even stupider: today, for the second time in a week, a student I don't know came wandering down the hallway, found my office way back in my module, knocked on my just-barely ajar door, and asked me to let her into the bathroom. Which is WAAAY down the hall from my office. When I'm in the middle of frantically prepping my afternoon classes during my whole hour and a half of downtime all day.

Even more irritating: I think it's the same girl, and I think she knew where my office was because, on Tuesday, at the same hour, an ancient male professor accompanied her on this errand. Thanks, pal. I'm keeping my door shut in the future.

State of the Union

2006-01-31T21:44:00.000-05:00

I was sitting here half-listening to that idiot talk, thinking about fixing myself a v-e-r-r-y strong drink, when I looked up and saw as if with new eyes the cartoon I have taped up above my desk:

"I figure if I don't have that third Martini, then the terrorists win."

In which the author proves how much of a clueless academic she is

2006-01-29T23:55:00.000-05:00

A few blocks away from my apartment, there's an extremely plain storefront bearing the legend AGAPE in big black letters on a stark white background. It's been there for at least a year, but it's not on a route I usually travel, so I don't go by it or think of it often. I'd long assumed that it was a religious bookstore--I suppose just because of the name and the smallness of the establishment.

A month or so ago I walked right past it, looked in the single small window, and was suprised to note that it's actually a hair salon. Huh, I thought. Why on earth does it have that name?

I passed it again yesterday, again marvelled at the bizarre name, and started trying to figure out some logic whereby the love of God for humankind would strike someone as an appropriate name for a hair salon. Agape, I said to myself. Agape. What the fuck?

And then, today, it hit me.

(Re)writing, and it feels so good

2006-01-29T21:05:00.000-05:00

Okay, first of all, my schedule this semester officially rocks. I've actually gotten a full night's sleep for the last three nights (and I'm looking forward to a fourth tonight), and I've been getting my reading and course-prep done in a leisurely fashion in the midst of a variety of other things.

Chief among those "other things" is working on that overdue article I think I've mentioned. It's been hanging over my head for a couple of weeks, and I'm still anxious about my ability to get it done in the next few days, but I've finally gotten to the point where working on it isn't actively painful.

I may have said this before, but I'm a terrible writer-from-scratch. I hate the early stages of writing with a firey passion, and although I've developed strategies to help me through them and I don't get "blocked," per se, the first several drafts of everything I write are accomplished only by my forcing myself to write (or revise) X number of pages a day. Doesn't matter if they're drivel (and I cheat, all the time, by plunking in r-e-a-l-l-y long block quotations followed by maybe three sentences of "analysis," just so I can meet my page quota)--the point is that I'm getting some rudimentary thoughts on paper.

But sooner or later, after moving those sentences around, expanding my arguments here and there, and forging some links between paragraphs, I reach the point where I mostly know what I'm trying to say, and the rest of the process is a joy. A qualified joy, since it's still work and it usually winds up taking me longer then I think it should, but past a certain point it's less about creating than it is about rearranging and polishing--or as I like to think of it, puzzle-solving.

I like puzzle-solving. I think that's why my personality tests, all my life long, always suggested that I'd be a great scientist (these personality tests didn't consider aptitude, which would have told them that I'm hopeless in quantitative fields). This worried me when I was younger, when what I really wanted to get were results that told me how creative and imaginative I was--since that's what someone who likes to read and write should be good at, right?--but I've come to realize that what makes me a good reader and a good writer are my patience and my attention to detail. I'm good at finding patterns, worrying over the thing that doesn't seem to fit, untangling syntax or imagery, and then constructing an argument that's maximally clear and coherent.

That's what I like about writing. I love figuring out where the paragraphs go, and what background information a certain audience needs. I love rearranging sentences, fiddling with words to achieve the right rhythm and effect, and making sure that my voice is strong and consistent. I get complimented on my academic writing all the time, and although I suppose that's a pretty left-handed form of praise (let's pause for a moment to think about how bad most academic writing is!)--I know it to be true. It's one of the few things I can confidently say I AM good at.

But I'm the first to admit, these days, that I'm not a "creative" person in the intuitive and fertile way that we expect artists to be. Nothing comes to me fully formed, and everything is a hell of a lot of work. In high school and college I wanted to be a writer--by which I meant a novelist or maybe an essayist--but I never had the gift for spontaneously generating storylines and characters that some of the students in my writing classes did. In fact, I didn't really enjoy coming up with stories for their own sake; they had to be about something larger.

So, I'm a craftsman, not an artist. I'm happy with that. But here's where the analogy breaks down: do we ask the master woodworker to go out and create wood? To grow the trees, harvest them, and make lumber before he gets down to making his fancy lintels or whatever? That's what I feel I'm doing when I start writing--growing the fucking trees. And it's usually about as much fun as watching the forest grow.

Stop the presses!

2006-01-27T00:54:00.000-05:00

The latest issue of PMLA looks. . . interesting!

I can't remember the last time more than a single article in what George Washington Boyfriend refers to as "the PMLA bran muffin" seemed plausibly worth reading. (And, honestly, I can only think of one article in the last year or two that proved, afterwards, actually to have been worth reading.)

Now, if only I had the time to read the damn thing. . .

Attack of the clones

2006-01-26T23:35:00.000-05:00

I’m having a terrible time remembering the names of all my students this semester. Partly it's because I’m teaching an absurdly large number of students (110, at last count), but it’s also because those students are grouped together in unhelpful and frankly rather alarming ways.

Example No. 1: In my afternoon survey I have 30 students, eight or ten of whom are women with straight, approximately collarbone-length hair somewhere on the spectrum from light brown to semi-blond. They all have pleasant, regular features and nice smiles. Almost all of them have names like Sarah (two of those), Katie (two of those, too), Rachel, and Kathy.

Example No. 2: My seminar on Pretty Darn Famous Author has 25 students, ten of whom are decidedly unkempt men—men with shaggy or genuinely long hair, a few days’ worth of stubble, and tired eyes. They all look like they’re in bands (most of them are) or take regular part in skateboard competitions. A large number have eastern or southern European last names.

Example No. 3: My morning survey contains nine of my eleven total African-American students, three of whom are men with essentially the same build, skin tone, and facial shape. However, since in this case there are only three who share the same general profile, I’ve been able to learn their names much more quickly because I’ve been able to identify and remember their differences--one has cornrows, one has a moustache, and the third has both a moustache and a goatee.

Because that’s the thing: it’s not that all the women in Example 1 or the men in Example 2 look identical—in some cases, they don’t even look that much alike—but when there are so many in one room who meet the same general profile, their sameness overwhelms whatever distinguishing features they may have.

All I can say is: thank God for Shaved Head Girl, Beard-and-John-Lennon-Glasses Guy, Pixie Haircut, Goofy Gangly Blond Dude, and Black Dyejob Waif with Tattoos. They'd rock under any circumstances, but they especially, especially rock under these.

No, really: this floor is very comfortable. And I could totally get up if I wanted to!

2006-01-24T22:45:00.000-05:00

After 12 hours of interviewing, teaching, eating, touring, and enthusing on my campus visit yesterday, I slept for five hours and then left, very early, so that I could get to Big Urban in time to teach my four classes today--two of which I hadn't prepped for, so I spent all my time in transit this morning scrawling lesson plans across legal pads and all my time in transit this evening grading the quizzes and semi-busywork I'd prepared for my other classes.

But I'm still alive, if not exactly vertical, and everything went, I think very well. I had quite a lot of fun on my visit and enjoyed seeing the campus, meeting the faculty, and teaching the students (indeed, the class I taught on Super Huge Famous Author there went better than my class in the same subject at Big Urban today). It's funny how much you learn just by watching people be themselves, regardless of what questions you ask or what answers they give*--and for the most part I was favorably impressed by what I saw.

And now--and now, I'm in my pyjamas, on my second glass of wine, and thinking about turning to my thank-you notes. Although maybe the wine and my exhaustion mean that I should put that particular project on hold until tomorrow morning.

*This is one reason I hate the excessively interrogatory style that so many schools use in their interviews; making me give an impromptu Marxist account of my work (which happened in one of my other MLA interviews) may indeed tell you how well I handle belligerent oddballs, and certainly that's a useful skill for a scholar to have. But. . . given that my work ISN'T Marxist, and that there's no real way it could be, there are, surely, more useful things that you could learn by letting me run in more loosely guided directions. If you've got basic horse sense and some knowledge of the field, you can tell who's full of shit, who's got scholarly chops, who's a good teacher--and who you'd want to have around your department for the next few years.

Will return by: 1/24

2006-01-21T15:12:00.000-05:00

I'm off tomorrow morning for my campus visit and I've got a ton of stuff to do between now and then--so I'll catch y'all on the flip side. Peace out!

An open letter to my colleague or colleagues

2006-01-19T23:57:00.000-05:00

Dear Unknown Colleague(s),

I don’t know what you teach, but I’m sure it’s terribly important. I’m sure you have a hard time fitting everything you want to teach into a semester, and everything you want to discuss into a class session. It’s hard, I know, when you have such wisdom to share, to remember that you aren’t the only person teaching at this school, and that your class isn’t the only class your students take.

But perhaps you have noticed that most of the classroom buildings on campus are vertical, and that several of them are more than ten stories high. Perhaps you have also noticed that these building have two or at most four ancient elevators that take their sweet time going up and down, and that between classes there are never fewer than fifty students at any time waiting for those elevators. Under the best of circumstances, the ten minutes between class periods is just enough time to get from a room in one building to a room in another building.

So I fail to understand why you have, apparently, informed some of your students—my students—that they should “just expect” that your classes will run five minutes over, every time.

Maybe you can explain it to me. Maybe you don't start your own classes on time, so you've never been interrupted in the middle of delivering your opening monologue, or administering a pop quiz, or explaining a complicated assignment. Maybe you've never had to rush from one building to another or from one subject to another--or, as many of our students do, from campus to a full-time job (where being more than five minutes late means getting docked a half-hour's pay). Maybe you've forgotten that your students and their time deserve your respect.

Or maybe you're just an asshole.

Cordially,
LL

Well, there goes another $700 I don't have

2006-01-18T10:35:00.000-05:00

I have to vent for a minute. The college of liberal arts at Big Urban offers a certain amount of conference travel funding, awarded on a competitive basis, to all full-time faculty. (That's how the announcement is worded, but I'm assuming that this means, basically, all lecturers, since I'd assume that t-t faculty already have travel budgets.)

So. I got an e-mail last week saying that for the first part of the spring semester there would be five awards given out, based on merit, but offered on a first-come, first-serve basis. Deadline Jan. 18th. And I thought, well, fuck, I've probably missed my chance if the deadline is so soon--but maybe they haven't had enough takers. So I spent a couple of hours writing up a proposal for the conference I'm presenting at next month, recovering my acceptance e-mail, finding the on-line PDF of the program, etc., and then late on Friday (the 13th) I emailed everything in to the relevant sub-dean.

I got an e-mail back on Monday saying that the 18th was the FIRST day to apply, and that I should resubmit then.

So. . . it's not really a "deadline," then, is it? I emailed back an apology and an explanation, and figured I'd resubmit today. It crossed my mind to submit at, like, 12.05 a.m., before I went to sleep, but since I'd already jumped the gun once, I didn't want to look like a jerk. Instead, I emailed my materials this morning, at about 9.30 a.m.

And forty-five minutes later I got an e-mail from the sub-dean saying, "sorry, all the awards have already been granted."

Why do I bother?

[UPDATE: Well, file this in the door-closed-window-open department: this afternoon I received a cheque in the mail for 470.00 Euros (about $560). What for? Why, reimbursing me, at long fucking last, for my plane fare to European City for that conference back in October.

The university hosting the conference had picked up my hotel room and most of my meals, but they've been having a hell of time reimbursing me for my ticket--we've gone 'round and 'round with wire transfer codes and I'd finally given up on ever seeing that money again. But, glory be! They came through!

None of this makes me less pissed off at Big Urban, or (much) more able to afford my conference next month--but I'm at least less pissed off at the universe for its treatment of my conference travel needs.]

Finnegan, begin again

2006-01-17T14:04:00.000-05:00

First day of classes today, and I have what is either the most brilliant schedule ever conceived (given that I'd be teaching four classes regardless), or the worst: I teach Tuesday/Thursday. Period.

Yes, this does mean that I'm teaching for nearly six hours on both of those days (two classes back-to-back in the morning; a break of an hour and a half; two back-to-back in the afternoon). And yes, I do foresee serious damage being done to both my feet and my vocal chords. But it also means that I'm only on campus two days a week, that I have one fewer day of my extraordinarily hellish commute, and that I have a blessedly long weekend, every weekend.

So we'll see. I think it will be good. I'm someone who is happier with big blocks of time in which to grade, read, or write, rather than a few hours here and a few hours there--even if putting together those blocks of time results in my busy days being EXTREMELY busy. I'm also someone who likes to work at home (although, now that I think about it, I've never had a real office--I share this one with another lecturer who teaches alternate days and who has taken over the, er, decorative responsibilities for the place). I'm also hoping that, once the job market plays itself out, I'll actually be able to dedicate one day a week to my own writing.

And you know, although I was really dreading coming to campus today, now that I've taught two of my four classes and met my students, I'm getting pumped about my courses--all of which are more or less in my field, and two of which I'm teaching for the first time. There's something so lovely about the way the academic schedule is full of both new beginnings and (blessedly) regular endings.

MLK Day

2006-01-16T18:38:00.000-05:00

Today I “celebrated” MLK day by doing an insane amount of course prep and tending to those last few household chores and errands that I could get to before the semester begins and my time is no longer my own.

I did listen to one of my favorite shows on the local NPR affiliate, however, which every year features a fantastic MLK program: the host invites callers to prepare a 1-minute-long reading that they feel does tribute to the values of Dr. King, but written by someone from a race or culture other than their own. And then, for an hour, he takes their calls. It's always amazing. This year people called in with readings from Margaret Cho, Desmond Tutu, and To Kill a Mockingbird. A nine-year-old girl called up and read a passage from Sojourner Truth's Ain't I a Woman. A woman called up and read a poem by a Kenyan poet, crying the whole time. Another woman called up and read part of the Gettysburg Address in memory of her husband, a journalist who was kidnapped and killed in Iraq.

Some of the local churches must have had services this morning, for several still had their doors open and flowers out front when I went out late in the day to do my errands. The only other evidence of commemoration that I saw was a homemade sign strapped to a lamppost on the main thoroughfare of Historically Black Neighborhood: made out of two pieces of cardboard held together with twine, it read, in awkward black marker, "Dr. King. Why did they kill you?" And on the second piece of cardboard, "Like Jesus Christ he died for us."

I don't think there was a parade up there, or any other official ceremony; someone just felt moved to make the sign and do homage in his own way. And as busy as I am, I wanted to spare a minute to try to do the same.

Reasons to date a libertarian

2006-01-14T21:40:00.000-05:00

Yes, there are disadvantages. But they also tend to say things like, "You know, I expect my office calls to be monitored. But from here on out I'm answering my home phone with: 'Good morning, fuck the NSA!'"

Good news x 3

2006-01-13T19:40:00.000-05:00

Good news the first
I've just had an essay solicited for an important new collection, edited by scholars I like and respect, to be published by Top University Press. I've been doing a little dance every few hours, whenever I think about this.

Good news the second
My first campus visit! I got a call today from Small College, with whose committee I had the other of my two best MLA interviews. I really liked the committee, I'm attracted by the school's undergraduate curriculum, and it's in a very appealing location. Haven't yet made up a dance, but I'm working on it.

Good news the third
I think I really am going back to the U.K. this summer. I have one project that really necessitates my going back, but since I'm not sure that I'll have the time or money this summer (especially if I'm moving and starting a new job) to work as intensively as I need to, I was thinking of waiting until 2007.

However, I had a nice chat today with h.k., who's going to be living in lavish corporate housing in London for part of the summer, and she promised I could crash there. I also want to catch up with my dear friend KFB, whose wedding I missed--and so even if I only get a little bit of work done, it won't be a waste. And of course it would be totally fun.

National de-lurking week

2006-01-11T16:16:00.000-05:00

I've been informed by many reliable sources that this is national (nay, international!) de-lurking week. And as my site hits have grown enormously over the last couple of months, I know that there are a lot of you out there.

So I'd like to invite any readers to feel free to step on up and join the party, but I can't promise there will be much to comment ON in the next several days--I'm currently holed up in Quaint Smallish City, hoping to use this last week before classes begin to punch out an article and read a stack of journals (but getting continually distracted by much more enjoyable things, like changing the template for this blog).

So instead, I encourage anyone to comment at any time, on anything, or just to introduce yourself. Make it your belated New Year's resolution. De-lurking "week" be damned!

Tagged! Tagged again!

2006-01-10T12:05:00.000-05:00

I've got a couple of memes to catch up on. First, ABD Me tagged me for the five weird things meme:

Five Weird Things about Me

1. I take a bath every day. Not because I'm all fancy like that, but because my apartment does not, in fact, have a shower. My apartment is in a circa-1890 townhouse, and I got the building's original bathroom. What do I mean by that? I mean that I'm in a 500-square-foot apartment, 100 SF of which is bathroom. A bathroom with a six-foot-long bathtub.

2. I would be totally happy never owning a car or driving one regularly again.

3. My memory works in really strange ways. For example: if I've had a conversation with someone and I'm trying to remember who it was with (you know: "I was talking about this with someone. . . who was it told me that . . . "), the one thing that I always, instantly know is the sex of that person. I may have no idea where the conversation took place, whether we were alone or with other people, or even how long ago it was, but I always know whether the person in question was male or female.

4. Although I'd bet that I have at least as many appearance-related anxieties as the next woman, I've never been concerned about my weight or figure. I've never dieted (or, for that matter, eaten particularly well) and I've never belonged to a gym.

5. I have serious sidewalk rage. I'm a very good and usually a very brisk walker, and I get REALLY irritated at people who don't know how to move around public spaces--who weave aimlessly back and forth, stop dead in the middle of a busy sidewalk, or (in the case of tourists) walk, like, three abreast with linked arms. I've been known to deliberately run into people in order to give their actions consequences. (See, it's a good thing that I don't like to drive!)

--------------------

Then, Clare tagged me for the 5 books/5 books meme:

Name five books that left you totally flat even though your friends / critics raved about them.

1. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things. I threw this book across the room when I finished it.

2. Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One. I'm all about Evelyn Waugh. I cede my place in the Waugh Fan Club to no one. But this book. . . just isn't the satiric masterpiece it's made out to be.

3. Everything by Haruki Murakami. Okay, I haven't read everything by Murakami, but I've read three or four novels and many short stories, and I've found them all a yawn when they aren't actively annoying.

4. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie. I like Williams generally, but this play irritates me beyond measure.

5. Can I cast a sweeping, negative judgement on an entire literary field? Knowing that some of my readers will probably abandon this blog in protest? Okay, well--I really dislike the Romantic poets. I can get behind individual poems by all of them, and I actually quite like Byron, but collectively they make me want to gag.

Name five books that you read and loved that your friends / critics panned, ignored, or hated, or that are just undeservingly uncelebrated.

1. Mary McCarthy, The Group. Her nonfiction is what I really love her for, but this novel--supposedly her trashy potboiler--deserves to be much more widely read.

2. John Dos Passos, U.S.A. It's not like the trilogy is unknown, or that critical opinion on it isn't high, but it seems neglected. Is it ever taught? Does the average reader with literary tastes even know it exists?

3. Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye. A great detective novel, but one that far transcends the limits of that genre. It's good literature, period.

4. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae. Yes, she's nuts. But she's an interesting kind of nuts. I read this book early on in college, and it was the first work of literary criticism that really excited and interested me--and made me see the discipline as something other than dry hairsplitting.

5. Pretty much all the works I focus on in my dissertation. I can't get more specific here, but most of them are regarded as the "weaker" or less interesting products of some great authors, and the lesser genre of a period with way more compelling stuff going on elsewhere. Bullshit, say I!

Phone interview

2006-01-09T15:34:00.000-05:00

Sigh. Everything that everyone said about phone interviews turned out to be true of this one--which is to say, it was an awkward and vexing experience.

First of all, there were SEVEN people on the other end of the line. I'd had prior contact with only two individuals, and, for various reasons, I expected the entire committee to consist of only three or four people. So: seven people to try to keep track of, a bad speakerphone connection, and no visual or even really verbal cues as to how what I was saying was going over. GREAT.

The best piece of advice I've read about how to stay collected in an interview emphasizes the importance of sticking to specifics--concrete examples of teaching techniques, illustrative moments from one's research--and I did generally manage to do that. But I found myself flailing around several times, unable to produce a neat and coherent example or anecdote even when I knew perfectly well what I wanted to say. That didn't happen in my in-person interviews, and I'm tempted to put it down to my discomfort with the format itself: not having a face or two to focus on and steady myself.

However, I have to say that the committee didn't seem particularly comfortable with the process, either. This brings me to the best piece of wisdom I've received about the interviewing process, which came, quite recently, from GWB, who's now been on both sides of it: most interviewers are fucking terrible at asking questions. I saw some of this at the MLA (where I'd think, wait, was that actually a question? Which part of it?), but I saw a lot of it today--quite possibly because they, too, weren't getting the cues we all look for in a conversation.

Take this question: "Can you talk about how your work on X Period of literature informs your work in Y Period, and your teaching?" Umm, well--I don't actually do any work in X Period. I do teach parts of it, sometimes, but neither my dissertation nor any of my other research projects engage with that period. At all.

I said as much, albeit more politely, and asked for a clarification, but the questioner essentially repeated exactly the same question. So all I could say was, "well, I really enjoy teaching Author A and Author B from that period, and I hope to do more of that in the future--and there's certainly been work done on, say, the influence of Author A on Pretty Darn Famous Author--but that influence doesn't really seem relevant to the works by PDFA that I investigate--so, I can't really answer your question."

Which wasn't probably my most stunning moment, but I had no idea what he was actually asking. It occurs to me now that he might have wanted to know whether I saw a rigid division between those two periods, artistically and culturally (thus explaining why I work on one and not on the other)--or that perhaps he was asking whether there was any scholarship on the first period that I was familiar with that was relevant to or had influenced my work on the second. But, dude! It's your job to know what you want from me! Not mine to guess it!

Anyway. It's not really a big deal; I'd absolutely love a couple of things about this position, but there's also one gi-normous drawback to it--so, on balance, I'm content to wait and see.

Indeed, that's more or less how I feel about this whole process right now: I'm anxious and rather irritable, but I also feel just profoundly bored by it all. Since I may well wind up with nothing, it doesn't seem like a reasonable use of my energy to get overly invested in any one school.

Advice

2006-01-08T11:22:00.000-05:00

I have a phone interview tomorrow. Anyone have any advice specific to this type of interview that they want to share?*

*I actually did have a phone interview last year, but it was for a position for which I'd already interviewed at the MLA: the chair of the search committee had had a last-minute family emergency, and so couldn't be at the conference; instead, the chair called all the candidates up a week or so later and asked exactly the same questions that the rest of the committee had already posed in person. So, no surprises.

Uptown, downtown, out & about

2006-01-07T23:35:00.000-05:00

In the spirit of so not thinking about the job market, and also in the spirit of catching up with as many of my friends as I can before the madness of the semester begins, I've got a pretty busy few days before I head out to Quaint Smallish City. Today, I spent all day with one of my bestest (and until recently somewhat long-lost) friends, Bert.

We'd made vague plans several days ago to get together and maybe see a movie, but when he called he had a better idea: the botanical gardens! To see the Christmas village and the trains! And because neither of us had ever been!

I had no idea what he was talking about, with the Christmas village and the trains, but it sounded like fun, and Bert's persuasive capacities are always increased by the way he shows up bearing interesting foodstuffs--today, bottles of Jamaican ginger beer and jerk chicken patties. So we figured out our somewhat complicated route and made our way to the subway with a number of stops along the way.

It was really cold, and our trip involved a lot of walking, but the Botanical Gardens were excellent, even in their more dormant winter state. We wandered through the enormous Gilded Age pavillion, part of which is set up as a rain forest and another part of which does an approximation of a desert, but all of which led us eventually to the Holiday Trains.

And. . . the exhibit was incredible. Throughout the very large room were scattered replicas of famous buildings in MEC and its environs--department stores, cathedrals, museums, Victorian mansions, municial buildings, statues and fountains--all made entirely out of organic materials. Twigs. Bark. Toadstoles. Petals for shingles. And what appeared to be sugar for the window panes. These were nestled among plants of every description, and numerous different electric trains ran around them and throughout the room. High above us were twig-and-branch replicas of the city's many bridges, strung with lights, on which trains also chugged back and forth. Really amazing.

After some more time in the gardens, we wended our way far downtown to a hole-in-the-wall Japanese place with excellent food and even better music--a crazy fusion of funk, rap, soul, and Japanese pop rock. Then we walked back to Bert's apartment, stopping to buy pastries on the way. We hung out for a couple of hours, eating and drinking coffee, while he occasionally doodled around on several of his many instruments. (His small studio apartment houses, by my count, these instruments: alto, tenor, and soprano saxes, a flute, a piccolo, a clarinet, a recorder, a tin whistle, a practice bagpipe, and a fife. Don't ask.)

And I dunno: every time I have a day like today, I'm torn between feeling glad that I'm making the most of my probably limited time in this city, and feeling just impossibly sad at the likelihood of leaving it.

Some of it is bound up with Bert himself: we both lived in this city right after we graduated from college, when we were both single, and for those two years we did everything together. Even after I started grad school, for my first couple of years I was here at least one weekend a month, crashing on his couch and going out clubbing with the gay boys after dark.

When I moved back, two and a half years ago, I was excited in large part because he was still here (even though he hadn't been himself for a long while by that point)--but until five months ago, we virtually didn't see each other. When we did, Bert was either manic or withdrawn or fighting with his boyfriend, or otherwise just not. . . present.

But now that he's back, and I'm remembering what he was like in the old old days--what he was like up until maybe 2000--it's so hard to think of leaving. I feel like I have so much lost time with him to make up for.

Cleaning house

2006-01-07T22:41:00.000-05:00

What with my sudden decision last summer to finish my dissertation by October, starting teaching full-time in late August, and going on the job market in the midst of it all, it's been a LONG time since I've really been on top of my shit, housekeeping-wise. Sure, I'd scrub out the bathroom, vaccuum, and sort my papers and books into relatively neat piles when I had company coming, but that was about the extent of it.

Over the last few days, however, I have:

Taken three large bags of clothing to the thrift store at my church
Thrown out all the drafts and other papers in my refrigerator's crisper drawer
Tossed a year's worth of old magazines
Filed or boxed old letters & correspondence
Purchased a shredder, the better to purge my file cabinet of old bills and bank statements
Written thank-you notes for Xmas presents, my hand-me-down doctoral robes (which actually aren't in the style INRU currently uses; bummer!), and my mink
Finalized my syllabi and uploaded them onto Blackboard
Written two letters of recommendation
Gotten my hair cut
Dusted, vaccuumed, scrubbed, and polished my apartment's Victorian-era woodwork

I'm not quite done yet, but I'm starting to feel as though I can breathe again. Although I still have a lot of work to do before the semester starts (most urgently: writing an article for which I've already had the deadline extended once; revising a paper for a conference next month; planning my first week of classes), getting on top of my physical environment and removing some of those little nagging obligations always improves my outlook. For the moment, anyway, I am so not thinking about the job market.