technologies of writing

Over at the Valve, Miriam J/Scribblingwoman asks the members of that group to answer some meme-like questions about writing and reading, each of which would be a good prompt for its own blog post. (Maybe I need to save her list for when I can't think of anything else to write about.) But for today I'm just interested in her first, deceptively simple, question: Do you compose on the computer? Why or why not?

It seems simple, and the easiest way for me to answer would be "yes, because the twin demons of Deadline and Procrastination are right behind me, breathing foul odors and scraping my back with their long talons."

But dig a little deeper and it gets more interesting. What, after all, does "compose" cover? My writing process of the past 14 years looks something like this:

1. read, write notes longhand
2. type quotes if I have time; cover books in sticky flags if I don't.
3. write extensive outline by hand
4. rewrite outline maybe 3 times to figure out what I'm actually arguing
5. write pages of crappy first draft on computer
6. revise by hand on hard copy in several colors of ink: inserting paragraphs, rearranging things, deleting lines, paragraphs, pages of unusable stuff.
   
7. transcribe to computer
   
8. repeat #6-7 multiple times.

I produce a heck of a lot of text on the computer, but what feels like serious work (or composing) is the outlining and the re/writing that happens after the first draft. I love being at the revision stage of a manuscript, rather than at the blank beginning, because that's where the artistic sense of composing really comes into play. That's where I can see the patterns in my own thoughts revealing themselves, where I can arrange the elements to my liking.

Earlier, more than 14 years ago, I was writing with a very different process, because I didn't yet own a computer. I would take notes, outline, and write the first draft longhand. Do several rounds of edits. Type up a final copy. Be done.

Lots of things are different when you write directly at the computer. The possibility of multiple revisions creates ever more demands for perfection. When I had to type up my papers once, before turning them in, I was limited in how often I could revise. Now the boundaries of my texts are less firm, their lifespan on my desk artifically prolonged. And, as I teach my students, it's easy to be deceived by simply quantity of output: it fills up several pages, it comes out looking nice from the printer, and you might think you have an essay when you don't. For me, if I'm working on something especially challenging, I have to write it out by hand, so I can think more slowly. Scott McLemee's recent article comes close to blaming computer technology for "boring" academic writing, a logical connection I don't agree with. I know plenty of people who write smart, beautiful prose at the keyboard, and plenty of terrible writers attached to their fetish pens and notebooks. The technology you choose inevitably affects your thinking and composing process, your speed of production, your relationship to your final result. But I don't think there's any wholesale answer (Tarzan: pens Good, computer Bad // Jane: computer Good, pens Bad) to be found.

There are plenty of good things about writing on the computer, too. Touch Typing was the best class I ever took in high school -- I'm fast, accurate, and able to get lots done at the keyboard. Writing by hand is slow and kind of painful after 45 minutes. Plus I feel much more comfortable knowing that my previous versions, my deleted sections, my alternative endings, all exist somewhere on my hard drive, neatly organized by file name and date. My computer offers a map of my thought process, which is greatly consoling for someone like me who has a terrible memory. I frequently come across a file of notes about a source that I don't remember reading. Thankfully I personally don't have to keep track of where all those notes are, or I'd really never get anything accomplished.

Lately, post-tenure, I've been trying to reimagine my writing process, to think about what really works for me and what doesn't. I have a sneaking suspicion that I was a more careful writer back in the longhand days -- and I might have been smarter. Yet at the time, I was only writing 20-30 page papers, not 50 pages or 250. It's a lot easier to have well-organized and well-crafted prose when your topic is so limited. But maybe, just maybe, I wonder, I should try going back to doing a first draft longhand. After all, I know people used to write whole books longhand -- I grew up in a house of writers, and one of my fond memories is watching my parents cut-and-paste, old-style. (Scissors, strips of paper on the floor, scotch tape. ) But my desire for efficiency won't let me even think about writing a whole article or chapter longhand, much less a whole book. I live in a world where speed does matter. And an academic world where quantity and speed of output matters. So it's really a question of figuring out where I need the speed and where I can get more value from slowing down, from physically wrestling with my words.

I read lots of writerly blogs and most of us at some point or other talk about these things. Confessing a particular pen, a special writing ritual. McLemee quotes a passage from Walter Benjamin that had a huge impact on me when I was 20ish, basically commanding the serious writer to develop some passions and rituals about the process. I have some of my own (certain pens I use for editing etc) but I'd really be interested in hearing about people's rituals and experiences at the keyboard -- because as long as the longhand folks are the only ones describing their experience as writers, then the writing that so many of us do for many of the day's hours seems not to count.

(I'll write up my own tomorrow, once I've had a chance to think about it some more. I didn't know when I started writing this that I'd wind up giving myself an assignment. Because of course I don't have a stack of other things to do right now...)

taste of things to come

So, next month, my gf and I are making a trip to my hometown to see my mother for her birthday. It'll be our first visit since she moved to her new house (longtime readers will recall I made several trips last spring/summer to help clear out & pack up the 40+ years of stuff in her old house), and she's excited to have us come and see the painting and remodeling she's had done. We, on the other hand, are less excited. She's a difficult person to deal with, and it takes a lot of energy just to be around her. I'm lucky my partner is coming with me, since she will serve as a good buffer for the nitpicking that invariably erupts when I see my mother. Though of course it has already started:

[Setting: on the phone earlier this evening. Background info: small college town where my mother lives is an hour away from the airport, and my mother is old enough that she doesn't really drive except for errands in town.]

Mel: so you got my email with the times of our flights?
Mother: Yes. I suppose you'll be getting a rental car? [said with withering scorn]
Mel: yes, that's the simplest thing.
Mother: but you'll only be here for a couple of days
Mel: well, we want to have the flexibility of having our own car
Mother: but what would you need to do?
Mel: you know, I want to go and see Steve and Mary while we're in town. And maybe we'll want to go out somewhere when you're busy.
Mother: I could arrange a ride for you from the airport with the people coming in for the festival my theatre group is putting on
Mel: no, I think we'll just get a rental car.
Mother: that's ridiculous.
Mel: it's only $40. It's what I've decided to do.
Mother: but you don't need to go anywhere.
etc.

Arrgghh. We go through this every single time I go to see her. It's infinitely easier and more efficient for me to get a rental car at the airport -- not to mention it's psychologically less damaging for me to be able to leave her house and go to a coffee shop or just drive around if I need to. Which I think deep down is precisely what bothers her. She'd much rather have us completely under her control, every minute of the day.

This makes the next two weeks of grading etc seem almost pleasant.

my favorite poet of the exclamation mark

Today

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! All
the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

-- The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara

poetrymonth

go forth and be distracted

All Consuming is back! A few weeks ago, I took my feed off my blog because I'd been having problems trying to update it -- and then Erik Benson explained his server had been compromised. So I just sort of forgot about it until this morning, when as I'm skimming around online while the coffee drips, I see a new feed on someone's blog.

Now you can track movies & music as well. And it's now tag-based, so you can create your own categories. Much more flexible.

Now if only the display script was a little bit more adjustable... but I figured out how to split it into two relevant groups using the tags I've put on things. (scroll down past my bloglist)

Because I really needed to futz around with this today, right? But, seriously, I really enjoy seeing other people's book & movie lists. Right now this seems like a pretty easy way to manage them.

saturday dog blogging

induction

One of the many end-of-semester things I had to do this past week was organizing and hosting an induction ceremony for the student honor society in our department. I agreed to become the faculty co-sponsor only because I really like the guy who asked me to do it with him -- he's a great older guy, very pleasant and wise. And it's really not that much extra work, if the students are on the ball. But the group had basically fallen apart last year, so there were no student officers to help plan the lunch and ceremony. So it was up to me and my colleague. I did all the clerical stuff (sending out invitation letters to 90 qualified students, dealing with the forms and fees for the 20 who replied, sending out letters inviting them to the lunch, etc etc) and made him deal with the caterers and flowers etc., which is the stuff that makes me more anxious. The clerical stuff is tedious but he certainly wouldn't have been organized or competent enough to do it. So it was a good division of labor. (Though, I should probably note that if he were sharing the job with another old guy, they would have found a secretary to do some of the work. But that's not how it works for younger faculty, who don't have privileges to request things from staff.)

I also agreed to be the co-sponsor because I think such a group has potential on a campus like ours, potential that isn't often realized. As an urban school with a mostly commuter student base, there aren't a lot of ways for students to get to know each other outside of class. And few opportunities for us as a department to recognize and honor our best students. Some years this honor society group doesn't really do anything; some years they have theatre outings or activities like literary readings -- things for literature nerds to do. And I feel like I have to support the nerds, you know?

The lunch & ceremony went off pretty well -- the students seemed to like it, the former faculty sponsors, who are always invited, said it was nice, and (perhaps best of all) I heard two of these colleagues in the women's bathroom later that day saying "that was nice" "yes, the lunch was nice" "yes, I liked the chicken" -- since I was in the stall unbeknownst to them, I guess it means they liked the lunch. I was a little worried that they'd say something less complimentary and then I'd either have to come out and face them or hide in the stall for a while.

But as I was up at the podium reading my part in the induction ceremony (it is a script from the national organization) I had one of those moments of looking down at the scene as if from a great distance, and I thought "what the heck am I doing up here?" Because not only was I never a member of a student club, I have never been a part of any organization that involves a ceremony for joining. Nor any organization that elects officers, except for the MLA. I'm all for community -- I've been part of various discussion groups and social gatherings and political things at various points in my life. But never in this sort of mainstream official sense. I was never in student government. I've never been a part of anything with the word "club" in the title. At heart, I'm suspicious of organized community, suspicious of any group that would make it easy for me to be a part of it. (As you can probably tell, I don't come from a church/temple background either.)

And yet, here I am, shaking these students' hands and encouraging them to become active participants in the organization. Very, very weird. I don't think it's quite "selling out," since I have nothing against student clubs in principle. But it doesn't feel quite like me, either. It's just part of my job. And, thankfully, one part of my job that is over until next year.

countdown to mid-May

• three more teaching days, including today
• one more dissertation defense
  
• two PhD oral exams
• 55 post-doc applications to review
• 42 scholarship award applications to review
• one more set of final papers to grade
• final exams to give and grade
  
• six different committee meetings of more than one hour's length (already scheduled; more to happen after the initial meetings re scholarships and post-docs)
• one letter of recommendation for colleague
  
• one application for a travel grant
  
• departmental student awards presentation and lunch
• roundtable panel discussion I have to participate in
  

This is just the leftover, the residue after the past two weeks' flurry of activity. And these are the parts of my job that don't really "count," when our meagre raises are on the table.

Sigh. Time to go get ready for class.

Grey's Anatomy

Among marketers and casual reviewers of films, there is a long-standing assumption that when heterosexual pairs go to the movies, female viewers will watch "male" films, but that men have to be really persuaded to watch "female" films. Thus the term "chick flick" has become a descriptive label that doesn't really say anything about content -- it's more about presumed audience behavior.

Several years ago, Janice Radway's research in Reading the Romance suggested that purchasers and readers of mass-market romance novels would frequently choose them based on aspects of setting -- one might be a reader who liked historical romances, another wants novels set in Paris or New York. Because the genre offers fairly conventional characterization and plot structures, the background details were actually very important to many consumers.

I've been thinking about both of these things in relation to the new medical drama show on ABC, Grey's Anatomy, which focuses on a group of young MDs doing a surgical internship in Seattle. There's a long history of television shows that select a professional situation -- medicine, law, police work -- to provide the backdrop to the interpersonal relations among the characters. The advantage of these professions is that each of them provides a daily supply of new patients/clients/criminals and new ethical or moral situations with which the protagonists have to come to terms. I suspect that for viewers, these backgrounds operate in much the same way as the settings of romance novels -- one might prefer crime drama, medical drama, or law drama, even though the emotional or ethical content boils down to much the same thing. It's just dressed up a little differently.

What's distinctive about this show is that there are three women in the central group of interns, and they work under a female resident. At least one gossip columnist has termed it "FelicMD" to point out its affiliations to so-called "chick TV." And yes, there's plenty of sexual tension between Meredith Grey and one of the attending physicians, who she slept with in a one-night stand before starting work at the hospital. But the fact that we can have a girly doctor show is a great cultural place to be in, no? It's not a perfect show, but it does try to offer a range of both female and male characters, which is pretty unusual in the professional soap/drama shows.

What's also interesting to me -- this show comes on after Desperate Housewives, which is how I wound up watching it. And both of them use a voice-over narrator who provides a theme or motif at the opening and some kind of concluding remark. In DH, it's the neighbor whose suicide started the show, and in GA it's Meredith Grey, the main protagonist. So these shows seem to me to be reaching for a kind of literary feel. Certainly DH follows the format of 19th-century serial fiction, with tension-producing twists at the end of episodes and the gradual unfolding of characters' interconnections. Grey's Anatomy, on the other hand, isn't in the thriller/suspense mode -- the first-person narration provides the Bildungsroman framework that makes each episodes events just a lesson for the protagonist's personal growth and development.

I don't watch enough television to know how common the voice-over narrator is -- it seems unusual to me, but perhaps you know of other examples?

it's still poetry month

LOVESIGHT.

WHEN do I see thee most, beloved one?
When in the light the spirits of mine eyes
Before thy face, their altar, solemnize
The worship of that Love through thee made known?
Or when in the dusk hours, (we two alone,)
Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies
Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies,
And my soul only sees thy soul its own?

O love, my love! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,—
How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
The wind of Death's imperishable wing?


-- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, from the sonnet series The House of Life (1870/1881) (This sonnet is numbered III in the 1870 series, and IV in the much-altered 1881 version.)
poetrymonth

literary study and pleasure

There's been all kinds of commenting theatrics going on over at the Valve and Crooked Timber the past couple of days (aptly characterized by Sean McCann as a version of pro wrestling or bad TV) -- I'm not going to provide links to specific comments because if you have the fortitude to read any of them, then you probably also have the inability to resist reading the whole mess. GZombie has been almost the sole defender of literary studies as it is actually practiced -- as it actually resembles what I've seen in the English departments I've been a part of. I haven't jumped into the fray because it hasn't really been about content. One guy says something rude, then someone else puts him into a headlock. Two guys in the audience go wild and rush the stage. Or something like that.

Some of the claims being bandied about in those comment threads include statements like this:

• there is a "crisis" in literary studies because (1) the guy on the street can't understand the published articles and they use specialized language; (2) because English lit profs don't "appreciate" or "love" literature in the way that the guy on the street (or the academic in another field) thinks they should or (3) because they've been messing with the Canon, and look how complicated things are now.
  
• literary study shouldn't be part of the academy because (1) it doesn't train people for jobs; (2) it doesn't make people into Novelists and Poets; or (3) because it doesn't result in tangible new things as scientific inquiry does.

There's more, but that gives you an idea. Most of these are pretty familiar claims -- and pretty tired-seeming by now.

But as I've been thinking about why this little tempest has been stirred up in the ways that it has been over the past few days, it strikes me that pleasure (or "love") is at the core of many of these claims. I've already expressed my irritation with the way that people in all sorts of other fields think they can go around announcing that there's a "crisis" in literary studies, and that they know the way to fix it, when most of them are not currently nor were formerly part of a Literature or English department. Yes, scholars in literary study frequently draw on scholarship in other fields (such as history, art history, music, etc) , for which we are sometimes criticised -- but I have never read attacks on the overall structure, goals, and methods of any another field that are mounted in the ways that attacks on English are.

Why is this? In part, because (as gzombie has been tirelessly reminding the CT/Valve crowd) "literature" and "literary studies" are two different things. Just as rocks and geology are different. But I suspect there more people who feel passionately about some literary text or texts than there are people who feel passionately about particular stones.

I'm not against passion, or the love of literature. Far from it -- I, and every person I know who teaches literature, feel passionately about it. But -- and this is key -- the difference between those of us who practice literary studies and the people who are suggesting that our departments be disbanded is that we don't think that intellectual engagement or logical analysis destroys passion, love, or pleasure. Instead, we believe that learning about the contexts (aesthetic, formal, historical, social, cultural) of a work of art helps us understand its power. Learning to read closely, to attend to specific semantic nuances, rhetorical strategies, and artistic choices visible in a text, develops our skills as interpreters of all sorts of texts. Human beings live in a world largely accessible to us through language -- learning how language works in different sorts of texts helps us become better readers, writers, speakers, and thinkers.

As gzombie said, literary study is not a vocational degree. And that is perplexing to administrators or researchers in other fields where the goals and outcomes seem more clear cut. The liberal arts degree in the modern university often fuctions as a site of resistance to or critique of the utilitarian vocational model that has proven its profitability. So, business majors say "what will you do with that" and English majors say "it doesn't matter because right now, I'm doing what I love: reading, writing, and thinking." I'm vastly oversimplifying, but I think that pleasure is threatening to some observers. I've never yet encountered a student who's told me "well, I really want to be an accounting major, but my parents are forcing me to study English." The great joy of teaching upper-level English courses is that students are there because they want to be. Sure, maybe they think they only love Shakespeare and don't want to read anything more recent; or maybe they think they don't like poetry and would prefer to read novels. We have distribution requirements for the degree that force students to expand their horizons, to push beyond their comfort zones. So they might not all be overjoyed to be reading every single text that is assigned. But in general, we share with our students a perspective about how we choose to spend our time and our money -- a belief that art is meaningful.

Unlike oil, coal, or other geologic resources, art and meaning are infinitely renewable. Literature is not a zero-sum game: if you love a text, and I love a different one -- that's fine. And in fact, that's good. In a world in which so many forces work to limit human expression, constrain human behavior, and destroy human lives, why bother feeling threatened by someone else finding beauty, pleasure, or intellectual satisfaction in a text that doesn't give you that same experience? I think the idea that there are thousands of students studying something that they love -- and that that something might be in fact many different things -- is somehow distressing to some observers. The idea that there are multiple meanings in a poem, or different possible forms of pleasure runs counter to the puritanical strain deep within American culture that descends from an interpretive tradition deeply suspicious of literary texts. The fundamentalist reader is one who wants a text (and usually only one text) to mean only one thing. A reader who wants and claims certainty. Yes, there is a difference between President Bush and Harold Bloom. But it is a difference only of degree and not kind.

Why do I teach literature? Because it opens up more pathways, rather than limiting them. Because it helps us understand human beings as they have been, as they wish they were, as they currently are, and as they might someday be. Because (as the title goes) I'm in favor of thinking. In a world that wants to limit thought, art is one space of resistance.

a language quiz

(via Nels)

Your Linguistic Profile:

65% General American English

25% Dixie

5% Midwestern

5% Yankee

0% Upper Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Since I've moved around a lot, this probably isn't that far from the truth. And I tried to answer by what I actually say, rather than what I heard growing up. American linguistic variation is actually something I'm quite interested in. I would've added a few more questions to the quiz, though:

• does motorcycle rhyme with "sickle"?
• which syllable of "cement" gets stressed?
• when you turn on a light switch, do you say that you "flip", "mash" or "burn" it?
• what do you call the playground equipment that is a plank balanced on a stand: see-saw or teeter-totter?

clothing angst

I've been feeling kind of middle-aged lately. It's not about my hormonal suffering, or the lines in my face, or the changes in my physique -- which are all irritating from time to time, but don't really impact me very much. No, it's something even more shallow. It's all about my clothes.

I'm feeling in need of wardrobe revitalization -- which I can't do very much of, because I'm on the financial austerity plan. Over the past few years, I've radically cut down on clothing and shoe purchases, since those are all optional expenses. And my lifestyle really doesn't require much in the way of glam or fun clothing: I mostly need basic professional stuff to teach in (pants, jackets, shirts) and casual stuff for the weekend (jeans, t-shirts). I used to care a lot more about how I looked (back in the 80s when fashion was fun and I was young) -- these days I care more about whether my shoes are comfortable and if my clothes have pockets & are machine washable. (Sign #1 of middle age.)

Half of the jackets I teach in I've had for more than five years. At least one I've had for maybe 8 or 9 years. So they're showing some wear. And probably looking kind of outdated (however timeless I think my overall look might be) (Sign #2 of middle age).

Upcoming fashion demands: In the fall, I'm taking on a half-time administrative post which will require my being at the office more days per week, and hence more professional clothes. Plus more meetings with people in other depts etc, where I have to dress a bit better than I do in my own department. In June, I'm going to be teaching summer school -- and I *hate* summer clothes. I'm fine if I'm slouching around the house. But trying to look professional, and crisp, and put together is kind of tough for me if I can't wear a lot of layers.

Before I moved to this city, I used to shop with my friends for fun -- not necessarily to buy anything, but as a way of spending time together. I had one friend in particular who had a significant income and liked to spend it -- it was always fun to accompany her. I'm a great shopping assistant, and it's actually a relief to shop for someone else's size and wallet rather than my own. I don't have any girly friends in this city to shop with. So any shopping I do is either therapy or necessity. And, since I've cut out the therapy shopping (I need less of it these days and it's not in the budget) I only go to the store when I'm really looking for something. Which may be practical, but it means that I'm less in touch with what's in style. So there's a jarring sense of dislocation or confusion (why are there fabric flowers pinned on every jacket? what's up with the jeweled hippie tunics?) each time I shop (Sign of Middle Age #3).

I am not preppy. I am not classic. I am not that frumpy either.

but I am also not going to wear shirts unbuttoned to my ribs (why are the top two buttons missing from 95% of button/collar type shirts for women these days???). I am not going to wear a thing that looks like half of what my mother used to call "a slip" and call it a shirt. I am not going to fold up my pants floodwater style. (Ranting about current trends=Sign of Middle Age #4.)

And I don't know where to shop any more. The last time I was in Old Navy, which has been my main standby for years, I felt too old for most of the clothes. But I'm not WASPy enough for the Gap or Banana Republic -- I'm too short, my rear's too large, and I'm not blond, so the colors look sad. I don't want to shop at "department stores" where middle-aged people shop. I'm not going to start wearing Liz Claiborne or something like that, for goodness sakes.

Ack. So I get frustrated, and leave the store, and keep on wearing the same old clothes, which just confirms my middle-agedness.

and it's only going to get worse as I get older, right? sigh.

20 minutes

Over the last few weeks, I've been experimenting with different strategies for focusing my attention and trying to integrate my research & writing into my daily activities. Especially in April, when I have to attend dissertation committees, scholarship committees, special honors & graduation events, etc etc, it's almost impossible to find large blocks of research time. So I've been really trying to focus using small bits of time well. I'm not alone in this:

Jay Parini's column in last week's Chronicle talks about how writing can actually fit with teaching, rather than compete with it -- he mentions 3 key strategies that have worked for him: trying to use odd 20-30 minutes chunks of time; aiming to write 2 pages a day, every day; and having more than one kind of project going at a time. Of course, as creative writer & scholar, he has not only different projects, but different genres or modes to work in, which helps create variety and allows him to choose a writing task to match his current energy level and interest. But breaking my list of things to work on into different kinds of tasks has been helpful for me: maybe I don't feel smart enough to write brilliant prose at 1:30 a.m., but I can transcribe hand-written notes for a while. And just doing that helps me stay in touch with my project, and usually generates some new ideas or sentences.

Because I sometimes struggle with procrastination, I've been using a timer. I can make a deal with myself to sit down for 20 minutes and just start something. Usually, the timer will go off and I can then continue for another 10 minutes or so before taking a break -- I just need to settle down long enough to focus and start.

Jason Womack, one of the coaches featured on David Allen's website, has an interesting outline of how to use 30 minutes wisely:

Over the past year, I have noticed the call to action increase in my work and life. Speaking, writing, working out, remodeling the house, maintaining friendships (you know, having a life!) all demands my attention, energy and time. How have I managed it all? Special, dedicated, carved-out blocks of "focus-30-minutes." Creating a workspace out of a hotel desk, a bookstore table, even a coffee shop chair, I "work" on one thing for 30-minutes straight (lately, I've been setting a timer...).

I'm pretty exact about how I do it:

5 minutes: I warm up (just like when I go to the gym). I may journal, or even mind-sweep, my intended focus area and outcome for the work-session.

20 minutes: I work - having created a space and time without interruptions.

5 minutes: I look at what I accomplished, and if necessary, set up a time to continue if I have not finished what I set out to complete, capturing any open loops.

"Mind-sweep" and "capturing any open loops" are part of the Getting Things Done methodology -- basically meaning to clear your mental decks by jotting things down that still need further action or attention.

I really like his idea that you have to warm up a little before focusing on work -- it's helped me gain clarity about what I hope to accomplish in a particular session.

So I'm trying to retrain my mental picture of what "working" looks like. Forget the dream of 3 hours at a time -- especially since, in reality, my attention span just isn't that good any more. I need little breaks to get coffee or stretch or whatever. But once I've found 20 minutes, I can usually find 30 minutes. And maybe another 20 or 30 later in the day. Eventually, it should all add up.

quick links

The conservative so-called lefties are at it again. I don't usually even read Crooked Timber because I find the tone and tenor of discussion there so unproductive. The Valve is a recent CT offshoot, with uber-conservative credentials (ALSC, the anti-MLA).

G Zombie has written much of the same sort of response as I would have. I really resent it when people outside my discipline claim that they *know* what's going on in literary studies. Especially since they usually claim that Theory has Killed Literature, or some such thing. (um, isn't that so 1991?)

There's a misguided assumption seen in such attacks (and in the MLA parodies and so forth) that because we study and teach literature, something that anyone could read outside of class, that all of our work should be immediately transparent to nonspecialists.

Of especial interest: Cultural Revolution wants to start up a leftier group blog to actually talk about literature, ideas, philosophy, theory...

31 flavors of guilt

New Kid has a nice piece about making the transition from grad student to professor. Her comments resonate with me on a number of levels, and could easily spawn several separate posts: what grad school looks like at this distance; the transition from grad student to Assistant; and the transition from Assistant to Associate. Maybe I'll come back to some of those topics eventually.

But her post also raises a topic for me that's been floating in my mind for a while recently. (I have a whole corner of my brain for Potential blog posts, Half-Written posts, Never to Be Written but Only Imagined ones, and so forth.) And that's Graduate School Survivor's Guilt. Or maybe, to put a finer point on it, Academic Success Guilt.

Guilt was one of the biggest features of my transition from ABD to Assistant Prof. I was not a shining star in my department -- not one of the best-published or fastest to complete the diss. My advisor wasn't one of the hot shots whose students all got publisher's contracts for dissertations. My field wasn't even one of the things that the dept was really known for. And I was ABD when I went on the market. All of which meant that some people (including me) were pretty surprised when I got a t-t job during my first year on the market.

Quite frankly, the whole thing felt like a lottery draw. I had five convention interviews, but only one campus flyout. And that turned into a job offer. All it takes is one. And this job has been a really good fit for me -- a diverse student population, freedom to teach new things, located in a city I like. I totally won the lottery.

And so, I felt incredibly lucky and incredibly guilty at the same time. My two best friends from grad school didn't get t-t jobs that year. They both have t-t jobs now -- in some ways better ones than mine. But it took a while. Lots of other people I knew didn't get jobs that year. Lots of people I know are stuck in crappy jobs, or without jobs at all, in a system that claims to be about merit but is really a mixture of all kinds of random factors that are totally beyond anyone's control. The mysterious question of "fit' is a huge factor that has nothing whatsoever to do with intellectual ability or professional success.

Every time someone said "congratulations" or, even worse "you deserve this" I felt compelled to explain how it there was really an awful lot of luck involved. How it didn't really have anything to do with "deserving" -- after all, I can list 50 people who "deserve" jobs -- whatever the f** that means -- but they don't have them. There just aren't enough jobs available.

My friendships with those two friends suffered for a few years. We were suddenly no longer peers, no longer in this thing together. The sweat and tears we'd spilt over our dissertations no longer counted. Academe's hierarchies were splitting us up. It's really hard for people who've been adjuncting for a couple of years to feel friendly towards someone who has what they wanted to have. And it was hard for me to feel like I won but I had also lost.

All of this was a long time ago now -- seven years. I'm mostly over my guilt about getting this job. But that sense of discomfort with the unfairness of academe is still very much with me. Recently, some good stuff happened to me -- I got accepted to a conference, and someone put me into a footnote. I told a friend about the first thing, and really regretted it -- b/c she then tried to cut it down. Now, she is a Negative Nelly, but it reminded me that mostly, other people don't really want to hear your good news. It's easier to bond if you're both complaining.

I did blog about both of those good things. But during those same weeks, I was reading other people's blogs about disappointments on the job market, about crappy treatment as an adjunct, about misery of all sorts. And I really wondered if it was right or fair of me to post something that was so "rah rah yay me." Because I want to create an environment that's fair for all workers. I'd like to imagine a world where smart talented people do get rewarded. How can I celebrate something good that randomly happens to me when all these other people don't get what they should have? Actually, it's not the celebrating privately that's an issue. But telling it to the world? isn't that just arrogance of the worst kind?

There's some kind of ethical issue here -- it's not just about guilt, or not wanting people to think I'm stuck up. It's also about trying to make my peace with a system that allows me to think and write and talk for a living, but which is also smothering the vitality out of so many of its members. How to succeed and survive and even thrive but not lose sight of the dark side. How not to become bitter and negative about everything or bloated with overconfidence. Finding some kind of middle ground.

more poetry

Loving in the War Years

Loving you is like living
in the war years.
I do think of Bogart & Bergman
not clear who's who
but still singin a long smoky
mood into the piano bar
drinks straight up
the last bottle in the house
while bombs split
outside, a broken
world.

A world war going on
but you and I still insisting
in each our own heads
still thinkin how
if I could only make some contact
with that woman across the keyboard
we size each other up
yes . . .

Loving you has this kind of desperation
to it, like do or die, I
having eyed you from the first
time you made the decision to move
from your stool
to live dangerously.

All on the hunch
that in our exchange of photos
of old girlfriends, names
of cities and memories
back in the states
the fronts we've manned
out here on the continent
all this on the hunch
that this time there'll be
no need for resistance.

Loving in the war years
calls for this kind of risking
without a home to call our own
I've got to take you as you come
to me, each time like a stranger
all over again. Not knowing
what deaths you saw today
I've got to take you
as you come, battle bruised
refusing our enemy, fear.

We're all we've got. You and I

maintaining
this war time morality
where being queer
and female is as bad
as we can get.

--Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios


technorati tag: poetrymonth

one year

So it's been a year since I started this blog. Over that time, it's become something like the intellectual equivalent of . . . lingerie? (or at least what I imagine lingerie is like for those who wear it: I don't think that my Hanes cotton underwear and cheap bras from Target really count. Those are underwear.) What I mean is that this is a really great part of my life that I keep pretty secret, except from those closest friends who I don't think will reveal it, on purpose or by accident. I and others have said plenty at other times about the reasons for pseudonymity, so I'm not going to get into all of that. But there's something satisfying to me about having this life that flourishes under the surface, beyond what the day to day people around me have any idea of.

It's also kind of like writerly push-ups: something that if you do it regularly enough, gets less painful and helps you get stronger. Like push-ups, too, I'm often jealous of other people's prowess, and sometimes inspired. I know I'm never going to have deltoids like Ripley, but I can get my workout done and that's ok too.

The social dynamic has been really interesting to me -- the ways this practice both is and isn't social. I feel like I've encountered some amazing people who I'm really glad to know. Some I communicate with (on off-blog email or just in comments) and some I never do, but I listen/read. I'm good at listening, more reserved at speaking, IRL -- and by and large the same dynamics hold true for me here. Sometimes I'm "on" and sometimes I'm really not, and just don't feel like saying much. But I think I started this really for myself, never having any idea that other people would start reading it, much less commenting. That was a surprise.

There are many different tidal flows that govern the blog soup: the semester's rhythms, the force of external events, my neurochemistry, and yours too. There have been nights at 3 am when I've scoured my blogroll and can't find anything new to read and can't think of anything to say myself. And mornings at 8 when it seems that every single person has written a zillion interesting things and I have to prepare for class -- and then again that night at 10 I glance at the list and feel overwhelmed by what I'm not caught up on. It's not homework, silly, it's just blogs. "Just" the lives of all these other people that I'm now interested in. I think about you people during my days -- the books you've mentioned, the arguments, the losses, the joys.

But also it's about writing. Every day that I do read blogs, I come across someone, somewhere, writing about something in a way that catches my breath, makes me cry, makes me think, makes me smile. In this oh-so-visual world it is still possible for words to be juggled and handled and passed around. And that is a great thing.

On Waking Up 25 Minutes Early and Not Going Back to Bed

It is lucky for our puppy -- our puppy who is really grown, but is the baby of the house -- that I sleep on my right side, face out. Ready to receive her nose bumping mine, her soft kisses on my mouth, alerting me to morning being here already.

for Poetry Month

I have to say I'm really enjoying the poems on other people's blogs...

Here's one (so hard to pick just one) from a poet I once knew, with an academic theme no less:

Community College in the Rain

Announcement: All pupils named Doug.
Please come to the lounge on Concourse K.

Please join us for coffee and remarks.

Dougs: We cannot come. We are injured by golf cleats.

Announcement: Today we will discuss the energy in a wing
and something about first basemen.

Ribs will be served in the cafeteria.

Pep Club: We will rally against golf cleats today.
The rally will be held behind the gymnasium.

There is a Model T in the parking lot with its lights on.

Dougs: We are dying in the nurse's office.
When she passes before the window, she looks like a bride.

Karen (whispers): We are ranking the great shipwrecks.

Announcement: In the classroom filled with dishwater light,

Share your thoughts on public sculpture.

All: O Dougs, where are you?

Dougs: In the wild hotels of the sea.

-- David Berman, Actual Air

technorati tag: poetrymonth

scenes from my day

• My least favorite student (the one who is barely understandable -- I think due to a mixture of second-language difficulty and learning disability) asked me about the course I'm teaching next fall (registration starts soon). Why is it that there is at least a 50% chance that my irritating students come back for more?
  
• An older student (60ish) cried in my office because she thinks she's too old to get a Masters degree when she graduates but wishes she had done this 40 years ago. She used my last Kleenex and apologized. I tried to get her to stay and talk but she was too embarrassed. (The younger ones who cry usually aren't embarrassed at all about it.)
  
• A senior colleague in a panic requested my help "because you're good at this sort of thing." That always means something with computers. Yes, I explained, once you've saved your document to a removable disc, even after you take the disc out of the drive, the folder & file will still appear on your computer until you've refreshed the view. (add that to the Too Stupid Even To Use a ***ing Mac files)
• Email from a student I barely remember wanting a rec letter for med school. Why do they think a letter from an English teacher will do them any good?
  
• Saw three of my students in the hallway after class still talking about the book. Now that's a good feeling.
  

synchronicity

My colleagues in the hard sciences (and perhaps in the social sciences as well?) are usually able to calculate in an extremely empirical fashion their "impact on the field" (as our P&T committees require) because their disciplines publish almost entirely in journal articles, which are fed into the citation indexes (our library subscribes to Web of Science; maybe there's another one too?). So they can track how many times a particular article of theirs has been cited by someone else.

That doesn't really work for those of us in the humanities -- sure, there is a "humanities" section of the Web of Science database, but it's woefully inadequate as a measure of our citation rates, because many humanities fields rely on book publication as the supreme measure of academic and professional success. I don't know of any database that tracks footnotes in books -- it seems an unwieldly and unlikely undertaking.

So there's a certain sense of unreality about my publications -- they're circulating out in the world, at least in theory -- but I'm not kidding myself -- the numbers of people who read the kind of journals I'm published in is fairly small. So whenever I hear from someone that they saw an article of mine, I'm pretty stoked. (They don't even have to have read it -- just seeing it in the table of contents is good enough.)

Obviously, if someone else published an article about something directly related to my area of focus I might see it and therefore know if they cited me. But so far I don't think I've stumbled across any that way. (Again, I'm pretty realistic about my limited "impact" on my limited sub-field.)

But I had a great experience of synchronicity this past weekend. The conference I was presenting at involved scholars from two disciplines. I met Professor D , who is in the Other Field, early on in the weekend (it was a small conference, very good for the chatting and networking). At the closing dinner party, he told me that he'd been in his hotel that afternoon reading a new book in his field by Esteemed Scholar -- and had happened to read a chapter that cites something I published! Had he read that chapter before meeting me, or a few days after the conference, I'd never have known. Especially since this book in Other Field isn't something I'd be likely to pick up or read very carefully if I did.

It just goes to show that you really never know who might see your work...

Monday Monday

The conference was really successful, I think -- both for my department/institution, and for me personally. My paper was well received, and I actually enjoyed some of the events far more than I had expected to.

But now I really wish I could have my weekend, since it was spent with the conference. I took yesterday afternoon totally off from work -- only checked my mail once, and didn't spend any time at the computer for the rest of the day. The last couple of weeks have been pretty crazy with several projects coinciding (or colliding). So yesterday was a nice day (good weather, and my gf had the day off as well) -- but today's been tough. I'm tired & cranky, my house is a mess, there are piles of laundry etc that have to fit into the weekday routine. I'm not yet adequately prepared for my teaching this week (and as we all know, I can't just try to wing it again like I did last Thursday.) Most irritating or painful: I got really pumped up about my research over the weekend -- but right now I need to take care of grading, and writing some assignments, and the paperwork to get reimbursed for some expenses, etc. Blech. I've been riding an adrenaline high for a couple of weeks and I guess the crash is coming. (not sure I'm all the way at the bottom yet...)

local conference

This morning I'm presenting a paper at a conference that's being held in my city, cosponsored by my institution and another. It started last night and so far seems to be going well -- good papers, good conversations. Even though I'm presenting today, I'm also feeling relieved -- this is the part I know how to deal with -- last night I had to make introductions and host a reception -- and I've been busy for weeks with all the little details: food and server for the reception, making sure visitors know where to park and how to find the building, dealing with people's travel arrangements. Giving a paper? talking about my ideas? that stuff I know how to do.

Although it was really nice to come home last night and collapse on the couch with my gf and the dogs, I missed the clarity of focus that you get when you travel to a conference: I didn't have the plane ride to read over the pre-circulated abstracts, and I didn't quite have all of my social and intellectual energy mustered for the event, because I was still in my real, local, life.

But it's a welcome luxury to spend a couple of days talking about ideas and texts to smart peers, rather than students. This is the best part of academia, the one I rarely get to experience.

on group work

As I walked up to my office just now after class, I thought "well, I guess I can blog about how group work saved my sorry ass today." Because it did: I have been really busy with other work and so my class prep suffered this week. Then, when I arrived at my office this morning, I realised I'd left a lot of my notes on the book at home -- my notes about specific passages on certain pages. So I really had to pull something out of thin air in a hurry.

But to say that (and yes, we all do group work on the fly sometimes) implies that group work is a fallback, a slacker thing to do, a time-filler. And if it's poorly thought out or badly executed, it can be all of those things. But pedagogically I really believe in the value of group work, if it's handled well. I've learned a lot of things over the years about what works and what doesn't, and I've read some of the theoretical research, and so I'm fairly confident in my ability to design an activity that will take the students to a new level of learning and engagement with the material. But good group work isn't just about clear expectations, clear outcomes, and so forth. It also depends upon the foundation you've already laid down in the class. If students know you expect them to come to class prepared to discuss, they're not freaked out by a group activity. If your activity builds on concepts already discussed in previous sessions, then the students begin at a point of confidence, on their way to something new. I use brief regular group work sessions in all of my classes; and then sometimes, like today, I use groups for more extensive things.

Today's class worked out really well. The activity looked as though it was something I'd carefully planned to follow Tuesday's lecture on critical strategies. I discussed the critical framework we'd set up on Tuesday, assigned topics to the groups, had them discuss the topics in the novel (all related to a particular character), and present passages for discussion to the class. Then I extemporized some pretty good lecture material out of what they brought forward. They worked hard, I worked hard, and we all came to a better understanding of what's going on in this book.

Days like this are really some of my favorite teaching days -- days when I surprise myself. I usually teach in a fairly free-form manner, rarely from a scripted lecture. But it's extra nice to hear smart ideas coming out that I didn't quite realise I had. Days I wish I had a tape-recorder, since I won't remember this in two years when I teach this course again.

hierarchies

I've been thinking about academic hierarchies lately, and my deeply ambivalent relationship to them: not so much the hierarchy of rank within a particular institution, but the list of schools we all carry around in our heads, tailored to our specific discipline or field. We all know, or think we know, which are the best schools, which are the second best. When confronted with any school name, even the less-familiar ones, I generally have an intuitive sense of where it falls in that list. And mostly, it's an easy guessing game: there's lots of agreement about which are the top ten or fifteen schools in a given field. And after that, the second tier is easy to fill in. Past second tier, and nobody really cares, except for the people in those institutions. And the people who might be hiring them, or reviewing their tenure files, or selecting papers for a conference.

I've been selecting papers for a conference panel recently, and even though my conscious mind knows it's a very flawed way of making judgments, I still recognize that the internalized hierarchy plays a role in how I read a proposal. Even though I'm trying to only read for the content, I also know that a session with some well-published, if not well-known scholars will more likely be approved for the conference, and more likely to draw some attendees. And unfortunately, the degree to which you're published usually reflects either the length of time you've been in the profession (i.e., you don't expect the same from grad students as from assistant profs) or your institutional location. People who are teaching 4-4 or 5-5 don't have time to publish, nor are they usually required to.

There are several things I find so pernicious about all of this. First is that in today's market (which in English has been this way for at least 15 years), the 3rd- and 4th-tier places are frequently staffed by people from top-ranking PhD programs. Like my institution, for instance: we are a research U, and we offer PhD and MA degrees. But we are not nationally known, at least in my field. We serve a regional student population, and we do that quite well. But we are definitely down in the 3rd or 4th tier, depending how you're counting. My colleagues include people with degrees from Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, UCLA, etc etc. So judging someone by their letterhead doesn't necessarily tell you anything about their individual caliber. (of course, neither does their PhD-granting institution -- but it usually tells you something about their training, if not their brains).

Secondly, there's this weird inflation of institutional self-importance. For instance, for my tenure review, I was told to list external reviewers "who would have good letterhead" -- by which my chair meant Ivies. Because to the College-level committee (not even humanities faculty, mostly) the letterhead meant more than anything else. I didn't actually have any Ivy reviewers, but I had people at tier1 and tier 2 schools in my field. What this means, multiplied by all the other tens of people trying to get tenure, is that a very small percentage of the published scholars in a given field wind up acting as the gatekeepers for the profession as a whole. (Plus it overloads them with work: MS reviews, P&T reviews, etc.)

Thirdly: the ethics of this profession are crap. Realistically, half of the PhD programs ought to shut their doors -- there's no point in churning out so many PhDs (a particular problem in English) when there aren't enough jobs. If people like me are working at places like this, and feeling damn grateful to do so -- where are the people from 3rd, 4th, or 5th tier places going to go?

Fourth and Most Pernicious: the myth of meritocracy. The myth that it's really just about your ideas and your arguments. Because at the end of the day, academics are making judgments all the time not about content, but about status.

Who knew I was so bilious today? this post actually relates to a much larger post that's been brewing in the back of my mind for a while, but I haven't been ready to write it yet.

balance sheet

Bad Prof: hadn't finished the reading assignment this morning before class
Good Prof: figured (rightly) that the students hadn't read that far, either; rearranged the syllabus to extend the time we talk about this book.

Bad Prof: is counting the days til the semester ends
Good Prof: enjoyed class today once she was actually there

Bad Prof: is eating potato chips
Good Prof: is staying late at the office to order next term's books, grade rewrites, print articles, answer emails.

Bad Prof: decided to blog
Good Prof: is going back to work now

thoughts about summer

I have been thinking a lot about the upcoming summer. Yes, it's only 7 weeks away (not that I'm counting or anything.) (Or that April truly is the cruelest month for academics; can we just say committees?!)

I put my name into the lottery for teaching summer school during June. We haven't been informed yet who will be teaching -- so it's possible that I won't even get an assignment. (As a publicly funded institution, we are dependent on the legislature for funding for summer school. We don't get much.) But if I'm offered one, do I really want to take it?

I've never taught summer school before. So those of you who have, please tell me whether it's really worth it.

The only real reason, of course, is the money. I'd pull about $2500 after taxes etc, which would take care of a hefty chunk of debt. My 12-year-old car has a terminal illness of the engine which means that I will have to get a new car some time in the next 6-10 months. So clearing some debt would make that easier to manage.

Other factors to consider: I'm going to be moving offices this summer -- I'm taking on an administrative position this fall, so I have to move up to the big house the main office. I will get a window (2 of them, actually) and larger space, which will be grand. Downside is the expectation that I spend more time there and be generally available to deal with crap. So, I'll have to be in the office a fair amount this summer, first moving offices and then sorting through the files of my predecessor and trying to learn my new position. So maybe the structure of summer school wouldn't be so bad -- a couple of hours in class every day, a couple hours in the office, then go home to read for the next day's class.

And when I put it like that, I feel the dread. Because I also want to do some serious writing and research this summer. My spring break was so great -- both relaxing and productive -- I'd really like to try and pick that up again this summer. Realistically, it's hard for me to produce sustained writing during the academic year. And next year, when I'll be taking on this half-time admin post, I'll have that whole learning curve. Do I really want to give up a month of my summer to teaching?

Any advice from those of you who've taught summer school? (NB -- the course I'd be teaching would either be a modified version of a course I teach often, or a new sophomore-level course that I could put together using texts I'm pretty familiar with.)

free reading recs, anyone?

My gf and I are going to the downtown library later today -- I've been out of "free reading" (as my 1st grade teacher used to call what we could do when we finished our worksheets) for over a week -- I have books on hand, but none of them were very satisfying.

Allconsuming.net has been down whenever I tried to update my current reading -- honestly, I haven't been reading Jonathan Norrell for four months.

When we went out of town I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and really enjoyed it far more than I'd expected. I'd picked it up before from the new fiction shelf, and thought it wasn't my sort of thing. It was at the library in paperback, though, when we were about to leave for our trip, so I got it, and I'm really glad I did. I'm not autistic, because I'm actually pretty empathic and good at reading people's faces. But because of my migraine sensitivities, I have a hard time in certain kinds of environments -- too much noise, flashing lights, or strong odors can easily overload my brain's circuits and make me feel or act weird. So on that level I could really understand and sympathize with the novel's narrator. I can also understand the impulse to want to obsessively organize one's environment and activities (although I mostly don't actually follow through with this, because planning a system is way more fun than the tedious work of putting it together).

I've been working a lot lately -- writing, reading, and more reading for my classes. But I need some good fun reading --nothing too challenging for my brain, but not badly-written dreck, either.

I always knew she was smart...

Guess who else in our house has been reading the Chronicle?




(Seriously, that wasn't staged or anything. She collects things and takes them to her nest sometimes.)

my Luddite moment

Now, I am generally comfortable with new technology, and willing to adopt it readily if it improves the quality of my life in some way. My lifestyle doesn't require some kinds of technology currently available, and my budget can't support them without a real need, so I don't have internet access always on my body, I can't post to my blog from my phone, or some of the other things that I see people doing. They're cool, but just not really part of my life.

Then, there are the non-optional technologies -- those that are encouraged or even mandated by the various institutions I have to deal with occasionally. In 1989, I moved to a new city where the bank would charge you to make a deposit or withdrawal with a human teller, so I used my first ATM and adapted to it no problem. Electronic tickets for air travel, concerts, and so forth are an excellent development of the past few years. I've never had a problem, never had any doubts or irritations.

Well, one now non-optional technology that is really irritating: the automated check-out machine at The Home Depot. Today I had to go and pick up a few things, and none of the human-run checkout lanes were open -- only the 4-stall automated lane. There's a slack-jawed clerk supervising the auto lanes, because the badly designed machines don't work very well. I don't mind automated check out at the library (books easily lie flat on the machine and you can easily see where to place the bar code). Even at our grocery store (where it's still optional) the auto check out works decently, although weighing the produce can be a pain. But at Home Depot, the laser beam of the scanner is in the flatbed of the machine, not above the surface. So you can't see precisely where it's located, so you're forced to keep waving your item around, hoping it will scan. Inevitably, I'm buying small little parts in plastic bags, which are rumpled and the codes don't scan well. To reduce theft, these machines are weight sensitive -- if you scan a small item and put it in the shopping bag, it keeps telling you "place item in bag" because it can't sense it. Today, I was buying three identical furnace filters -- two scanned OK, but the third wouldn't. So I tried to rescan one of the first two -- and set off all kinds of warnings about "item removed from bag area." I had to get the clerk to help me, and she couldn't scan it either. Then typing in the code didn't work. This went on and on and on.

Now, I love technology when it works. But this was really frustrating -- not only because I wanted to pay for my three items and get out of there, but because there were people lined up behind me watching me. I don't want to be judged on my lousy scan technique. I'm just buying some filters. (It was, of course, gratifying when the clerk couldn't scan the code either, so that my incompetence was at least as bad as hers.) I nearly just ditched my things and walked out of there. And I rarely get that frustrated.

I'm young(ish, anway), I'm techno-friendly, & I speak English. Today I felt like a confused old fart visiting a foreign land. How do the real oldsters manage in HD?

true confession

I actually wrote something yesterday.

Something new, something not just cobbled together from work I've been doing for ages.

Something that isn't a memo, slide notes for class, a report for a committee.

And once I got started (it only took three days of thinking, outlining, and laundry, vaccuuming, etc) it actually felt amazing. How is it that writing feels so great when you're doing it, but getting started is so incredibly painful?

Why am I confessing this? Since this is what we are supposed to be doing all of the time anyway? it shouldn't be a big deal, right?

Well, it was and is. This was the first writing I've done in 18 months that has felt good. The first writing in 18 months that made me feel that my brain actually might work again. That reminded me why I actually got into this business in the first place. I like thinking, I really do. It's just hard to do when you're depressed. The further I come out from my depression, the more I realise just how hard it's been.

note to self

Assigning three long novels that you have never taught before in one semester is not a great idea. Sure, you learn a lot and stretch yourself and expand your teaching resources. But it's a heck of a lot of work. And you thought you'd read them all ahead of time over Winter Break, and you didn't. You did read the one you'd never even ever read before (well, 85% of it anyway) and that was something. But not quite enough. And then you thought you'd read the second new one over the Spring Break and get ahead. But you didn't. In fact, you didn't even read the first week's reading ahead of time. You were still finishing today's reading this morning before class. It would be nice to think that this was just a momentary aberration, but deep down you know you are always this way. Doomed to prepare things right before class. And doomed to only read & teach new things by forcing yourself to do it by assigning the books. So this afternoon, when you are putting in your book orders for next fall, how many new novels are you going to choose?

writing & games

So, one of the achievements of my spring break was moving forward on two separate writing projects. And the success of that kept my brain feeling sort of awake and ticklish today even though I was busy writing memos and dealing with bureaucracy and simpering secretaries for something like six hours at the office.

One of the ways I know that I'm really working, really writing, or at least getting awfully close to putting real draft words on the page (as opposed to all those pretend freewriting, notetaking, outlining words) is that I start playing computer games. (Not role-playing games or anything complicated. Just puzzle, arcade, or board games that you can stop & start easily.)

That might sound counterintuitive. But when I'm depressed or on vacation, I rarely play games. If I'm working, I use them as a way of taking little breaks that energize my logical circuits. At least that's my theory.

It's been different games at different times. Tetris, on my old DOS computer, got me through my first few years of graduate school. When I had to get a new machine, I wound up playing FreeCell. My writing buddy was addicted to it, and she got me doing it too. That was the main thing for my dissertation writing years. A few years ago I went through a Reversi phase on Yahoo games -- I still play sometimes, but it never really worked as a writing break, because of the distraction of having to wait for a person to play with in real time. Then I downloaded Clickomania, a completely addictive freeware game. (There are other variants of it -- JT's blocks, which is on Yahoo, is basically the same thing, with different scoring.) That's mostly what I've relied on for the past few years. Oh, and Snug, a great little puzzle game.

I'll write for 45 minutes or so, then play a game for a few minutes. If I get stuck on an idea or a paragraph that just isn't working out, I'll go play a game to distract my mind. When I come back, it's usually clear what I need to do.

I was thinking the other day about my game strategy for writing, and about how great Tetris was. There have been lots of experiments to discover how the brain processes Tetris, and why it's so addictive. I was relieved to learn that something like 60% of people who play regularly dream about it -- I used to, when I was writing & playing a lot. Tetris is apparently a real workout for your brain. (A good article with references to others is here.)

Since I have frequently lamented the fact that I think I used to be smarter than I am now, maybe it's all in the games I'm playing. So I downloaded a Tetris clone two days ago...we'll see what happens.

last day of spring break

This spring break has been great. Definitely better than 2004, when I had to travel to my home town to begin cleaning up and packing my mother's house in preparation for her selling it and moving. (That was not relaxing, it was more like a trip to a prison labor camp.) Definitely better than 2003, when I had my arm in a cast and yet was frantically trying to write in preparation for turning in my tenure file that August. Definitely better than 2002, when we were in couples therapy wrestling with some big issues. I can't remember further back than that in detail. But 2005 rocked, in comparison:

• I broke through my horrible terrible embarrassing psychological block on a particular writing project (with help from my friend)
• I began writing a short talk for a conference that needs to be done in two weeks
• I only went to the office one day and didn't let the administrivia take over any more of my break than that
  
• I cleaned up piles of stuff in my study at home
• I got to talk to a dear friend twice, after months of separation. I caught up with some other long-distance friends, too.
  
• I watched movies, did yoga, caught up on sleep, played with the dogs and generally lived a pleasant and sane existence.

I wonder if in part this year's break was so good because I'd taken that long weekend so soon beforehand -- started the relaxation response and just kept it going.

Even today, as I inevitably consider all the things that have to get done tomorrow, Tuesday, the rest of the week, I'm just not feeling too stressed. Yes, it would have been nice to been superhumanly productive. But I wasn't and I refuse to get all crazy about it. Tomorrow will be time enough.

My plan for the rest of the day: I'm going to meet a friend for a matinee, take the dogs to the park, make lasagne (which will take care of meals for a couple of days), and get ahead on the reading for my classes this week. I refuse to make this a grumpy last day.

happily dancing around the room

Woo-hoo!! I got accepted to a Super Big Deal conference!!

Or, more precisely, the potentially edgy paper proposal I wrote for this conference (which relates to what I think the topic of my next book will be, and therefore most of my research for the next two years) got accepted. Which is super exciting not only because I get to go and network with people who are really the tops in my field, but also because it means my ideas about this next project (still in very early stages) have received at least some validation. And this is good motivation for moving forward on that project. Plus, Super Big Deal conference is being held this year at an institution where I have several important connections and many fond memories.

But mostly right now I'm just grinning from ear to ear that I actually got accepted. I really didn't think I'd have much chance at this one.

blogs & nondiversity

Bitch has lots of good thoughts and links today about women and argument. More specifically, about (yet again) why the representation of women in political blogrolls and op-ed pieces is so skewed. I also just saw a good piece by Stephen Levy in Newsweek about the fame logorithms and striking nondiversity of "the blogosphere," which led me to Global Voices Online,one effort to try and make blogs by nonwhite and non N.Amer/Euro voices more visible. It's all interesting stuff worth looking at if you haven't already been reading it.

Of course, a lot of these concerns operate from a very narrow definition of what constitutes "the blogosphere": politics as only having to do with governments, laws, violence. It's basically a white male definition of the public sphere, and of public discourse (following from the 18th & 19th century newspaper model). In newspapers, ideas are generated by a small group of people and controlled by financial interests. Newspapers did provide many more people with information and entertainment, and the growth of newspapers in the 19th century accompanied the rise of both the middle class and a mass reading audience. Newspapers were also crucial, as Benedict Anderson suggests, in fostering a sense of community that helped solidify national interests in the modern period.

Yet historically speaking, even within that capitalist-modern period, other kinds of groups & communities have fostered other kinds of communication networks, other modes of discourse. I'm thinking about everything from quilting groups to Quaker Meetings. There are so many already-existing alternatives to the newspaper op-ed format (which has to be one antecedent to the Crossfire type TV shows), that I have to assume that there are other kinds of communication models similarly growing on the web. The really interesting question for me isn't "where are the women/people of color in mainstream technorati-top-100 blogs" but "what have the women & people of color already begun to create as an alternative to that hierarchy."

The great thing about blogs is that they have the power to overturn the newspaper model, by giving many people the power of framing their thoughts in language and publishing their ideas to an audience. Our very sense of what the public sphere might look like, of what community might look like, has already been expanded and altered by the rapid growth of the web and specifically of personal-publishing options like blogs. But we're in a transition stage right now -- as one media dinosaur species slowly dies off, it struggles and makes big splashes. And it tries to make the future awkwardly fit its own model (like Newsweek's little list of "blogs to watch"). Who knows what the future of information access and shared discourse is going to look like. But I would be willing to bet that it won't look much like the NYT or Newsweek.

change

We rent a little house in one of the oldest inner-city residential neighborhoods in our city. It's a mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood and we've been really happy living there. We're on the shabby side of the main boulevard, where the houses are smaller, the yards are scruffier, and the dogs are bigger. Over the past two years or so, housing values in this area have been rising rapidly, and the developers have been moving in, buying up and tearing down older homes to put in townhomes and hugely bloated neo-Victorian houses.

Our block has been a townhouse-free zone, in large part because six of the houses on our street have been owned by two families who have been here for generations. There's three generations of each here on this one block. That kind of rootedness, that kind of local history, is increasingly rare in a large city these days - - and it's so completely different from my own family's trajectory. I've been sort of fascinated by our neighbors, who have this kind of local existence in the middle of what is a very urban setting.

We'd heard some disturbing rumors a week or two ago, and today our concerns were realized: the brightly-colored signs of one of the major developers dot two of the yards across the street from us: the parents and grandparents of the guy who lives two houses down from us. They've sold their adjoining lots and their two older houses will be torn down to make 5 or more yuppie homes.

It's a sad day. They won't be closing until June, but then we'll have a long summer of noisy construction going on all around us. We'll never have another Christmas with Sylvia's super-bright lights and crazy decorations in her yard. Rich people are going to come into our block with their fancy cars and their babies and their immaculate tiny lawns. The flavor is draining away.

good omen?

I don't often dream very much, or at least not so that I can remember my dreams when I wake up. Sometimes I'll get little fragments of nonsense, but rarely do I have the clear narrative and vivid detail that other people report.

But last night I did have a dream (actually two of them) that I remember, and one was the first flying dream I have ever had. I've known many people who report flying in their dreams and this seemed like one of those excellent fanciful experiences that just wouldn't ever happen to me. And now it has.

In the dream, I was running down a grassy slope and then my feet lifted off into the air. The first time I was kind of nervous, but then I tried it again and figured out how to navigate -- if I lifted and turned my hands I could steer, rise, and lower. It was amazing.

A brief online search suggests it's usually a good thing to dream about in most cultural traditions. And it certainly felt like a good sign. I'm going to try and hang onto that feeling for a while today and see how it affects my outlook.

pre-Monday

Plans/Goals/Wishes for Monday:

• I will wake up feeling refreshed and focused.
• I will work on my article.
• I will enjoy the sense of time expanding before me for the next few days rather than feeling anxious about the time that has already slipped away

It seems crazy to have time anxiety at the beginning of a break. But I do. I have a lot I want to accomplish over the next week. I had to spend Friday at the office, and I should go in tomorrow or Tuesday as well to make arrangements for two upcoming events. Maybe I'll put that off until Tues, and make sure I focus on my own work tomorrow. The weekend was good, but Saturday was all about yoga (there was a special workhop I attended plus my regular class), Saturday night we were out with a friend, and today I cleaned up the house and talked on the phone. Erf.

Things I'm feeling grateful for: my partner, our dogs, my friends. Being able to breathe, move, hear, see, and talk with ease. Having a life of relative comfort.

It doesn't take much to be able to step back and realize how small my issues really are. There's no real blood or suffering involved, for me or others.

questions to ponder

1. Is a Sunday at the beginning of Spring Break still a Sunday, complete with chores and grumpiness?
2. Am I ever going to get back into regular blogging?
   
3. Does listening to the Alt-80s shoutcast radio stream improve my chances of cleaning up my study, or will it make me feel more melancholy than the day really deserves?
4. Did my third eye really open up in the yoga workshop yesterday?
   
5. Should I teach summer school in June? (I put in for the lottery, but it's not a sure thing whether a course would even be available for me to teach.)
   

Spring Break Fever

Our Spring Break starts Saturday...which, if you're a student, means it starts tomorrow, or today, or whatever. I actually had more students in my class today than I had expected. But here are some of the day's communications, suggesting the scattered minds all around me.

(1) In a conference about a paper that I'm offering a chance to rewrite. Student: "well, I lost my paper. I think I must have left it in the room when you handed them back. But I printed another copy." Me: "What are your thoughts about rewriting it?" Student: "Well, I never read your comments. And I didn't read the paper today before coming here, either."

(2) Before class. Student:"I just wanted to apologize about missing class. My life has been really terrible lately. I just want you to know that of all my classes, yours is my favorite, so I'm the most sorry about missing it."

(3) In an email, from a student who missed her conference: "I am sorry that I am not in school today, and therefore will not be in attendance at our meeting. Of course I understand that this is to my disadvantage, but the truth is I have Spring Break fever. "

And me? I'm glad the teaching part of the day is over. I have to spend tomorrow at the office dealing with administrative crud and clearing off my desk. Then I will really and truly be free to focus on the article that I'm writing. I already had my vacation days last weekend, so Spring Break is going to be all about work, yoga, and cleaning up/organizing/purging the house.

selfish?

A few days ago (yes, I'm slowly catching up on all my blogreading) BitchPhd posted this call for papers for this year's MLA, on women writing about academe. The organizer of the proposed special session was requesting submissions from bloggers who might be interested.

I agree with her comment that some of the most interesting writing about academe is happening on blogs -- I read so many insightful pieces every week which are far more useful and interesting than most of the so-called advice manuals and Chronicle columns that get published.

So, on the one hand, I was immediately imagining how great it would be if BitchPhD did write a paper for that panel, and I would get to see the panel at next year's convention, etc. But part of me wants to keep the academic blogosphere small & cozy. It's already grown tremendously over the year or so that I've been blogging. Sure, there's room for more people to get on board, and smaller sub-groups to form, as they already inevitably do. But I sort of like feeling like I'm in on something that not everyone does. Not everyone reads blogs, and I like it that way. Is that wrong? I don't want to be like one of those pretentious kids in college who would always wind up arguing something like "well, REM (U2, the Cure, the Dead Kennedys, whoever) were so much better before they sold so many records." It's not that I think I'm cool for reading blogs. Certainly I wasn't in on this from the beginning, because it wasn't appealing to me until there were more of my sort of people on board (i.e., humanities-type academics) . It's more that I don't want it to get messed up, diluted. And it's felt really nice to have this quasi-academic space that is separate from my department. No one comes up to me in the hallway and says "did you see what New Kid wrote today?" And I like it like that. I don't really want to share this world with the whole frickin' MLA.

vacation bubble

My transition back into "regular life" has been sort of odd. I still feel like I'm enclosed by a protective bubble that keeps me from taking anything here at the office too seriously. I guess maybe that's relaxation? This is the last week before spring break, and the weather is getting nicer, so I'm not expecting great attendance in my classes tomorrow. But here in my department things are busy, busy, busy because we have three job candidates giving presentations. It's for a joint position with another program -- an awkward setup in which we would be the tenuring dept, but the person would be teaching mostly for this other group. I don't envy the person coming into that situation. It was supposed to be an open-rank search, but all of the candidates have wound up being new PhDs. Maybe the terms of the search changed somewhere along the way. I'm not on the search committee, or on either of the committees in my dept who will have voting power for the hire. But we are all encouraged to attend the events and make our opinions known. It's been nice for once not to be deeply involved in this hire -- I've served on several hiring committees over the past few years (two of which wound up in no hires at all due to an evil dean and political wrangling). It does matter to me, who we hire; but I'm also feeling kind of detached this time around. But I think that's a good thing.

I am really glad to be back with the dogs -- and they are really glad to be back with us. Several of you suggested that we get someone to stay with them in our house next time, and I think that would be a good idea. The problem is that most of our friends have pets, partners, or children, and wouldn't be able to stay at our place. But we'll have to work on this for the future.

Plus, I have an (irrational?) paranoia about someone staying in my house, potentially messing with my stuff, going through my personal things. Sure, I could hide anything really personal or incriminating. But it's just the feeling. My house is my personal zone. I don't even really like having friends over that much. (If we had a little more space it might be different -- in a larger house you could have a room that was more "public" space, like a living room, and other, "private" bedroom & studies. Our house is about as big as your elbow, so there's really not much distinction.)

Luckily, G. (aka Houndini, who escaped not once but twice from the groovy country boarding farm) has relaxed and settled back into her old routine just fine with us. I was worried that she would be trying to escape from our yard too. But she's been happy to patrol the yard for squirrels, sleep on the couch, and play with her toys. I feel so bad for her, how scared and nervous she must have been. W., our other dog, was there with her, but apparently that wasn't consoling enough.

Now if I can just get through the next 3 days, it'll be spring break! I am really looking forward to writing, reading, and cleaning up my house.

back

We had a great trip -- it was wonderful to spend time with our friends. And we saw some amazing art & ate great food. Thoroughly relaxing.

And now, it's back to the routine. Just for one week, and then it's spring break. But today's a teaching day for me and I'm just not really in the mood. We got back yesterday evening after a long day of airline delays etc. So I really didn't do anything besides answer urgent emails and fall into bed. So this morning I have to prepare the week's material. I feel like I really need one more day -- to unpack the suitcase, do the laundry, all that tedious transition stuff. A compression day -- since I'm already relaxed, I need to get stuff done, wake my brain up, maybe drive the freeways to charge up my adrenaline. But I don't have that luxury, so I'll just drink coffee and maybe come up with a group activity my classes.

And then later on I can finally catch up with blogworld. Oh internet, I've missed you so much.

what I have learned

What I have learned on my vacation:

• It is really hard to type on a laptop with a 70-lb dog trying to sit in your lap. The friend we are staying with has a sweet big dog who thinks she's toy-sized. I love cuddling with her, especially because I miss our dogs so much, but she just caused my brilliant, witty, almost-finished post to disappear into the ether. So I have no wits left: you'll just have to be satisfied with bullet points.
• When you are as old as we are, you spend the first day of vacation being really, really tired. Not just from travelling, but as a kind of reaction to the weeks and months leading up to the trip.
• It's great to have time to just hang out with old friends. And newer ones too.
• Even though I haven't been blogging much in the past 2 weeks, I still spend a lot of time daily on the internet. It's been tough not having that opportunity -- two whole days offline was weird. Corollary lesson: downshifting to dial-up makes me grateful for my setup at home.
• I didn't bring much work--just the books I'm teaching next week. (And I have started reading & taking notes from those.) Being away from my work, from my routine, from the daily distractions is really an unusual experience. I can go for several days at home without working, but that's procrastination or slackness, not relaxation. This really feels different. I can already tell I'll be really glad to get back to work when I return Monday night. How do people go on vacation for a week or more? The best part is that I'm actually having good feelings and thoughts about my writing projects -- the important work that too often gets shifted aside by the pressures of teaching & urgent crap.
  
• I wish we could do more of this sort of thing. It's a real luxury.
• Our dogs are not doing well at the groovy boarding place out in the country. I talked to the owner last night and they have turned into digging escape artists. Especially our nervous younger dog. I'm worried about her. They have taken extra precautions to keep her contained and safe, which is the important thing. But she isn't having the fun time running around and playing with other dogs that we'd had in mind. She's a nervous little girl anyway-- and this is only the third time that we've boarded her, so maybe she doesn't understand that we are coming back. I talked to her and sent her mental pictures, but she gets overwrought when she's really scared.
• So if you balance good vacation and expense plus dog anxiety, I don't think it comes out on the side of many more trips in the near future. But I'm trying to squeeze what I can out of it.
  

and we're off

going out of town....not sure what my internet access will be...

elevated spirits

Woo-hoo! I'm done teaching for today. I finished all the grading. And tore through the reading, and even taught pretty well, considering how underslept I was. I've been ready for spring break for a week and a half already. Ours isn't for another two weeks, but I've cancelled my classes for this Thursday, because I'm going out of town for the weekend. So it's like Spring Break Part I. Yay! (Spring Break Part II will involve staying here--writing an article and reading a frickin' long novel I'm teaching in the second half of term.)

Though now that I'm through that little teaching flurry, I have a zillion things I should/want to do before leaving town. Why is it that all of a sudden, if I'm going somewhere, I feel like I have to do the errands and chores that haven't been done for two weeks? Some errands, like cash machine and public library, are essential. But some of this stuff could probably slide. They probably sell my face lotion in the place I'm going to, if I don't get to the drugstore. Etc.

This is the first trip out of town longer than a 50-minute drive away that my partner and I have ever taken that doesn't involve either work or family. That seems kind of momentous.

I'm not really much of a traveller, though. I've never had the luxury of time and money coinciding to indulge in travel just for the heck of it. I've never even had the time or money to take some of the research trips I ought to. (That's one of many reasons I am an Imposter, if you listen to my inner critic.) Plus, having been emotionally and existentially rootless for many years, I've spent a lot of time creating my home base. I like hanging out at home. It's nice to have time off, but I don't feel the urge to flee this city.

My biggest concern in recent years has been about who will take care of the dogs if my gf and I are both out of town (which has only happened once or twice in the four years we've been together.) For this trip, we've found a woman who boards dogs at her place out in the country -- it's quite a drive, but I think it'll be worth it, to know my babies aren't in cages and are running around having fun. But I will still miss them, and worry. Just writing those sentences makes me feel anxious about leaving them.

The questions now filling my mind:

How much work should I take with me? It's not really spring break, after all. I definitely have to bring the books I'm teaching next week, so I can get that reading done. Is that enough on the work front? We're going to be busy with seeing friends and I don't want to schlep 20 pounds of books and never read them.

Can I get by with just taking running shoes and one pair of street shoes? or do I really need two different pairs of real shoes. (I don't really know all the activities that might be involved for the weekend.)

How long am I going to stay here in the office tidying things up? How much can I really accomplish workwise tomorrow, aside from the meetings I have to attend? Am I totally distracted and braindead?