To Delight and to Instruct

Queering "Queer"

2012-01-23T10:25:00.002-05:00

I am what folks once upon a time would have called "a bit of a queer fellow." I'm not talking about my sexuality here: it's neither at issue in this post, nor is it particularly useful as a site of public discourse, since my identity and practice are both quite hetero-normative (I've been in a committed state-and-church-sanctioned marriage for a dozen years).

What I'm talking about is the velvet blazer, the plaid bow-tie, the fact that I'm vaguely ostentatious, flamboyant, chatty, gossipy, into theatre, concerned with home decor, the list goes on. I am, as you might say, somewhat (though not extraordinarily) "queer," and it's a persona that in this town I play up a bit.

In a sense, I'm just a test case. I've been setting off people's gaydar for years, and while that used to bother me, I realized that was mostly just homophobia (although in some cases, it was about the power of presumption). In fact, part of what I think I'm doing, here on this campus that takes its hyper-masculine mascot very very seriously, is opening up a non-normative model of masculinity in such a way that uncouples compulsory gender performance from sexuality.

This post is both a vague rumination and a query (I might say Queer-y), about the history of the word "queer" and about the politics of deploying it in a way that I might claim that identity independent of sexual practice.

I came up in a cultural moment in which ACT UP, Queer Nation (and Queer Campus), and importantly, queer theory were all changing the discourse, and reclaiming "queer" so I have little sense of how that term actually functioned before that moment. Of course it was used as a homophobic slur, but how, and when, did it make meaning as "eccentric" before Stonewall, or even between 1969 and 1990?

And is there a use in self-consciously re-claiming "eccentric" under the newer umbrella of "queer" that has developed in my adult lifetime?

I think there are some interesting precedents here, particularly in the intersection between queer activism and disability activism. This is articulated in academic work like Robert McRuer's, but also in popular culture like Lady Gaga's use of the term "freak."

And here is where some of this all comes together. In the last year, at three different times, someone has shouted some homophobic epithet at me as I walked down the street. And I've gotten these off and on my entire life. So while epithets and slurs are not the worst kind of bullying, I've been bullied a bit about being queer, but queer in the sense of eccentric--since for those young men (all of them that I can think of), they were the same thing.

As always, dear reader, your thoughts welcome, for mine at this stage are amorphous and poorly thought out.

Less

2012-01-15T14:45:00.002-05:00

Some readers will remember that 3 years ago, I went on a serious campaign to lose weight, and in the space of a summer, I lost 25 pounds (193 lbs down to 168). A few minor injuries and another child later, and I settled into a comfortable, though not ideal weight of around 180. Well, a long semester and just plain inertia set in in the fall, and I've found myself back up to 190. More importantly, my favorite clothes don't fit well, my strength level is down, and I feel sluggish--though admittedly, I do think of myself as stunningly handsome at any weight ;-)

Eh. But seriously. With the opportunity of a sabbatical to reestablish some better exercise and eating habits, I'm looking to get back down into the 170s sometime this year (a pretty modest goal, all things considered). And having seen the excellent success of M. Smith Lindemann I am inspired to take up the charge. The regime? Eat less, and more mindfully, and exercise in ways I enjoy: playing squash, coaching Rambunctious's soccer team, light weight-lifting, modest-but-regular cardio at the gym and at home.

We'll see how it goes, but I'd say it's at least as important as the writing goals.

Every Day is Yours to Win

2012-01-11T21:46:00.003-05:00

Those who know me, and longer readers of this blog know that I'm quasi-obsessed with REM, and so the news of their closing-up-shop in 2011 was a blow, especially since they had released their best album in 15 years just months before.

But on that album is a typically Stipe-ean song that shares its title, one that seems at once idealistic and optimistic, while at the same time, knowingly ironic. And it is with that same combination of motivational optimism and vaguely weary ironic detachment that I trot that phrase out for my sabbatical.

Because I know that if I don't treat every day as one to be, well, won--against inertia, primarily--that the whole thing will be frittered away before I know it. And so without further adieu, here is the list of projects on the front, middle, and back burners. I won't get to them all, but I want to touch, if not complete most of them.

proofreading corrections to the book manuscript.
indexing (or arranging for indexing) of the book manuscript
The overdue book review.
The narratology essay, already 18 pages drafted
the pain essay (see the recent MLA program), currently in either 6 pages of prose or 22 pages of prosy notes
The essay on theatrical representations of terrorists and human rights, an extension of a recent essay, and maybe only a conference paper.
The essay on published autobiographies of autobiographical performance artists
The next book, which will have 8 chapters, with the following thematic titles: history, community, body, authenticity, space, gender, alterity, disability. Of those, only two chapters will be built from the ground up, and there are probably about 150 pages of extant prose to work with.

So keep your fingers crossed. To win tomorrow, I've got to touch the book review.

Books I Read and Liked: 2011

2012-01-02T16:36:00.005-05:00

The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart by Glenn Taylor: Glenn is newly my colleague, but I am not merely being a good department-mate when I say I thought this was a pretty terrific book. What I think is best about it is that the novel thinks critically about the stereotypes of Appalachia that it traffics in, without losing the degree to which the region is deeply steeped in story. A book both suspicious of and inflected by postmodern storytelling, this book put Taylor on the scene from out of nowhere for a reason.

A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb by Amitava Kumar: A look at the war on terror from the vantage point of the bumblers and ne'er-do-wells caught on the wrong side of a global exercise of power. What Kumar does that I haven't seen elsewhere is that he looks at the injustice for those who were roped into and sometimes even entrapped in terrorist activities. So that human rights doesn't necessarily presume innocence, which is, I think, an important point to bring in. His approach is also transnational in ways that model an ethic rather than just preaching one. The book has its problems, but it's definitely worth a read.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan: Egan's book, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was most interesting to me as one of a growing category of contemporary fiction that is taking the formal experiments of an earlier generation of writers, and and turning them to somewhat less solipsistic, more humanist concerns. Here Egan uses formal play with narrative time to actually comment on the ravages, possibilities, and unexpected left turns that the inexorable movement of time plays on all of us. More formally interesting interesting than I think it's given credit for, but for me, also somewhat less affecting.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: Can you believe I had never read it?

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker: So I read this while I was teaching the poetry unit in the Foundations course, and I kind of wished my students had been reading it with me, but I also know that assigning it would have been deadly. The plot is reed-thin, but it's a love letter to poetry that I was feeling pretty deeply at the time. Irrationally, perhaps my favorite read of the year.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit By Jeanette Winterson: Oddly, it took me forever to polish this one off...Partially, the crazy evangelical thing in this book hits close to home, though not in a way that is uncomfortable, but rather leaves me somewhat blase (more than one traveling evangelist prophesied a preacherly future for me...there's still time, I guess). Still, as a bit of a Winterson completist, it was important to finish and I think it picked up as it went on.

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht: While I very much enjoyed reading this, I did not find it the brilliant fabulism that the reviews sold it to be. But, she's a storyteller, and moments and threads in this were really lovely and wonderful. If by the time Obreht is done writing, this is her best book, then meh. But the potential here is really great. I do want to read her next one.

The Weight by Jeanette Winterson: I read this very early in the year...it's a bit slight by Winterson standards, but a nifty little book, nonetheless. The image of Atlas watching Laika, the Russian astro-mutt sticks with me...

So those are the ones I remember. Up for 2012: Atwood's Penelopiad, Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur, Julian Barnes's England, England, Safran Foer's, Tree of Codes, and maybe David Foster Wallace's The Pale King (we'll see). Of course, recommendations welcome.

So that was a year...

2012-01-02T11:18:00.003-05:00

I tend to treat the new year as an opportunity to look forward rather than back, but given that 2011 was largely a very good year by most measures, a quick glance is in order I think. The highlights:

tenure
book contract
sabbatical approved

So those were the big professional milestones, all in some way slated for this year (contractually, or at least mentally), and so while in many ways this was a big year, it was also kind of pro forma. I know, easy for me to say. But because it was kind of pro forma, it also left me thinking and worrying about a number of other things.

Willow's job/career was one of them. Because of some unfortunate local culture issues, although she was perfectly well qualified (and in some ways over-qualified), she could not secure a permanent teaching position either at BRU or the local school system. This was, indeed, an issue, and my professional successes in the first half of the year were very much colored by her frustrations. And then, in August, sort of out of left field, this unexpectedly great opportunity arose as the Provost's Assistant, and she has gone to being deeply disenchanted with this place and this institution to being unexpectedly optimistic about her and our prospects.

This about-face has meant that my own thinking about my career path has been widely divergent, going from feeling somewhat apologetic about not only the modicum of success, but also a certain level of career commitment, to feeling oddly, not ambitious enough. All of this will sort itself out soon enough, I think, as we both acclimate to our changing professional positions and environments, but it's been a change.

The teaching year was honestly a familiar one, though at some point I may talk about the two tasks that really consumed my attention this year: developing the foundations course in the major, and become one of the department's undergraduate advisors. Both of these things sort of pulled me away from my research a smidge, but more importantly, pulled me away from my specialization, in good ways I think: forcing me to think about my specific areas of expertise in broader contexts, and to remind me of the things I haven't developed expertise on, but still nonetheless feel quite passionate about--a broad humanistic approach that is not currently emphasized in the current educational climate.

Meanwhile, our children are growing, forming personalities, achieving things, really just becoming people on their own. Willow's new job means I've been a more active parent, which has been a positive change in many ways, attuning me honestly to rhythms of childhood life that are grounding.

In sum, 2011 has been a positive year, and I'm certainly more comfortable and secure than I was at the end of 2010. How I use that security and comfort in 2012 is another matter, and perhaps this space will document that more thoroughly.

So Resolved

2012-01-01T12:11:00.000-05:00

There's a been, for me at least, a flurry of posts these past few days, and for this new year, my first resolution is to either post or close up shop. For reasons that will either become quite clear or remain a complete mystery (depending on the course I take) there's a lot cooking, and this space will either fit perfectly, or be singularly unsuited. We'll see.

The other resolutions are less about the new year, and more about the new sabbatical, a one-semester research break I've got for the spring semester. We'll see how I do with that one, especially since I've agreed (foolishly, perhaps, but still) to retain some major service commitments through the spring ( a large search committee, the College curriculum committee, and PhD job placement director).

Still, I'm resolving to set weekly goals, at least through April, and perhaps through August, that look like this:

Each week, I will:

Accomplish one major writing goal (appropriate to the writing project at hand)
Accomplish one project around the house
Exercise three times
Post at least once to the blog

Not too overwhelming, I don't think, but given what I already have written and in process, I hope to end my sabbatical with four articles and some progress toward the next book project. Depending on what happens for the summer and beyond, I hope to finish that book by the end of summer 2013 (fingers crossed).

About this space: Now that I am more secure in my academic position, this blog might shift in tone a bit; for what audience, I'm not sure I know. But among the new things this year, I am likely to take on something of a leadership role in the church of which I am a member, and so it's possible that I may take a break to ruminate on matters metaphysical, about which I'm sure I have very little original to say. But we'll see. Onward to 2012!

Bedtime Songs

2011-12-31T21:00:00.000-05:00

These evenings just at the end of the year are long, and dark.

When Junebug is ready for bed, I take him up into his room, turn out the lights, and in the very dark, I sit with him in my lap on the rocking chair, and sing him songs.

We've been singing carols as bedtime songs for weeks now, and we begin with a rousing "Rudolph," and he bellows "Like Pinocchio!" at the proper time. But we slow down, moving from "Angels We Have Heard on High" to "Away in the Manger" and down to "Silent Night."

These are perfect lullabies, because I do still feel them profoundly, and the long round notes relax us both.

On "O Little Town of Bethlehem," Junebug nestles into the crook of my arm, and when we move to our regular lullabies, with lines like "rest your head / close to my heart / never to part," he lays his right ear on my chest, and with his left hand reaches up to stroke my beard.

The unsentimental part of me recognizes that the vibrations of my chest cavity and my open mouth register those baritone lyrics most perceptibly at these places, when the darkness is least familiar, and most unsettling.

But I also know that, vice versa, he is feeling my words and listening to my heart sing just for him.

Revenge

2011-12-30T13:47:00.003-05:00

It's been months since I posted, but the last post from September is a good one, 'cause guess what? That student sure showed me.

Several days ago, just before the holidays began in earnest, I got the statistical reports back from my two sections of the "foundations" course that I had been teaching. Two sections: same syllabus, same lesson plans, same assignments, similar grade distribution. The earlier section was somewhat less talkative, and had fewer pure standout students, and the later section seemed to be running preternaturally well, but by-and-large, these were the same class, held back to back.

So when I handed out course evals in each class, I figured that they would look quite similar, and that (since both courses felt like they'd gone in familiar ways) both sets would look like most of the other sets of evaluations I had done in the past.

So, last week, when I looked at the statistical reports, I was pleased, but not surprised, to see that the later section (the first set I read) gave me quite good scores--on a 1-5 scale, most of the average scores were 4.7 and above. Statistically, these evaluations were the best of any course I'd ever taught that didn't involve an actual trip to London.

I didn't expect the next section's scores to be quite as high, but for a moment, I believed that this first batch confirmed what I had believed: that this particularly rigorous version of the course that I had designed had been successful. In addition to the three graded papers that each required conferences, I had students complete 20 written exercises that sometimes took particularly ambitious students 3 pages to complete fully. I had asked them to work quite hard, but for all but one student (and not the one you may be thinking) that work had yielded sometimes transformative dividends in their thinking and writing.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the pdf for the other section and discovered that these scores were flat out the worst of my entire teaching career. A couple of mean scores dipped below the 4.0 mark (which for me is pretty shockingly low, and were in some cases in the 10th and 15th percentile across all university courses)

Whaaaa?

Now, part of this stems from what seems to be one student who (I would argue, in bad faith) simply gave me straight 1's. And my guess is that the student who produced that document was the same student mentioned in the below post. But even accounting for that student, these were still statistically low evaluations. How do I account for this? Some possibilities.

1) A poisoned well: This student was so disenchanted with me and this course that hir bitching and moaning when I wasn't in the room colored the perceptions of everyone else in the room. This is something of a possibility, but this was a fairly quiet student, so it's hard to attribute the entire anomaly to this effect.

2) My optimism about the course and how well it had gone is somewhere in between the two, and the rosy view of the "better" section is no more a precise measure than the scathing ones were. I certainly want to believe that the great scores were the true ones, and the poor ones were a statistical anomaly, but perhaps to a certain degree they are both statistical anomalies.

3) The difference in student populations between the two courses had a bigger effect on student perception than I had imagined. This is possible, but this theory is contradicted by other courses in my experience. Of the 10+ sections of the survey course I've taught, my perception of student ability and enthusiasm is usually irrelevant to their perceptions of the course, and sometimes they actually seem inversely related. Now, I went for "rigor" more vociferously here, and if anything (outside of actual learning) seems likely to produce lower course evaluations, it is more writing and "stricter" grading policies. In this case, then, the section with the fewer high performing students seems to have fostered a classroom culture that less thoroughly bought into what I was aiming for in the course.

So some lessons to learn here:
1) As I think we all know, course evaluations are an imprecise, if not downright inaccurate way of measuring how well a given instructor is doing in a given class. Certainly trends over several sections can be telling, but the caprice that seems to have determined the wild divergence in these two sets disrupts many sureties we may have about these assessment tools.

2) Perception may matter more than actual learning in student evals. I think we all knew this too, but it underscores a dangerous trend, and one that many assessment initiatives are unable to account for. This is, given that my merit raise is keyed to my annual evaluation, and that evaluation may in fact suffer from the comparative dissatisfaction of, maximum, five students, I am monetarily incentivized to move away from the practices that I believe created the conditions for these poor evaluations. And in at least one case, I think that practice was simply this: intellectual honesty with a poor performing student who is ill-suited for this discipline. So, what? when I meet a student like this one in the future, I smile and nod and say, "Sure, the civil right movement was about rainbows and ponies. What original thinking!"? No, of course, not, but when that choice may in fact literally cost me hundreds, and even thousands of dollars over the course of my lifetime (Since merit raises are a percentage of base pay, so the effect compounds over time)? Whew, that's a hard one. I understand why some folks have decided to simply punt on rigorous courses.

3) This is the one more personal to me: I care waaaay too much about this. This has bothered me for over a week now, and has unsettled my thinking in a number of ways. While, sure, it's weird, I shouldn't still be talking about it, or at least bringing it up in casual conversation. But the fact is, Like many of my students, I derive a not-small chunk of my self-worth from external validation--it used to be grades, and then conference paper acceptances, and now articles and book contracts and yes, on a predictably regular interval, course evaluations. Five students should not have this kind of sway over me, but dammit they do. And like the student with whom I believe I was intellectually honest (or so I strongly suspect), I have taken this personally. And I shouldn't.

Why not to major in English

2011-09-19T19:52:00.001-04:00

So this semester, I’m teaching two sections of intro to the major, a course that is often a “service” course, but since we’ve just recently introduced a foundations component into our major, I’m one of the folks who are really piloting it as a key component of the curriculum. So functionally, nearly half of the class of 2014 in the English major may have ended up taking this course from me.

I’ve designed the course around three papers and a series of 20 written exercises. Some of these exercises are analytical stepping stones for their papers, some are creative-writing responses to texts we’re reading, some are reflections on their favorite pieces of writing, etc.

The standard analytical prompts (e.g. “choose a concrete image in this poem and in a 5-8 sentence paragraph, make and support a claim about how that image contributes to a specific theme in the poem”) have posed few problems, but the less analytical ones have been a mixed bag. Now, I stand by these different types of prompts.

Not only do I want to introduce them to the different tracks within the major, but I want to introduce some metadiscourse about the field, one being the idea that literature is itself a way to think through issues—analogically, polysemantically, allusively, etc—a claim advanced by Marjorie Garber in her recent book The Use and Abuse of Literature which we’re also reading in this class.

This last creative response (in your own creative text, re-work a metaphor found in one of the poems for this week, using the metaphor in a new context for different, though perhaps complementary, effect) seem to bring out the drama, though. One student’s response is a straight up journal entry about depression and the help she’s been getting. OK. But how do I grade that? Uggh (answer: I didn’t. I responded with a long, supportive note, and a request that she try something a little less personal for the assignment itself. Extension granted.)…

The one that really got me was a poem that reworked a Harlem Renaissance text as a poem about the power of positive thinking. Deferring one’s dreams, it seems is only the result of a poor attitude. Not, you know, centuries of virulent racism.

But then, at the end of the student's explanatory note (I ask them to contextualize their choices), I get a long rant on how this student just isn’t a fan of poetry. After all, why bother with burying your point in flowery language? To quote: “I believe all of the metaphors are a silly guessing game. Interpreting these poems because the authors were too complicated to express their feelings in a straight forward [sic] manner frustrates me to no end.”

!!!

And so my question: Why are you an English major?

No really. I believe that the skills we teach are important, and that the critical thinking skills we teach here are crucial, but when you believe that nothing less than artfulness is the obstacle to your sense of the language, why would you choose to be in a major that revolves, frequently, around artfulness of language?

More to the point: one of the goals of the class is to provide a clearer entry point into our field, and thereby work as a bit of affirmation for our new majors. But what about this student? Would it not be in everyone’s best interest to say to this child, “I really don’t think this is right for you”?

The student wasn’t in class today, so it’s quite possible that that last outburst was a parting shot before she withdrew from the course. While I usually don’t like to have students drop my classes, in this case, it may just be the best thing possible.

Oh, yeah, how about that?

2011-09-02T12:06:00.002-04:00

I neglected to mention: It's a bit of a new stage here at D&I. Since I'm now officially a Tenured Professor, and I've mailed that revised book ms. off to the press, where it is now officially somewhere In Production, I have now achieved My Goals (all obnoxious boldface intended).

I suspect there's a deep an vicious post-tenure malaise sitting out there somewhere (probably during my Spring semester sabbatical) and maybe some kind of other-shoe-dropping thing, but for now, glorious vistas of...something or other.

The other big deal is that Willow is now, for the first time since we've been here at BRU, fully employed. In the intervening 6 years, she was writing (quite successfully, but not yet profitably), completing and MFA and teaching with that, and then for the last year or so, underemployed while she substitute-taught, adjuncted, wrote, and other things. The employment issue was big deal though, because her options were limited here, and the kinds of positions she was sometimes in contention for were here in the department, where some of you, dear Readers, are also employed. The not-being-able-to-talk-about-that has really driven me away from blogging, since it was the single biggest stressor in our lives, and much of What I Had To Say revolved around things like partner hiring was inappropriate to be blogged here and then.

But the new statuses (tenured, employed) mean I'm in a new posting place. Whether I'll actually post or not remains to be seen.

Which Pond I'm In

2011-09-01T12:37:00.003-04:00

So, after 6 years here, one degree program, and an unnecessarily humiliating turn trying to get a job in the public school system here, Willow has secured employment. Insofar as she is not teaching literature or creative writing, or, for that matter, anything, at the moment, it is not an ideal job, but it is a good position that pays well.

She is working as an executive assistant to a very highly-placed official on our large (30K students) campus, and so in her first week she has been very, very busy, and seems (if I may speak for her) both energized and exhausted by the work.

She has also met, very quickly, the most important people on campus in a very short time. And while her job is, as she put it, "to hold their sandals," the sense of access that she has serves to underscore just how little access to big decisions any of us has at any time. So on the one hand, I'm tenured faculty at a Carnegie High (very high? I can't remember. Borderline, either way) Research Activity University, with a comfy teaching load and humane publishing requirements and a rising, if not firmly established, reputation in my field.

And yet how small I felt just from hearing her rattle off the names of the people to whom she was introduced on her first day. It was such a curious feeling, and the vertigo of privilege and influence that it has initiated (admittedly, not all consuming, but definitely perceptible) has me questioning a number of things: how much I imagine I can accomplish in a career, how significant (or not) my idealistic and utopian visions of academia might be in enacting change.

There's an exchange in the film The American President between the Chief of Staff (Martin Sheen) and the President (Michael Douglas) in which Sheen tells Douglas that without him, Douglas would "be the most popular history professor at the University of Wisconsin." Ouch.

And as not-even-the-most-popular English Professor at an institution further downstream, having just secured most of my tangible career goals (tenure, book) I am wondering: where to from here? Do I aspire to work in the fancy building with the busy staff? I imagine I can get there, but would that be aspiring for the sake of aspiration? Would I be happier where I am? Would my sense of integrity (hardly unimpeachable, but trying) and idealism (ditto) be put to better use on some further path, or is it best placed here?

From the new perspective provided by Willow's new job, the pond I'm in suddenly seems smaller than before, a small departmental inlet off of a minor university pond. But I'm not yet clear on whether I'm better off in another pond, or cove, or whatever. At the moment, I'm feeling just slightly....adrift.

And I think that's a wrap...

2011-08-16T14:00:00.003-04:00

The book revisions have been a it of an elusive thing. I think I had this sense that since they were quite manageable, I'd plow through them in May and June, and be done ahead of schedule. And then when that didn't happen. I figured they'd end up waiting until the end of the summer, when I'd have to plow through them and squeak in under deadline...

But here it is, a few weeks before deadline--closer than I would've liked, to be sure--and I think I'm done. I did the substantive revisions in July mostly, and edited those last week, to little fanfare, and this week, I've been concentrating on converting the whole thing to Chicago Style (nothing like a full on manual style sheet cobnversion to force you to proofread your endnotes!). So that's all done, and, I think that's it. There's some manuscript prep to do (breaking it up into files, numbering pages, stuff like that), but besides that, I think this draft is complete.

And of course, there's still copyediting and page proofs and indexing, so there's work left to do, but intellectually, at least, I think I can lay this project to rest. After all, it's only been, what? 11 years?

Something that probably just won't work

2011-07-20T19:31:00.002-04:00

Things were different when I wrote up a really excellent abstract for what looks to be a really excellent conference. Conferences that are this close to the very center of my work--contemporary political theatre--are rare (as in, I've never been to one). And so I was excited to get my acceptance from them.

But some things have changed. First, I found out I'm teaching on a MWF schedule, which means classes suffer more from conferences (especially distant ones). Then I found out that I had a paper accepted at another conference (ASTR), one I adore going to and hope to attend as regularly as possible. Then fuel prices went up. And then I realized how difficult it was going to be to get to York, UK.

Sigh.

I would really like to get to this conference. But I'm not sure that it's worth the money, the jet lag, and the missed classes to do it.

Fun with Revision

2011-07-18T10:57:00.002-04:00

Let it be known, I am not a great reviser of my own work. More accurately, while I am happy to really muck around with the text while I am drafting, once I think it's done, I have a great deal of trouble opening it back up and making significant changes. I tend to simply add things that are suggested, without changing much of the existing text--this sometimes results in ideas coming a bit out of order, things expressed redundantly, or the persistence of ideas that seem naive or obsolete even in light of other ideas expressed in the text.

It also usually means the word count goes up.

Since the contract specified that the word count could be no higher than 100k words, and the draft was already at 101K, this revision process has been a significant challenge. I plucked a couple thousand off with some of my revisions to the intro, but the final chapter's worth of revisions found me back in my old habits of adding without cutting. I'm going to try to go back over it one more time with an eye specifically to trimming, but I wanted to check my word count just to see where I was for the complete ms. with this last bit of chapter revisions.

The total count: 99,918 words.

You know what I like?

2011-07-11T19:37:00.002-04:00

Colleagues. I don't know if many of you have noticed this, but without our colleagues, many of us would be really really screwed. Think about it. What would it be like going to dinner parties, having hallway chats, even waging contentious debates over email, if you knew that no one, not ever, shared the experience of academia with you. It's not that non-academics are not capable of scintillating conversations, or sustained, adult debate, or even (certainly) that all academics ARE capable of such. It's just that it's so nice to have a body of like-minded folks in close reach.

I know that if I were not a member of an academic department, I would either be regarded as very weird, or I would feel very alone, constantly rambling on about cultural constructions of this and performing that while my hosts rolled their eyes and returned to their discussions of taxes or city management or whatever else normal people talk about over dinner.

But really, before I follow that line of argument too far in any given direction, what I like most about colleagues is having really smart people with whom to talk about books, with whom to think about ideas, or whose writing about books and ideas we get to read.

Two instances: when I arrived at my office this morning, I found in my box an offprint of one colleague's really great article on authorship in comics, which I avidly read instead of the article relating to my own research. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The second...a colleague who is, like me, teaching the gateway-to-the-major course had recently borrowed a play by Sarah Kane that I had not-entirely-seriously recommended to her for the class. She stopped by to see if I had received the returned copy, and then just lingered in the doorway while we talked about the books we were teaching, and why those books were really just pretty much awesome.

That's all. Just a casual 20 minute conversation on how great Angela Carter is, and why Stoppard's Arcadia is so good for teaching...with a colleague. The kind I'd be thrilled to find anywhere in the corporate world, but that I can count on existing in high numbers in a university English department. That's what I like.

Floating an idea: The Humanities Academy

2011-07-08T13:32:00.003-04:00

So Tenured Radical has moved over to a new blog at the Chronicle, where she has a fascinating post up. The central question is how might we in academia employ a development model based on a liberal capitalism that privileges long term infrastructure growth and smart innovation (rather than a privatization model that rewards short-term growth often at the expense of long-term institutional health).

She makes two assertions in particular that I want to pick up on here:

1) "Recognize that some students will feel well-served by [the humanities] and others won’t. Ask the students who feel served by the humanities why, and invest in those students. Release the others from humanities requirements."

2) "Look around your institution, find something that doesn’t work as it should, and fix it. This requires dedicated faculty-administration partnership."

So BRU is a fairly large state flagship institution that is currently going crazy over STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) in a geographical region where the cultural values are generally pretty suspicious about liberal study anyway. The message that I as a humanities scholar lately has been that while my place at the university is basically important and sound, the amount of resources coming our way will be shrinking, and that we must continue to justify any new initiatives, faculty hires (including line replacements), and even some maintenance procedures in relation to the privatizing logic of money making; We have more than once been asked, then, to frame ourselves and our needs as subservient (not just below, but in service to) the more lucrative STEM fields that the university loves right now. As we lose literature faculty lines, for example, we gain technical writing lines.

At the same time, the students who are coming to my mid-level English classes are sharply divided: English majors looking to fill in electives sit on one side, while majors from engineering or journalism sit on the other. Classes are often initially at least split into affinity groups, and meeting the needs of each of these groups is a juggling act, and often only really successful in isolated moments.

There are a lot of other factors that contribute to the particular ways that humanities are being constrained from thriving most majors can only count 42 hours from a single discipline toward graduation, which means that we end up losing our most dedicated majors at the end of their junior year because they've maxed out their English credits and are off to fill out a second major.
So what I'm looking for is a way to shore up the humanities, not just for their own sake, but for the good of the undergraduate students in our program (who are often literally not permitted to get the kind of humanistic education they come to desire), and for the institution.

We are also an institution that is sufficiently isolated such that we cannot follow TR's suggestion to share faculty among institutions, which also means we're the only (reasonably competitive) game in town for at least an hour in any direction. There are, in fact, very few SLACs in our state, and frankly, none of any particular prestige.

So forgive me while I float an idea here, a pretty half-baked one, but still...

The Humanities Academy
The idea of a humanities academy somewhat follows the model of the Living/Learning communities that popped up in the 90s, the idea of the small college within the large university. But whereas those had students beginning their university careers within small academies, and then moving out into the larger university for their upper division work, this would have students doing some or even much of their general education work early on, and then entering a smaller, more concentrated SLAC-style program within the larger university. In short, I'm imaging starting a new SLAC that draws on the resources of its host flagship state u.

Let's say we admit students during their third semester, having completed (or enrolled in) at least 33 of the required 41 credits of general education (That leaves 2 or 3 of their gen-eds to fulfill over the course of the remaining 5 semesters). With the remaining 75-90 credits (depending on how expediently they move through the program, and how well they planned their pre-academy courses), they take 4 semesters of an additional language (already required by BRU's College of Arts and Sciences) and take a double major, one of which is a traditional major and the other of which is a multi-disciplinary humanities major.

Many students already follow this path, actually, but there would be add-ons here:
1) Every semester, students enroll in a 1-or 2-credit humanities discussion section where faculty from each of the participating disciplines run open-ended discussions on trans-disciplinary topics that are guided as much by what students are taking in their other classes.

2) Students would get guided advising that guides them specifically through their home-department's most rigorous options and through a thoughtfully planned selection of other participating disciplines.

3) Home departments would offer one or two sections per semester that were limited to Humanities Academy students, which would help create the kind of small-college community that is currently sorely lacking in this large university.

4) Although students are currently required here to take a capstone in their home department, the Humanities academy would offer interdisciplinary sections of the capstone course that would have students from different home-disciplines working together on somewhat more rigorous final projects than they might otherwise.

5) The initiative of the Humanities Academy might also allow our current (very small) multi-disciplinary studies program to hire one or two dedicated faculty to teach in areas that we currently don't have departments to fully support. I'm thinking particularly of Classics here (Latin is taught at BRU by a retired chemistry prof.), but other fields that might specifically supplement a humanities education that couldn't otherwise thrive in a STEM-crazy flagship might could also be useful.

If we were able to make such a program fly, we might be able to concentrate together our most talented humanities students, allowing them to reinforce each others' interests and habits of mind instead of having them always suffer silently in the corners of rooms stocked largely by gen-ed students who are frequently working hard but are just not at the same level. It would also provide a focal point for the university to highlight student accomplishments in the humanities, instead of finding them dispersed across academic departments where they are too isolated from one another to achieve much in the way of critical mass.

Such Academy-dedicated classes would also likely be invigorating places to teach as well, and could provide a bit of a cyclical boost for faculty (tenure-track and "teaching-track" alike) who spend many classroom hours in lower-level courses.

What would it require? A lot of work, first off. Buy-in from participating disciplines, and especially from individual faculty from each discipline, whose participation in the academy would help anchor a sense of real scholarly community. More time resources than fiscal ones, though in terms of faculty hours, those are interchangeable in some ways.

So that's the rough sketch for a big idea. Is it anything more than a nice idea? Problems of potentials I haven't seen yet?

On Being Edited

2011-06-01T12:38:00.002-04:00

There is typically very little discussion on what constitutes good editing of academic prose. I've been through the editing process in a number of different formats, both through major and minor print journals, electronic journals, and books chapters. I've also been the editor once, and found that there were a good number more choices to be made as an editor of academics than I had suspected.

Typically, I have had few, if any, problems with edits that were suggested, since typically, they were edits made to conform to house style, or simple proof-reading. Although when I was an editor, I did have to be a bit more active and hands-on with my edits. In one case, the author specifically gave me license to edit his very theory-heavy prose for readability, and while I think I did a decent job at readability, I was also very clear that I wanted him to make sure that I hadn't changed the nuance of anything that he had written. In the other case, the author had gone overboard on the block quotes, and instead of making those edits myself, we went through two or three rounds of revisions where I asked him to make specific kinds of revisions. That was a bit of an arduous process, but I think he felt ownership over the essay at different points when some major edits were needed. In all the other essays I edited, it was my policy to not comment on matters of style if comprehensibility was not on the line. I did not edit out things that I prefer to avoid personally (passive voice, even strategic; overly clunky signposting, etc.), but sought instead to preserve the author's voice with the (admittedly flexible) bounds of standard grammatical structure, a subject on which I am no expert.

I have just gotten back edits on a book chapter however, where the editor (or more accurately, I think, the editor's assistant) has taken a very active hand in re-working the prose. Some of the edits are fine, I suppose, but others change the nuance of phrases, cut whole sentences, or simply re-phrase sentences on the basis of stylistic preferences rather than actual comprehensibility. In a few places, there are comments that say, "This sentence is unclear" on sentences that make perfect sense to me.

In isolation, few of these comments or edits would bother me, but they are so thorough, and so unnecessarily thorough, that it feels like the language was often edited for the sake of being edited.

But my experience is generally limited, and so I pose this query: when either editing or being edited, how much of an editors' fingerprints do you think should be on any given draft? Should an editor of academic prose in a collection of essays be editing for style? How much so? And how do you respond when you think an editor has overstepped what you believe to be a comfortable ownership of the prose?

Welcomes: Some thoughts on Academic Communities

2011-05-23T20:34:00.002-04:00

It seems, for the time being at least, that the department bleeding is done. We've lost most of the people whom we were likely to lose, and those who remain (and let's be serious; it's a big department and a lot of us remain) are in the frankly enviable position of being able to look at all of the newly blank spaces on our departmental rolls, and think about possibilities, and potential.

The question I'm asking myself is, "At this moment and at this institution, what kind of department do I want to be a part of?"

Certainly I have many ambitions for this department, as a space for learning, primarily, but also as a space for living. And to me, both of those things are best convivially. Conviviality is a value we don't often speak of, but it's really high up there on my list. I love to eat and drink with friends, to have long talks about stuff over coffee, or sitting on a bench. A friend and colleague of mine and I took our kids on an outing yesterday, and the cumulative hours in the car talking over our relationship to cities, the difficulties of junior faculty at our institution, and how roles for women in academia were and weren't changing... these topics were as satisfying as the rest of the outing.

What does this have to do with the university? A lot, I think. At least to me. My understanding of the university is that it is a site for exchange, a place where ideas mingle because the idea-havers are mingling. Mingling itself is an important function, I think, and so a convivial atmosphere, in which we understand that working together is a kind of living together, for me fosters the best place for good teaching and great scholarship.

So this week, an incoming faculty member is arriving in town to look for houses, do some paperwork, etc. And I'm happy that we're hosting him and his spouse for a meal. I hope it's the first of many. Because the way to establish a convivial space, one in which we learn and think together begins with a simple but generous welcome. Any readers, then, on their way to new homes, new departments, let me wish you a department and an institution that welcomes you generously and convivially. I hope it becomes a good place to work, and through working, to live. As I hope this place will continue to be, even more so, for us here.

A thought about blogging and literary studies

2011-05-21T22:22:00.002-04:00

In her new book, The Uses and Abuses of Literature (Pantheon, 2011), which I'm reading to teach in my foundations course in the fall, Marjorie Garber writes:

"The best way for literary scholars to reinstate the study of literature, language, and culture as a key player among the academic humanities is to do what we do best, to engage in big questions of intellectual importance and to address them by using the tools of our trade, which include not only material culture but also theory, interpretation, linguistic analysis, and a close and passionate attention to the rich allusiveness, deep ambivalence, and powerful slipperiness that is language in action."

In some ways, this isn't either particularly groundbreaking, or really all that different from what most scholars I know are doing implicitly or explicitly. But there's something implied in here that I do think is something we've lost a sense of: what literature itself tells us about our own world. When I think about the academic blogs that I read , and write, for that matter, it occurs to me that few or even none of us regularly cites the literature we study when considering the big questions that we are often considering.

Why don't we do this, I wonder? Are we so steeped in the dogma of historical contingency that we cannot see the relevance of a Romantic, or Anglo-Saxon, or Modernist text to a contemporary issue? I know we want to avoid the Bartlett's Quotations approach to literature and the Big Questions, but certainly we can do better. This is how we renew our status as public intellectuals, and perhaps how we reinvigorate our apparently flagging discipline.

What else is nice

2011-05-19T15:25:00.002-04:00

I learned that although revisions on the book were requested, I have a standard contract, rather than a provisional one. Fewer hurdles to clear, and with an August 31 revision deadline, I'm really looking forward to finishing up this project with a little room to breathe.

Pacing

2011-05-18T17:10:00.002-04:00

The last few summers have been packed with stuff. Last summer fit in both a summer grad course and much of what turned out to be a large-scale re-write of the book. The summer before that we welcomed Junebug, and before that I was doing much of the work that brought the edited collection to press (while also, if I recall correctly, working out enough to lose 25 pounds).

The point is, I've made my summers count, with plenty of writing, and other sorts of work. This summer, with only a book review, and some manageable revisions to the book project. The kids will be around the house some, but largely we've got childcare for them lined up. So there will be time to work with, which is somethig I've rarely been able to say.

I found myself saying to someone the other day, in response to a query about my summer plans, that I though I just might read. That sounds like crazy talk, I know, from an English professor, but it just might work out. when it comes down to it, I'm trying to readjust my pace for this summer, see if I can slow down some. We'll see. We'll see.

Lucky

2011-05-14T13:36:00.004-04:00

So Friday the 13th, in this case, turned out all right, at least as far as I can tell. It was the deadline for which final tenure decisions were mailed out, and since I've only heard positive decisions all the way up the line, I expect that the letter that will come in the mail will be good news. So in that way, Friday the 13th was lucky.

But it was also lucky in another way, because the editorial board for the press I've been working with has approved the offer of a contract for my book. This is gratifying for all the usual reasons, and a few extras. First off, since I was able to go up for tenure on the strength of articles and an edited collection, this book will actually count--some five years on--for full promotion. Secondly, this work doesn't just reflect the academic/ intellectual work of a decade, but also much of the theatre work I was lucky enough to be a part of for several years while I was in grad school. So one of many hat-tips to the fantastic women of The Theatre Conspiracy (now sadly defunct). I also feel lucky in another way, for as a man working in the field of feminist theatre and performance, I feel lucky to have been accepted to join perhaps the best published list on gender and performance, one that has produced nearly half of the texts most influential to my thinking. The acquisitions editor I've been working with brought dozens of fantastic feminist theatre scholars to press for the first time, and so to be even a blip in that now-long history feels very fortunate indeed.

I'm lucky in lots of other ways, too--I've got a wonderful and healthy family, a solid job, and a lot of advantages. So while my facebook wall has been blowing up with congratulations (relatively speaking, of course--it's not like I won a MacArthur or anything), I feel the need to deflect some of that to gratitude.

Pretentious

2011-05-11T21:44:00.000-04:00

This is a word that I typically loathe. "Pretentious" is most often used to describe "something that seems intellectual and that I don't understand, and must therefore be bad." It's often used in conjunction with "elitist."

But the thing about the word "pretentious" is that is indicates pretense, or even pretending, that someone or something is pretending to be smarter, more intelligent, more sophisticated than they really are. If we take that specific sense of the word, then, pretentious is always at some level both completely true, and never true. If we limit our understanding of the word to works of art, in this case, a novel, ambitious texts are always aspiring to be something more than the author has already mastered, aspiring to achieve something with this text that the author has not achieved before. In this way, pretense is always built into art. But the other side of aspiring is not achieving such a goal--that the novel is trying to be intellectual, but never reaches those aspirations. And in this case, any text or artwork that visibly aspires to an ambitious goal is already accomplishing something more than the conventional. It may not accomplish it perfectly, but a text's very aspiration to accomplish more than convention asks its reader to reconsider the conventions themselves.

So a pretentious novel--typically one that is trying to be intellectual, or experimental, or artistically ambitious in some way, but failing--is to me a terrible label, because it both dishonors the ambition itself, even as it misrecognizes the way that an aesthetic of failure is itself sometimes an artistically valid process. That label also, typically, fails to acknowledge that the fault may be readerly.

And yet, I have just read a novel (I won't name names here) that nonetheless feels pretentious. In his infamous and oft misinterpreted essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," John Barth identifies to vectors for categorizing literature--something like artistic integrity and something like up-to-date technique. And for him, too much of what we've now come to call postmodern literature feels technically up-to-date, but artistically bankrupt. This novel feels something like that, but not entirely. There is, at its heart, an artistic project, one that seems to invoke Calvino and Barth and a kind of pure literary surrealism (anyone ever read Sedagh Hedayat's The Blind Owl?). But it is also precious in its deployment of about half of its tricks: character names feel intentionally contrived; instead of pages, paragraphs are numbered; a series of hand-drawings and one-inch black dots occasionally populate and punctuate the pages (the hand-drawings are at least functional--I cannot fathom the dots).

I recognize, to a point, that I may in fact not be getting it all--indeed, much of the novel has come into focus after letting it sink in for a day. But enough of it remains not only incomprehensible, but self-consciously and cleverly incomprehensible, that the novel itself seems to be pretending that it is more than it is, and in this case, it would be more, if there were less.

I am no minimalist--I take as first evidence of my hatred of James Wood's literary criticism that he derides Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie as the most "theatrical" of writers. But the excess here seems purposeless, and ultimately, pretentious.

I'm off to read some Appalachian fiction that I know is neither pretentious not pretense. I wonder how I'll feel about this last one after this next one.

Finishing up

2011-05-09T21:58:00.002-04:00

OK, so last week's malaise has settled a bit, and I'm now looking to stretch out over the long weeks of the summer. Grades are in, and save a few essays that students who are still in town want comments on, I'm done for the spring semester.

Last summer I had a new grad course to prep and most of a book to write. This summer, I've got a book review due at the end of the month, and about 19 pages of revisions to write. If I'm diligent, I can get that done by June 1, and even if not, July 1 is plenty.

With what's left of the summer, we'll be doing a bit of traveling: I'm taking the twins to Ontario in late July, and the whole family is joining Willow's brother's family in DC for a week in mid-August (looking at you, Natalie!).

It's been a while since I've relaxed, even during breaks, and so perhaps one challenge I'll take on this summer is actually relaxing some, and recharging for the fall.

Exodus

2011-05-03T15:53:00.003-04:00

It's finals week in what has been an otherwise packed school year. Since last September I've completed my tenure file, a book project, and a sabbatical application, all of which, if not officially deemed successful, certainly look as if they're going to be. By next September, I'll be an Associate Professor with a book contract and a Spring sabbatical to look forward to. The future stretches out before me like a vast plain, arid and empty.

Eh, I overstate. But I am feeling a fair amount of ennui, of the "What's next?" variety, and part of it is that I just had one of those conversations. You know the sort. They begin with colleague of whom you are fond, ducking their head into the frame of your open door. "You have a minute?"

Early on in the conversation, you hear "I wanted to tell you this before anyone else did..." and already you know the direction this is taking: the congratulations, the we'll-miss-you's, the excited questions. And when your colleague-for-not-much-longer leaves the room, you feel, well, I felt left behind.

A couple of things are at work here. One, we have a bit of a departmental exodus in the past 2 years: between retirements, family emergencies, jobs in better locations, jobs at better schools, jobs closer to home, jobs that provide a better opportunity for spousal employment, we will have lost (if all of the present rumors persist) eight TT faculty in under two years. And who knows what other rumors I haven't heard. So part of my malaise about the departmental exodus is that very simply, a lot of my friends are leaving (indeed, some of my closest friends in the department have left or are going), and I am the sort of person who really depends on a large and warm community of friends and colleagues.

Two: While there's not a single reason for this exodus (in a department that had lost faculty only to retirement in the previous 4 years of my time here), it's not doing a very good job of making people want to stay. Certainly, each of these people has had reasons for going, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that I had plenty, too, some of which are quite pressing, actually. But in not one of those cases was the department/college/university sufficiently proactive to retain some of their best folks, or suffieciently willing to compete to keep those folks. We hired three TT folks this year, and already put in to hire three more next year, and who knows how many more after that? Those searches are expensive. Plus, the turnover in faculty creates any number of intangible but very real costs: to faculty morale, to the smooth transition of ongoing programs, to the sense that new things can be accomplished. An exodus like this is bound to have a chilling effect on the healthy life of a department. And I expect to remain living in this chilly department after the exodus is done.

Three: (paging Dr. Freud) I prefer to be the one who is leaving. Even more than most people, I thrive on novelty and change, and here, now, with the department rolls depleted, with those big professional hurdles cleared, I feel, perhaps overly morosely, like I'm looking on into a future of unremarkable sameness, a thinner kind of sameness. Of course that's not actually true, but being left behind certainly creates that sensation.

Lots of question marks for the future around here at BRU. Will new blood bring new life? Will the simmering issues that make retention an issue (including for me) be resolved or even addressed? Who can tell?

In other news, blogging's been sparse around here in part because I don't know if I'm really even a blogger any more. The blogosphere's changed, and I was never a loud voice here anyway. And maybe I've said my things to say.

How about that?

2011-03-28T19:40:00.001-04:00

While in London, the Press emailed me with readers' reports, two very good readers' reports. I've got a couple of weeks worth of revisions, but fingers crossed, and onto the editorial board in May.

Off to London!

2011-03-18T11:51:00.000-04:00

My usual bloggy silence will be interrupted with a different sort of bloggy silence: I'm heading off to London fro Spring Break to do the second iteration of the London Theatre Tour, which some readers (both of you), may recall I blogged about last time in 2007.

Some highlights:

This time I have a PhD student doing an independent study and coming along, which will add a bit of peer-camaraderie to the mix.
While I'm not as excited about the plays that I was able to secure for my students, our existing schedule leaves a few evenings open for additional theatre, and I'm hoping to catch both Caryl Churchill's Fen and Blank and Jensen's documentary play The Exonerated.
The weather forecast currently has every single day forecast for sunny and low 50s. I'm packing an umbrella anyway.

In the meantime, I staying in the Lancaster Gate/Notting Hill Gate area, just north of Hyde Park. Any dining recommendations in the area are very very welcome. In the meantime, I'm off!

True Stories: a Reading List

2011-03-06T19:24:00.002-05:00

I'm teaching a 200-level Contemporary Literature course next semester, which I've taught 3 or 4 times already, and I'm thinking I want to switch it up a bit. Instead of roughly following a "greatest hits of postmodernism" kind of thing, I'm going with the theme "True Stories" focusing on literature of the last 50 years that focus on purportedly true stories that, in their execution, raise issues about the instabilities and the uses of the true, either in terms of life-writing or of history (or, frequently, the intersection of all those things). I haven't quite set my list yet, but I'm looking for other suggestions to add to the list as well. Some possibilities include:

David Foster Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram"
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Jeannette Winterson, Oranges are not the Only Fruit
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Doug Wright, I Am My Own Wife
Rita Dove, Museum
Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
Tim OBrien, The Things They Carried
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Robin Soans, Talking to Terrorists

This list is already too big, and I have some ideas of which texts to cut, and why, but I'm looking for a great text to act as an exclamation point on the semester, a "good read" that raises interesting questions at a point in the semester when many of those questions have already been raised, and when students are also overwhelmed with end-of-the semester work.

So, my friends, if you have any advice on good texts to add to the list (particularly the very contemporary), or experience teaching any of these texts to a broad swath of students, from gen. ed. students to senior English majors, I'm all ears.

On dialogue in the Department

2011-02-09T13:16:00.002-05:00

I promised a whole host of posts a few days ago, and I promise, some of them are coming, but I write today with a concern that is both pressing and philosophical: How does dialogue occur within an academic department. Ours is one that, while not undergoing any kind of full-scale transformation, is going through some changes that need to be hashed out, question involving teaching load, course caps, tenure requirements, and faculty hiring directions.

We're a comparatively large (about 40 TT faculty) department that is remarkably collegial, though this seems facilitated largely by neglect rather than loads of outright sociable warmth. What this tends to mean is that we are free of factions, generally, but when contentious issues do come up, we are out of practice in actually hammering them out, and so those issues either get decided for us, or we decide them somewhat blindly.

Certainly email listservs might be a component of good communication, but ours is largely unused for discussion (I think people are too afraid of flame wars). And our monthly faculty meetings are usually a hurried ninety minutes, in which everybody says their piece, nobody listens, and after we get a little itchy about sitting in that room. we all go back to our offices and vote however we were going to in the first place.

In my ideal world, we'd be better at discussing our own best interests, and actually deliberating over issues. The upshot of dialogue should be that nothing gets railroaded through, but neither does warring factionalism keep us at a stalemate, or worse.

I know that such utopian departments aren't possible, for as much as we like to think of ourselves as enlightened socratic bodies in a protype democracy, truth is, we're as petty and venal and contentious as any group of self-interested humans.

But still: dialogue as a goal. How do departments facilitate it well? how do individuals within departments (say, newly tenured faculty who have little to no administrative responsibility) facilitate it? Please: what works best in your department? what is a disaster?

Trade Big Ben

2011-02-06T22:29:00.004-05:00

Dear Mr. Rooney,

My first memories of watching football are with my grandfather, an inspector for Koppers up to his death in the mid 1980s. For him, the team wasn't just a great football team, or even a team from a great city, but a team that represented something great about America, something about hard work, and grit, forging something great out of something humble.

And in true family fashion, I rooted for the Steelers when Franco Harris got too old to hit the hole. I rooted for the Steelers when Mark Malone trotted off the field smiling after an interception. And when Kordell Stewart couldn't make a smart play if his life depended on it. I still have the black-and-gold striped scarf I wore to school during the long ignominious stretch of mediocrity, and the drive-for-five Christmas ornament that hung on my family's tree until just five years ago.

My kids, then three, watched the kickoff against the Seahawks with their grandmother, herself a die hard fan, and then we all watched again three years later against the Cardinals. I come from a long line of Steelers fans, and I have never ever had a single compunction about waving my terrible towel.

Until this year. Tonight, as the Steelers lost a good football game, I rooted for the team, but not its quarterback.

Last season, my son had a number 7 jersey that he loved. I couldn't let him wear it anymore. I had to explain to him that while Big Ben is a good quarterback, it turns out that he's not really a very good man. I cringed every time I saw another boy wearing one this season. I even asked one fellow parent whether he felt comfortable knowing his son was rooting for someone who likely assaulted women. He said he didn't. Let Ben go.

I know Ben Roethlisberger was never convicted of a crime, but two allegations of rape in such a short period of time doesn't look good. You let Plaxico Burress go for being trouble. You let Santonio Holmes go for being trouble. Who knows who else has been sent packing for being a distraction, for not living up to the team's standards. Let Ben go.

I could make an argument that you've already gotten the best out of Roethlisberger--that his value was always inflated by the great team around him (look at the 3-1 record at the start of this season with guys who couldn't start for anyone else). I could make an argument that you could actually get his value in a trade for, say, offensive linemen, or defensive backs, or draft picks, or really, a mediocre quarterback who doesn't assault women. Let Ben go.

Frankly, I wasn't sad when the Packers won tonight. They're a good team, built and run not unlike the team I've grown up loving. What I was sad about was that I normally would have watched that game in passionate agony--that a game like this should have brought out every impulse to pace and shout and grind my teeth and jump (just like in 2009). But my heart wasn't in it. I love this team, but I hate its quarterback. Let Ben go.

Mr. Rooney, my position on this is unwavering. Every year that Ben plays for the Steelers will be a year that you ask me to give up on an important part of my family's heritage. Because you will be asking me to root for a man who has done reprehensible things and gotten away scot-free. Because you are asking me to let my kids pull for his success. Because you are asking me to believe that the Steelers are willing to look the other way just this once. My plea to you, sir, is simple. Let Ben go. Trade Big Ben.

RBOC: Newsy

2011-02-01T14:25:00.002-05:00

So, yeah. There's a lot to report. I want to write about fifteen posts, but for the moment I have to bullet everything, because It would take about week of constant typing to get everything I want to say on the screen.

Over the weekend, I saw Anna Deavere Smith's new performance, Let me Down Easy at Arena Stage. It'll probably figure prominently in one of the chapters on the next book project, and in many ways it was affecting in the ways that Smith's performances often are, but it was also a bit of an unwieldy mess that didn't grapple with some of the representational problems she's taken on more successfully in the past (specifically: performing different kinds of bodily identities--but race signifies differently that disability and pain, which she has trouble with here). I hope to post more soon, but for now: I liked it, I would recommend it, and I have a lot to say about it.
Yesterday I got somewhat more official (although perhaps not final?) confirmation of my sabbatical for Spring 2012. Perhaps I will spend it writing about bullet point #1.
This morning, I got my tenure recommendation letter form the department. Which recommended me for tenure. It's not the last stop in the process, but it's the most important one, and the most substantive in terms of feedback. Particularly wonderful--and I mean really wonderful--was reading the digested reports from the external reviewers, some of whom said nicer things about my work than I actually believe, even at my least modest. I know that these are crafted rhetorically, but that these reviewers would choose to single out some of the things that I didn't think I did very well (i.e. prose--Thanks Willow!) has had me grinning all day long. I want to write about this much more, and in a more thoughtful way, not just in the "Yay! I rawk!" way I am now.
This afternoon, I got an email from the press telling me that reader's reports are due in three weeks. This in response to a query I made about a month ago, and which I since was able to follow up on at MLA. Point is, this particular update then seemed kind of random, and so I assume it means that one of them has already come in, but I don't know how to read those particular tea leaves.
The itinerary for London Theatre Tour came in today (quite belatedly). But at least I have confirmed the plays that I've already been teaching for the last three weeks.

Frankly, I've been waiting for a lot to happen these last few weeks. A few things have not come to fruition. And while all this stuff is happened, I have been reluctant to talk about others, namely Willow's long employment (now just underemployment, but still), which will likely hang over our heads for a while longer. I'm still ambivalent about how to blog about all of that, but there are number of issues there germane to the substance of this blog and to academia more broadly, which I am trying to parse out. Perhaps I will find more time to post about those things in ways consistent with my online persona here, perhaps not. In the meantime, there's plenty going on worth celebrating, so I'll start with, I think.

Good for what ails ya

2011-01-24T23:49:00.002-05:00

So, hey. Thanks for all those great suggestions on that last post. They ALL went into a packet that is going to form the basis of this good old fashioned close reading unit.

In other news, I'm waiting on stuff, including final word about sabbatical and the department's decision about my tenure (also the fate of the book ms., but that's on a less predictable timetable). In fact, while I already got preliminary word on sabbatical, and my department's beautifully clear tenure requirements have left me with comparatively little to worry about, I still find myself anxious about these pending pieces of news.

And so, in the face of the self-doubt that such waiting inevitable occasions (for me, at least), I've done a little patting of the self on the back by autogoogling at Google Scholar. How nice it is to find oneself quoted in articles, syllabi, dissertations and in two cases, a book. Now, these are still just smatterings. I've not written anything so monumental that it is blowing up the search engine. But even so, what a lovely and affirming moment to see that an M.A. thesis devotes well over half of its pages to engaging an idea that I advanced in a recent article.

See? There really is a conversation. And I really am part of it! How nice!

And now, back to the inexplicable worrying.

ETA: Of course now I can add worrying about the burst pipe in the basement--explicable worrying on top of the inexplicable.

Pop Quiz, Hotshot

2011-01-09T20:26:00.001-05:00

Quick: name, in your experience, the single best poem, pre-1900, to teach close reading to new English majors. Bonus points if it involves sex.

Readings on "Why Major in English"

2011-01-05T19:08:00.002-05:00

A few years ago, either Profession or PMLA had a "Why Major in English?" forum. I want to use those readings, or perhaps others clustered around them, for the gateway course that we are implementing this year. So, does anyone remember where that forum appeared, and also, has anyone had particular success with other readings about the discipline?

Phew.

2010-11-06T21:19:00.002-04:00

The manuscript is done. I send it out Monday.

Job Satisfaction

2010-10-27T21:12:00.003-04:00

The other day, I read precisely two blog posts: Moria's, and Annie Em's. Moria's asks her readers, importantly and earnestly, what got them through graduate school and what keeps them going int the field despite the constant inferiority complex, while Annie Em posted the Xtranormal video "So you Want a PhD in the Humanities?" that most readers of this space will have already seen linked 57 times, and watched at least twice.

I understand all of the anxiety being floated about: the untenable economics of the labor market, the exploitation that that has engendered, the anxieties that people feel about constantly having to justify their work to family members and friends whose eyes cross before you even finish telling the title of your research project. It's not easy to be in the humanities at the moment.

But people seriously. Let's also not lose sight of the fact that it is GOOD to be in the humanities right now. Forgive me for the pollyannaish rhetoric here, but I love the fact that even though I do not live in a particularly desirable geographic region, that I have friends and colleagues and neighbors who understand and even make Foucault jokes at the bus stop. I love that I get to have serious, in depth conversations with students about the nature of time and the past in literature, about how drama and performance help us understand our very identity, how the language of advertising leaves us without a language of our own to describe our experiences of the real world (Virginia Woolf, Caryl Churchill, George Saunders, all this week).

Just today, I finished a revision of that last chapter to send to a colleague, I read a dissertation chapter on J.M. Coetzee for a supplemental job letter I'm writing for someone just going on to the job market, I read two other dissertation chapters on the politics of narrative space in the literature of the marvelous for a student who is preparing to defend in a month, and I am about to read an article by a colleague in history on 19th century American masculinity and aspirational class identity for an interdisciplinary writing group. I have worked HARD today, but that work has been amazing to do.

And that's the thing about this job. As I wrote over at Moria's, this job is great because at its core, I get to read books and talk about them all day long. I get to think hard, have ideas, discuss those ideas, share those ideas, write about those ideas, listen to feedback about my ideas, learn about other people's ideas, respond to other people writing their ideas, have drinks over ideas and dinner over ideas.

Yep. Tomorrow I'll begin grading a batch of moderately poor student essays, and I have five recommendation letters to write sooner or later, and advising to do in the advising office and a thousand other things that make this profession like virtually any other profession: annoying, boring, mind-numbing.

But I worked in offices, doing copy writing, answering phones, supporting business plans and mission statements that not only did I really not believe in, but working with a group of people most of whom were not even interested in the critical thinking that went into my reasons for even having a stance on a business plan or a mission statement other than "It's profitable."

This job? not profitable. The business plan? not really a world-beater, if the current trends in the corporatized university hold true. The mission? Not perfect, but really pretty damn good. Have ideas. Refine the ideas. Exchange the ideas. Teach the ideas.

So I'm going to take a minute and say that yes, there are all sorts of reasons that we should be reading our own profession critically right now. I hate that so many smart, rigorous, awesome people are out there struggling to find decent work in the field. But I hope they keep looking. And yes, I am bugged by the number of not-always-brilliant undergrads who want to find out how to be a professor. But if they see how much I love this job, how can I blame them? And yes, I know that in the scheme of things, I have a very good job, geographical location notwithstanding. But that only makes me want to fight harder so that more people can do this work and do it well.

So you want a PhD in the Humanities? I. Don't. Blame You.

Counting

2010-10-25T13:17:00.002-04:00

Please indulge me for a bit, while I do a bit of counting:

The dissertation was about 70k words. I excised one of three sections from that to save for a later project, leaving me with about 50K words to work from.

Given that I completely rewrote the introduction from scratch, we're actually talking about 45K words that formed the basis for this project, when I began rewriting in earnest in Fall 2008, five years after I defended the project.

Since then, I've seriously revised much of that baseline, plus written another 50K words, few of which I could've written in 2003. I don't know what this says about the pressure to publish a dissertation as a book, but I can say that I needed those 5 years to rethink the central claims of the project, to let the ideas simmer, to teach them a few times and test them against skeptical undergraduate and graduate students, and to generally get comfortable with them.

After cleaning up the notes and doing a complete bibliography, the project with all of it is just under 100k words, and ends on page 316. When I defended, and my family felt impressed that I had written a book, a demurred. This, though, feels like a book. I started writing it as a dissertation 9 years ago, defended it 7 years ago, and barring a few more revisions, feel good about sending it out to a press only just now.

What I did last summer

2010-10-22T13:35:00.002-04:00

I had hoped to write a post like this about 2 months ago, and I'm even jumping the gun a little in writing it now. But what I did last summer was...

Write a book.

I've been incommunicado these last few weeks because I was knee deep in midterms, service obligations and other teaching stuff. I was totally blocked on the last chapter, which had a bunch of messy notes and drafted conference papers, but not much of a central argument, let alone one that connected to the previous chapter, let alone the whole book.

But during a workshop of a previous chapter on Wednesday, something clicked. I worked all Wednesday evening on those revisions, and then jumped in yesterday morning--before class, between classes, after class, on the last chapter. Today at about 12:30, I saved a complete draft of the last chapter.

Now of course Willow will help with some edits and surface revisions. And the notes still need cleaning up, along with a complete works cited page. But this is stuff that requires little anxiety from me, and can be done in shorter sessions at the writing desk.

As of now, though, the final tally: I have a 268 page manuscript, exclusive of notes, which in the end, will probably add up to about 30 pages, depending on fonts and spacing. To put it another way, the body of the ms. is about 85k words, with another 10k for notes etc.

I'll be polishing up those pages to a shiny sheen over the next several days, but for now, a big sigh of relief, and after the children go to be tonight, maybe a big glass of wine.

Desirous

2010-09-30T13:09:00.001-04:00

Never ever have I wanted more to go see a play that I will be unable to go see.

One chapter left

2010-09-27T21:37:00.005-04:00

I have been a bit sick these past two weeks--nothing serious, just a cough that won't go away and occasionally keeps me up at night. But given that the cough had turned into a bacterial infection in the chest, my doctor urged me to take both the antibiotics and steroids that he had prescribed. I hate feeling like I'm coughing up a lung, so I'm now on day five of this course, with some, but not much improvement.

What this has to do with writing: perhaps you've been on prednisone. Perhaps you know that it can make you a bit...manic. Not usually the kind of manic that's good for writing, and whether this was that, I do not know. But over there on the right, you'll see sixteen new pages. In a day.

Willow will read them over the next few days, and point out the places in the argument where (very likely) I have skipped over two of three important pieces of information moving from pithy line to pithy line, but hey! it's drafted, and it's a conclusion, so it doesn't need to have quite the same level of analysis that the other chapters require.

So that leaves one chapter left, and not one that is particularly daunting. It does deal more substantially with race than other material I've written does, and I've never been particularly insightful on that topic. I have a senior colleague, however, who is very good on that subject, and so if I can have a draft completed by October 15, I can submit it for our faculty writing group.

In the meantime, I have a batch of response papers to grade, as well as a batch of quizzes, a dissertation chapter to read, and six recommendation letters to write for very bright and committed students who deserve really good thorough ones.

But tonight, perhaps I'll let my 16 pages stand as a good day's work.

Smell that burning?

2010-09-22T08:36:00.002-04:00

It's the fire that just got lit under my ass.

I had been working on the notion that the end of the summer was a loosely set, self-imposed deadline that the press really didn't care one way or the other about. I mean, they've probably got a backlog of good work: why would a month or so matter to them at all?

Except for in my email last evening was a not from the acquisitions editor checking in on the status of the manuscript. I said end of October.

So there. Now it's been said. Now, I just have to write it.

Pat on the back

2010-09-20T15:53:00.002-04:00

Look! right over there! on the right!-->

See that the writing progress meter has logged some more pages. Right now, I'm at 221 revised pages (although not all totally polished: I'm fudging the little clean-up things I have to do here and there).

I finished another chapter draft today. The last chapter was a delight to write: the argument was in my head, I wrote quickly and forcefully, and the ideas, while running against conventional wisdom, still add up.

This chapter, not so much. Twenty of its 42 pages were close-readings lifted from the dissertation, and in fact, they may be among the few pages that survive from the diss unscathed, for many of the other 50 pages of "drafted" material that I started with have actually been completely re-written. The problems were these:

These were close readings that didn't actually have a stand-alone argument that was separate from the previous chapter. They had a theme, a common thread, but no argument. They now have one, but not after fits and starts.
This would have to be the first piece of this writing push that has happened successfully while classes were in session.

So while my pace has slowed down from the summer a bit, it's still gone well. Because I work better with moderately large chunks of writing time, I've been going at about 5 pages a day, with really only one or two writing days a week. It's not ideal, but it's working. So while I'm not thrilled with the pace, I'm patting myself on the back that I have any pace at all.

The next chapter is not unlike the previous one, but the close readings in draft form are even more fragmentary, which means I'll be doing a lot of writing from the ground up. I need to give myself permission to let this chapter be a bit shorter than the others (I've estimated about 25 pages), so I can push through to the end of this draft.

I had initially aimed for the end of the summer, which I first interpreted as the beginning of the semester. That came and went, and now the end of the seasonal summer is nigh. I don't have a natural deadline for the remaining chapter and conclusion, but I'm now aiming for the end of October. Halloween and the twins' 7th birthday would go nicely with a completed book manuscript, don't you think? Keep your fingers crossed, 'cause the going gets tough here.

Goodbyes

2010-09-07T21:53:00.003-04:00

Not to worry, I'm not leaving anywhere. The goodbyes I've been thinking about lately are from the vantage point of those of us left behind.

Our department here at BRU has experienced, for no single reason, a bit of a mini-exodus, with three junior faculty leaving, and the announcement of a couple of other retirements and career-enhancing departures on the horizon in the next year. we're a pretty big department, but still, (at least) five full-time faculty from a state flagship English department is a lot, I think.

It's all the more a shock because things had been quite stable for several years, which suggests that the exodus was not rats-from-a-sinking-ship, but rather simply bad timing.

But the goodbyes themselves have been in some ways kind of devastating. Some of our very closest friends have suddenly up-and-gone, and others are going. The transience here is hard to swallow, because for me, my sense of place largely depends not on where I am, but with whom I am. Of course Willow is here, and the kids, and we already (like most academics) left behind our dearest friends when we left from grad school city. And if, someday, we decide to go elsewhere, we'll be leaving behind empty spots, spots in other people's daily lives.

When I was in undergrad, I worked summers at a restaurant. the friendships among the college age waitstaff there were fast and intense, and all dissolved at the end of the summer. The bartender there, Doug, was probably ten years older than we were, and was totally disinterested in these ephemeral connections. He regarded us all with a sort of grumpy disdain. And he wasn't shy about why: "why should I invest my time and energy in making friends with people who are only going to be here for three months?" He'd seen so many people come and go, that the real prospects of connecting with his co-workers was completely undermined.

Of course, it's not the same, at least in terms of degrees, but I am still heart-broken about some of these departures, and the prospect of others. Community in an academic context depends largely on the ability of a department or group or whatever to come to trust one another, and as little as I blame any single person for decisions that made perfect sense, I still mourn the little hits that our sense of community takes: both for their losses and for the small scars they leave behind.

Labor day, labor, and poverty

2010-09-06T23:05:00.000-04:00

A former student and an amazing post at Daily Kos.

Back in the Saddle

2010-09-01T11:48:00.002-04:00

Lest you think that this blog permanently become a kind of "here's what I've been doing lately" space (which it has temporarily), fear not. A few things are going on with some bigger issues that have would otherwise provide so much material for writing, but alas, this blog is not nearly anonymous enough for me to discuss issues of such a sensitive nature while they are actually happening.

So instead: here's what I've been doing lately.

With the computer disaster, the beginning of the semester, a string of delightful guests, and the annual faculty report I had to compile, my writing hit a three-week snag. I finished up chapter 4, thus closing the gap and leaving me with five full chapters drafted. Willow is working on editing that chapter, and I hope in the next week to move those 30 drafted pages into the 30 revised pages column. In the meantime, onto chapter 6. In its earlier incarnation, that chapter was two close readings of plays that had been attached to chapter 5, but together with another play I did not write about, they represent a very specific phenomenon that in rethinking and reorganizing the project became worth breaking out into their own chapter. Today, I wrote an introductory framing section for that chapter, which is (I am happy to report) less risky than the last chapter, but still a new argument to make. I hope that on Friday, I can revise one of the two close reading sections so that I'll be on track to finish the chapter draft within the following week. This one, I hope, shouldn't be too, too hard.

In the meantime, classes have begun, and teaching this semester will have the potential to get dull if I don't work to keep myself engaged, and some tenure materials will need to be assembled, so while writing still remains a priority, I've got a lot to think about (in addition to all those things I cannot write about at the moment).

Affirmation

2010-08-14T13:13:00.002-04:00

Nice little bit of news arrived yesterday: my Spring 2009 article on Equus published in one of the stronger journals in my field, earned an honourable mention for outstanding essay.

The recognition is nice in an of itself, but it's also good affirmation that in a period in which I've been producing a great deal of writing, kind of in a vacuum, that my work is at least deserving of mention.

Draft Done

2010-08-12T14:02:00.002-04:00

Commenting on my last post, Sisyphus congratulated me on the writing progress while turning a willful blind eye to the great data loss of 2010. Essentially, I think the good progress of this week has amounted to essentially the same thing:

La lalalalalalala The semester starts in 10 days? lalalalalalala my computer is in a shambles? lalalalalala my office is a wreck? lalalalala annual reports are due this month? lalalalala I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!!

You know things aren't going well when you are writing academic prose as a way of avoiding everything else.

But if anything, it's paid off in the writing. Ten mostly new pages today (the two drafted pages were primarily outline, and only fragments of sentences remain from that), which adds up to about 22 new pages since Tuesday afternoon. If only I could write at that clip all the time!

I'm labeling the entire chapter "drafted," since the next stage is to get Willow to do her magical editing thing, where she simultaneously polishes up my prose while at the same time points out the places where my argument goes off the tracks.

And there is one place in this essay where the argument does go off the tracks. Whether that is forging brave new territory or simply running into a ditch I cannot say. Many of my readers down the road will say "ditch" but I'm sticking to my guns, for now. Those two pages felt like the most dangerous words I'd ever written, because they risk, I think violent disagreement. We'll see how it goes.

Back at it

2010-08-11T14:27:00.002-04:00

Despite the technical difficulties and the lost data, I have noted the waning days of the summer break, and have returned with some urgency to the writing at hand. On the one hand, the demands of summer teaching had already ensured that I wouldn't be done with the draft of the book by August 23, the first day of classes here. On the other hand I had still hoped to be done with chapter 4 and onto the revisions of chapter 6, which would include the research I traveled to NYC for last week. I was making decent progress, only a day or two behind my revised timeline.

Though it was difficult yesterday to get back to it, I have made significant progress, drafting another 8 or 9 good pages in the last 24 hours. I am on track, I hope, to finish this draft of chapter 4 by tomorrow, and use the last week before classes to at least open up the document that is chapter 6 (chapter 5 is done).

While composing on Willow's netbook is hardly ideal, it has reduced the amount of internet procrastination that often attends my writing. So for now, I will point you to the updated tracker to the right, and then close up shop for the day.

Oofff!

2010-08-09T17:26:00.002-04:00

That's the sound of the punch in the gut I felt when OIT told me that they wouldn't be able to retrieve any of that data: apparently, none of the retrieval machines would even recognize it as a drive.

Which means that I totally dodged a bullet by almost randomly deciding to back up many of my documents, and almost all of my most important documents, on Saturday night.

I can only imagine how I'd be feeling if I had not done that, because I would have lost: a year of teaching documentation mere weeks before my annual report was due, all of my work on my tenure file and annual report, and much of the writing I've done in the last year, including huge chunks of the book manuscript (see all that progress over there on the right?).

Frankly, I've been very cavalier about backing up, and this could have been a total disaster. Instead, this is only a minor disaster, and I've learned (I hope) a Very Important Lesson.

Sooo, internets? umm...how do you back up your files? anything systematic? simple? reliable? If enough of you give me good advice, I'll repost the findings.

Adrift

2010-08-09T11:49:00.004-04:00

Blogging will likely be light for a few days or even weeks. Sigh.

My laptop died. Specifically, "Internal hard disk drive not found."

It's not as bad as it could be, for a few reasons. First, it's the university's computer, so I am not responsible for the troubleshooting, rebuilding, and/or replacement that might be deemed necessary. In fact, the machine is already on its way to its destination (whatever that may be).

Second, Facebook saved my life. Saturday night, as I was shutting down for the evening, I opened a tab that was already on facebook, and noticed that someone on my feed posted the end of a long day recovering their data from a virus-infected computer. "hmmm," I thought. "I haven't backed up in ages, and I've written a LOT of new material in the last weeks." So I popped in my data key, and downloaded the contents of My Docs. And went to bed.

The next morning, when I awoke, the computer had tried to reboot, and failed. A clicking sound emanated from the hard-drive side of the machine, and the black screen of death (apparently worse than its blue cousin) taunted me. It was 6:30 and I was on baby duty while everyone else slept. Junebug was kind enough to let me check to make sure that the data on the key was ok, and it was, so my early morning panic was mitigated.

What I don't have backed up: A few somewhat important documents that were only on the desktop (my to do list/calendar, and the zero draft document for freewriting and brainstorming the book project), my large library of PDFs which had not been backed up recently, my email archives older than 6 months, and my iTunes, which is mostly still safe on my actual iPod. So the losses, if they are irretrievable, are not earth-shattering.

But the timing, with the book project running just a little behind schedule, the semester starting in two weeks, and my annual report due at the end of the month, could've been better. Today, which should've been a writing day, has been a day of sending the laptop off to OIT, of checking my files to see what I do have, and have lost, and of a belated freaking out, which is better now. I'm working on Willow's netbook, which is tiny and slow, but adequate, so I have some access, but I feel electronically homeless, or at least itinerant, for now, and that will mean that some of my goals are just going to have to change. We'll see how it goes.

Flying Solo

2010-08-07T19:54:00.005-04:00

Long-time readers of this space surely know that I harbor an interest in performances of white masculinity (particularly middle class, hetero, white masculinity) in American culture, specifically how bourgeois men perform when they think they are being watched in specific ways.

So having posted about academic masculinities, and masculine performances in the gym and the locker room, I hadn't touched the subject here in a while, though I think about it constantly, as this is a campus that takes its particularly masculine (but sometimes female) mascot very seriously.

But wandering through airports for large chunks of the previous three days sparked an observation that I think is worth pondering a bit: Airports are the perfect place to observe bourgeois masculinity.

First off, airports are full of men traveling alone, often on business. There seem to be fewer women traveling on their own, and it seems that women more often have traveling companions. And for reasons I'll suggest a bit below, the women who do travel alone are frequently not responding in this particular way to these circumstances, because....

Men traveling alone have virtually nothing at stake in airports--that is, if we taken as a tenuous given that much of the way that white middle class hetero men style themselves for public is a play for, and display of, power. Posture, gait, vocal inflection, clothing, even facial expression, are all finely tuned mechanisms for negotiating social empowerment. But because men flying solo are surrounded by people they don't know, with virtually every logistical arrangement already in place, their behaviors mean almost nothing is at stake. Aside from making it onto the flight or not, the hours preceding boarding for the single man are virtually consequenceless, at least based on the kinds of micro-behaviors that we so carefully modulate otherwise.

And yet, at the same time, these men are completely out of context, which means that there are no other clues to their behaviors: the observer of such figures has nothing to go on except for the man himself, which means that the things we might observe about them individually, guess about them, hypothesize about them, can only be discerned from, well, the text itself. If there is a new critical cultural studies--the text and nothing but the text--this is the place for it.

One might imagine, then, that without context and without stakes, single men in airports exist in their pure, true state. With nothing to gain or lose, and no meaningful context with which to interact, men and their behaviors can teach us loads about a whole (quite powerful) swath of our culture, and presumably, about individual men as well.

What's interesting, though, is that if this is the case, if the single male traveler waiting at the gate has nothing impinging on his performance of masculinity, he, well, kind of stops performing. In short, outside of its cultural-rhetorical negotiations, masculinity stops functioning, and given these conditions, many men stop functioning in any meaningful way as well. This is not to say that there is no there there, that such men lack interiority (after all, I devised this theory in precisely these conditions). But rather, there's nothing for them to do. Look around the waiting area; so many of these guys look completely adrift. Tired, frequently, and uncomfortable largely, but with nothing to do but wait, their faces are largely blank, and their postures are largely slouching, limp.

We could read this a few ways: Robert Bly once might have said that this was clearly evidence that modern society had robbed men of their true natural habitat, and we need to go beat some drums. perhaps. I choose to read this as the absence of a kind of a priori masculinity that burns within the bodies and souls of individual men. More usefully, I think, this suggests the deeply mythical nature of the importance of the self-sufficient male subject as an ideal. For without social maneuvering and negotiation to engage in, airport guy (I probably should have named him earlier. Mitch, maybe), Mitch has nothing to do, no purpose.

But watch him as his cell phone rings, and a switch flips, and his whole posture changes. Cancel Mitch's flight, and the whole army of Mitches go into hyperdrive, with a range of tactics, approaches, strategies in play to find a new flight, to negotiate a better situation (mine was to wait out the loonies and then flatter and empathise with the harried attendant, who seemed to be nicer to me for my comparative kindness to him).

Why masculinity in particular? Because my sense is that while men in such situations are prone to seeing no function for themselves, women are largely conditioned to a) be more aware of themselves as objects of the gaze in such situations, in ways that men are not, and b) bored men with a sense of consequencelessness are dangerous. So while Mitch might really be letting his guard down, the female business traveler across the aisle must remain wary.

The point is, what Mitch at the airport tells me is that masculinity is more than anything a social code, precisely the opposite of the facade of solitary sufficiency that it seeks to project; that the behaviors of real men--especially in a white, hetero, bourgeois context--demonstrate not that men are islands, but that their very function exists in building better bridges.

What I did with my 36-hour research trip (that took 55 hours)

2010-08-06T19:12:00.002-04:00

So on Wednesday morning, I hopped a flight to NYC for a brief research trip, mostly to look at the files that an Off-Broadway company kept on a play they had commissioned in the late 90s that has only very recently been published, and now will get the treatment in the book. In fact, I'm close enough to that part of the ms. revision (ch 6) that I hope to get all of this trip's fruits incorporated into the prose by the end of the month.

But the actual archive time was very brief: only about three hours. There wasn't too much of interest (though precisely what I needed), I was allowed to make photocopies, and they had me set up in the front lobby of their small admin offices, so I felt a bit intrusive (though they assured me I wasn't). At any rate, that left me enough time to do the following things (keeping in mind I was on a very tight budget and was lugging around my only bag w/ books and laptop the whole time).

Read two very different but wonderful novels: Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Ms. Hempel Chronicles which is very different from her amazing previous novel is still lovely and affecting, and which I polished off in its entirety on Wednesday; also, David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, which like the other work of his I've read, This is not a Novel, is brilliantly cerebral, remarkably propulsive, and despite being barely narrative at all, still manages to tell an incredible, mysterious story.

Also: got lost behind Lincoln Center, sweated through two shirts, took a break from 95 degree heat in Central Park, took a lovely dinner with my friend Sue in the Village, lounged around the Columbia campus for a while, noticed how disproportionate were the hands and feet of The Thinker, looked for Fornes plays at the 66th St. Barnes and Noble, failed to enjoy several cab rides, and spent more time than I'd like in airports.

The last thing was an unwelcome cap on a nice little trip: Because it was so hot yesterday and I was so tired, I headed off to the airport at 3 for a 7:30 flight. It was air conditioned, it was free, and there was wi-fi (not free). Except that my flight was canceled. Fortunately, my friend Sue had room on her sofa for a visitor, and at 5:00 am, I woke up to try again, and finally made my way home (the extra airport time facilitating the completion of the Markson novel).

So, good trip, a little longer than expected. Lots of reading (two novels and multiple drafts of a play, plus a couple of academic articles and a bunch of supplementary materials), and some good research.

And remind me to do that post about men flying alone. A veritable sociological study there.

Making an intervention

2010-07-29T11:43:00.003-04:00

My strength as a writer and as a theorist has typically been in the form of synthesis, bringing together ideas that haven't been considered together, or that have been previously regarded as incompatible. Indeed, the bulk of this book project has been work on the latter: considering alongside one another essentialist and constructivist notions of the individual subject on the feminist stage. That in itself is a critical intervention, but one that is characterized by an attempt at critical harmony rather than dissensus.

The current chapter, however, is one in which I am actively refuting a major critical commonplace, not just on the criticism of one text, but on how we read a whole body of texts. And this is a big one, too. When I presented an early version of this argument recently, the response was measured, and in conversation about the idea, one similarly early-career scholar said only, cryptically, "Oh...Bold." The insinuation there was, "Oh...mind-blowingly stupid and wrong-headed." On the other hand, the reader who reviewed the book proposal and sample chapters felt that this particular argument was "nothing short of brilliant" which is overstatement, I think, but good to hear.

At any rate, while I'm committed to this argument, and find it both logical, compelling, and important to make, I am made anxious about the argumentative strategy. Actually refuting "critical orthodoxies" and "post-structuralist dogma" feels, well, not my style. On the one hand, it feels rhetorically like the kind of thing that overconfident first-year grad students do with concepts they haven't entirely grasped, and so in that way, it feels brash. On the other, it feels like the thing that I should be doing, by making an actual intervention in the discussion, making a real, contestable argument rather than playing the critical peacemaker.

I imagine that in fact much of my writing career will be filling that critical peacemaker role--synthesis has always been my intellectual forte, and frankly, it's what I do in interpersonal relationships, too (ENFJ's are harmony seekers, so the Meyers-Briggs test says). But in this chapter, I'm doing things I haven't done well before: stake out a claim, refute the conventional wisdom, and make some noise.

And honestly, it's making me nervous.

Writing!

2010-07-14T16:39:00.002-04:00

I know, I'm a bit of a one-note blog these days, in part because I'm often writing here as a "cool down" from other writing sessions--it's something of a rewards for writing, rather than a warm-up. Anyway, as you can see from the writing progress bar, pages are shifting from the unwritten italics count over to the red revised count. The key accomplishment is that I've completed a draft of chapter 3, which was, frankly, the most terrifying part of the whole process at summer's start. And now, that shift should continue in dramatic fashion over the next couple of days, as the 20 pages of drafted material in chapters 2 and 3 should be pounded out by next Monday.

Between now and then, and soon after, some other concerns will intervene. We're sending the twins on a weeklong vacation with my folks, which will on the one hand free up some time otherwise devoted to parenting, but will also require trips to and from the ancestral home to drop them off this Friday, and pick them up the following Saturday (any DC folks interested in getting together Friday night?). Then Junebug's beloved godmother is coming in for a visit, which will still allow for writing time, but also provides opportunities for distraction.

Also, I have a book review deadline on August 1, and a very short research trip to NYC on August 4 and 5, so my hope is to do all of those things, and come back to chapter 4 (if I haven't started it already) when I return. At that point it's only 2 more weeks until the semester starts, and so I hope to at least have chapter 4 drafted by then, with only Chapters 6, 7, and the conclusion to polish off in August and September. It wasn't my ideal schedule for the beginning of the summer, but I think it's still doable.

So yes. Writing! it goes.

Headway

2010-07-08T12:37:00.002-04:00

I have read, written and revised for two days in a row now, largely working on the chapter whose argument itself needed the most overhauling (Chapter 3, or Section1 chapter 2, depending on how you're counting). I at once feel pretty good about the work I'm doing, even as I cringe at some of the prose I wrote on the subject when I first drafted it. This chapter itself was written in the final throes of dissertation revision (7 years ago, now), and are at once naively composed and wildly out of date. Some of the central argument and most of the close readings remain valid, but damn, so of the phrases written there sound, frankly, like a 1975 consciousness-raising tract. Revision is indeed good.

Speaking of, I've drawn up a revision tracker over there on the right, which shows how much is revised and current, how much is drafted but needs revision, and how much I expect to draft from scratch. According to that, as of yesterday, I had about 105 pages of updated prose, another 75 that will need some kind of revision and polishing, and about 70 left to write from scratch for a goal of roughly 250 pages or 8000-9000 words. So watch me as I write, and I'll try to update that occasionally and at periodic intervals, post tallies at the bottom. Fingers crossed!

Ready, Steady, Go!

2010-07-06T12:45:00.004-04:00

Three processes resume today:

1) Writing: The summer course now done, grades submitted, and comments returned, the time has not come to write. After a tiny anxiety attack this morning (so distracted by it was I, that I sideswiped a mailbox after dropping off the kids. The mailbox is fine, but the side mirror on my car less so), I did some warm up writing on my tenure documents, and sat down with the book chapter du jour. Chapter 1.2 (or chapter 3, depending how you count) actually requires less work than I had imagined, mostly in the form of bulking up the theoretical grounding and stakes, and adding a major final section at the end to account for an extremely important new direction in both performance and in scholarship, that will make this section much more than a retread of existing scholarship or a retread of the dissertation chapter. This is significant work, to be sure, but less involved than, say, rebuilding the chapter from the ground up that I thought I'd have to do. Instead of writing a 35-page chapter with a handful of usable paragraphs, I've actually got to write 15 new pages to accompany the 25 I must revise and expand. Very doable. Moreover, I began the process of polishing up some of those older pages, and identifying a handful of sources to supplement the writing. I'll pick those up this afternoon on a trip to the library with Junebug.

2) Tenure: My external evaluators for tenure have been determined and confirmed, which means that today I am sending out the packet of my published work with a cover letter to frame it. Our department does not require the book for tenure, but in creating the narrative of my scholarly project, I have come to realize that the subject matter of the book forms a center to my work around which other material constellates. Since earlier articles published before I arrived do not count for my tenure case (something I understand is somewhat unique to this institution), but came from the dissertation-turned-book-project there appears to be a large absence that would otherwise tie my work together. I have tried to frame the existing publications within a narrative suggests that they cluster around this bigger project descried under future work, but I sure don't want evaluators to say, "well if only he had that book!" This is my only serious worry about the tenure process, and submitting these packets today (the other thing to do on my trip to campus with Junebug) is the great leap that the tenure process will entail for me. Everything else seems by comparison like bureaucracy.

3) Other great leaps into the unknown: Junebug took two very tiny, very tentative steps this weekend. He will walk all over the place either holding onto a single hand or cruising along the furniture, so full-on speed-walking is mere days away. I tremble. The coming weeks will be an adventure indeed.

Pleasure Reading

2010-06-30T17:23:00.004-04:00

Oh, yes, that. It seems to me that after the intensity of two grad classes in the last six months, coupled with the writing onslaught that is coming, I should probably take up some pleasure reading. I've done very little in the last year, knocking off maybe four books that I can honestly say I read for my own personal interests, Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, Terry Galloway's memoir Mean Little deaf Queer, Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, and Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red. Despite that smallish number, I am pleased to say that I enjoyed them all immensely (though the Pamuk will stand out as a giant among giants in that list).

I've also been reading a good deal of short fiction. Willow's work keeps me engaged there, and the New Yorker's fiction issue has kept me well stocked for a few days. I quite liked Jonathan Safran Foer's short piece there, enjoyed Rivka Galchen's and Philipp Meyer's pieces, too. Last week's fiction from Nicole Krauss was beutiful, but ended on a bit of a baffling note, and I'm eager to read Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's story "The Erlking" in the issue that arrived today. Her novel Madeline is Sleeping is a pure unadulterated joy.

But for my birthday, I got a big ol' Barnes and Noble gift certificate, and purchased five books that I've been looking at for some time, reviews I've read, Amazon recommendations, etc. And then, last evening, I ran my fingers along my bookshelves to pull another dozen or so possibilities.

So here are several novels on the short(ish) list for next thing to read. Happy to take votes of confidence. There's no rhyme or reason to the order.

David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (I know, can you believe it?)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Lev Grossman, The Magicians
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
Jesse Ball, The Way through Doors
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children
J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello
Kathy Acker, Don Quixote
Don Delillo, Libra
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

So obviously, some of these are Books I Should've Read By Now, but that might be a disincentive to choosing them as pleasure reading. Your thoughts welcome.

New Look

2010-06-29T13:24:00.002-04:00

So....The blog has been neglected for some time now, and so I thought, "Hey! Why not a new look to neglect?"

The projects are piling up right now, and I've got a lot of work to do to catch up. But several things are on pins and needles around here--spotty childcare, Willow with uncertain employment options, a tenure case to prepare for, and an ms. to finish, so I feel like this space might be useful again. So we'll see.

Update

2010-06-28T22:35:00.002-04:00

Summer session over, comments still left to put on grad papers from both this session and last semester (cringe), book to finish writing by end of summer. But right now my eyes burn from reading papers on the screen all day. But maybe soon I'll post more often.

Happy Birthday Junebug!

2010-06-19T21:47:00.002-04:00

Happy birthday, my littlest one. It's been a very good year (and a week, since I'm late here).

But a picture from his first birthday, followed by historical precedent:

Tenure: The early steps

2010-06-09T14:56:00.002-04:00

So. It is time. I am beginning, in effect, my critical year.

Let me be clear here. My department, despite the many flaws of the larger institution, is a really good place to work (for those of us privileged to be on the tenure track, at least). The teaching load is a humane 2/3, and the minimum publication requirements for tenure are a very humane four major articles (there are more recommendations that surround that baseline, but still, that's the baseline.

By June now, I have begun the early steps of the tenure process.

Step One: Introducing Myself to the Committee
So that they could begin to choose evaluators, the committee that covers tenure and promotion required a brief paragraph from me to determine good matches. As my work is eclectic in subject matter and ecumenical in approach, and worse, constellates around a book project that will NOT be part of my tenure file, this was not an easy task. But there it is. Short story? I do modern drama. Longer story? I do modern drama and performance studies as it relates to gender studies, life writing, narratology, contemporary British literature, cultural studies and (occasionally) composition pedagogy.

Step Two: assembling the list of external evaluators.
So BRU doesn't offer an honorarium to evaluators, and because of some hitches in the way that our Evaluation Committee (EC) (which handles both annual evaluation and T&P) is constituted, we get a late start on collecting names of potential external evaluators. Which means, with nothing bu good will to offer in return, we call evaluators late in the game, after they've often already agreed to review sometimes multiple other cases. This means that the luxury of choosing a few really wonderful outside readers is mitigated by the likelihood that the most wonderful readers very well may decline the request.

So the process is this: The (EC) and I both submit lists of potential external evaluators. In the past and elsewhere, I've heard that each body gives 5-6 names, and the chair collates those lists, and after I vet them for any material conflicts of interest, gets them approved by the Dean. Once the list is approved, he calls down the lest to secure between 3-6 external evaluators of the case. Because of the likelihood that those requests might be denied, though, both I and the committee were asked to assemble much larger lists of possible readers (somewhere around 40-45 between the two lists). This means that the bottom of the list ends up with people much further afield from my work than I might like, and also that the list inevitably includes those few people on the list who, for whatever reason, don't like me, or my work, or my approach, or (relevantly) the fact that I'm a man doing feminist studies in performance.

But, as of the end of May, I understand that both lists were generated, collated, approved by the Dean, and that readers were secured.

Step three: Assemble packets for External evaluators.
This would seem straightforward, but there are two parts, and questions about each.

Part One: What to include. So obviously, I include the major articles, and the components of the edited collection that I wrote or co-wrote. But. Do I include the entire collection as evidence of the editing work? Do I include minor articles (10 pages or shorter?) Do I include reviews? Book reviews and/or performance reviews? Do I include multiple incarnations of radically different lengths of material published under the same title (ie short draft for online journal, expanded significantly for collection)? The book reviews gesture toward that empty center of my work that would otherwise be occupied by the book project in process. The performance review and minor article overlap very closely in subject matter and even primary argument. Current talley: iterations of same article yes, book reviews yes, minor article yes, performance review no.
Related question: An article has been accepted for a collection that has not yet found a publisher. I know I can't include it if it's not under contract, but do I a) hold off sending out the packet to see if a contract comes through? b) pull the article from the collection and roll the dice on a journal? c) just send out the packet without the article? I seem to have, by inaction, settled on c).
Part two: The framing letter. So I write a letter to tell my evaluators what they're reading. The big questions here are twofold: a) how to explain the collection which represents a significant portion of the page count they are reading, but is only tangentially connected to my stated field. b) how to explain the book project as the nucleus of my work thus far around which all the other pieces revolve as satellites, without looking like a slacker, or intellectually ADD.

So that's where I am now. Making copies of articles, drafting the letter (the chair is glancing over it as we speak), and fretting about the most unknown part of the process. Wish me luck.

Willow, now with more degrees!

2010-06-04T09:42:00.003-04:00

In the bustle of the end of last semester and the beginning of the summer session, I neglected to post anything on Willow's completion of her MFA, which along with an MA in English, means that she's actually taken more coursework and defended more prose than I did. huzzah!

In tribute, I want to post links to a few of her publications, now available online, because they are teh awesome, and you should read them. Now. Even if you've read them before.

"WQED, Channel 13: Programming Guide"

"Jeannette Leaves her Recipes"

"Proof of a Wedding Photo, 1969"

"Protege"

Other publications in print-only include "Pas de Deux" (Madison Review, 1999), "Distance Driving (Fourth River, 2007), and "In Search of a Smaller Bar Scene" (Evansville Review, forthcoming). More is in the submissions till, so keep your eyes peeled!

Ti-i-i-ime ain't on my side

2010-06-03T09:18:00.003-04:00

I have begun to hit something of a rhythm in managing the summer grad class, which is turning out to be a really fun, interesting group of people on what is to me an immensely engaging topic. Who wouldn't have fun with two consecutive days on authorship?

(On a side note, I think that for many cultural-studies-trained folks narratological formalism seems archaic and a historical, but these discussions on the building blocks of story-making, with old questions like the place of authorial intent, are not useless to today's graduate students, and indeed continue to provide and effective vocabulary and critical framework for how texts carry cultural information.)

I have in fact hit enough of a rhythm that I am now dipping my toes back into the writing pond, finding that the waters aren't as chilly as I'd imagined they'd be. A paragraph of an old article on Tuesday night, some brainstorming notes on chapter 3 last night, and today who knows? The problem has been that these little bits of writing time have been stolen moments: 15 minutes here while Willow read the twins a bedtime story, 10 minutes there as I pulled over on the road, opened my laptop, typed in some ideas, and got back on my way to pick up Imperia from a playdate. No article, let along book manuscript will be successfully produced this way.

No matter I suppose, Summer Session I is over in three more weeks, after which a 6 week vista opens up for me to write, write, write, at which point I will have little choice but to do exactly that.

Clapping

2010-05-26T07:34:00.002-04:00

Junebug has recently learned to clap, which means that he claps at all sorts of things, but mostly himself. He also like being clapped for, and if I'm not clapping for him often enough, he'll reach over, grab my hands, and clap them for me. Too cute.

The Summer Grad Class

2010-05-25T11:31:00.002-04:00

You perhaps have seen references in the sparse previous posts about a summer graduate class that I'm teaching, one that is a lot of fun already, but is killing me. I've devised a way to make the reading more manageable to the students--by making half of the essays "supplementary" and then assigning 2 people to present the arguments of each one, I've cut the reading from 16-20 essays a week to 10-12. It's still a lot of reading for them, but they seem to be doing it. I however, am still reading 16-20 essays a week.

This has meant that I've had to put writing on the back burner, and will instead have to write like a fiend through July and August. In the interim, I'm going to try to clean up a few article drafts I have laying around, to perhaps get them out to readers in order to supplement my tenure file, which goes forward this fall.

Lesson learned? Teaching a summer grad class is a great deal of fun: laid back and focused at the same time. But I shouldn't ever count on doing anything else with that time.

Pruning

2010-05-24T20:23:00.000-04:00

If I had time for a full post right now, I'd write one on pruning--on trimming back what seems like fertile growth, but which stretches the root structure past capacity. I pruned some oregano and sage back (also, I wanted the herbs), and thinned out some dill this evening (while the twins finished their dinner), and thought, "boy, do I need to do this with my life."

Because I suspect if I pruned back the extra teaching, the extra trips to soccer practice, the friendly morning meetings over coffee, I wonder if a writing plant would flourish?

Mostly

2010-05-11T19:27:00.002-04:00

Mostly, the semester is done. So I can finally breathe easy.

But...
I've got comments on grad papers, and a few lingering undergrad assignments, to write.
I've got two incompletes to expect work from.
I've got a dissertation draft to read.
I've got a summer session I course that begins in 6 days.
I've got a book project whose first deadline I just blithely blew off.
I've got a tenure file to begin assembling.
I've got an invitation to contribute an article to a very good journal outside of my field that I really should NOT agree to.
I've got a backlog of email.
I've got a nagging feeling that a shoe is going to drop.
I've got this sense that optimism will have to stop sufficing for actual labor, and that things like my herb garden and my Netflix account and sometimes even the kids' soccer practice are going to have to wait while I do these things, these things that I've said I'd do, that I need to do.
I've got to go.

Work update, week 1

2010-04-19T16:30:00.002-04:00

So a lot has happened this week that has nothing to do with my writing: Willow had a birthday, defended her MFA thesis, and is at this moment interviewing for a job (while I watch the kids, who are playing happily in the background, so imagine the deafening burble of twins kindergartners and a baby who adores them). Also, I collected proposals from my grad students, who have really pulled it together this semester, and a batch of papers from the survey section.

BUT! in the last week I did do an intermediate revision on the Narrative paper, so at least i can say I left it good shape as I move back to the book. I sent a copy of that off to my advisor, who is most interested in this particular aspect of my work.

As for the remaining revisions to chapter 1.1, not so much. But the document is up on the desktop, and whenever I turn to writing (and reading, which includes both Butler and Foucault for this stage), this is the project. I'm hoping to finish a draft by Friday.

Onward and Upward

2010-04-13T10:14:00.003-04:00

So I'm back from the Narrative Conference, which I find consistently stimulating, and where after five visits, I've finally settled into a groove with enough contacts and enough sense of my place in that particular field that I don't feel like a total conference loner. Of course, This one has given me another book idea, but that seems sufficiently separate from my regular research that it feels like the sort of thing that I can work on for the next several years by pecking out conference papers just for that conference, and slowly expanding and revising them into fuller chapters.

Meanwhile, back to the book at hand. My goal is to have a complete manuscript in the press' hands by the end of the summer. I am teaching a summer grad course (daily in the afternoons), but it is structured such that I can continue to get some writing done as I go. So here's what I have written already, and my target dates for revised chapters.

Intro: drafted and polished (check)
1.1: Drafted and under final revisions (by April 30)
1.2: About 20 pages of drafted material, another 15-20 of new material (by May 31)
1.3: About 12 pages drafted, another 15 (to 30, depending on using another text) (by June 30)
2.1: Drafted and polished (check)
2.2: About 20 pages drafted, with another 15-20 to draft or seriously revise (by July 15)
2.3: 15-20 pages drafted, in bad shape; another 10-15 to write (by August 7)
Epilogue: One drafted but it barely fits the project anymore. We'll see. (by September 1)

That's as much as 85 new pages through the summer, but the research on this and the background reading is all largely done. The issue really is just putting the butt in the chair and writing. Keep your fingers crossed!

Writing news

2010-03-24T12:36:00.003-04:00

After putting up a post about the difficulty of committing to writing, I promptly wrote nothing, on the blog or really anywhere, for weeks.

But an email that came in yesterday will change all that. To quote selectively:

Dear Horace,
Good news today--the outside reader has confirmed my instincts about your book project, calling it "a substantial, informative, and original piece of scholarship." How exciting! . . . I'll look forward to having the complete manuscript, when it's ready to send.

So if that doesn't inspire a commitment to writing, then, well, I might as well not be in this profession.

Committed

2010-02-23T17:17:00.002-05:00

Over at ProfHacker, contributor Billie Hara has a post about ways that we might think about emotionally committing ourselves to write. And you know, I've tried those tactics: the everyday, the writing as an addiction, the rhythms of daily habit. For me, not to much. I've always been a writer who works in fits and starts: nothing for two, three months, and then an article in three weeks. If you count actual writing time, I wrote my dissertation in about four months. But those four months of writing happened over about two years.

And now, with three kids, one of them on a still-quite-unpredictable schedule, the other two home a lot for snow days, a three-prep courseload (including a new grad prep), and enough service obligations to fill in the gaps, and the fifteen-minutes-a-day approach isn't working, because many days I don't have even those fifteen minutes to spare.

When I am able to carve out time, they tend to be big swaths that require a good big of schedule juggling, and can't be counted on to be repeated at regular intervals. So those of you who don't of can't manage those regular writing schedules, how do you get your writing done? Every article has been different for me, sometimes working at night, sometimes finding a sweet spot in my semesterly schedule (not this semester!), sometimes using my summer really well. But rarely for more than a month at a time, and even more rarely two writing stretches in one semester/summer. Those spots are really productive, often producing anywhere from 25-65 polished ms pages. But then I'm shot for a while. I feel like I'm gearing up for another stretch here soon (not sure when, exactly), but I've got to find the time. So am I committed to writing? Yeah. But I'm committed to a lot of other things, too.

Lent, Spirituality, and Ethics

2010-02-21T18:23:00.002-05:00

I mentioned last post that Willow and I were forgoing meat for this Lenten season, something that we felt was an environmentally responsible choice first, with other considerations following.

That is true for that specific set of choices, but I also feel like I want to note that the spiritual element (although I do dislike that word) is a real component. Over the last three or four years, Willow and I have been attending an Episcopal church here, in part for a kind of education for the children, but also for our own impulses.

For me, I've struggled with this choice mightily: I was raised in an increasingly fundamentalist/evangelical home, and after I left for college, spent about a decade drifting between agnosticism and atheism. Importantly, I think I still have not rejected those positions, but I've also stopped rejecting the Christian theology that I had been for so long. We started with this parish about three years ago, when close friends visited and wanted to attend an Episcopal church. I joined them, and since that time, we have tentatively but steadily become more involved.

Even so, I approach religion from a position of doubt, but one open to possibility. I still shudder at the language of sin, authority, and hierarchy, and yet embedded in much Christian theology is the set of ethical principals that I still, and have always, tried to hold close.

Estranging ethics from the language of sin and virtue is, as I am finding, no mean feat, and so you can imagine the semantic gymnastics required to negotiate a season such as Lent. And yet from the sermon today, i find myself meditating on--of all things--the seven deadly sins. Not as sins, per se, but as behaviors and practices that provide the language for a more proactively ethical life.

Wrath: That I might avoid looking at other people as obstacles to my own desires without first considering their needs.

Greed: That I might evaluate my worth and that of others on actions and not on markers of material wealth or privilege.

Sloth: That I might be motivate to work to better the lives of those most in need to mitigate suffering.

Pride: That I remember that I am not the center of any moral universe but (perhaps) my own, and that no one owes me that position of privilege.

Lust: That I remain as interested in my partner's pleasure as much as my own.

Envy: That I admire in others their talents and achievements without resenting them.

Gluttony: That I make the best use of my resources for the health of my body, my family, and my environment.

In general, I find that this set of principals is much easier for me to sign on to, even if (or perhaps because) it skews from ecclesiastical definitions of these ideas. What remains true within all of them, however, as an attempt to ethically engage those around me with as much consideration as possible, and to weigh the good of my family, my community, and the world as highly or even more highly than I weigh my own surplus pleasure.

I am not blind to all the ways that the discourse surrounding these 'sins' has been used for all kinds of social control and institutional empowerment, and so I am trying to be both very careful with how I imagine them (not all desire is lust; not all eating is gluttony, etc.), and how I talk about them, if at all. But if this is in fact a season for self reflection, then using the lens of ethics, the one that incites the fewest misgivings for me, seems the way to do it.

On Malaise

2010-02-17T10:16:00.002-05:00

The twins have been home from school for 12 of the last 13 days. The baby is on his second cold in the last month (though this one seems quite minor, but still). I am behind in almost every conceivable way. Willow is also behind, so the idea of one of us throwing another a lifeline feels impossible too. We are simply not set up to do full-time childcare for three and maintain full-time (or even part-time jobs.

So at the moment, I have a batch of undergraduate response papers to grade, all of the material for my grad class to prep for tomorrow (three plays by Pirandello), a stack of PhD applications to read, and on the horizon, another batch of response papers and two sets of midterms.

And at the moment, instead of doing any of these things, I am blogging. Sitting in front of the magic happy light box (which isn't at the moment, working wonders), listening to Junebug cry while somehow not managing to cry himself to sleep.

Paul Atreides, of Frank Herbert's Dune series, uses the mantra, "Fear is the mind killer," but frankly, I am not so much afraid of everything as simply buried and therefore rendered completely inert. And my mind is dead. I am unexcited by my objectively exciting classes, unwilling to crack the top of that stack of response papers, even blase about going up to soothe the baby (bad daddy).

If the sun doesn't come out soon (tomorrow is, after all, always a day away), I'm going to burst. If I have to wear my goddamn winter boots to walk to campus another day, I'm gonna scream. If it doesn't stop snowing soon so I can send the twins back to school, I'm going to curl up in a little ball and weep. None of which will help anything at all.

Ash Wednesday is the inauguration of Lent, a period of doing without. In Christian terms, it's a self-shriving to prepare for the grace of Easter, but on a broader, pan-spiritual level, it's seemingly related to the necessary practice of stretching the remaining provisions through the winter. Willow and I are responding to both terms this year by forgoing meat. It's an environmental decision first, with elements of finances and spirituality mixed in. And it's a test run for perhaps a more permanent solution down the road.

I wonder what the connection between these Lenten sacrifices and winter malaise might have to do with one another, and whether the discipline involved in going without might also be related to the discipline of muddling through.

For now though, the happy light box has finished its cycle, the baby has finally fallen asleep, and I think I'll read a play. We'll see whether the winter malaise has faded any by then.

Rethinking Grad School Advice

2010-02-12T11:33:00.003-05:00

Thanks to T.E. I've just found Escape the Ivory Tower and its compelling post about our responsibilities for advising grad school in the humanities. This is an old topic around the blogosophere, with too many posts to list-and-link. It's also one I've been hesitant to join.

Part of the reason that I have been hesitant to join is that had I gotten this kind of reality check advice, I might not have pursued this path, one that I do find extraordinarily rewarding in a way that I personally cannot imagine experiencing in many other life paths. Yes, I'm in a fair amount of debt, and yes it took three tries on the job market to land a good TT job, but in many ways, the "life of the mind" is something I associate quite closely with the job and the way I work.

Still, the scenario gets worse and worse, and I am slowly coming to understand that the job market is significantly worse right now than it was even five years ago when I was last out. I really do wonder how to give advice, knowing that the advice that this line of thinking would have me give would have very likely led to a somewhat (or even extremely) less satisfying career and work/life exchange than I currently enjoy, and might therefore do the same for certain students whom I might advise.

Still, I'll be sending those students this link as a reality check, and would be interested to hear of other links (please do send them on) that I might compile.

Snow Days and Voluntary Classes

2010-02-09T20:46:00.002-05:00

On Monday, we had the first declared snow day at this institution in eleven years, a combination of good fortune and sheer cussedness in the face of the moderate elements. But a new provost and fourteen-odd inches of snow kept us out yesterday. Today, we were back on, despite some lingering treacherous conditions.

Faculty had been urged to exercise consideration for students who might have a difficult commute, but I hate that particular judgment call. Nothing worse than getting an email from a student that they can't make it to campus, only to see them at the gym right after class. So on such days (when I can afford it on the syllabus) I take a different tack, and send an email to tell students that while I will be having class, I will not be taking attendance. I remind them of the value of the material, but the way I structure my syllabi, rarely is the material of any given day "must-know."

In effect, the day is a free absence, and the students who end up coming to class are the students who actually want to be there. No surprise, then, that the postmodernism class saw about 1/3 attendance, while the amazing survey from heaven saw 2/3 attendance (and many of those who missed were the less-engaged in this highly-engaged group).

But the ones who were there in the postmodern class ended up making it a banner day there. We were talking about Ashbery's "What is Poetry" and "Paradoxes and Oxymorons" both highly playful poems that play around with the way that language functions as pure sign. In fact, one student mentioned the ideas of Derrida (though she could not remember the name), which prompted a quick explanation of differance, in a 200-level class. As importantly, contemporary poetry is not my bag, so while I had a few bon mots to offer, I struggle through his poetry just as much as they do, and so the interpretation they arrived at as a class was ultimately more convincing (or at least more interesting, and maybe both) than the one I'd walked in with.

These were the last texts in a unit on textual play (Borges, Barth, Calvino, Stoppard, Ashbery), and we ended with a casual discussion of simply "what you thought of these texts taken as a group." The discussion ranged far and wide, and touched on nihilism, readerly vs. writerly texts, and the place of pain and anguish within formal play. And I suspect that this was due as in large part to who was not there as to who was not.

This is not so much a dig on those students who might be bringing the class down as it is a reminder of the intellectual joy that arises when you know that the people in the room want to be in the room.

Auspicious?

2010-02-03T16:44:00.003-05:00

Just before the semester began, I sent out a proposal to a single high-profile university press for my ongoing book project. I had been in conversation for a little over a year with the Sr. Acquisitions editor, who had made her name in the field by bringing my subfield to prominence. So our most recent contacts had been friendly and relaxed (indeed, at MLA, she hailed me down to show me a new book as I approached the table).

So the packet of materials I sent contained the proposal, a table of contents, a shorter abstract, and two sample chapters: the long introduction, and a later chapter.

She emailed today to confirm receipt, but also to say that she "admired my choice of artists," which in turn made her "realize how long it's been since we've [seen] a good book of this kind," and that she's sending it on to "others," presumably series editors or others in house. On the one hand, I hope that the enthusiasm that I read in this note is more than just professional courtesy. But on the other hand, without a complete manuscript, she probably isn't going to tip her hand too much.

This is the first basically unsolicited proposal I've made to a press. Others with book experience: what kind of early responses did you get, and how should one read this sort of thing?

The Problem of Re-reading

2010-01-31T19:31:00.003-05:00

I am not, by nature, a re-reader. Willow is, and many of my friends are. They are the sort of people who, when they have some free time, will pick up an old comfy favorite, and dig right in, sometimes cover-to-cover, sometimes just the good bits.

This is not the way I read. Partially because I read slowly, and partially because reading for pleasure for me can be so engrossing that I kind of shirk my other reading responsibilities, and partially because I'd rather just read something on my already towering to-be-read pile.

Unfortunately, this predilection away from re-reading is not particularly good for teaching, where not re-reading tends to leave you looking like a bit of a fool in front of the classroom, when you don't remember an incidental, but useful detail. For me, now in year five of my TT position, this really is starting to be an issue, because I'm re-teaching enough texts that I am having to go back for fourth and fifth readings--I know them well enough for this to be a little bit of drudgery, but not well enough to go without doing it.

I know, no one really enjoys re-reading for class: it's work, and it has a tendency to turn the thing we love into labor. But I think my particular problem with it also goes back to why I'm not a re-reader (two of those reasons, at least).

This week, I got a desk copy of Pale Fire in my box. I'm teaching it in a summer narrative theory course. I haven't read it yet, though I knew enough about it to know that it was going to be a good fit. And I've learned that if I want to keep up anything like a diet of new texts, I have to add them to my syllabi. Rarely do I teach a class in which I'm not reading something along with my students. So I've got Pale Fire on my pile.

That, and I took the kids to the bookstore today, to kill a little time on a frigid day where snowplay was impossible. They browsed the kids section, while I went off to look for something particular. I didn't find that text, but while poking around the fiction section, I ran across Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, something I've been salivating over for some time. Since I read Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence this past winter break, I thought that since the Pamuk book covered some of the same historical and geographical territory, that now was a good time to grab it. (also...It was a lovely book that I already wanted and my will power was eroded by begging for Littlest Pet Shop sticker books). So I picked it up, and brought it home.

I walked in, and laid it on the table by the door, on top of Pale Fire and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which I'm teaching this week (Also, Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet--in a different class--and Shelley and Keats). In terms of urgency, then, My Name is Red automatically goes to the bottom of the pile. This makes me actually resent R&G, which would seem preposterous, except that I've already read it twice and seen it once in the last 15 months, and should look over it again tonight, instead of tucking into bed with a new marvelous beautiful novel that I really just want to read. For the first time.

On Calvino

2010-01-29T16:56:00.003-05:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that I'm teaching Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler to my undergraduate class on postmodern literature. I'm teaching it following a week of Borges stories, so it is at once a natural follow-up, and at the same time, overkill, especially for young (mostly female, in this section) readers raised on the funnel-cake-and-cotton-candy diet of Rowling, Meyers, and Sparks.

I didn't read it until I was an MA student, right after taking a narrative theory course that I loved. So the pump was primed, so to speak. And for someone who loves formal play, Calvino's novel is pure joy. The second person narration begins with a near-perfect mapping of narrated Reader and the flesh-and-blood reader, and slowly but inexorably spins into pure fictional world, ending up in the literary police state of Ataguitania. And then there is the series of ten novel beginnings the reader encounters, each one a pastiche of a literary style or even a particular author (I can pick out at least Kawabata and Marquez). Add to this winking references to perversions of the 1001 nights, ingeniously contructed mise-en-abymes (an author in the book imagines writing a book that looks exactly like the book we're reading), and some striking metaphors for reading-for-pleasure.

In fact, this last idea is the central argument for the novel: that pleasure is the one pure-and-true motive for picking up a novel. In fact, he ties reading to not only physical pleasure, but sexual pleasure throughout: sex becomes an ongoing metaphor for reading, and when it happens, reading becomes a metaphor for sex (a trope Jeannette Winterson improves upon in Written on the Body). This, of course, was the way in to the most successful lesson with this class so far. Since the Other Reader of the novel is also an ideal (and idealized reader) the frame story of the novel is something of a love plot between the Reader (you) and the Other Reader (Ludmilla), even as it is a quest narrative to find the end of one of the frame stories.

So the idea of reading for pleasure and sex for pleasure are conflated into the same plot, and of course, the novel ends (a full narrative after all) with "you" and Ludmilla married. yay, and all.

The thing is, this idealized plot is peppered all the way along with bad readers: Irnerio, the sexually ambiguous non-reader who only sees books for their value as beautiful objects; Professor Uzzi-Tuzii, the shriveled, dusty professor of a dead language who is caught up in grammar, syntax, and punctuation; the general of Ataguitania, who uses his control of access to books as a means to power; Cavedagna, the hurried little publisher who has lost the pleasure of books to the bustle of putting books together; and most disturbingly, Lotaria (a purposeful re-gendering of the Lothario, who is in it not for the love of it, but for the chase). Lotaria is Ludmilla's sister, and is as passionate about books as her sibling. But Lotaria is a ball-breaking, militant feminist, who reduces characters, settings and situations to "general concepts" (and a litany of academic jargon is inserted here). Later in the novel, she reduces writing down further, processing it electronically to garner word frequency, thereby deducing the major themes.

Now it's hardly coincidental that Calvino's book, which doesn't hold up too well to feminist scrutiny, chooses a feminist for his radical academic target. But add to this the fact that each of these bad readers is, in some ways made either sexually undesireable or sexually suspect, and the critique gets a little more vicious. The insinuation (and I might, under such a reading, be compelled to take this personally, as a somewhat sexually ambiguous, feminist, professor of literature) is that folks who read in these bad ways, are both undesireable as readers, and therefore ineligible for the pleasures of reading.

Well, harrumph.

The thing is, those students in my class, the ones who both identify as "pleasure readers"--they were the students who inevitably complained about the novel's frustrated beginnings: a string of coitus interruptus if you will. They complained that they were so frustrated with the stops and starts that had it not been for class, they'd have never finished the novel. Conversely, the students who enjoyed the novel found themselves mocked via the figures of Lotaria and Professor Uzzi-Tuzii.

I wonder whether, in much of today's reading climate, Calvino hasn't created a novel that can only (or mostly only) be loved by those it mocks, while it shuts out those readers it adulates. That is, I first read this novel for pleasure. and every time I've read it since, I derive a kind of pleasure in it. But I've also always seen my own reading practices mocked somehow.

But perhaps I am the audience. Perhaps Calvino is invoking the Lotarias and Uzzi-Tuzii's of the world, and reminding us that there is still pleasure to be had in books, not just politics, or even a livelihood. I'm not ready to renounce my politicized interpretive strategies or even my pickiness about grammar, but I do need to remind myself now and again that not every book needs to be the subject of my teaching and writing. Unfortunately, I've got enough of a backlog on that, that the pleasure reading will wait.

A Class is its Students

2010-01-29T09:22:00.002-05:00

At the beginning of every semester, I tweak the syllabus, look at the roster, check the room out beforehand, and think about which lessons will still work and which need to be revisited, or created from scratch.

And despite all of that work, how well a class goes often depends not on that immaculate preparation but the ten or twenty-five, or forty people in the room. Take for example my later British Lit survey. In the past five years, I've taught roughly 11 sections of the class. I've had some really solid ones and one or two stinkers (and even those had bright spots). But I'll admit: even after switching up some themes and texts last fall, I'm still kinda bored with the class. Evals have been very good, but have sort of plateaued off, and the occasional negative or even constructive comments I get are of the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't variety (seriously, the two lowest aggregate scoring ones said, on one hand, "more open class discussion," and the other said, "more lecture"!). The point is, I feel like I've kind of maxed out my own personal reward from the class.

Until this semester. I expected the same-old-thing, but the 27 people in the room are totally rocking it out. I didn't need to do the whole "Crazy Ol' Blake" routine, and when I started up my riff on Wordsworth's sorta self-serving and kinda arrogant criteria for the poet (Really, you think your soul is more comprehensive than mine?), the students totally stepped up and defended the entire project--using evidence from the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. I mean, that's the ideal scenario, but it's never gotten even close to happen. These folks have ideas about texts, and the backbones to express and defend them. I'm totally in love with them.

Meanwhile, my course of postmodern lit (a gen-ed) is only in its second iteration. The first one started off fairly roughly, but ended up being a lot of fun. So I made some fairly substantial modifications to the beginning of the course, and was really excited to get back into it this semester. But after the very full first day of class, and I discover that most of my students think postmodern lit is written by Stephanie Meyers, Jodi Picoult, and Nicholas Sparks. I've been pulling all of my best tricks out of the bag in the first three weeks, and I'm dying here. I got a moderately good discussion out of the conflation of reading and sex in Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night..., but I had to resort to some pretty cheap tricks to do that.

So I thought I'd have one great class, and one just-ok class this semester, and so far that's turned out to be true. But with the actual classes flipped around.

This reminds me that students themselves have a responsibility for how classes proceed. My sense is that we often enforce this with participation grades and such, and there are a variety of lesson-planning strategies built around hedging against this fact (several usefully noted in a recent post at ProfHacker). But I also want us to think about how we can convey that responsibility to our students.

One way that I do it is that when I do midterm evals, I ask students to make a column for things I can control, but also things that they can control, and then suggest that some of those suggestions will become specific criteria for class participation. But this is still a bit more whip than carrot. If you're reading, and have other ideas, I'd love to hear them. Once we've exhausted our own tactics for livening up a classroom, how do we convey to student their responsibility for doing so?

The Grad Course: Metatheatre and Metadrama

2010-01-27T16:08:00.002-05:00

In designing the graduate course I'm teaching this semester, I looked to the common themes of my favorite and most teachable plays, and the common theme is, almost invariably, texts that play formally and thematically with the boundaries between performance and reality. This is a theme that connects in an unexpected way with my research, on staged life-writing, and as a result, it's become a course in which the critical conversation is a fairly new topic of concerted study.

The curious thing is that this central idea is a fairly old one, with foundational books on the topic dating back to the 60s, but it's never been a particularly faddish scholarly line, which is to say that the history of metatheatrical criticism doesn't really feature a spike or a lull. The bad news about that is that the most ambitious students are not likely to find it professionally sexy on the front end, but since it's an MA level course (as opposed to a seminar), there are lots of ways in, in terms of the texts and the critical schools of thought that approach them.

The primary texts in the course could read like a (spotty) survey of (non-realistic drama, with a particular emphasis on the 20th c.:

Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape
Anonymous, Mankynde
Medwall, Fulgens and Lucres
Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Midsummer, Hamlet
Beaumont and Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle
Sheridan, The Critic
Villiers, The Rehearsal
Pirandello, Six Characters and the remainder of the theatre trilogy
Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Genet, The Balcony
Weiss, Marat/Sade
Gambaro, Information for Foreigners
Handke, Offending the Audience
The Performance Group, Dionysus in 69
Stoppard, R&G, Travesties
Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman
Walcott, Pantomime
Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus
Wertenbaker, Our Country's Good, Love of the Nightingale
Valdez, Zoot Suit
Churchill, Cloud 9
Schenkar, The Universal Wolf

Ultimately, my hope is to use the framework of metadrama to introduce these students to a wider range of drama than they've perhaps been exposed to, and to raise a number of other theoretical concerns through this basically formal lens. And finally, this frame is designed to get students to think about these plays as both literature and performance, a double lens with which scholars on both side of the disciplinary aisle struggle.

So far, the class has been pretty game, willing to read and think historically, theoretically, and in one case already, physically. We'll see how the rest of the semester progresses, and whether my five weeks before the 20th century material is a success.

Stretched Thin

2010-01-26T21:21:00.002-05:00

It's been a rough week. Junebug's virus has turned out to be RSV which has turned into bronchiolitis, and may have even developed into a mild case of pneumonia. There's an ear infection in there, too. So since Friday, we've been to the doctor's office four times, and again tomorrow, all of which is the alternative to admitting him into the hospital. Through it all, he's been a total champ, and as he begins to feel better (despite the somewhat labored breathing, and hideous cough) he's been super smiley, which is all the sadder with his face slightly puffy from the inflamed sinuses and coated entirely in snot and tears.

So in between the temp-taking and the oral medicine administering (we're on our second anti-biotic now) and the diffuser with albuterol vapor and blah blah blah, Willow and I are both trying to keep our semesters from falling apart. Willow, teaching comp this semester, has been in conferences this week for first papers, while I've been trying to pull together materials for texts as diverse as--seriously--Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, and finally, the pairing of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Shakespeare's The Tempest.

I've been lucky so far with forgiving classes: while the postmodernism class has needed some pulling along (half of that class cites Stephanie Meyer, Jodi Picoult or Nicholas Sparks as a favorite author), the survey class has been totally rocking my world--today students asked questions like whether Wordworth's ideal poet's "more comprehensive soul" was innate or a learned quality, and whether the democratic impulses of his poetry actually translated into a readership that included the "common man" he so valorized. But still, I've got two Renaissance plays to prep for grad students on Thursday, and the insane Jan Svankmajer film version of Faust that I may want to screen some clips of to watch in class, and a set of quizzes to grade and a another set of worksheets on Borges to collate into one usable document and...

I'm on childcare duty tomorrow, with a Doctor's appointment at 11am.

RBOC: Discombobulated edition

2010-01-23T10:36:00.002-05:00

Too many things going on, and I used up all of my coherence in the last few posts, so...

Junebug's got a wicked virus: 103+ fever, snot coming out of his nose and eyes, coughing, ear infection, raspy little voice. The smiles (when they appear) are heartbreaking.
A death in the family (an uncle with whom I was once quite close, but who had withdrawn after a long series of illnesses) meant that all five of us had to pile into the car on Thursday for the services in Nearest City (about 90 minutes away). I canceled my two undergrad classes for the day, but couldn't in good conscience cancel the grad class that evening. Which meant that after a long drive with kids, a somewhat difficult funeral, and the long drive back with the kids, I arrived on campus (without ever having set foot inside the house) with about 45 minutes until class. I was underprepared, but a save from a colleague meant that the class went fairly well, despite the very very long day.
I'm not sure if it's a good thing, but Very Good Journal asked me to do a review (right up my alley) and then asked if there was anything else I'd like to review in the future, which gave me the opportunity to chalk up another text I've been itching to do. So two book reviews in the next year? Good exposure, I guess, and book's I'd read anyway, but still.
My favorite cashmere sweater (the one Willow bought for me to wear to on-campus interviews five+ years ago) has a little moth-hole in in, right on the chest. I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad that my my nicest dress-up sweater has become my comfiest around-the-house sweater.
The twins got Kindergarten report cards on Friday. They both did great. But nobody told me that kids report cards had such an effect on their parents. Pride to be sure on this batch, but methinks I'll need to check myself in the future that I don't bring my own demands, hopes, and aspirations to my responses to future report cards...
Whither writing? Nowhere lately, but I do know I've got a lot of it to do, esp. if I want to meet the deadline that I set for myself when I sent UPress my proposal last week. I I want to ever get to one of those public intellectual projects, I'll need to finish one of those straight-up intellectual projects first...
I realized this morning that while I like smoked salmon a lot, I always wish it were prosciutto.

On the move

2010-01-20T12:33:00.004-05:00

(And now for something completely different)

This is Junebug. You've seen him before, but maybe it's been awhile since you've seen just how cute he is. I know I'm biased. I think he's the cutest baby ever, but even when I look from as objective a perspective as I can muster, you've still gotta admit that he's, like, what? Top Ten cutest, at least.

He's crawling around now, which is terrifying, but also adds to his cuteness. His is not an up-on-all-fours crawl, but something a little more makeshift: left forearm forward for locomotion, right arm out for stability, right leg pushing off for more locomotion, left leg kicking up and down kind of pointlessly for added adorability, and nice little rhythm you can dance to.

Since I began this post, he's done two laps around our home library, stopping here at the desk to smile at me beatifically at least twice (he might not have completed the second lap otherwise, but those smiles are distracting.)

Anyway, since I can't be actually working on Chapter 3 while he's awake, or, for that matter, prepping my grad course (tomorrow night's topic: metatheatricality in late medieval drama (Mankynde and Fulgens and Lucres), I might as well issue this paean to his cuteness. Or play with him. Which reminds me...

Your "Public Intellectual" Project

2010-01-19T22:52:00.003-05:00

So my last post has had me thinking about what kind of book I'd write if I were going to try to stake a claim as a "public intellectual" of the sort that Louis Menand is and his reviewers adore. A few possibilities:

Teeming: The Aesthetics and Ethics of the Arts of the Messy, Unruly, and Overabundant...This book would make a case for an aesthetic line that runs from Aristophanes through Salman Rushdie, Knight of the Burning Pestle through the films of Baz Luhrman, and from the art of Hieronymus Bosch to the joy of teaching. It would be a direct and pointed response to James Wood's wrongheaded but oft-cited essay, published in his most recent book as "Hysterical Realism" and indeed, his entire ouevre.
The Weight Room Mirror: What men are looking at in the gym...My most popular posts, likely because of the the phrase "naked men in locker rooms" are the series of posts that tried to look at my own weight loss and a gender studies approach to what I found in that process, both about my own body attitudes and the body attitudes I saw manifesting around me.
Token Male: Life among Feminists...I often joke about being the only straight (white) guy in the room at most of the conference panels I'm on...it's overstatement, to be sure, and frankly, the history of feminism doesn't need my memoir, although I do think a good book needs to be written on why men should be feminists--which is not the same as why feminism is good for men (although that could be a chapter).

So what would your "Public Intellectual" project be? What might you title it?

Liberal Arts and the Public Intellectual

2010-01-18T18:53:00.005-05:00

The usual roar of angst about the relevance of the liberal arts has not gotten louder lately, but it does seem to be taking on a particular tenor and timbre. In part based on Louis Menand's book about the professionalization of the humanities as an obstacle to creating public intellectuals, and in part based on a study done in sociology that both documents and explains a clear tendency toward liberal political affinities among humanities and social sciences scholars (h/t to Claire Potter at Tenured Radical), people doing the same job that I am doing are apparently not doing it to the satisfaction of someone else.

All of this hand-wringing in the general populace about the relevance of the liberal humanist academic to the, umm, real world is all sorts of things at once: troubling, democratic, anti-elitist, anti-intellectual, politically conservative, misinformed.

I do indeed understand the anxiety that the political middle and right have about the bias in the classroom--and of course its there, no matter how much we may hedge against our own politics. I do wonder though whether bankers, financial advisers, Army generals, CEOs of major corporations, even MBA faculty in the same institutions are as anxious about the political biases of their fields. Do we really think that those are politically balanced professions? As Gross and Fosse argue, these professions (English prof and army general and many others, too) self-select as much as anything, and I really do wonder whether the professoriate in the humanities really does have any out-sized influence: It's not like millions of conservatives didn't go through the same humanities coursework that is required in gen-ed curricula the nation over.

So whatever about political bias: I'm over it, and my tactic in the classroom is not to hide it, but rather to be crystal clear about my politics, and then invite debate. I want conservative students to speak up, and I don't try to "make examples out of them." Articulate conservative students are frequently quite persuasive in these (still infrequent) politically charged classroom moments.

But the review of Menand's book (which I hope to obtain and read soon) suggests that Menand's argument is essentially, ... Fine, the humanities are self-selecting. But the narrow band of folks who self-select academia tells us that the professionalization of the humanities has made it too insular to be healthy...

I agree and disagree. In the introduction to the co-edited collection on anti-disciplinarity (wow! in the top million in book sales! Who knew?), my co-editor and I argue that we do need to cut across the narrow disciplinary lines created by both the professionalization of and the state regulation of the academy. But we do not do so on the argument that this creates a more competitive marketplace of ideas (I so dislike the capitalist logic of that notion), but rather that doing so can better create conditions for a more politically engaged classroom space. Not the marketplace of ideas, but the town square of ideas, the speaker's corner of ideas. It's the academy as preparation for the democracy, not the market. I'm self-consciously training citizens, not consumers. And other disciplines do self-consciously train consumers, and even more pointedly, laborers. So the late-market capitalist bias functious right alongside my leftist one (though really, is teaching for democracy actually leftist?).

When we are told that English needs to better communicate its value to the job market, to the career preparation of its students, and in short, to produce better human capital, I get it. It's both a survival tactic for English, but also a cultural shift in the place of the academy, an argument made in turns cranky, troubling, and illuminating by William Chace recently in The American Scholar. But we also must assert our value in training citizens, something without a specific exchange value, but is, as the MasterCard commercials say, priceless.

While Menand [eta: rather Gideon Lewis-Kraus, the Slate reviewer of Menand's book] wants a public intellectual who functions in the public marketplace, I want (and want to become) a different kind of public intellectual: the sort who engages the public sphere of our commonly owned government and governance. And for me that starts in the classroom, and in fact demands that I be the political provocateur that I sometimes become. I will tie Wordsworth's laments in "Tintern Abbey" to arguments over mountaintop removal. I will make clear that the imperial tactics in Heart of Darkness are primarily economic, and therefore still entirely in operation today in the under-developed world. I will note the particular nature of the construction of masculinity in Tennyson, and the ways that those constructions are still rooted to our sense of nation and empire as well as leadership and achievement. These are reading tactics that help my students translate the ideas of literature into the very practical world of their own, where their votes might well hinge on their beliefs about mountaintop removal, their sense of international economic policy, or their biases against a female candidate for the highest office in the land.

Now, Menand's argument (and Chace's and to a degree Stanley Fish's in Save the World on Your own Time and in the most recent issue of Profession) rests upon decrying (depending upon the specific argument) increased specialization, disciplinary fragmentation , cultural studies inflections, politicization, and professionalization of our research and writing. I think there's a legitimate claim in here that our published work does often reach only a very tiny coterie audience, needlessly speaking a specialized language. But I think there's a lot of factors here, including the very limited demand (again, marketplace, dammit) for the work of even the most accessible of public intellectuals. The Slate review of Menand's book holds him to the highest standards, but he doesn't sell nearly as many books than the intellectually mendacious Glenn Beck, or Dan Brown, or Nicholas Sparks, or Stephanie Meyer or ... or ... or (although admittedly his Amazon rank on all of his books are higher than for my co-edited collection...so...). So how many public intellectuals can we really sustain, after all?

But to become a kind of public intellectual in the classroom, we do need ways to converse and distinguish ourselves, and sometimes this means writing to each other, to our coterie audiences. The texts I write about appear seldom on my syllabi, especially at the undergraduate level. Sure they make cameos. but I'd never dream of writing about Shakespeare in any concerted fashion, and yet I teach his work constantly in the genre classes on drama. This is its own marketplace of ideas (or idea-havers), and runs (devastatingly for most on the job market or in contingent positions) with its own cruel logic. If we add the consuming public to the machinery of that particular market, we make our demands for scholarship nigh on impossible.

But, perhaps there is something usable here, something about opening up the standards of the discipline, rather than building them up by accretion of demands. Perhaps we do need to be thinking more broadly about "what counts" not just toward tenure, but as labor. Does the demand for public intellectual production extend to activism on the local, state, or national level? Does it include op-eds or even the occasional letter to the editor? Does blogging belong in this discussion?

Or, is all of this sturm and drang another pissy set of cliches that is aimed at deflating academic egos? Does the critique amount to little more than bitching about somebody else getting paid to do something that too many people believe that a) they could do and b) isn't really work. Or alternatively (and sometimes simultaneously) that c) they were never able to do (often as students themselves) and d) weren't willing to put in the work to accomplish. There are old and mean biases against intellectual labor here, and they abound, and when cast in ideological turns, they get vicious.

But really let's be clear about some of they monetary stakes here, because money does get mentioned often. I could be making more writing cheap ad copy for computer resellers (which I got more for per hour as a part-timer during grad school than I get now per hour on a 9.5 month 40 hour work-week basis). I'm not bilking America, or my students, or the state, or parents, or anyone. I'm doing my job, which is to think, write, and teach about literature, and I do it damn well. Most of my colleagues do, too.

All of this is to say that I think that, sure, academic reform is useful in places and ways. But rarely in these zeitgeist ways that make it onto bestseller lists or into the pages of the NYT or the WSJ. I'd love to become the kind of public intellectual who writes smart books that lots of other people want to read. But even were the figure of the public intellectual to emerge more prominently at the broader cultural level, the public appetite for public intellectualism in the humanities will still staff only a handful of actual English departments. In the meantime, everywhere else there are (often underprivileged) students to teach, and a democracy that keeps on demanding a citizenry that should, after all, know how to participate.

Me and My University Bookstore

2010-01-07T14:58:00.002-05:00

Usually, I've had a perfectly functional relationship with my university bookstore. I porder my textbooks, usually on time, or very close, occasionally make a tweak or two to the booklist, and generally, the stuff is there when the semester begins.

This semester has been one message after another from the textbook coordinator, and while some of them have not been her fault, I have nonetheless am now moved to ire everytime I see her name in my inbox.

First: a major book for my grad class (admittedly over 20 years old from a smallish press) is out of print. Somehow, my department was able to get me a desk copy which I can now put on reserve, but the bookstore couldn't get it, or do anything for me. OK, fine. Monographs go out of print all the time. I can deal.

Then: A single edition play is on backorder. nevermind that it's the New Mermaids edition of The Spanish Tragedy, a text taught often enough that these contingencies should be accounted for. But. Both Amazon and another major online outlet that bears the name of the smae corporate entity that owns our campus store listed the text ass in stock and able to ship within days. And yet the textbook department couldn't lay their hands on 9 copies. Grrr.

And today: the anthology I'm using for my survey course has just gone into a new edition. Longman does this fairly often, enough to irk me, since everytime they change something, I lose things I wanted to teach without getting new ones about which I'm equally enthusiastic. I lost Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 four years ago, and have nothing of its functional equivalent in either the previous or the brand-new edition. So I ordered the old edition, thinking that surely there'd be enough copies floating around on the used market to supply my class. No dice. The bookstore has informed me that they can only procure 8 copies for my class of 40, and I've pretty much got to go to the new edition if I want the texts available by day 1. Of course, Longman has "conveniently" moved several texts to an online resource which is a pain-in-the-ass to access for me, let alone my students and has again gotten rid of a few things that I had been planning to teach. This is particularly irksome since I taught the same course last fall, and was really hoping to use the same syllabus two semesters in a row (heaven forfend!).

So now, classes start next week, public schools have been out of session 2 1/2 out of the last 4 days, and are likely out again tomorrow, and goddamn it, I've got to scramble to reconfigure my survey syllabus. Longman reps, if you're out there, I will not be adopting your anthology anymore. You revise it too damn often and cause me too much inconvenience.

New Years and Midpoints

2010-01-05T16:40:00.002-05:00

We just celebrated New Year's Day, for the calendar year, at least. We made resolutions (weight loss, finances, coffee consumption), we're making plans to fill them out, we're looking forward to 2010.

I've always loved the new year. I like to think of myself as a fairly reflective person (or narcissistic, depending on how you look at it), but the exercise of marking the passage of time is typically a way that we measure change, and ideally, something like progress (always moving forward, we are). This year I accomplished more, made more, had more fun, whatever. And if change is the unit of annual currency, we here at Chez Horace had plenty: new house, new family member, one less fuzzy family member, new school for the twins, now in kindergarten. New New New New.

But Auld Lang Syne and all, and I don't want to forget what remains true. We remain quite healthy, if a bit more sedentary from Junebug's demands. Our family situations are stable enough, and while they could be better, they could also be worse. Willow and I remain in love, we love our children, and our children (despite the occasional protestation) love us. We've got lots of friends, and we even saw some of them this year. These things were by and large true last year, and I am grateful that they remain so.

I'm sure there's a rhetoric to these annual reflections, complete with tropes: the accomplishments, the travels, the big changes, the silver linings, the resolutions. For a while I resolved not to make any resolutions (it's like my Lenten practice of giving up sacrifices). But we are these creatures, we make narratives out of events, we wrest 365 days worth of happenings into a coherent year: was it a good one? a bad one? Did we bid 2009 good riddance (facebook status updates do suggest so), do we welcome the unknown with open arms?

But instead of marking beginnings and endings, I also want to attend for a moment to middles and in-betweens. For this present moment, poised at the cusp of the old year and the new is its own thing, and while the marked time and date turn us backwards into the past even as it washes us forward to an indeterminate future, we are remiss to miss the now.

Right now, my syllabi are in process (themselves documents awash in promise of a new period of time). I like writing syllabi for the same reason I like new years: all that possibility.

Right now, the children are all falling asleep: one listening to Anne of Green Gables on cd, another thinking about his Magic Treehouse book we've been reading, the third nursing back to a quiet rest.

Right now, I am posting to this blog, an activity that I missed doing more of, and at the same time feel somewhat silly (or self-indulgent, or whatever) doing even now.

Right now, the Christmas tree remains lit in the living room, where for whatever reason, its light is a hedge against these grey, snowy days.

I risk turning into a bad Van Halen video, but my point has become (though it wasn't where I imagined going), that I have to remind myself, no matter how much I enjoy patting myself on the back for last year, or benignly deluding myself about the next one, that this space seemingly in between years (or more accurately at least, in between semesters) is at least as important as the big measurable, markable histories I might write about 2009, a year that was, well, fine.

The year in theater

2009-12-22T23:33:00.005-05:00

It's getting on time for all of those year-in-review posts. There's that little facebook app that makes pretty little graphic out of random status updates, but all it does it tell you that we sold a house, bought one, had a baby, and have been raising him and his older siblings.

With all of that personal stuff going on, it might surprise you to know that it was a fairly eventful year theatre-wise--in terms of spectatorship and scholarship. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that I taught the Theatre Tour class in the spring, followed by and intro drama course in the fall, but I thought I might do a post that gave a little tour of some of the highlights of my theatre going year.

Scholarship: I published my Equus article in the spring, and while it was sort of a one-off--the offshoot of the first theatre tour, it felt good to have it out. It felt like a substantial contribution to the discourse on that once-again-zeitgeist-y play, and at the same time was fun to research and write. I also did a long talk for Nels on pain, performance and performativity which could someday be a full article. In May, I wrote an article on documentary performances surrounding the "war on terror," this for a collection on political theatre post-9/11. After the baby was born, the writing slowed down a bit, but I pecked away at the book manuscript that was once a dissertation, something I'm still working at.

In November, I participated in the fantastic Contemporary Women Playwrights session at ASTR. For that working group, I was required to read several plays, many new to me. Highlights include Judith Thompson's amazing Palace of the End, DebbieTucker Green's gut-wrenching Stoning Mary, Rebecca Lenkiewicz's illuminating her Naked Skin, and Marina Carr's lovely yet harrowing Woman and Scarecrow.

At the moment, I'm procrastinating on revising a draft of my upcoming MLA talk on Eve Ensler, which has to be cut down to 15 minutes, which means i'm having trouble getting to my point more than a page before the time limit is up. I may not have mentioned this, but I'm not a big fan. Come to my MLA talk and you'll hear why.

Plays I saw: several at the American Shakespeare Center's Blackfriars reproduction, including Hamlet and R&G in rep. There's a sort of commonplace about doing those two together, which is that you can't really do both well together. If you cast for an excellent Hamlet there's little chance to get the madcap feeling of R&G, but if you go the comic route for R&G, you get a ridiculous Hamlet. We got the latter, with an only-OK R&G to make up for it. The other Hamlet we saw was a University production that was quite ably done...better than the ASC production by a yard. ASC's biggest success of our experience was an eye-opening production of Middleton's The Changeling which brought what I had always imagined to be a pretty salacious text to very entertaining life.

We also took a trip to DC to see three productions. The most interesting was a vibrant, messy, provocative production of Brecht's Roundheads and Peakheads which turned out to be the last weekend of the final production of Catalyst Theatre, a cutting-edge little theatre venture that was an unfortunate victim of the economic bust. My students didn't love it, but that play, hingeing as it does on an unfortunate parallel with pre-holocaust Germany, getting its predictions quite wrong and risking always a nasty potential anti-semitic echo. This production shifted away from history entirely, which is fine, but removes one of the more compelling angles to even revive the play in the first place.

We also took in Albee's A Delicate Balance at Arena, with a crackerjack cast, including Kathleen Chalfant (Wit, Angels in America) and Ellen McLaughlin (the actual Angel of Angels in America). It was a beautifully polished production, if a little soulless. It was also the setting for one of the oddest experiences I've ever had as an audience member: I had asked my students to take notes during production so that they would be able to write about them in more detail. This is something I've been doing for years, and I've never gotten so much as a sidelong glance. But several of the students had seats in the front row, right in front of a spot on the apron of the stage that was sort of an imaginary window in the fourth wall, so Chalfant often delivered her lines from this spot, as if delivering them while looking out onto her lawn.

During the second intermission, a tech came out to us, and asked my students to please put away their notebooks: they were "distracting the actors." The two students who were addressed in particular looked baffled, but they complied. And during her first monologue in the third act, sure enough, Chalfant shot a glance downward at us, and seeing that those notebooks had been stashed away, visibly relaxed.

There was, understandably, no theatregoing during the summer, and this fall my options have been limited. The one production I was looking desperately forward to, though, was a campus production of Timberlake Wertenbaker's beautiful The Love of the Nightingale. Wertenbaker, a British playwright, is not a household name in the U.S., but her lyrical body of work is, to my mind, a highlight of feminist theatre's boom in the last three decades of the 20th century (the subject of my book). I've published on this play, and when I was working for a DC theatre company during grad school, it had always been one we'd hoped to do, but cast requirements were too big, and our budget too small. Whenever I interviewed for jobs that had a directing requirement, this play was one I mentioned as a great choice for university stages. So as you can imagine, I already had a pretty clear picture of it in my head.

I required my drama students to read it, and I had gotten some reports on it during rehearsals and such. It was, of course, hardly a perfect production, and the director made some choices that found a different emphasis for the play than I would have chosen to highlight, but seeing students do good plays well always carries a charge, and that the play made an important political statement about women and violence, I was happy enough to have seen it.

So that's the year in theatre. We'll see what next year holds!

Missing Ziggy

2009-12-21T17:27:00.003-05:00

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the kidney-failure-that-was-just-fleas...to which I now sadly append -but-was-actually-also-kidney-failure. He hadn't been holding down food lately, and so we took him to the vet, where he was pronounced deeply dehydrated and in kidney failure. While heroic measures might have helped indefinitely, they might not have, might have exacerbated another shadow condition, would have cost hundreds of dollars, and might not have worked for long, we decided (hesitantly) that he had already deteriorated enough, and that letting him go much longer would not be humane. Willow and Junebug went to the vet Thursday afternoon to help him die. In true Ziggy fashion, he was angry about the whole affair (his vet file has already had a big red flag on it).

Ziggy was Willow's cat from before we met. In fact, he was one of the earliest litmus tests for my fitness as Willow's partner. One afternoon soon after we had started seeing each other, I emerged from a classroom (intro to theory as a 1st year MA student) to find Willow holding an enormous grey creature in her lap. "This is Ziggy" she said as she handed him to me. My job was to hold him in my lap as we drove ... somewhere... Ziggy was fine with me, and although he was unusually large (probably about 19 pounds then) I had grown up with large housecats, and we got along quite well. It was only much later that I learned just how protective Ziggy was of Willow, and that he rarely let men over 5' 10" get away without a hiss and a scratch.

After the twins were born, Ziggy was a self-appointed protector of our kids, and our personal gargoyle. He topped out at about 23 muscled pounds (fat, yes, but also a bear of a cat). He was down to about 10 when he died. Every moving shadow I see around the house, I expect to be him, and we're all missing him terribly.

Juggling (plus bonus Junebug update)

2009-12-14T12:52:00.003-05:00

The semester is winding down, and this scene of our family juggling act is coming to a close. Every time someone asked me how my semester was going, I was privately bemused: This semester was SO not about the semester. It was about the three days a week that I spent my mornings with Junebug.

When the semester started, Junebug was doing ok, but not wonderfully. He wasn't sleeping wellat all, and more importantly, he wasn't gaining nearly enough weight. At 3 months, he had fallen off of the bottom of the growth charts. There were aspersions cast on Willow's supply of breast milk, whispers about formula (which was fine for the twins, but which we wanted to avoid if we could), allergic reactions to the first few formula types we tried, a LOT of spit-up, and some quite sleepless night. Reflux was discussed, but because he has generally been such a laid-back, happy baby, he wasn't crying in the way that a normally collicky baby would, we weren't really focused on that too badly.

Well, about six weeks ago, we moved him to to prevacid and started him on solid food. Bingo.

He's gaining weight, sleeping a little bit better (though still not what we'd like, honestly). But at six months, he's getting ready to sit up, he's doing the beginnings of an arm-crawl, and he's cutting a tooth. Adorable, so says his dad.

In the meantime, I'm merely trying to keep up with the classes I'm teaching (which has gone, well, fine), while doing a little writing here and there. This particular ratio of work-life balance isn't going to be sustainable for long (after all, my tenure file is due in one year), but for now, it's been the right choice.

Next semester, I'm teaching a new grad course, and I need to have the bulk of this book manuscript in order to get out the door by, say, September. And as I mentioned, the tenure file must be assembled and submitted. So 2010 will look (had better look) a lot different from 2009. That's a good thing, in certain ways, but there will be a lot about this semester that I'll miss, too.

RBOC: In which a single post is a microcosm of the whole blog

2009-10-29T17:22:00.003-04:00

The trope of regret, in which I apologize for not having blogged.
The trope of political advocacy ex-post facto, in which I am happy that hate crime legislation is finally law
The theme of crazy teaching juxtapositions, in which I teach "The Waste Land" and The America Play back-to-back on the same day, not long after I did the same thing with Waiting for Godot and Heart of Darkness.
The trend of pondering ethical teaching questions, such as "when does one draw the line between sob story and actual tragedy, between reason and excuse?"
The recurring plotline of uncomfortable family moments, in which my mother has an accidental overdose resulting in hallucinations in front of the children, and also in which my father and I negotiate tacitly and ickily about patriarchal responsibility.
The typically unusual catblogging about the-kidney-failure-that-is-now-just-fleas.
The odd publication news about the collection that Amazon said was due to be released yesterday, but is still only available for pre-order.
The familiar adoration of chocolate that would likely show up as a product endorsement for this overpriced, but somehow still worth it merchant.
The ethical rumination on masculinity, football, fanhood, concussions, and a month-old post-and-discussion at Tenured Radical.
A bit of subtle gloating about getting ready to go to ASTR in two weeks, held this year in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Which is warmer than it is here.
A great deal of doting on a beautiful baby boy who is having trouble gaining weight (like both his siblings, and apparently, once, his father), but is still hitting all of his developmental marks.
Some thoughtful response to a book I have recently read for pleasure, such as my positive-but-still-ambivalent thoughts on Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Some fanboyish anticipation of a forthcoming album, like perhaps Hem's musical setting of Twelfth Night as featured in this summer's Shakespeare in the Park.
A minor rant about academic politics, probably concerning Outcomes Assessment and a fair amount of work I did last year that was not really even acknowledged when the discussion was taken up again this year.
Some rhapsody on nature, such as the beautiful leaves this season that keep making me not want to go to class, and instead take walks around town with the baby boy in the black fleece slig that sometimes lulls him to sleep.

That's what I would post, if I had time to post.

My own personal madeleines

2009-10-17T10:22:00.002-04:00

Rambunctious and I went to the farmer's market today, and picked up a bag of Winesap apples: they were locally orchard-grown, and so they didn't look like perfect grocery store apples. I immediately flashed back to a memory of picking small winesaps off of a tree at the farmhouse of a great-aunt and -uncle when I was probably not that much older than Rambunctious.

My father's family is rooted only about 2 hours away. The first ancestors helped settle that foothill town about 200 years ago, and some still farm that land today. In fact, the very first of my clan to settle in the new world put down their first homestead in what is now this very state in the 1780's. If anywhere in the country is "my people's," this is it.

It was brisk morning today, and a bit wet, so Rambo and I were a little shivery when we walked in, and we were immediately met with the warmth of the house, and a smell that made me think "Hunh, I wonder if thinking about those apples made me think of Grandma's house?" But then I realized no, it was something more specific: Willow was slow-roasting pork, my grandmother's favorite dish. That's why it smelled like her house.

It's fall in the foothills: Apples and pork shoulder on a chilly October Saturday.

Things that could, for example, be pre-ordered, or ordered by your library

2009-10-06T14:49:00.000-04:00

Well, lots of things, but the one I'm plugging is this.

Why I love October

2009-10-05T16:46:00.002-04:00

October is, far and away, my favorite month. April is a distant second, followed by May and then June (especially a temperate one). September not so much, and November is just too cold. Here then, are ten reasons why I love October:

The weather: today it was 65 and sunny. Earlier this week it was 55 and rainy. by the end of the month, we might even have a daily high in the 40s. Who cares? It's temperate, and bit brisk, even, but it's rarely really cold here in October. Perfect day for walking to campus or driving with one window down.
Teaching in October: While it may be the fat part of the semester, when the blush has worn off, and the hustle hasn't yet begun, I find that this is the time when a class really begins to define itself, and some of the best individual lessons happen. Classes are more relaxed, and discussions can be a bit more wide-ranging.
The pumpkin patch, complete with hayride and the maize maze (although I will lament that hayrides apparently no longer feature actual hay. bummer). That makes for a damn good Saturday, with kids or without.
The leaves turn. Here the have just started changing color in earnest, and will peak in about three weeks. We have three beautiful seasons and then winter here. Of the three beautiful ones, fall is the most extraordinary. I've been told that some places in this state technically could be called deciduous rain forests, which doesn't surprise me. And as we know, wet conditions mean more color. It's been a wet spring and summer here, so I'm looking forward to extraordinary foliage.
Pumpkin-spice whatever. Latte, beer, bread, pie, toast, chocolate, meat, water, milk, cardboard. You name it, pumpkin pie spices makes it better. But only in October.
Clothing: The leather jacket comes out, as does my extensive collection of sweaters (many of them in lovely argyle). In the autumn, people start dressing like grown-ups again, and so I can stop pretending I am a teenager in cargo shorts and ill-fitting t-shirts. This is a self-serving thing to love, since my love of nice clothing earns me funny looks in the summer, and no looks at all underneath the bundling of the winter. But the autumn is the time to bring out the best outfits. In fact, I'm feeling a velvet blazer day coming on.
Brunch. I don't know why, but brunches are best in the fall. Since we've moved to the new neighborhood, we've developed a friendship with two other families of new faculty members, both of whom just moved in around the corner within a month of us. We've started having brunch every weekend, and there's really nothing like a brisk morning of strong coffee, bacon, fritatas, and mimosas, with Thistle-and-Shamrock on NPR, or African Jazz on the CD player, or whatever, and sunlight pouring through the windows. And then that full, drowsy, I want-to-get-inside-and-take-a-nap feeling afterwards. Good many times of the year, best in October.
Football: College, Professional, or backyard touch. I love a good football game, despite myself.
The twins' birthday on October 30. I am looking forward to when they're in middle school and high school (really one of the only reasons I am actively looking forward to them being in middle school), and the Claycomb birthday/Halloween party becomes an annual event.
Did I mention Halloween? Since the kids were born, I haven't been able to do much myself, but any holiday involving elaborate and/or creative costuming is going to be a favorite. Some of my past best costumes: The Universe, Route 66, and an illuminated manuscript.

Daddy Time

2009-10-03T21:31:00.003-04:00

Willow and Junebug are on the West Coast, halfway through a 6-day excursion, which leaves me home with the twins during a long weekend (half day Thursday and inservice Friday for parent-teacher conferences). Everyone's been saying things like "will you be ok?" and "let us know if you need any help" and things like that, comments that, while of course well-intentioned, also reveal the differing expectations for academic mothers and fathers.

Of course I'll be ok. Rambunctious and Imperia are almost six. They play well together; they are well-behaved (if, well, rambunctious), well-adjusted, and easy to entertain. And if not, they fit nicely into a closet (I joke). So far we've had a fantastic time: playdates, the Children's Museum, soccer practice, Saturday brunch with friends.

But even this afternoon, after all the activities, and the scheduled quiet time, we were great. They played in the back yard, collecting grass clippiings for the nest they were building for the butterflies in the butterfly bush, while I cut the grass and moved some of the summer stuff into the garage.

Then we went in and they colored while I made dinner (pasta, tomatoes, limas, milk, pears), and we cleaned up the kitchen together, and they colored some more while I folded a couple of loads of laundry. Kind of what we do every night. Imperia got a little sad at bed time, missing mommy after a phone call out west, but barring that, this was a pretty average fun Saturday at Chez Horace.

BUT. I've barely thought about my teaching or scholarship since I picked the kids up on Thursday afternoon, and of course this is precisely why these distinctions get made: because so many women are doing that second-shift work, especially since female academic have those flexible schedules that are so easily and blithely carved into. That I am doing the second shift is not uncommon for our household (though admittedly, Willow typically does more of this than I do), but it always makes work-life balance difficult.

I'm in a lucky spot right now. I have almost a full year before my critical year for tenure begins, and I've already met my benchmarks for publishing, have earned a minor teaching award, have a raft of strong evals, and do more service than is good for me. I would be shocked if my tenure case at this institution posed more difficulty than simply the labor of compiling the file (no mean feat, I understand). But I was reading Earnest English, and hearing her talk about the anxietieis of new parenthood coinciding with the new demands of TT faculty life. My comments there were that it can be done and is done often, and that early baby time is the worst time to try to gauge how hard parenting will be. I did it with twins (thoughas a Dad, not a Mom), and am kind of doing it again, and it was hard, but it happened. It would've been much harder were I woman.

All of this makes me a bit more bothered by the questions, not because they assume that I can't do the job, but because so many mothers in the same scenario would not get nearly the same sympathetic concern.

OK, so this post went ina direction I didn't expect, but there it is. And now, since this is my only alone time of the day, I'm off to read for this week. It's Beckett week intro to drama, and so I have to find a way to teach 200-level non-majors how to love the wait for Godot.

I Contributed

2009-09-25T17:23:00.003-04:00

Milestone

2009-09-25T13:18:00.001-04:00

Junebug rolled over today. Next thing you know, he'll be driving my car (or I hope, Rambunctious's car).

Instant Feedback

2009-09-24T15:59:00.002-04:00

While I tend to obsess over formal course evaluations (rate me! rate me!) I do often find them of limited use, if no other reason than that they reflect the vagaries of a distinct group of students after I have finished working with that group.

And so, I have begun to put more emphasis on the midterm course evaluation, which has been creeping incrementally forward from midterm, so that I tend to administer them around week 5, when there's been enough get-to-know-you time, but there is still plenty of time to make adjustments that will really affect the workings of the classroom.

The format I use is the stop/start/continue rubric, where students make two columns on the page (one for things I can control, and one for things they can control, individually and collectively). Then they label three rows: Things they'd like to see stop happening (group work, quizzes, classroom chatter), things they'd like to see start happening (candy, more group work, even participation), things they'd like to see continue that are already working (group discussions, paper feedback, tapdancing).

I've taught 9 or 10 sections of this particular course since I've been at BRU so on the one hand, I can anticipate many of the responses (as many students say less group work as ask for more), but that frequency often breeds ossification, and so I really do need to be responsive to trends in the feedback. This semester, for example, students would prefer that we slow down with the material, and make more time for a free-form discussion. This indicates a level of comfort with and respect for their classmates' opnions that--especially with a strong group such as this one--I'm thrilled to oblige. I also picked up a significant, if not overwhelming level of anxiety about the upcoming midterm, which is easy enough to address.

What bugs me, though, and has me even a little rattled, is the response that seeks to debunk the mechanism of the midterm eval itself. I got one response that insisted that the exercise was a joke, and that I was just "getting my jollies" by finding out what class really thought of me, and that I could tell everyone by their handwriting anyway, so it wasn't even anonymous. And while yes, I could correlate handwriting if I were trying, and I do enjoy getting positive feedback, this student is missing the point. Because I will say, I've focused more on hir individual response than any of the "love this course" responses that I get.

The rhetoric of "You're the teacher; stop asking us to do your work for you" is equally troubling, because of course this student is buying into an educational model that is at once passive and at the same time consumerist: "I've paid for your labor; now do the work for me." (The response also mentioned that the close-reading quizzes were little more than bs-ing).

Sigh. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, but I can't help focusing on the one or two students who really are not responding to the work. But because the eval responses really are pretty anonymous, I'm not even sure whom to contact to check in with, nor am I sure if such a reaction would even prove worthwhile. So for now, I'll institute the tweaks to my classroom management, and hope that this person finds a way to obtain hir own education the way ze wants.

On Responding to Presumption

2009-09-17T14:37:00.004-04:00

When I dressed today, I decided I needed to wear some light clothes in bright colors to convey the opposite of the bedraggled state I was in. So when I got out of the shower, I put on a light teal button-down with some light khaki linen pants.

When I went downstairs to pack up my stuff, Willow had graciously set out some food for me to take in for lunch, though instead of the usual small brown shopping bag I often carry (and had accidentally left on campus) the food was placed in a similarly small gift bag, a tiffany-blue thing with an elegant chocolate-brown pattern.

"Hunh." I smiled, "I match my lunch bag."

On the way into campus, I stopped to get a cup of coffee, and the young lady who had just gotten her coffee at the counter, and was on her way out the door, smiled and said, "I like your little handbag."

"Oh my lunchbag? I think I gave my wife some jewelry in this, and we keep recycling it for other things."

"Oh, honey, you don't need to pretend you're married for me!"

.....

I was caught completely off guard by this, and my response as she walked out the door was, "but I really am!" My face was flushed red for the next several minutes.

I'm unnerved by this exchange for any number of reasons. The most knee-jerk response derives from the fact that people often think they can read my sexuality from my clothes and mannerisms, and presume to comment on that reading.

But my own answer to her is equally unnerving to me, because I felt it important, even imperative to disabuse her of her reading? Why had she not read me as straight? This kind of reactionary return to a compulsory heterosexuality should perhaps be more troubling to me as someone who tries to actively work against those notions as the presumption exercised by this young woman. She, at least, wasn't reading me through this compulsory lens, even if her reading was guided by a troubling set of stereotypes.

So as the day was worn on, my embarrassment has shifted from being mistaken as queer to reinforcing a kind of homophobia in my response.

Brevity

2009-09-12T19:59:00.002-04:00

is an online literary journal focusing on very short form (fewer than 750 words)creative nonfiction. Issue 31 is now available. You should totally go check it out...

Alongside work from Sherman Alexie, Brenda Miller and Ron Arias, you'll find Willow, Rambunctious, and Imperia as characters...