33 1/3

I don't think I blogged my birthday this year (although I commented at Dr. Crazy's about our shared Jesus Year). But something potential more momentous, numerically speaking, passed last Wednesday, around 4:22pm...

33 1/3 years...a third of a century.

Not that much in the grand scheme, is it?

Emptying, Filling

Two unrelated things are on my mind right now:

1) The 300 level class that started out so exciting and compelling has slowed considerably: we are experiencing something like semester-fatigue. A heavy reading and writing load seems to have burned out many students, and several including a couple of my best, are dropping like flies--four have withdrawn and three others have simply stopped coming. The rest are not doing the reading regularly. They had a paper due on Monday, but for today all that was due was a short story and a short essay by Salman Rushdie, and getting people to answer even the simplest questions was like pulling teeth. So how do you jump-start a flagging class like this? Carrot or stick?

2) Registration for Spring semester is starting, and enrollment numbers in undergraduate courses are almost-ridiculous-looking: 1/20, 3/40 etc. But the graduate course I'm teaching in the spring? 14/15! I'm almost full for January and its still October. No pressure or anything!

No, Really, I'm not on the Job Market

I didn't even think this was a question, until the other day, I got an email from my advisor, which said, basically, "If you're applying for Job X, let me know, because I have some contacts there." Now Job X is essentially a lateral move: in a medium-small city with a thriving theatre scene, as opposed to the overgrown small town with very little theatre that currently houses us, but also further away by six hours from my family.

But I was curious...had I missed something when skimming the ad? So I went back and looked at it. Yeah I would've been very good for the position when I was on the market, and yeah it would be nice to be in a more metropolitan area with some real live theatre. But I didn't think it was worth the hassle of uprooting again.

But what's this? this listing that came up just above Job X? The one I had missed? The perfect job description in a part of the country that I'd give my left ear to live in? The one near some family and friends we don't get to see enough of? The one on...oh...the west coast.

Willow and I had a long talk last night and we decided that while I would've salivated over this job a couple of years ago, now is just not the right time to go, and the west coast, while very. very. appealing, is just not an option. I am not going on the market for either of these jobs.

I am breathing a small sigh of relief, but the what-ifs remain.

"Parsley" and autumn

One of my colleagues, a brilliant scholar and highly esteemed teacher, too, sent an email out early in the semester asking if a few people would be willing to pop into class at seemingly random times throughout the semester and read a poem of their choosing. The poem was designed to go with the reading in question, but not too well. The course was early American Lit, and the poem that I chose was Rita Dove's "Parsley" to go with William Wells Brown's The Escape.

The poem, if you don't know it, is about Dominican general Rafael Trujillo's rumored genocide of black Haitian cane workers in 1937, based on their (in)ability to pronounce the word "perejil" (or parsley) correctly. While her linguistics may be a little shaky, Dove suggests ways that the mispronunciation of the word, connected to class, race, and nation played out. (You can hear the poet read and speak about the poem here.)

Today, I went in and read the poem to the class, wearing a grass-green shirt to match the constant references to green and spring and growth that counter the persistent death images in the poem, a tension that a couple of students brought up. The exercise was fantastic, and it was really great to go in and spend 20 minutes with someone else's class to read and talk about a poem that I have loved since I discovered it as an undergrad (right when Dove was named Poet Laureate). There was a complete absence of pressure to get to a specific point with the discussion, and plenty of time to blend the reasons I love the poem, both critical (its formal precision, its historical rootedness, its dueling senses of the arbitrariness and consequentiality of language) and uncritical (my god, that green, than rhythm, the beauty of that poem about cruel, useless death).

The second part of the poem occurs in "fall, when thoughts turn / to love and death," while the general's green parrot sits in his cage "coy as a widow, practising / spring."

I'm thinking about our autumn here, and a beautiful, amazing thing that's been going on in our back yard. Of course it's been hot here, but the diminished sunshine means the leaves are starting to turn and fall just the same. A week or so ago, I planted a stand of new grass along our back patio, which had been currently rimmed with a two-feet border of lava rock. I dug up the rock, laid down some top soil, and raked in the handfuls of tiny grass seed, and have been watering the dark soil since.

Last Saturday, the grass shoots popped up. Where the dirt had seemed bare the night before, it was now teeming with tiny fragile shoots, green as a parrot, green as spring. The other thing that had happened overnight: a wind had blown through, scattering the backyard with drying and dying leaves.

Hope shoots up, frail and vulnerable, even while the world dies around it.

Linens in October

One advantage of being a clothes-horse:

On those days, in October, when it's supposed to be a crisp 65, but instead, it's 90, and your windowless office which hasn't had air-conditioning in 2 weeks, it's nice to be able to choose between the tweed jacket an wool scarf on the one hand, and a light linen shirt and linen pants. Because today, even jeans and a button-down would be oppressive.

(Soon, though. Soon. Actual fall weather: something to console me as I wade through huge unending piles of work...London Theatre Tour prep, grading out the wazzoo, prepping a new grad course for the fall, two major committees, a collection project to edit and an introduction to write, three novels that I haven't read closely recently to teach, a house to clean, recommendations to write, book orders to place, and miles to go before...oh, you know. Your head is probably exploding too.)

Proud

Something happened to Willow tonight that would make almost anyone proud...

Henry Louis Gates Jr. (yes, that one) said to her, based on a story of hers that won a contest he recently judged: "You are going to be a star."

I want him to to tell me I'll be star!

Le sigh. But she probably will be. (grin)

In unrelated news...

Frustrating

It's frustrating when a student plagiarizes, by copying directly from the web.

Its more frustrating when some of it is the student's writing (13 words/55), some paraphrased very closely (12 words/55), and some of it is verbatim (30/55), leaving room for a little nagging doubt.

It's really frustrating when the assignment for which the student submitted a plagiarized response is merely a discussion question exercise.

It's really really frustrating when the student's explanation that the evidence is "merely coincidence," and then later that the coincidence could be explained by having studied the book in high school.

I meet with the student tomorrow to provide an opportunity to rethink the denial. I'll be ready. I wish I didn't have to be.