The Care of the Self

Sorry, Foucauldians:  you’ll learn nothing powerful/knowledgeable from me.  Go buy the book.

Today I find myself possessed of that rarest of professorial commodities:  free time in mid-November.  As I’ve mentioned in the past few posts, obligations rain down hot and heavy past the mid-semester mark.  In addition to all the usual work of reading, grading, and class preparation–all of which become more challenging in the second half, as students become more disenchanted and/or more desperate and require additional attention and energy–I’ve found my days gummed up with the business of governance.  The English Department is in the midst of its triennial program review, and my committee responsibilities have multiplied like pre-moistened Mogwai.  I pride myself on foresight, so the onrush of obligations seldom catches me flat-footed; even so, it can be hard to remain abreast of all the developments that a semester might bring to bear.

The past several days have been grindstone-intensive:  on Saturday I graded 45 exams, on Sunday I graded 20 senior capstone essays, and the past three days have been devoted exclusively to program review, which is something of a mystery to all parties concerned.  I was entrusted with compiling and interpreting assessment data for our baccalaureate concentration in creative writing, a task that involved more mystery and imagination than I care to admit.  Natheless, after a timely consult with the chair of the department (who was handling the same questions at the M.A. level), I was able to churn on through and file away the papers yesterday.  For good measure I spent last evening reading Chabon’s The Final Solution, which I teach next week.  When it comes to getting stuff done, I’m something of a show-off.

What’s somewhat interesting to me (at least this morning, as the caffeine starts to kick in) is the sacrifices academics  and students make–the corners we feel obliged to cut–as we head into the last leg.  One of my colleagues recently lamented the necessity of skipping her morning yoga class so that she could tackle the last of her grading; another posted on Facebook that she would be foregoing trips to the gym until she had the chance to wade through a batch of essays.  On Friday mornings I normally meet with an extra-shiny student to talk shop about an ongoing project, but she’s fallen into something of a slump, almost certainly a consequence of her attempt to juggle several writing-intensive classes and grad school applications.  Still another student has a project proposal for a spring independent study pending, a proposal she’s set aside in order to wrangle paperwork that will allow her to teach abroad next fall.  There’s a reason we get so frazzled at semester’s end, a reason we need the time off that mercifully arrives during the holiday and summer seasons.  Academic obligations have a way of sprawling, of occupying every minute we’re willing to give them, and once we’ve set the bar for our best attempt we tend to slough off the superfluities in our lives:  the acts and habits that bring us pleasure or contentment as we limp toward December.  They seem like weight we can’t afford to carry.

In the past I’ve accepted the inevitability of the same pattern, but this semester I’m committed to fighting that practical gravity as much as I can.  Admittedly, my R&R probably isn’t very restful or recreative when judged by human standards, but I still save space to indulge in my therapeutic nerdery.  More importantly, I’ve worked determinedly to take the critical second step:  resisting the guilt and regret that attends such “wasted” time.  Most teachers find themselves squeezed between a self-inflicted Scylla and Charybdis:  some experience guilt for falling short of self-imposed standards (trying to return all work to students within seven days, for instance), while some simply surrender to the inevitability of failure and stop trying to meet the deadlines they set in happier times.   What’s doubly tragic, however, is that both groups forsake their sources of pleasure and contentment along the way, the former in the attempt to create the time they feel they need, the latter because that sense of failure fouls their enjoyment with a corollary shame.  Pushing past that part of the process represents a real challenge, especially if one is prone (as I often am) to an exaggerated sense of accountability.

We’ll see if I feel the same way at semester’s end, but right now the choices I’ve made feel positively (if inversely)  Rochesterian:  the time I’ve taken to gratify my appetites, such as they are, has generally kept me perky and productive when it comes time to tuck in to those stacks of books and essays.

Am I looking forward to the holiday break?  Sure and begorrah.  But I feel much less apprehensive about the condition I’ll be in when it arrives than I normally do at this time of year.

Zombies!

Today, brevity, as anything that smacks of non-essential recreation must be knocked out before 7:45am.  It’s going to be that kind of weekend.

Zombies, seriocomically enough, occur in my dream life as an exceedingly versatile, recurrent symbol.  Once upon a time they figured primarily in terms of insatiable predation:  they would descend upon me in the usual droves, and it didn’t require much interpretive work to appreciate after the fact what the menace most certainly meant.  Sometimes the zombies served as stand-ins for folks who wanted things of me that I was loath to yield, and sometimes they embodied the piles of paper I needed to push.  In general terms they represented too much of a muchness, swarms and hordes of shambling abstractions hemming me in or closing upon me.  My dream life consisted largely of  fighting and flight, the exhausting–and always futile–effort to resist or escape.

What’s fascinating to me nowadays about my periodic visits to Zombieland  is a finicky shift in focus:  rather than zeroing in exclusively on the descent of the undead, I find myself more often than not enjoying the benefits of a divided mind, one that monitors the menace but also tends to question how I found myself in dire circumstantial straits.  Last night, for instance, I was part of a group of four survivors flying through the streets of a beachside resort town.  I was keeping an eye out for defensible positions along the boardwalk as well as spots where we might change direction to elude pursuit as our undead friends assembled and began to give chase, but the group I was with–foolishly, I knew–turned toward the shore itself.  Not only were we bogged down in the sand in plain sight of our pursuers, we were also headed directly for a raised platform beneath an outcropping of rock; in accordance with the usual dream logic, that outcropping became the underside of an overpass, and the beach itself became a barren expanse of sand.  What was certain, in any case, is that we were purposely, determinedly going to corner ourselves.  I knew the move could only be a prelude to our doom, but our progress made me powerless to oppose it.

There’s no time to assign blame when you’re furiously defending the edges of your chosen refuge, but even as I was kicking and shoving the clambering corpses from the lip of the platform, watching their numbers swell on the sand, I was mostly thinking about my companions, about my decision to go along with them, about the prospects of escape if I spotted an opening wide enough to strike out on my own.  Self-sacrifice is never less appealing than when it promises to get you eaten.

Dreams are always useful, the crucible in which we get to test our intentions and sensibilities under pressure and duress.  I just wish that dreams like these could last long enough for me to see the consequence of the choices I might otherwise make, the courses of action I might otherwise take.

That Which We Are, We Are

At the moment I should be fleshing out a book order for my Spring 2010 session of Popular Culture in America, but instead I am blogging.  This is because I have my priorities straight.

The past few weeks have been unduly frustrating, and I think I have identified the primary reason why:  other people, as it turns out, are not very much like me.  While such manifest difference ought to be reckoned a win for all parties involved–even my tolerance for me has its limits–I cannot help but wish at times that the folks I know were just a smidgen more Wandlessian when it counts.  I have many, many, many faults (some theorists would contend that I have all of them, and I would be hard pressed to refute them), but one thing cannot be denied:  the Bald Man gets stuff done.

I am not opposed to committees, procedures, debates, and negotiations, but when the time comes to act, one ought to act. Moreover, I also believe only one rule ought to apply in those two most common cases of commission:  doing what one says one will do, and doing what one ought to do.  These are not mysteries of expression or discretion; one does not need a focus group or decision tree to sanction or second a promise.  Even mathematicians, most of whom are lunatics, would agree that obligation = obligation, duty =  duty.  I’m nutty for semiotics, and I’m down with the arbitrariness of signification, but I believe a certain pragmatism ought to come into play when we tell a colleague or a student that we’ll handle some bit of needful business (or when some bit of needful-if-unwelcome business is thrust upon us).  Performative utterance trumps the tricksiest linguistic legerdemain.

The coming spring will ring in a number of changes for me on both personal and professional fronts.  At the level of university service I’ll be faced with nearly total turnover:  I am currently involved in the work of  five separate committees, and my membership in four will lapse at semester’s end.  My decision to sign on for a second tour (or to pick up other work in other places) will depend on whether or not I can reconcile my sense of duty with my constitutional ruthlessness, a strong will to work that doesn’t brook delays or deferrals especially well.

Potentially tenured, possibly promoted, and freed from the constraints of committee?  If you asked me to make my May decisions today, I don’t know that my essential self would make you feel too welcome.

Polymaths and Aftermaths

One of the worst things a teacher can do at October’s end, in my learned opinion, is look at the calendar.  Nothing good can ever come of it.

The past week was an odd one.  In defiance of science I’ve been harboring a nice, steady fever of about 101, yet without any pesky symptoms to tell me what might be going down.   I didn’t let it interfere with my days and ways to any meaningful degree (I did avoid taking part in more social interaction than usual, which is not saying much), but the prevalence of illness in the vicinity nixed a number of normal functions.  That allowed me to take Friday off and take in a movie, and the coming week promises to be comparably idle, with only Wednesday and Friday meetings added to my usual work.  When November arrives, however, it looks like an all-out sprint from the first to the thirtieth, which should find me (and most everyone associated with CMU) limping into December, assuming the swine flu doesn’t fell us all beforehand.

What’s fairly fascinating about the current state of affairs, however, is just how far it extends beyond my usual ken.  The weekend found me designing an Honors course for Fall 2010, for example, a study of cultural duality that will oblige me to trespass on a wide variety of disciplinary territories.  It should be a hoot and a half, and I’ve already designed some really engaging activities to get students thinking critically about doubles and doppelgangers, but I feel like a bit of a poacher in prepping my plans.  In the coming weeks I’ll also be taking part in the English Department’s program review, an assessment of the curriculum we need to perform every three years.  Although I’m a true blue Brit-lit guy, I’ve been entrusted with reviewing the assessment portion of our undergraduate concentration in creative writing.  There’s  only one person in our entire department who’s actually equipped to comment meaningfully on the ways assessment has changed in our creative writing division over the past few years, but since he’s tackling the M.A. program, I reckon I’m the best they could get in a pinch.

Moreover, what promised to be a staid spring has become increasingly complex in the past couple of weeks.  I really enjoy and value teaching in a variety of contexts, but January will find me–our 18th-century British fiction specialist–taking up Studies in American Popular Culture and Masterpieces of Ancient Literature.  Both can be brought into my wheelhouse with a little imagination…but new constraints make those adjustments a little tricksy.  I would normally use an organizing theme in the pop culture course that veers toward the Gothic, but the early edition of the class roster features quite a few students who’ve already taken my Stephen King course and my senior seminar (which has a month-long Gothic component); ergo, I’ll have to reach down deep into my bag of tricks to give them something new.  I picked up the Masterpieces class to fill the gap left by our Classicist, who retired in the spring; I’ve got a respectable grounding in the Greeks and Romans thanks to the reading needed to address Neoclassicism, and a traditional olde skool focus seemed like an equitable way to organize the course.  In a nifty twist, however, one of my seniors (who plans to go on to doctoral school, possibly in Classics) asked to sign on as a teaching assistant, so I’m accordingly intent on designing a course in collaboration with her, one that will address her personal and pre-professional interests.  Rather than leaning on the Homers and Virgils of the world as I’d planned, I’m now taking a long look-see at The Tale of Genji, The Bhagavad Gita, and other texts well outside my normal range.  I’ve got a course release in the spring, but something tells me much of that “free time” is already committed.

In the short term I reckon I probably ought to attend to the business of tomorrow, but the next couple of months will either find me becoming very knowledgeable about many things or else retreating to my grotto, waiting for next autumn to come.

Reading Readings

The academic life is fraught with horrors–fraught I say!–and none more unnerving than the Monday night class.

I kid, I kid; everyone knows that Wednesday night class is where we keep the horror.  Monday night classes are, in contrast, the bomb-diggity.  You heard me:  the bomb-diggity, with a hyphen.  The batch of students I’ve got this semester for my film class is fantastic, and we’ve had no trouble whatsoever sustaining a high level of discourse for four frickin’ hours each Monday evening.  My sole regret, alas and alack, is that our creative writing folks kicked off a new Monday night reading series this semester, and I’m something of a junkie when it comes to watching others get their read on.

I’ve given academic papers before, of course, and I’ve even read some of my speculative fiction to a smallish audience.  Poetry, however, strikes me as a different beastie, especially when it comes to explication and delivery.  Our resident poets, Robert Fanning and Jeffrey Bean, are peas in a pod when it comes to their convivial camaraderie, but they tackle the act of reading quite differently.  Fanning’s style involves an earnestness that translates into kinetic emphasis:  he alternately draws himself erect and relaxes as he reads,  leaning and and weaving, tempering rhythms and inflections to match the tenor of the verse.  That tenor is at once declamatory and conspiratorial–an interesting auditory effect that’s tough to pin down.  Bean, in contrast, has a much more limber delivery, his voice naturally supple, his reading style level and measured.  You can discern a difference between his reading and his speaking voices, but that departure involves deliberation and weight rather than volume or velocity.  Bean also offers a greater variety of contextual content between selections, content that takes on a jovial tone no matter the tenor of the verse.  That commentary yields some extremely interesting complementary and contrapuntal effects–again, a tough quantity to pin down.

I hope to deliver readings of my own somewhere down the line, which might very well require me to develop something slightly more compelling than the murmur I use to rehearse my verse, mighty microphones notwithstanding.  I’d like to see a wider sample of styles and approaches before I do, however, so here’s to hoping next spring’s schedule is somewhat more congenial to my oratorical ambitions.

Chronicle of a Faceplant Foretold

It started on Friday.

I woke, as I always do, around 4:30am.  I cannot explain this particular habit, so let’s just let it slide.  By 4:45 I had my protein shake in hand and was answering student e-mails; by 5:15 I had dipped into the batch of exams that I had to grade.  My process for grading exams, alas, is time consuming in the most obsessive-compulsive way:  I score the objective questions separately, read all the essays to get some sense of their overall complexion (which can be an enormous evaluative help if I’ve asked students to furnish me with three examples of some phenomenon, for instance, and the majority have only tendered two), then read through essays once again to make deductions and offer comments.  I finished up the first essay read-through by about 9:00, just in time to get to my 9:30 meeting.

The meeting of ETAC (our excellence in teaching award committee) went merrily; it’s much warmer and more convivial than it was last year, for some reason, although we seem a bit more collectively contentious.  The challenge of the committee is finding some way to evaluate all faculty on a level playing field across disciplines, which involves complex questions of eligibility and assessment.  We managed to wrangle with the central question of the day for the full session (we see our charge as a mandate to reward recent teaching, so we had to decide how far back to gather information on those whose teaching appointments involve sabbaticals, administrative leave, summer terms, and related obligations), but we committed some provisional answers to paper and went merrily on our way.

At 10:45 I took a very early lunch at the local sandwich dispensary, where I pored over seven Master Course Syllabi, the guiding documents we use to shape our program for the sake of curricular rigor.  Much of our work involves procedural paper-pushing (we must update our syllabi with fresh bibliographies and standardized prereqs every three years, for example), but we’re also charged with doing a great deal of curricular steering–evaluating new course proposals (of which we had two), refining assignment structures, weeding out old courses, and thinking about the prospects of the department in the long term.  I was at lunch until 12:30 or so, then I returned to campus, answered more e-mail, and settled in for the day’s second round of meetings.

The general department meeting went smoothly, more or less.  We had an especially slippery initiative on the table–the question of whether or not we should offer our composition battery online, and how–and that concern took up the better part of the 90-minute session.  I’m reading some thoughts from one of the meeting’s more vocal commentators right now as I type this, and he consolidates many of the procedural concerns that were raised along the way.   As soon as the session wrapped up, I settled in for my third round, a meeting of the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, the one charged with steering the program and setting its parameters.  Our work involves a fascinating dynamic, as we have to consider curricular documents both at the microscopic level (mending and amending language to the point of needful nitpickery) and at an overarching level of curricular concern.  We only made it through about four of our nine documents, which is about par for the course.  We wrapped up at 5:00–this on my “day off.”

At 5:45 (after a quickie dinner) I reread the proem and Book I of The Faerie Queene, which I’ll teach today.  That was about all I could manage at day’s end.  I had an invitation to a game night fiesta, but I had a pretty good sense of the condition I would be in (especially given what I thought was the onset of a cold, and may still be).  Hopefully I’ll have the chance to make it up to the hostess somewhere down the road, but the Bald Man is a Working Man.

Saturday I woke, as I always do, around 4:30.  Protein shake, e-mail, etc.  Then I started hammering out manuscript submissions for the second phase of the first-book contest season.  Even after a coffee break (the local caffeine dispensary doesn’t open till 9:00, and it was mobbed with Homecoming customers) I was still a bit fuzzy in the forebrain, so the process involved a great deal of double- and triple-checking before I could seal the envelopes.  Natheless, by 1:00 I was at the post office, mailing out the second batch.  That should hold me in good stead until December, which is not a bad place to be.

Next up was a deliberate skim of A Nightmare on Main Street, which I read in August and I’ll be teaching this week as part of a segment on the Gothic in my senior seminar.  A friend of mine recommended the text, and I hope my students find the author’s argument as provocative as I do.  Happily, the first segment of the case lends itself to group work (of a kind I can design to help along those who didn’t get a head start thanks to Homecoming hijinks), so I have my Tuesday and Thursday classes more or less scripted.  The rest of the day was spent designing a new PowerPoint for my film and literature class, reading two more sections of The Faerie Queene for Wednesday’s session of the survey, and dosing on coffee once again to attend to the multiple choice questions on my exam.  I wrapped up at 7:30 and watched The Wrestler.

Sunday, 4:30:  protein drink, e-mail, laundry, grocery store.  I graded a half dozen exams in the early going, then turned my attention to the revision of a Master Course Syllabus for our Introduction to Literary Analysis class.  The task was one I assumed half-voluntarily:  our Public Relations committee expressed a desire to integrate a Career Services component formally into the course (it’s our gateway course for English majors, and we’d like them to get a little vocational guidance at the beginning and end of their curricular careers), and so I pilfered the syllabus from our principal literary theorist and laid in.  The syllabus is a document of Bygone Days, well before a number of new curricular initiatives were implemented, so I had to bring it in line with  new imperatives, spruce up the language, and rejigger the bibliography from top to bottom.   I was torn between the usual impulses–to completely reimagine the course and its place in our curriculum or simply to spitshine it for the sake of the necessary paper-pushing.   I reckon I split the difference.  Took me a good long time, though, especially since I was tasked with picking out books to represent the contours of contemporary literary criticism in three pages or less.

At about 12:30 I broke for a long lunch and answered a half dozen emails, and the rest of the day was devoted to polishing off my exams from the survey class (about 50, all told).  I wrapped up at 7:15.

This morning–despite my protein shake and coffee break–I feel just about as spry as you’d expect.  I already braced the 30-degree weather and trundled off to the gym at 6:15, which makes me feel a little bit better for not braving the Homecoming crowds and hitting the gym on Saturday.  At the end of the day (and I teach until 8:00), something tells me I have a pretty spectacular king-sized mattress faceplant in store.

Is there a moral to this story?  None whatsoever.  I offer the post, however, as a general, gentle reflection on the candy-colored conception of the princely professorial five-hour work week.

The Perils of PowerPoint

I’ve been a delinquent blogger of late, as you’ve probably noticed.  This semester is filthy with commitments, most of them time-consuming, and as a result the odd hours I might devote to these jottings have become a little more elusive.  I’m also trying to weed out some of the more narcissistic navel-gazery (avid and/or obsessive compulsive readers may notice that I’ve begun to delete some of my eldern posts), and let’s face it–that make up 85% of my schtick.

Today, however, I’ll wax pedagogical.  Part of the reason this semester has involved a heavier expense of time is that I’ve been preparing more durable teaching resources for my own use.  I am more diligent than efficient, for example, and every semester finds me rereading the staples of the British literature survey from start to finish; this fall, however, I took the time to develop a complete annotated outline for Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, one that I hope will spare me some redundancy further down the road.  Moreover, I’ve been working with PowerPoint much more often, developing two or three presentations each week to a) supplement my lesson plans and b) furnish myself with durable goods I might turn to a variety of purposes.  PP is a fairly limber tool, and while I know many folks who are much more savvy than I am when it comes to finessing the tech, the program has allowed me to satisfy visual learners and reinforce key concepts without changing the complexion of my classes overmuch.

The chief virtue of PP for my teaching is its versatility.  I have a pretty good memory for what I’ve done and where I’ve done it, so I can often swap slides in and out of presentations, arrange them differently, and update or adjust them depending on the approach I want to take to a given course.  It’s not exactly cutting edge stuff, but it does the kind of work I need it to do.  PP also allows me to make concepts simple and vivid.  Alongside a definition for metanarrative, for example, I might include an image of Itchy and Scratchy; if I want to point out a key moment of intertextuality in a movie like Behind the Mask, I can simply jump in, snap a screenshot, and add it to the mix.  I like being able to strike a balance between the exemplary and the indicative.  Having seen one specimen of the phenomenon I’m rambling on about, students this semester have picked up on parallel cases much more readily.  Now that I’ve got a few practice PowerPoints under my belt, I’ve also got a pretty good sense of the pragmatics and pacing involved.  I find it useful to spend time refining definitions to fit into a box beside an image, and students who would never ask me to repeat something I said in a lecture won’t hesitate to ask me to leave a slide up for another minute or two.  That’s a significant win in my book, since I’m an improviser who can’t always read collective cues that indicate I’m moving too quickly.  Any technology that compensates for that weakness is a game-changer.

At the same time, of course, I’m also working out the kinks in my practice.  Over the weekend, for example, I spent far too much time preparing a primer for a segment on the Gothic.  I try to balance images and words evenly, and it’s no mean feat to find an image that somehow represents the ineffable or a clean image that can stand in for the perverse.  I found myself winding down various rabbit holes, trying to devise the needful connection that would complement the text.  What should have taken me 90 minutes took me three hours.

In terms of classroom practice, I’m also trying not to be That Guy.  There’s a prof in our building whose teaching consists almost entirely of PowerPoints, but his approach is exceedingly austere:  he might add in a few transitional comments, but for the most part he just trots out slide after slide after slide, checking in with the class to see if they’re keeping pace.  I reckon it’s effective as a way of disseminating material–his students are diligent and disciplined, trained in scanning, panning and penning–but that kind of experience makes the classroom dynamic stiff and stilted.  I value interactive learning, and PP presentations sometimes make me feel as though I’m spinning my wheels, efficient though they may be.

For similar reasons, my habit of offering live, improvisational commentary tends to complicate the process.  Students intent on recording definitions of concepts word for word tend to belong to two parties:  those who would really rather not account for the complementary glosses, and those whose efforts to account for both the glosses and the items on the slide leaves them discombobulated.  Since the virtue of the traditional PP slide is elegant compression, definitions and ideas boiled down to their most essential form, I like to expand, exemplify, and otherwise expatiate while students are taking notes.  I have no problem ceding the stage to the image on the screen, but I think it’s crucial to furnish students with explanatory,  interpretive, critical comments on the fly.  There’s a balance to be struck, but I have yet to strike it.

As a final, long-term concern, I’ll throw out the prospect of stagnation.  I skim our student newspaper every now and again, and from its pages you would gather that tenure is the Devil:  the moment a prof has job security, he starts mailing it in, recycling lesson plans for thirty-odd years while sipping cognac, enjoying summers off, and killing time until retirement.  I’m unduly amused by that funhouse-mirror version of the professorial life, but I can envision a world in which it becomes increasingly easy to lean on old lectures and presentations.  Some knowledge, of course, is durable and useful–the most vocal commentators even seem to resent the fact that a History prof might recycle names and dates from semester to semester–but English folk have the wherewithal to work with canned plans, especially if they are doing specialized research that doesn’t translate well into the classroom and need to buy some library time.  Back when I was a whelp, I’d sometimes see a teacher break out yellowed notes, and while the information they offered was invariably useful, I had a pretty good sense that I’d have to cover some ground on my own to get a more current rendering of trends and tendencies.

That will do for today; Utopia awaits.

The Synergy Twist

Looking at the calendar once the fall is well and truly underway tends to disorient me:  here we are, more than a month in to the semester’s proceedings and I feel as though we’ve barely scratched the surface.  Students may feel a bit differently, I reckon–once the autumn starts to gobble up their time like Langoliers, the corner-cutting begins in good earnest–but I always feel as though more could be squeezed in, pause enough for dilatory discussion, leisurely assessment, and deep critique.  The good news, at least, is that I’m one of those folks that feels as though teaching ought to inform research, and as a result the gears of my mental machinery have been spinning for weeks.  More on that in a moment.

As a bit of advice for folks new to the classroom, consider engineering a little tactical overlap in your plans for any given semester.  Some seasons won’t allow it–in the spring I’ll be teaching Studies in American Popular Culture and Masterpieces of Ancient Literature, and never the twain shall meet–but most will give you the chance to create some suggestive synergy.  I’m teaching Beowulf in all three of my classes (in the British literature survey, in film and literature, and as a touchstone for reading Grendel in senior seminar), and I think my ability to articulate some of the critical possibilities has improved as a result.  Looking at the poem formally, socioculturally, and semiotically by turns has obliged me to break out a variety of lenses, to sharpen distinctions, to commit to paper the separate trajectories.  What I gain in reading time I probably lose in planning, but those pedagogical scripts are much more cogent and coherent as a result.

What’s been even more useful, however, is the sifting, shifting, and twisting, holding the stories up to the light and turning them around, evaluating them in terms of my overarching critical concerns.  While students often experience the semester as a mad scramble, a dash from September to December, for me these sixteen weeks represent a chance to table other concerns and really think about what it is I do and why I do it.  Like most folks with a need for tweed, I have a “take,” an idiosyncratic sense of how literature works; the semester allows me to test and tweak that take, to revise and refine it based on new readings and new responses in the classroom.  Better yet, when I’m obliged to strip it down for students, to get at the nitty-gritties of my approach without all the technical set dressing that academic writing requires, I have the chance to take a hard look at its accuracy, its integrity, its heuristic possibility.  There are times when that experience is a kick in the teeth, when a tiny flaw I perceived at the fringes of my vision looms up large and mars the critical picture.  At other times–like now, for instance–I come away with conviction:  not perfect certainty, of course, but a confidence that my case can be made, that it possesses a commonsensical dimension that supports layers of subsequent sophistication.

I devoted much of my summer to creative work and procedural paperwork.  I think I’m ready, however, to take down my white whale.

Dial “M” for Monday

Last night when I went to bed there was mischief afoot in the neighborhood.  Someone somehow summoned the thunder, and I fell asleep to the sound of rumbling not unlike the genuine article.  I don’t think that any fireworks were scheduled or any fusillades of cannon fire were meant to accompany local sporting events (our teams consist of Oilers and/or Chippewas, not Pirates), so I can only guess that rowdy dwarves were bowling in their underground kingdom.  That’s as far as the empirical method will take me today.

Today is Zero Hour for submission of reappointment/tenure/promotion dossiers, so perhaps the collective beating of breasts and gnashing of teeth was the culprit.  I filed mine a couple weeks ago, but it’s hard not to feel pangs of sympathetic anxiety for those who are racing to beat the deadline.  The dossier is (or at least can be) a monster, representing the work of 1-6 years in a form that must be legible to folks outside the discipline, and it also involves a healthy measure of savvy salesmanship.  It’s hard to know what really sells, of course, and folklore varies enough to treble the mystery.  All I know for sure is that the personnel peeps are fond of my color-coded index tabs; what they see when they look at my credentials is anybody’s guess.

The week promises to be a bit on the sluggish side.  In my British literature survey we’re tackling Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is a jaunty read but one I cover annually.  I’ve got new material on tap in my senior seminar–Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Robert Coover’s Briar Rose–both of which may or may not oblige me to introduce some wiggedy new conceptual tools.  I’d rather just chew on the texts and see how the class responds, but I heart me some wiggedy.  And in my film and literature class we’re only going to have time for a screening of the Zeffirelli Hamlet, since I want to adjourn class early enough to that the gaggle of Broadcast Arts folks can go see Trey Parker.  Despite my devilish machinations I myself won’t be able to attend:  a few students asked if they could use the freed up time to come speak with me about papers and projects, and I would be King of the Hypocrites if I stood in the way of foresight and planning.  At least I’ll be back home in time for pro wrasslin’.

The good news, such as it is, is that I’ve already scripted these classes for this week and can get a running start on the next.  I used my weekend to finalize two more first-book contest submissions, put together a proposal for a new Honors course, and plot out some research and teaching prospects for spring and next fall.  The present tense is not my friend, even if I feel obliged to drag my feet a bit as I wait for various outcomes on which my plans depend.  All I can do in the short term is create time and space, and that’s what I do best.

This particular Monday, however, may involve some plodding and nodding, espresso notwithstanding.  The rain isn’t helping, nor is the scriptedness of today’s events.  I reckon I’ll slink onto campus as late as possible, both to avoid the frenzy of the dossier crunch and also to loaf and laze as much as I can beforehand.  New projects are a-brewin’, and I reckon I need more time for them to percolate.

Meanderings

As is so often the case once the semester is underway, I am posting out of a sense of obligation, not as the result of inspiration.  Kindly temper your expectations accordingly.

This semester, alas, is filthy with meetings.  While some are a pleasure–I get to meet with an Honors student every Friday to discuss an ongoing volume of short stories, for example–most involve the usual procedural drudgery.  Don’t get me wrong:  I’m more than happy to shoulder my share of the load.  Stylistically, however, I am the most practical of pragmatists.  I like to get stuff done, and committee activity does not often lend itself to my bull-rush approach to bureaucracy.  Seeing a weekly calendar stretched thin with meetings accordingly makes me cry on the inside, and this fall there’s not much for me to do but keep my head down and soldier on.  The good news is that most of my obligations lapse at the end of the spring term (I signed on to quite a few two-year commitments two years ago), so I have a new window of self-selection to look forward to.  Right now I think my response will be e) none of the above, but we’ll see how I feel in May.

Through some fortuitous happenstance, next week looks quite kindly.  We’ll be looking at The Bloody Chamber and Briar Rose in my senior seminar, my British literature survey will be working on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and my film and literature class will be screening the Zeffirelli Hamlet (Trey Parker is giving a talk on campus next Monday, and I would be a real jerk if I denied the bevy of Broadcast and Cinematic Arts majors a chance to go see him).  If I’m wily–and you know that I am–I’ll be able to use the time to get ahead for the following week.  When the grading tsunami hits, I’ll be ready.

I’ve also been looking ahead a bit, toward some pleasing prospects at the end of the road.  I had originally planned to reward myself if I managed to meet three summer goals (completing the collection, filing my tenure dossier, and losing about twenty pounds), but the money I’d set aside for the purpose was spent on my trip to New Hampshire o’er Labor Day weekend.  I’ve still got some extra funds in reserve, however, so I’m thinking about some year-end incentives–tenured, promoted, published, or otherwise.  I’m only willing to play out the requisite cathexis so long.  I’ve also been giving more thought to home ownership and, as a necessary corollary, critter adoption.  The former promises all the usual thrills and spills:  if you hop on over to realtor.com, plunk in my zip code (48858), and take a gander at the lower end of the price range, you’ll see that a little money buys a whole lotta house round here.  I’ve lived in quite a few college towns, and for various reasons (the assumption that most folks in the vicinity were university employees, for example, or the assumption that some buyers at Auburn would be willing to fork over a premium for a second home close to the football stadium–I am not kidding about this) the prices were always quite steep.  Around here, however, I can get an unbelievably appointed home ten miles away from work for next to nothing, or I can pay about the same for a more modest home within walking distance of campus.  I’m not used to having those kinds of choices, but I’m ready to take the plunge.

Critter adoption will come with its own set of complexities.  I’m down with dogs and cats and most furred folk of the field, so I’m open to a variety of possibilities.  Most of the folks I know have adopted two pets so that their critters will always have company, and I’m also leaning that way even though I was raised in a single-critter household.  The single-critter arrangement has the advantage of codependent camaraderie; in my experience a wee solo beastie tends to be more affectionate, and my zany professorial lifestyle affords me with plenty of time at home.  I’ll have the wherewithal to adopt a gaggle if I’m so inclined, however, and I reckon that’s the kindlier thing to do.  Figuring out the dynamics, alas, might be a sticking point.

These are the things that preoccupy me on an idle Thursday morning; you can’t say I didn’t warn you.