After a wild and woolly week I believe I’m officially ready to settle into the summer. I had exam sessions back-to-back-to-back on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; made a visit to Kalamazoo on Thursday/Friday/Saturday; and spent the remainder of Saturday cleaning up stately Wandless Manor. The coming week will be devoted to recalibrating my cranium for the festivities ahead, so to get ready I’m closing out the business of 2008-09, at least insofar as doing so is possible with a couple of lingering exams and Monday meetings left to go.
I gave my mother a holiday call a few moments ago, which is perhaps not the treat it ought to be. She’s bedridden and speaks with the help of a wheezing machine, so hearing her above the hisses and clicks and beeps of her hospital room is always a bit tricksy. I managed to navigate the nurses’ station, at least, which was hit or miss at her prior extended care residence, and I hope she has a visitor or two left on tap to spruce up her day. I have a healthy faith in little things; let’s hope she does too.
The formal work of the semester is just about finished. I’ve got one exam on hand left to grade and another coming in tomorrow or Tuesday. I’ve done the rest of the obligatory math, so the wrap-up will be painless. As always, I’ve got a bit of a post-semester hangover, although my variation on that theme always reminds me of the wrap party that followed a performance of Vaclav Havel’s The Memorandum long ago (I was the prop master, naturally, lest you suspect me of getting in touch with my inner Garrick). There’s a bit of exhaustion, a bit of relief, a bit of self-evaluation, and a bit of wistfulness, and this semester that last term seems to be governing. I had three solid sessions this spring, with an especially bright batch of Honors students and some of my favorite repeat customers in my Studies in Authors class. I’m sad to see them go, as always, but that’s the nature of this particular beastie.
The summer will feature a couple of novel wrinkles in addition to those plans I’ve already mentioned in this space. I’ll be supervising the senior project of a McNair scholar, which I’m very much looking forward to. I sat in on the program’s research symposium last week, and all the youngsters are working on pretty nifty stuff. What strikes me about my scholar’s work, however, is that he’s wading into an exceedingly bloody field, tackling one of its hoariest questions, and approaching the process descriptively rather than with a pat batch of anticipated outcomes. I’m curious to see what he comes up with.
I’ll also be supervising an independent study during the second summer session, an eleventh-hour commitment I picked up this past Wednesday. Few things elicit the sympathy of an otherwise ornery bald man like the plight of a student forced to go door to door during exam week to find a project advisor. The student in question was in the last act of her carefully scripted five-year plan, but she learned that she had been booted from a summer course at another university despite going to great lengths to secure permission to take it months ago. Accordingly, I’m teaching a miniature virtual symposium on Jeanette Winterson when July comes around. Some eighteenth-century specialist I’ve turned out to be.
Speaking of specialists, I had the chance to hang out with one of my bosom chums at the International Congress on Medieval Studies this weekend, an annual roadshow that brings a genuinely interesting batch of scholars up Michigan way. In the past I’ve approached conferences with a grim goal orientation; most of those I would choose to attend occur during the central stretch of the spring semester, so I feel obliged to get in, get out, and get back to teaching. Next time around, however, I hope to set aside enough time for a nice dilatory dawdle; those medievalists are masterful merrymakers (and in Kalamazoo, no less), and I’m pretty sure I need to see more of the pop culture and eighteenth-century peeps than can be witnessed on the airport shuttle.
I hope the coming weeks will feature much more bona fide commentary on poetry, as I’ll be entering the thick of the manuscripting process. Today, however, there will be napping and ice cream, perhaps at the same time.
