Yesterday I received about 90 pages worth of revised essays; today I’ll get the second half of a set of 30 research essays, which will total at least 210 pages.  On Monday I’ll collect a set of close readings, this batch totalling about 250 pages.   Then I get a miniature “vacation,” a wee hiatus before I receive the next 150 pages of essays, 80 pages of informal writing, and 80 final exams the week of May 4th.

Let’s get one thing straight:  the bald man knows how to party.

While I’m writing, a note to administrators:  the last weeks of the semester are a fairly poor time to send out surveys and sundry instruments of assessment.  I can only take them seriously to the same extent I take the Wayans  brothers seriously.

I’m actually looking forward to the reading, which becomes somewhat more magical at semester’s end because there’s absolutely no practicable way to point out grammatical errors or offer marginal commentary.  I get to view each essay as something like a capstone artifact, a snapshot of each student’s development as a reader, thinker, researcher, and writer, without fretting overmuch about the placement of quotation marks or comma splices.  It’s still a hard march–this weekend promises lovely weather, and I’ll be in one office or another, squinting and jotting–but a manageable one.  And then the semester will be behind me and I’ll be depressed, but that’s another post for another day.

If I’m a little scarce in the coming weeks, you’ll know why.  Good luck to those of you with essays, projects, and exams on tap.  I’ll see you on the flip side.

Right now, for reasons I do not care to question, it is 46 degrees in Central Michigan.  I have accordingly turned off my heat, thrown open my windows, and read “In Just-” to round out the trifecta.  That makes for a respectable Saturday morning.

The day looks fairly promising altogether, truth be told.  I’ve nearly finished grading my first batch of essays for the semester, and the writing is mighty fine so far.  I’ve also got an essay on tap that I’ve looked forward to reading, one on a topic near and dear to my heart.  I’m terribly curious to see how the subject was treated, and the same holds true for the student-led class discussions we’ll kick off in the coming week.  On Monday we’ll dip into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in my survey of British literature, and the week’s work in my Stephen King seminar involves both ethical questions (the breadbox in my wheelhouse) and a breather day as we slide from Night Shift into Different Seasons.  After that we’ve got Cycle of the Werewolf, and after that, spring break.  This semester is blazing by.

It might just be the springtime friskiness talking, but I’m also preparing for a major sea change in my writing life.  Although I’ll undoubtedly continue my obsessive habit of jotting down short story ideas on the 418 yellow pads that litter my office and my apartment, the coming year will properly be devoted to verse and scholarship.  I’ve got one long-gestating article (the inescapable Charlotte Smith piece) I’ll need to finish off, and I’ve also been encouraged to submit to a new collection–encouragement that happened to coincide with the rediscovery of some perfectly suitable notes on Defoe.  Those two pieces and some summer work with peeps in CMU’s Honors and McNair Scholars programs should fill up my daylight hours pretty well, daily trips to the gym notwithstanding. 

All carnival-quality antics aside, my nights will be devoted to finishing the manuscript of a full-blown poetry collection.  To turn the existential screws I plan to apply for a summer grant that will cover the costs of production and contest submission, and in a self-reflexive way my readiness to do so would seem to confirm my readiness to round out the collection itself.  I likes my reasoning like I likes my cookies:  soft and vaguely circular.

And with that, I’m off.  I have a longer post on the writing life a-brewing in my skull, but I’ll save it for a more wintry day.

Have I dropped a little Beckett on you?  Oh yes, it seems I have.

Today will involve advanced tricksiness, as I’ve still got to find some magical way to systematize thirteen very different essay exams.  I’ve managed to put two classes to bed for ‘08, so I have a bit of leisure to dwell on the matter.  At the moment I am accordingly dwellin’ like a felon, and presumably I’ll find some way to sort it out during tomorrow morning’s read-through.   11th-hour statistical epiphanies are my specialty.

After that, endingness.  I’d have a hard time drumming up two thoughts to rub together right now, so I may need to lapse into offseason mode sooner rather than later.  I wouldn’t characterize the past semester as an especially stressful one (the skool biz actually passed with unprecedented speed), but my noggin’s been sodden for the past month or so.  The ol’ squash remains unduly generative, mind you–whilst proctoring exams, I covered two notebook pages with sketches and snapshots and outlines of poems and stories–but execution?  Well, that’s another matter.

I don’t see the point in blogging at length about the stuff that’s weighing on my mind.  We’ve been down that road twice or thrice before.  Besides, I know folks heading to MLA, folks applying to grad school, and folks with tenure and promotion decisions pending who have much better reasons to be stressed out than me.  Ergo, I reckon I should be devoting my thoughts to prospection rather than retrospection or introspection.  Lord knows I’ve mucked around in my skull more than enough this fall.

In the short term I’ve got courses to plot, which should make for some quality mayhem.  I also may wind up returning to poetry sooner rather than later, since I feel as though I’d best pluck a few ideas before they become overripe.  I’ve still got 33 outstanding submission packets out there in circulation, so I think it’s high time to put some new verse in the hopper.  The spring submission scrum is drawing nigh, and a few publishers offered me extremely kind and encouraging words to close out the fall.  Let’s hope I can live up to that kindness.

The holidays are rough on me, however, because they leave me with an inordinate amount of time to fill.  Most folks would thrive under similar circumstances–or would at least vegetate like champeens–but I require a modicum of structure to make my days pass by.  I’ve got the next week roughly scripted, but after that I enter a great Abyss of Self-Determination.  If I don’t have a plan in place by then, I’ll founder like a $14 rowboat. 

In the short term, at least, I’ll allow myself to bask in yet another semester of gainful employment and the knowledge that I probably didn’t ruin too many young lives with book-larnin’.

Then I think I’ll need to get to gettin’ whilst the gettin’s good.

Well, here I am on the day of my first final exam and I just caught up with my grading for the semester thus far about 45 minutes ago.  That either makes me a banana slug drunk on molasses or a ninja of the space-time continuum.  In any case, it’s certainly not the worst place to be–100 more exams and I can call it a year.  (I figure I’ll spend the last three weeks of December sleeping.)

The break looks pretty promising.  I’ve got a story to wrap up and a couple more shorties on deck, and then I think it will be poetry o’clock.   At some point I’ll need to touch base with established poets regarding the process of preparing and submitting a book-length manuscript, which strikes me as a pleasing prospect as well.  (And if established poets happen to be reading along, an intervention may be in order.)  I also have a computer upgrade on tap in the near future, one that should allow me to run some mighty fine recreational programs to help me while away my odd hours.  This, too, is a nifty thing, since the temptation to drive to New York and give dozens of cable programming directors fat lips is pretty strong.  Seriously, if the best way they can think to work through off-season hours is with marathons of Storm Chasers, MANswers, or video countdowns originally aired in 2002, they’ve got fat lips coming.

What preoccupies me today, however, is a loss:  my formal interaction with the folks in my Romantic Poetry and Prose seminar ends on the morrow.  I’m a wistful kid by nature, and my memory is populated with all sorts of recollections that those involved have long forgotten, but one doesn’t come across like classes like this one too often.  When I do, I hate to see them end.

I should say up front that mine is a fairly traditional student-centered pedagogy, but one that entails any number of contingent risks.  My job, as I understand it,  is to guide the ship out of the port and then let students take the wheel.  I might describe other ports of call, footnote various discoveries (“That is not a mermaid; that is a manatee wearing a feather boa”), and offer conventional assessments of the constellations that we spot along the way, but I try not to refer to my charts too often.  For students who like more directive, prescriptive classes, my approach to communal discourse can be maddening, and some literally freak out when afforded too much freedom.  It takes a certain combination of personalities to concede to the inevitable drifting of the ship and a measure of collective faith in an arrival that will justify the journey.  I teach, of course, the kinds of classes I thrived in when I was a whelp, but like any approach it’s not attuned to every learner.

This section of 439 fireflied.  It’s my homely version of lightning in a bottle, an understanding that describes causes and consequences a little more accurately.  Lightning in a bottle gives too much credit to the person holding the bottle, and most of the time it amounts to nothing more than dumb luck.  Fireflies in a mayonnaise jar, however, strikes me as somewhat more apt–especially since I’m the kind of prof who prefers to keep the lid off. 

I remember walking through the dark with a jar of fireflies when I was a kid.  I didn’t want them to suffocate, so I would just lay one hand over the top with my fingers spread.  It never seemed like they were generating enough light, but it was always just enough for me to see my way.  Some were brighter than others, some lit up more often, and some kept a kind of weak glow going.  I might have spent a few tense seconds in darkness now and again, but after awhile I developed the necessary faith.  I knew the light was coming back.

Since I’m feeling all metaphorical today, I should note that a jar full of fireflies is just enough to steer you through the woods.  Hold it up in front of your face and you won’t get lashed in the eye with pine branches; hold it down low and you won’t trip over protruding roots.  It takes a little practice to navigate with it, and if you let them drift in and out of the jar as they please, chances are good that you’ll be left in the dark before long.  This time around, however, they kept each other company, and while they probably weren’t entirely sure where the guy carrying the jar was going, they never let that jar go dark.

As a prof, I wonder how rare those experiences are from a student’s perspective.  Group dynamics and chemistry tend to carry the day, and off the top of my head I can’t recall a single comparable experience in my own undergraduate career.  Sure, I had plenty of classes with good friends, and from time to time we would shoulder loads for one another, but it’s not often that you come across a bona fide collective effort, even in graduate school. 

Now that I’m old and wizened, I get around in the dark by myself pretty well;  I quite like it, actually.  Even so, there’s nothing quite like having a jar full of fireflies, if only for a while.  I’m sorry to see them go, and I’m sentimental enough to hope they’ll remember the work of reliable light long after they’ve forgotten the jar was ever there.