At last, by not-especially-popular demand, the post the ladies have all been waiting for:  The Bald Man Compatibility Quiz; or, Why I Remain Single, Part 114 of 114!!!

This is, as Serious Cat will confirm, a very serious quiz.  There’s a scoring system involved and tiered results and everything.  It’s just like Cosmopolitan, except not very cosmopolitan.  That’s how we protect ourselves from copyright infringement.

You can take the quiz today, and I’ll post the scoring system when the weekend comes around.  You’ll have to wait until next week to find where you fall in the bald man compatibility continuum.  Can you handle the suspense?  I sure can’t!

Without further ado, the most quizzical quiz you ever will see:

1.  Given your druthers, which of the following would you take to the annual fall ice cream social/sock hop?

            a. Westley

            b. Vizzini

            c. Fezzik

            d. Inigo

2.  You are the figurative cheese to the bald man’s metaphorical macaroni.  Which variety are you?

            a. gouda

            b. cheddar

            c. pepperjack

            d. brie

3. You are mackin’ in the back seat (or possibly the trunk) of your Daihatsu.  Which of the following songs is on the radio, setting the mood for your smoocheration?

            a. “Tubular Bells”

            b. “Peanut Butter Jelly Time”

            c. “Conjunction Junction”

            d. “The Linus and Lucy Rag”

4.  You discover the bald man’s reasonably unhealthy attraction to mimes.  You accordingly spend much of your quality time…

            a. trapped inside imaginary boxes

            b. climbing imaginary ladders

            c. walking against imaginary wind

            d. leaning against imaginary walls

5.  Based on your karmic performance in this lifetime, you will most likely be reincarnated as…

            a. desulforudis audaxviator

            b. mapusaurus roseae

            c. najash rionegrina

            d. helarctos malayanus

6.  The bald man, as we all know, is unnervingly androgynous.  From which gender-inappropriate cartoon character have you learned the most precious life lessons?

            a. Funshine Bear

            b. Ookla the Mok

            c. Barbapapa

            d. Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living

7.  The bald man is, as you might expect, a roller derby aficionado.  Which of the following bitchin’ roller derby names would you most wish to claim as your own?

            a. Abra Cadaver

            b. Clownsnack

            c. Eva Destruction

            d. Sadie Masochist

8.  Much to the chagrin of native speakers of English, the bald man makes up roughly 54% of all the words he uses.  Which of the following portmanteau words would you most wish to claim as your own?

            a. ouroborobotic

            b. ampersandwich

            c. curlicubicle

            d. nonsensual

9.  The bald man, as you may have noticed, refers to himself in the third-person with appalling regularity.  What would you choose as your own third-person nom de diablerie?

            a. the wiggedy minx

            b. the muscatel jezebel

            c. the woebegone amazon

            d. the tricksy vixen

10.  You just finished the Bald Man Compatibility Quiz!  How do you feel?

            a. squishy

            b. bewigginsed

            c. woozy

            d. reprobate

That’s it!  Tune in next time (“next time” here meaning one representative point in a possible future, not necessarily the very next time) for the results!

Today’s festive search phrase used to find my blog:  “ploys used to earn affection.”  Ah, they know me so well.

Not much to write about of late, as I’ve been busily chipping away at a story (my fiction mojo is a little rusty, and the shift from verse has been slow going), designing diabolical exams, scripting new course content for my Romanticism class, and trying to figure out exactly what I’m doing on the committee which I chair.  Add in the heightened hostilities between the faculty association and the administration up here and you have a delightful high-stress, low-productivity environment.  Right now I’m setting the bar for personal expectations pretty low.

I’m generally rhinocerine when it comes to the slings and arrows of administrators, angry alumni, and unsympathetic students; I can’t blame them for having reservations about the prospect of a labor action, especially given the economy in general and the Michigan economy in particular.  What is sort of frustrating, however, is the rapid devolution of the bargaining process into something like the idiocy of partisan politics.  Of late the administration has taken to stating its case in the local newspapers, yet in stating that case they’ve focused on a distorted representation of facts rather than allowing the fiscal concerns to stand on their own merits.  Recently, for example, the university’s public spokesman noted that negotiations had broken off after 50 fruitless bargaining sessions.  It might be worth noting, however, that 45 of those sessions were used to resolve contractual concerns unrelated to finances–the administration stepped away from the bargaining table immediately after the discussion turned to money.  Some of our students were savvy enough to point out that disparity, but the folks in the front office seem intent on playing such reindeer games at the level of public relations rather than bargaining seriously.  By the same token (and I’m working from memory here, as my internet connection has flickered out at the moment), the university alleges that the faculty demands will cost $30 million over the course of the next three years.  What they neglect to mention is that a) the numbers cited represent the faculty association’s initial bargaining position–if you’ve ever bargained, you might recognize that first figure as the one you expect to be talked down from as you work toward a tweener term–and b) were they only to maintain our contract exactly as it is right now, they’d be paying about $20 million over the next three years anyway.  Throw out the striking figure, their wisdom seems to suggest, and you can polarize folks who aren’t quite clever enough to press past that first impression.  That would be a terribly useful practice if public opinion had a real bearing on negotiations, but I think that’s not an especially smart war to wage.  Even were the entire student body aligned against the faculty (and a healthy percentage seem to think the faculty is in the right), the folks in the faculty association seem more than willing to lose the popularity contest for the sake of a fair contract.  Assuming that the education of students is somewhere among the university’s top five priorities, I would guess that recruiting and retaining a strong faculty might be somewhat important.

Perhaps the only thing more frustrating than that policy of selective representation is the kind of language being used to discuss the financial bailout plans being bandied about on Capitol Hill.  I watched some CNN from my perch on the elliptical machine today, and the congressmen they spoke to all offered essentially the same message:  “What’s going on here is sooper-complicated, so you kids out there had best not worry your little heads about it; just take for granted that we’re doing what’s best for you, even if you can’t see the good in it.”   While they cannot be explicit about the benefits and probable outcomes, it seems, they’ve managed to be surprisingly graphic when it comes to portraying the scorched-earth devastation that will follow if we don’t foot the bill.  The funny part is that the motives for the bailout are actually pretty easy to understand–Laura Tyson  on The Rachel Maddow Show did a mighty fine job of laying out the premises in layman’s terms.  Even if you don’t agree with the response, there’s a rationale to be had and I think folks deserve to have it.  Of course, the folks on Capitol Hill are far more concerned about making sure that this historic intervention is called a “rescue,” not a bailout, than communicating the impulse behind the decisions in the offing.

I had plans to make a thematic connection to the language of poetry, but I’ve managed to depress myself.  I’m off to read Mary Robinson’s poem about a kid abandoned in the woods when thugs killed his mother.  I’m sure that will cheer me up.

If you handed me a mug and told me it was full of “autumnal froth,” I would totally drink it.  I cannot help but think this will someday be my undoing.

I’ve had a reasonably busy week, which is why I’ve been a bit of a posting delinquent.  I must admit, however, that I’m enjoying this particular flavor of busy.  Last September I was devoting a ludicrous amount of time to class preparation; I had the moderately absurd notion in my head that I could anticipate just about every vagary of conversation that might occur in three classes.  I’ve been logging quite a bit of time this year for prep as well, but said prep has added more meaningful, concerted content.  Moreover, I’ve also tried to be more welcoming and accommodating of classroom surprises, and my students are so sharp that they deliver one or more in just about every session.  All I really have to do sometimes is show up and look pretty.  I have my uses, after all.

In a fairly freakish surprise, I’m also excited about this semester’s committee work.  No, I haven’t been drinking.  Well, maybe a little wiggedy fizz.

Two of my committee responsibilities (Excellence in Teaching and Honors) involve dispensing awards and scholarships.  That, I think you’ll agree, is pretty swell.  I’m also a member of the Grievance Committee inside the College of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences, which might be the best possible introduction to the ins and outs of CMU’s approach to policy.  I’ll be on the happy side of the desk for one or two hiring committees, and I’m chairing our departmental public relations committee, which has a number of interesting and valuable programs on tap.  By the end of the year we’ll have produced some tangible results–programs for students, programs for alumni, a renovated website–and concrete goals of that nature tend to keep me on task.  I’m unsurprisingly anxious about being the chair, but some of my favorite folks in the department are also on the committee.  Odds are I’ll stumble, but I don’t think I can fall too far.

It’s also been an interesting week in verse for me.  I received a rejection notice for poems I sent out just last Monday, which is a surprisingly quick turnaround, and I also received a very kindly rejection notice for work I mailed out in Septmber 2006.  Rejection, as you might expect, is not innately festive, but I appreciate it when editors respond with alacrity (as in the former case) or consideration (as in the latter).  I also draw a bit of reassurance from knowing that a) I did not flub the postage and b) my record-keeping is reasonably sound.

In better news still, I received my first (he said optimistically) acceptance notice of the academic year; it’s especially nice when that happens about a week before the business of 2007-08 officially comes to a close (we turn in our summary reappointment files on September 22nd).  More jaunty still is the fact that I was on the cusp of including the poem in a new set of submissions to be mailed out in the next couple of weeks, which would have obliged me to send out a cavalcade of hasty withdrawal notices.  At year’s end I always feel a little deflated, as though the work of the prior academic session must be relegated to the past, leaving me empty-handed in the present.  That was especially true during this long, quiet summer.  A little good news, however, is enough to buoy me up and get me thinking in the future tense, which is something like my natural habitat (spatiotemporally speaking).  Another poem from the same set has made it through the initial review stage of another journal, so my hopes have a more concrete form than usual.  I have a good attitude about concrete.

This weekend I think a little R&R is in order.  I’ve done about 80% of the prep for next week’s classes, and I’ve even addressed and stamped envelopes for my next set of submissions.  I’ve got to return to short fiction soon, but I think that the next couple days will afford me the chance to reconsider some older verse before the clock strikes fall.

Today, a confession:  I am not what I profess to be.   Oh no, dear Reader–I recline upon a throne of lies.  Deep down inside, in my heart of hearts, where I keep all the artefacts of secret shame, I have hoarded up the ugliest of truths.  I am probably a Romanticist. 

Let this expiate!

This week I begin teaching Romantic poetry and prose, and I freely admit that I love this stuff far too well.  I purposely chose my area of specialization (British literature of the long eighteenth century, 1660-1820) because it would allow me to poach willy-nilly on territories I coveted (John Milton, Jane Austen) and let me annex the entire Romantic era when no one was paying attention.  Left unattended in the shopping cart of life, I will pilfer your Frankenberry.  Better still, I would get to teach and talk about the Romantics–maybe even read them for pleasure–without the attendant obligation of a-pickin’ and a-parsin’ them for the sake of publication.  The serpent, as they say, was subtil.

Such a confession may be leavened by the fact that I really love eighteenth-century literature as well.  This might be why I’m still single:  I’m literarily promiscuous and afraid of periodic commitment. 

We’re beginning our course work in Romanticism with a bit of prefatory context:  we’ll be reading Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” followed by Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and “The Progress of Poesy.”  I was rereading “Vanity” today, and I can’t think of a poem that could more perfectly serve my turn in setting the tone for the course.  Johnson, as always, is so perfectly reasonable, even if that reason leads him through a maze of disappointments to an act of transcendent submission.  He surrenders to the sentiments of the poem in a way that rivals the Romantics at their best. 

The longer I read and think and write about the eighteenth century, the more I can feel the opulence, even decadence of its poetry and prose, the way Dryden and Pope and Johnson and Richardson and Fielding luxuriate in language.  There’s something satisfyingly rational about the work as well, a real commitment to truth and transparency, even when the poet must scald his subject with satire or cage it within a latticework of diamond-hard couplets.  I’m learning to appreciate the Romantics in much the same way–their attempts to illuminate the concerns of civic life, to peel away the rind of reason and squeeze the pulp between their fingers, to write the rose and write the thorn.

I’ve botched many a decision in my day, but of all the careers and all the areas of specialization I might have chosen, none could suit me better. 

But watch out, Tennyson; I’m coming for you next.

First, to throw the celebrity hunters off the scent:  Ed Begley, Jr.  Let that be a lesson to you.

Today promises to be an odd one, as (one last round of grading aside) I have finished the last of my heavy lifting for the summer session, all wild variables in my life have been domesticated, and all cathexes have been momentarily discharged.  A pint of Ben and Jerry’s cheesecake brownie ice cream aside, I have essentially flatlined in terms of human aspiration, ambition, and desire.  And said pint is already in my freezer, so we’re talking about a fairly achievable dream, assuming I have clean spoons.

Had I written yesterday, you would have been regaled with my thoughts on dating, relationships, and the opposite sex.  It would not have gone well, and I thus opted to write a final exam instead.  I think we’re all feeling pretty good about that decision right about now.

In the course of a conversation yesterday, however, I discovered that one of my creative habits–one that I assumed must be common practice–might not be so shopworn as I imagined.  Accordingly, I thought I might actually attempt something useful here for a change.  I told you this would be an odd bloggin’ day.

The practice in question is the creative equivalent of cold fusion, a tactic that capitalizes on the associative habits of my mind.  On Thursday afternoon a few of my survey students stopped by to ask for help in refining their topics for close readings.  In three out of four cases, said students presented me with either/or scenarios:  they’d considered writing about one topic or another, but they felt like they might be leaving some of their best insights on the table if they made the wrong commitment.  In all three cases I recommended a have cake/eat cake approach, encouraging them to reorient the framework of the original idea to accommodate all the insights they had on tap.  The initial syntheses looked a little bit unwieldy, but it put the students in the preferable position of a-pickin’ and a-trimmin’ rather than trying desperately to stretch a slender idea out to fill the frame.  The process might seem a little counterintuitive from a pedagogical standpoint, since ideally close readings will involve the meticulous excavation of a small plot, but these three writers had already done the right kind of digging and just needed a bigger display case to present what they found.

As I’ve mentioned before, my creative process involves snatching flickerings and fulminations from the firefight inside my head.  Catching ideas on the fly, of course, is sometimes not enough:  those thoughts are often insular and involuted, limited in scope and intention, good for a few lines or (as I’ve lately come to realize) a couple hundred words of flash fiction.  Rather than committing those notions to paper right away, fleshing out a form or a narrative around them, I prefer to let them set for a spell.  That gestative period lets me know if the idea is substantial, substantive, and self-sufficient–if it will amount to a complete story or poem all by its lonesome.

When I suspect that’s not the case, I toss it back in the hopper along with all the other ideas that seem somehow incomplete.  While I’m not a big fan of forced juxtaposition, splicing ideas together capriciously to create freaky hybrids (that’s what  we have science for, people), I believe that much of the work writers do is subconscious, that the answers they generate sometimes connect to questions they haven’t yet asked.  When I sift back through the ideas I’ve generated for stories and poems (and no, I don’t know how to tell them apart), I often find destinations waiting for their journeys, monsters waiting for their makers, effects waiting for causes.  More often than not it’s only a matter of moments before I discern an unnoticed affinity, and then I’m off to the races.

For speculative fiction, this approach can be an enormous asset:  if a writer manages to surprise himself by fusing two formerly unrelated ideas together, odds are he’s going to surprise the reader as well.  Verse tends to require greater delicacy, lest the reader feel that the writer is mixing metaphors or shifting gears too suddenly, yet I find that revealing those hidden affinities can surprise and delight in much the same way.

I hope that’s of some use to someone, somewhere.   As always, your mileage may vary.

I’ve attempted to be a diligent critter for the past several days, reading ahead and scripting lesson plans for next week so I’d have time enough this weekend to grade exams and essays.  Along the way, however, tension mounted:  there were many volatile topics I wanted to blog about, but I couldn’t find time to put pixels to page.  As a result I’ve got all sorts of nettlesome notions careening around my noggin, some of which have been colorized by the Wachowski brothers, all of which I suspect are unhealthy.  Accordingly, today we purge.  Feel my (yellow) bile!

*Democrats:  I don’t know where to begin.  Maybe with the superdelegates, who could have made all of today’s ridiculous haggling totally moot but would rather sit on the fence until either Clinton or Obama promises them milk and cookies?  The folks who now shrilly proclaim that Michigan and Florida primary votes must be counted as-is, else voters will feel disenfranchised and cry on the inside like clowns do…never mind that counting them as-is will disenfranchise a bunch of other folks?  All the folks threatening to vote McCain and/or take their ball and go home if the decision doesn’t go their way?  Seriously, I expect to hear circus music playing every time I see Nancy Pelosi on the teevee.

*The NBA:  If you would really like all the talk of conspiracies, set-ups, and preferred outcomes to secure better ratings to die down, perhaps you could stage a game that looks like it was called fairly. On a related note, demanding to talk to Tim Donaghy, the dirty referee, after he’s been sentenced?  Where I come from, we call prison a “disincentive.”  Our dictionaries are notoriously ambiguous.

*Yard sale critters:  Pull your minivans off the road.  Off the road.  The opposite of “on.”  That off.

*Farmers:  You are not always on the farm.  You will be able to tell because cars will be behind you, in front of you, and sometimes to the side.  You accordingly cannot pull over to talk to interesting pedestrians as you might in your own driveway, nor can you wave people past you into oncoming traffic.  You just don’t have that kind of juice.

*Dunkin Donuts:  Seriously?

*Pfleger, Wright, Parsley, Hagee, et al: What part of “spiritual leader” don’t you understand?

*Catholic church:  Female priests?  Excommunicated.  Pedophiles?  Reassigned.  I do not feel the need to expand on this.

*Gay marriage advocates:  This really puts the kibosh on my plans to marry Portia de Rossi.  You are off my Christmas card list.

*Reviewers of Sex and the City:  There are many things you may do, but you may not praise the film for its “gritty realism.”  It is not The Wire.  And Entertainment Weekly guy who likes watching the show for its insight into the feminine psyche?  You’d be better off watching Flava of Love for dating advice.

*My cohort:  Despite all indications to the contrary, this is not a reenactment of And Then There Were None (see here for details).  You are creeping me out, and not in the good way.

*Lucy van Pelt:  She knows what she did.  Love the hair, though.