This weekend promises to be leisurely and liminal, as it represents (for me, at least) that last great breath before the dive down to semester’s end.  In front of me I have the second half of Johnson’s Rasselas, Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, and a few award-winning bits of short fiction.  On the horizon I can also see those mountains of grading rising up, but they’re a ways off yet.   My exams will wrap May 7th, and then summer comes, right on schedule.

As finishes go, this one has been exceedingly sweet.  Early in the week I learned that my proposal for a Summer Faculty Scholars grant had been accepted.  That means I’ll get to spend most of the season working on verse to finalize a collection, and the university will sponsor the material outlay and the entry fees for a number of first-book contests.  Yesterday, between a grievance hearing and a department meeting, I knocked out the last of the semester’s committee obligations as well.   There’s still a little cooking left to do, but it can be done in my idle time.  Finally, last night I got the chance to head out to dinner with the members of Sigma Tau Delta and some of my favorite folks in the English department; niftier still, STD accorded me the Chip Off the Old Block Distinguished Faculty Award, a delightful surprise.  Teaching is something of a rudderless profession, but feeling that I’m doing right by some of our brightest and shiniest makes for a mighty fine star to steer by.

Today, if I manage things well, should involve nothing but even breathing.  I promised one of my Honors advisees that I’d go over her project proposal with a fine-toothed comb, but most of my plans for the coming week are otherwise already scripted.  Maybe I’ll do a little advance work for finals.  Maybe I’ll pay an extra visit to the gym.  Maybe I’ll call a few friends or send a few letters.

Or maybe I’ll just get outside and enjoy this gorgeous day.

In response to some posts and messages, a few bits and bobs regarding “Sex and the Single Professor.”  Though they may not be delicious, the portions will be small and served in succession.  Some will be steamed, others fried.  If they stick to your ribs, it is only because you’ve eaten your monitor.

First, a bit of sidelong commentary.  Though I did not gloss it yesterday, the Chronicle article also links to a fascinating chat  with Bella M. DePaulo, one of the single scholars cited in “Singular Mistreatment.”  Ms. DePaulo’s contribution is none too fascinating, as she is uniformly politic in her responses to even the most inflammatory questions.  The questions posed by the chatters, however, intrigue. 

The first respondent’s request–show me the numbers!–seems perfectly reasonable, and I agree completely with her subsequent contention:  if my own insurance needs are being met by the university, for example, I would never bedgrude my married/bewoobied colleagues the same benefit, even if that benefit costs the university more in absolute dollars.  By the same token, however, I think singles have reasonable cause to resent insurance plans that deduct more from their take-home pay than couples/families fork over for the same coverage package, anti-family values though that sentiment may be.

I would like to think that Jonathon Parry, the third respondent, is an ironist, but his rhetoric seems a little too earnest to read in that way.  His first contention, that the extra allocations set aside for the benefits of married faculty members are for living expenses and are not “fun money,” doesn’t perturb me at all (though it rankled a writer who mailed me).  If I’m getting medical, dental, and life insurance and so are my peers–and that benefit happens to extend to their wives, husbands, and kids–we should all be pretty happy.  Tuition remission for the education of their dependents, however, is a very different thing.  The second contention, “that married couples receive extra benefits because they contribute more to society, especially if they raise kids” (which is followed by an assessment of child-rearing costs and a circle-of-life projection that reminds singles that they owe couples for bearing the young that will someday earn graduate degrees), is perhaps the portion of his response for which DePaulo should have saved her laughter.  Every parent is fully entitled to believe that his or her child is magical–I think that’s healthy and wholesome, actually–but please forgive the single folk if they don’t view the carriers of your genetic materials in quite the same way.

Other respondents do some nifty parsing of the statistics cited in the original article, and others still take umbrage with the language used by the article’s author.  I really don’t have the background or the invested perspective to respond to those concerns meaningfully.  What I can offer, however, are a couple of clarifications which may verge on insightfulness, depending on how low your standards are.

First, to flesh out my reaction to the Clayman Institute’s suggestion that dual hiring offers a way for universities to secure the services of the best available candidates.  I believe the likelihood that both halves of a couple will be the best-qualified applicants for a pair of positions that happen to be open in the same year is quite small, and I also have reservations about opening up a second tenure line for a scholar whose presence was not anticipated in a university’s personnel plans.  If the university is intent on hiring both halves of a couple, I think the only legitimate way to go about it is the time-honored tradition of the prohibitive search, a convention academic job-seekers are no doubt familiar with.  Once a school has landed the fish it sought in the first place, then it can cast a very small net for a scholar whose peculiar area of expertise just happens to coincide with that of the fish’s spouse.  It’s not a perfect practice by any means, but it does have something like transparency on its side. 

I also mentioned Friday that “I have not experienced different treatment as oppression,” which might warrant some clarification.  At another school, for example, such different treatment occurred as service that was predicated on my fancy-free bachelor status.  I was once assigned early morning Saturday conference duties in deference to those with child care concerns, and I also was drafted to drive a guest speaker to the airport on a Sunday when other faculty members were preoccupied with church and family obligations.  In both cases I was happy to pitch in; the work was necessary, I was available, and I felt (and feel) I was doing nothing more than being a decent departmental citizen.  I have a caretaker personality, and I like doing things for the folks and the institutions that matter to me or have done right by me.  It’s worth noting, however, that I don’t experience guilt and obligation in quite the same way most humans do:  those who’ve tried to wheedle me into assuming some responsibility I ought to take up by citing debt or duty can attest that on such occasions a nictating membrane slides over my eyes, I jam my hands in my pockets, and I utter noncommittal statements at a dizzying clip.  I have enough moxie to shrug off those kinds of imposition, which is why acts of service probably do not strike me as oppressive.  Folks who feel as though they cannot refuse might find the single situation more problematic.

Finally, I would note that the single life is not without its trials.  Most of the time my prospects for self-determination are just as giddy as married folks might imagine they are.  If I decide to eat cake for breakfast no one’s going to scold me, and I never have to consult with four or more parties to coordinate a mental health day.  When I was recently looking forward to the possibility of surgery, however, I realized that I had a) no one who could drive me back from the hospital, b) no one I could reasonably ask to stay with me for the requisite 24 hours after the procedure, and c) no one to drive me to work in the following week.  These are all remediable matters, to be sure, but both halves of a couple generally enjoy a default response to such questions when they arise.  I relish my solitude, but it comes with a price.

****

Per Jason’s recent addendum, I fear the patterns of mackeration are unavoidable–who else but an academic would be willing to put up with another academic?  We are our own occupational hazards.

And let’s face it:  I’m a horrible human being, to be sure, but not much worse than women in the academy have seen before.

Because WordPress tracks the search terms that lead web browsers to its member pages, I’ve noticed that an unnervingly large population comes here expressly to learn more about this “post-lapsarian” thingamawhizzle.  Since an old post somehow seems to top the charts, leading these seekers to one of my amazing episodes of navel-gazery, I thought I could at least provide a working definition.  Someone bring this up if I’m ever arrested for my myriad blogging-related crimes.

“Post-lapsarian” is an adjective referring to the human condition since the Fall of Man, the trespass of Adam and Eve (who ate from the Tree of Knowledge, which is totally not on Atkins) in the Garden of Eden.  It entails at least their eviction from the Garden and the associated punishments (labor, pain at childbirth, poor dental coverage), but more liberal constructions also attach a general sense of human degeneracy to their expulsion.  This degeneracy causes us to become progressively more sinful, behaving worse and worse (more and more “unnaturally,” I s’pose) as time goes by.  Moreover, this sin clouds our perception, experience, and understanding of divinity like a layer of grime.  If we cannot make sense of divine presence, will, or dispensations in our lives, the theory goes, it’s only because the residue of sin clings to us, obscuring those truths.

I’m sure there’s more out there if intrepid searchers are willing to do a little hunting; folks in the know should feel welcome to add their two cents in the comments if they’d like.  Happy lapsing!

Fun fact:  I planned on using a line from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” today, but a hoppity-skippity jump brought me here instead.  I think you’ll agree that Alex Jarvis’ contribution to contemporary letters is far more substantive than anything I might have to offer.

You may also notice that I didn’t sprain my neck hunting for alliteration or assonance to round out a subject line today either.  We will call this a baby step.  I did sprain my neck, of course, but in wicked figurative terms.  Allow me to explain.

This morning I think I successfully executed my first 178, which is nothing less than the triple lindy of poetry.  More impressively, I performed said maneuver just prior to 7:00 AM, although that has made subsequent course descriptions and e-mails seem a little anti-climactic.  Some prices I am willing to pay.

The 178 is a term I made up about 45 minutes ago to describe a poetic near-reversal, in which the writer successfully harnesses the forward momentum of a poem and somehow manages to turn it back on itself almost completely.  I emphasize “almost” because the basic 180 is relatively easy, requiring only an antonymic or oppositional twist.  The 178 involves a kind of latent torque, surprising the reader with a kinetic shift that was implied in the image or language but had not yet manifested.  It is, I admit, pretty hard to quantify, but it packs a wallop when it happens.  Frost does it with some regularity, lulling the reader with gentle rhythms before wrenching her around (“Earth’s the right place for love:/ I don’t know where it’s likely to go better”); Carl Dennis does it almost constantly, which is why I read his collections with a neck brace nearby.

I’ve come close before, but the 178 only occurs in the poems you have to fight.  I’m fighting one right now, one that wants to dissolve into a sweet and simple image.  Under different conditions, were I of a different mind, this piece would have been terribly easy to write.  One line has lent itself readily to the next, and I’ve seldom lacked for a segue.  If poems were all about getting from Point A to Point B, I’d have already checked into my hotel and asked the desk clerk for extra towels and a wake-up call.

The 178, however, involves coaxing, cajoling, hectoring, and bullying, grabbing each line by the scruff of the neck and dragging it up through the ranks of comparatives, eyes fixed on the -est affix at the top.  It’s been enormously frustrating, painstaking work, as I’ve blown past my first, second, and third impressions and gone with the sixth or seventh, the shifts in tenor and tension obliging me to modify all the work I’ve already done.  Then, just when I thought I’d got the concept squared away, the 178 happened. 

The magic of the 178 is that it changes everything about the poem without requiring complementary modification:  the poem now seems radically altered, but all the other lines remain intact, just as they were–the same elements, catalyzed by the introduction of a new one, produce a surprising new reaction.  I’ve tried to come up with an apt analogy for a minute or three, and the best I’ve got is descriptive but icky:  it’s like mixing a new recipe for tomato soup yet, by adding one exotic spice, turning it to blood.  Yeah, it’s a lot like that, actually.  Kudos, simile.

Now, alas, I’ve got the close the poem, which may be tough because it’s not the same one I started to write.

You know the day is going well when you’ve got three shots of espresso in your system and you’re still flatlining circa 11:15 AM.  Faulty wiring may be involved.

All things considered, it’s been a decent week.  I’ve got a rough script for the upcoming academic year in place; I’ve devised a spine-tingling new way to teach Film and Literature, and I’ve got a nifty theme in mind for a section of Honors composition; I committed to paper a draft of the capstone poem I’ve mentioned in prior posts; and I had the chance to catch up with a coupla friends on business utterly unrelated to teaching, writing, and scholarship.  Moreover, in one of the zazzier plot twists of the week, even an exceedingly random lapse into procrastination yielded a smidgen of sweetness.

On Wednesday I spent a couple hours searching old floppies for a syllabus file I thought I might adapt for the Honors course.   Way back when I designed a really ingenious sectional syllabus, although at the time I probably (definitely) wasn’t ready to teach it.  Alas, only a few files from that time in my life have survived, and the syllabus was not among them.  What I did find, however, was an unmarked disk with three poems on it. 

I am almost certain that all three were written during the summer of 2006, during my last Atlanta sojourn.  It was an awkward transitional time for me–I was actually chillin’ at my friend Eduardo’s apartment just prior to making the drive to Mount Pleasant–and two of the three poems are really, really awful.  I value them for what they are (an effort to make sense of my time in the South in slightly less space than Absalom! Absalom!), but they were essentially garbled attempts at catharsis, that sort of purgative poetry dense with personal reference but with little else to redeem it. 

The third poem, however, I remember rather keenly.   It was one of my first “arresting” poems, one so vivid that I had to pull off the highway and jot down the germinal lines that occurred to me when I was driving from Auburn to Atlanta (in the interests of full disclosure, you should probably know that this romantic image was almost certainly punctuated by the purchase of a Mountain Dew and a bag of trail mix).  At bottom, the conceit is nothing special; it’s a theme you’ve probably come across before.  In contrast to much of my other work from that time, however, the verse is unaffected and straightforward.  Rather than wandering through a swamp of complicated language play, it does nothing more than take a commonplace experience and appraise it from a novel point of view.  I hadn’t fractured my fingers looking for a five-syllable iambic adjective or a verb with an obscure tertiary meaning.  I had just revolved the image in my mind, describing the experience as carefully and lovingly as I could as each new element came into view.

As folks who’ve seen all my work (including my tragic early efforts) might have gathered, this lost poem probably marks the onset of my current practice.  In it I can see the writer I was and the one I was trying to be.

A nostalgic part of me wants to preserve the piece as-is and view it historically, as an artifact of the self fixed in figurative amber.  The better part of me, however, feels the best expression of that developing self deserves the chance to meet the person it prefigured.

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.

Today is a double-dutch bloggery day; some days it’s not worth fighting the impulse.  While I would like to profess inspiration, some effluence of esemplastic élan that drove me to the keyboard, I’m actually just clearing the docket for tomorrow, which I hope to commit wholly to finishing a story.  If I can muster a little diligence over the next few weeks I’ll finish the summer session with an empty desktop and the option of devoting myself to poetry (and my annual report) for about 75 days.   I haven’t quite overcome my obsessive need to fixate on the future, but at least I’m back in the current calendar year.

In the minor triumphs department, by the bye, a small success:  when I sat down with my checkbook to smear my outstanding credit card debt with a dollop of dollars (as I mentioned on Wednesday), I actually managed to go big when I pulled the trigger.  I know that’s no too momentous by human standards, but when you’ve spent two decades fretting about empty coffers with no fallback options to speak of, the sense of security that comes with a rainy day fund is hard to let go.  Even so, the prospect of being entirely debt-free (student loans notwithstanding) by the end of 2008 sounds mighty sweet to me.

In a related lame-to-you/exciting-for-me turn of events, I also found a magical sandwich shoppe.  When I began to approach the prospect of writing more seriously during my last summer in Auburn, I went to Panera every Friday evening with a volume of poetry and a notebook for a little self-inflicted quality time.  When it comes to writerly work I’m a bit of an introvert, but too much quiet finds me conjuring excuses to stray from the keyboard.  A little subdued bustle tends to be good for my antisocial soul, and I found that my trips to Panera (coupled with Auburn’s excellent holdings of contemporary poetry) routinely refreshed my perceptions.  We have a world class sandwich shoppe here in Mount Pleasant, Max and Emily’s, but when the university is in session it tends to be a little too hectic for my meditative mojo.  I went there today, however, and I recaptured a vibe that I didn’t realize I’d been missing so much.  My sedate summer session suddenly looks much more promising.

As you might expect, I’m dwelling on these none-too-momentous turns of events because I’m shirking work, which brings me to my somewhat topical material for the day. 

Right now I’m trying to whip a story, a bit called “The Third Mercy,” into shape.  I’ve had this piece on my desktop (or in my “On Deck Projects” folder) for a few months now, and I think it’s ripened long enough.  In defense of the dilatory method, various delays have rescued the story from a spectacularly lame title.  Much to my chagrin, however, that same slow progress has revealed a truth at once pleasing and problematic:  “The Third Mercy” is a prose poem.

Attentive readers may have noticed that my propensity for assonance and alliteration has become a little more rambunctious than usual.  I don’t like pointing fingers, but the story is clearly to blame. 

What I’m attempting is, in essence, the story of a people, and “The Third Mercy” moves all the way from a creation myth to the narrative present, to a pivotal moment in their history (yes, I’m cribbing from my Myspace blog; this is what happens when I double dip).  After an exploratory paragraph or two, as I attempted to pinpoint the tone I was going for, I realized that a tale of that nature would probably sound a lot like the product of oral tradition.  As a result, the piece has gone from being something of a narrative experiment (I wanted to try something a little less character-driven than usual to see what it would look like) to a full-blown exercise in rhythmic reading.  I’m writing the story as I would write verse, and that has made the process a lot more labor-intensive.

When I’m finished I hope the rhythm will occur as a subliminal effect, making the progress from passage to passage much more memorable.  I don’t wish to hammer the reader with iambs, but I’d like to give the piece a kind of bonfire unity, a structure that mirrors the mechanics of a live fireside telling.  It’s been an involving process, as I’ve had to reread and revise time and again to make sure I preserved both the narrative sense and the verve of the verse.  It’s a kind of challenge I enjoy, thought I’ll be awfully glad when I’m done.

Better still:  when I’m writing that annual report, explaining to my peers how I see the several facets of my work informing one another, I’m going to have a really vivid example to show them.