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.

The Academic Job Market: English Search Advice (One-Stop Shopping)

It’s that time of year, and I thought it would be wise to consolidate all the job market-related posts under a single umbrella.  They so seldom wear their wellies.

If you’ve stumbled upon these posts for the first time, please know that they represent a) only one person’s perspective, a perspective informed by only a few go-rounds on the market as a job seeker and one as a member of a search committee and b) they were originally written at a time (2008-09) when the job market was unusually unkind.   The coming year may not be much kinder, but if these posts seem durable, I’ll leave them up even if I walk away from the blog.

The string of posts corresponds approximately to the contours of the long search season–the first offers some preliminary thoughts, and the last offers some recommendations on handling the aftermath.  I’ve fielded occasional questions in the comments section, and I’ve embedded some links that may lead you to other resources you can use.

• Part I (preparatory overview)
• Part II (one search committee member’s point of view)
• Part III (recommendations for the cover letter)
• Part IV (the curriculum vitae)
• Part V (more search committee insights)
• Part VI (the MLA interview)
• Part VII (the MLA aftermath)
• Part VIII (the campus visit in general)
• Part IX (the teaching presentation)
• Part X (the research presentation)
• Part XI (negotiation)
• Part XII (at search season’s end)
• Addendum (a few stray thoughts on the 2008-09 search season)
• Various and Sundry (notes on search term queries)

I hope that makes life a bit easier on the keyword searchers.  Also be sure to visit the English Literature Job Search Wiki, but be forewarned:  more than a few folks have noted that the wiki experience can be a little obsessive, a little addictive.  The English Who_Got_In lounge also addresses the thrills and spills of the job search and is a nifty resource that covers even more aspects of the academic life.

It goes without saying that you’ll want to pay weekly visits to the MLA Job Information List (which should punt you over to ade.org once the season officially opens on September 17th), and don’t forget to keep tabs on the list over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, which often features gigs that go unadvertised on the MLA site.

I get to take the year off from search considerations (we’re looking for folks in English Education and Rhet/Comp, or so we hope, and we have a gaggle of faculty better equipped to evaluate candidates), but I’ll try and offer fresh perspective if new insights come to mind.

Good luck in your searches; here’s to hoping this year will be friskier than the last.

The Midst

Today’s ambition, such as it is, seems exceedingly modest:  make it through the day.  I also resolved not to use the weak qualifier “such as it is,” but we can only aspire so high.

Yesterday I enjoyed a late endorphin surge, as I finally submitted my tenure dossier, which had dominated my desk since early August.  (Thanks to my formidable friends–and I really cannot offer enough thanks to Chris, Erin, Jason, Rashna, and Margie–I feel as though I have a compelling case to make.  Let us hope the personnel peeps agree.)  I have plans–big plans!–for that 13″ x 15″ space on my desk, at least some of which will involve stacks of paper of a different kind, perhaps even a little origami.  The prospect makes me giddy.

Those endorphins juiced me sufficiently to do a little planning and writing last night, but today I’m back down in the zero.  As I mentioned a coupla posts ago, I made a trip back to New Hampshire over the long weekend, and it went just as I expected as it would.  It is perhaps also worth mentioning that I am also a pessimist.  My hopes were not high, and they were accordingly met.

I’m feeling drained, which is not terribly surprising, and I’m also feeling some of the usual dislocation and disorientation.  I reckon the long weekend, which has split the early stretch of the semester a little oddly, hasn’t helped all that much.  I anticipated a perspectival shift following the visit, and I suppose I’m probably still in the midst of it, but I’m also fully aware that the cosmos hasn’t changed all that much.  As a self-examining animal, I’m also of the opinion that I should probably have changed in some material way.  I suppose it’s to my credit that I’m sophisticated enough to feel angst about the angst I have not yet experienced.  It’s very meta, very pomo, very 2010.

It’s funny what we do to recover our rhythm.  For me, returning to the gym yesterday morning was critical.  When my days are going as I like them to go, the trip to the gym is an automatic habit, an essentially mindless act that nevertheless sets the tone for the rest of my day.  Anchoring my mind in my body is fairly healthy in itself, and I like being out there in the midst of people, most of whom are oblivious to all things but their own exertion.  Aside from a few nods in greeting, all I have to worry about is the placement of my feet on pedals or the roll of my shoulders.  Anything else I manage after that is incidental.

After the gym, however, my days are spacious enough to take on many complexions and turn in many directions.  I’ve got a bit of Beowulf to look forward to–he’s going after Grendel’s mother, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out!–but after that, improv.  The trick will be keeping my mind on the near term, since I’ve got few especially interesting objects on the horizon but many in my rear-view mirror.

If I can stay in my lane and keep my mind between the lines, I reckon that will do.

Atoms and Eves

No, I don’t really know what the title of today’s post means or implies.   Like The Godfather, it insists upon itself.  Let’s just embrace it and let the magic happen.

Let me begin by noting that it might not be wrong to murder the landscaping crew.  They sweep in once a week, fire up their engines at about 7:30, and then descend in waves:  a big mower comes by, then an edger, then a small mower, then a weed whacker, then a leaf blower.  I’m up at 5:30 most days, and I still find it fairly offensive.

Let me also sing the praises of the place that sells my protein powder and vitamins, Bodybuilding.com.  I kvetch every now and again about economic matters, mostly because all the efforts to get the machinery greased and running again still adhere to a flawed trickle-down logic:  feed enough dollars into the top of the hopper and eventually consumers (those pesky, obstinate folks who make up more than two third of the nation’s economic activity yet refuse to buy as much junk as they used to) will see the benefits.  Everything I’ve seen in the midst of an energetic shopping season, however, suggests that business as usual is the order of the day.  All we get are lots of sellers  jacking up prices, offering the same “values,” and complaining that consumers aren’t doing their bit.  Bodybuilding.com, in the meantime, simply offers enormous selection, low prices, reasonable shipping (I’ve done plenty of comparison shopping, and the few places that edge BB.com in price then sting you for $15 cardboard boxes), and zesty service.  I placed an order at 7:33 yesterday, and it was packaged by 7:45 and at FedEx by 1:00.  That’s the easy way to earn customer loyalty for life.

In theory I should be leading a committee meeting right about now, but as you might have surmised my thought process is more than a little scattershot at the moment.  I’ll scrape myself out of bed around 4:30 tomorrow morning to get to the airport on time, and in the interim I’ve got to do a great deal of class prep and travel planning–no mean feat when plotting out worst-case scenarios is my forte.  The semester is still young, but the first three weeks have required/will require far too many major literal and figurative acts of submission:  turning in my tenure and promotion portfolio, entering my poetry collection in several contests,  flying to New Hampshire and seeing what comes of the trip.  I’m happy to concede that some things are beyond my control (or even meaningful influence), but I know myself well enough to anticipate some autocratic overcorrection further down the road.  You know you’re in for a festive stretch when one of your chief ambitions for the next few months is to avoid becoming a frothing, domineering fascist.

That’ll do for now.  I’ve spent the past ten minutes setting aside my travel toothbrush, emptying the trash, backing up files, and answering e-mail, so I’d guess I’ve exhausted the day’s supply of coherence.  I reckon my skull will settle down enough to do some reading this afternoon, but when tomorrow comes, all bets are off.

Despite and Respite

Today, thanks to some extraordinary diligence over the past several days, I have a smidgen of free time.  Let’s see how creatively I can squander it.

As I mentioned in the last couple of posts, I’m betwixted and betweened:  I closed a door behind me, finalizing the text of the collection and beginning the formal process of contest entry, but I’m also awaiting/dreading my trip home this weekend, a visit that should produce answers to a variety of questions, none of which I expect to like.  Add in a quasi-hilarious wrenching of the spinal column that has prevented me from working out to dissipate stress (the tweak began as a bathtub-scrubbing accident and was aggravated by a subsequent back workout, but the spine did not go out of alignment until I reached down to unplug my flash drive from a classroom computer), and you get a wound-up windup bald man.  I’ve got stuff to do, of course, but the business of next week seems a little bit remote to me, the business of October (when I’ll make my second round of contest entries) even more so.  I’m doing my best to stretch out my current supply of short-term obligations, creating new handouts and outlines for texts I’ve taught many times before, but I view the other side of the weekend as The Other Side right now.  For better or for worse, I conceive of the next stretch as necessarily different, and accordingly it seems wasteful to prepare for it as though it will involve more of the same.  I am, as you know, wired poorly.

Some low-quality wailing and lamentation would be in order, perhaps even some less-than-emphatic beating of the breast or gnashing of the teeth, were it not for the most promising of consolation prizes:  despite the prevalence of stopped-up noggin operations, I find I can still write.  I have not hurtled headlong into new territory, of course, since I’m still mourning the closure of the previous project to some extent, but the mental machinery still spins and ticks exactly as it should.  I still find myself shaken awake when a line occurs to me just as I’m drifting off, and even though I did a thorough cleaning of the homestead prior to the start of the semester, my desk, kitchen counter, and nightstand are already littered with notes and post-its, plots and jottings.  It’s not full-blown work, I know, but it’s the precondition for it, the step that makes progress possible.

And since I’m made up of work and not much else, it makes me possible, too.