Ferule & Fescue

Self-improvement without the "self"

2012-02-22T15:57:00.009-05:00

Today is Ash Wednesday and I'm thinking about the provocative series of posts that Anastasia wrote last year about fasting.

Although I've never fasted on days other than Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, I'm considering adding in one fast day per week this Lent; Anastasia makes a compelling argument that fasting is a different discipline than just "giving up" something for six weeks, since the point of Lent isn't merely to sacrifice a few pleasures or to find a little more time to attend to the spiritual.

As she writes:

It's about finitude. It's about death. It's about the limits of a body that is dying. There's nothing that makes a person aware of her limits like fasting. And on top of that, fasting exposes the deficiencies of character that exist when one is stripped of ordinary comforts. It's about stark naked mortality. And unless you need the internet or chocolate to live. . . then you aren't getting it.

This is what I feel, too, when I fast (even in the very modest ways that I do fast): my deficiencies of character. Fasting makes me tired and cranky and low-energy, and that means it's more of an effort to be patient with and pleasant to the people I encounter. However, since fasting is something totally within my control, and since I'm very aware of why I have a shorter fuse, it's easier to be courteous than on days when I've accidentally skipped meals. Ideally this makes me more mindful, on other occasions, of what others deserve from me no matter what my mood, my preoccupations, or my state of health.

But there are problems with fasting, too. Anastasia talks about the misuses that fasting can be put to by those with eating disorders or who otherwise find pleasure in pain, but for most of us the temptation is simply toward satisfaction with our own virtue. We live in a culture that easily converts any form of self-discipline into a commodity, a challenge, or a sign of personal merit: take this 14-day juice fast and feel extra-specially virtuous! know your superiority to those who merely eat sensibly and go to the gym! you, my friend, are winning the self-improvement sweepstakes!

And that's what's hard about Lent, in the end: making it about one's limits while not making it about oneself.

Thirty-seven.

2012-02-19T11:02:00.001-05:00

Once, in the 1970s, I was young. And I stood beside enormous rocks, and I wore orange and blue (and strikingly short shorts), and life was good.

Now I'm older and less skilled with the color blocking--but life is still good. I've spent a fine holiday-birthday weekend in New York City and now I'm off to a boozy brunch with some friends.

I raise a glass in all y'all's general direction.

Happy cathexis day!

2012-02-14T23:48:00.002-05:00

Like most teachers, I have a few students every semester who have some kind of obvious crush going on. It's usually women and it's usually low-key; to the extent that I can translate their smiley delightedness into words, it amounts to this: "Omigod! she's so funny! and smart! and NICE! I love her!" I had a lot of those crushes myself in college, and I understand that the students who cathect on us are really just working through their own stuff. They're looking for nerdy aspirational models, figuring out what kinds of relationships to the intellectual life are possible, and generally seeking ways of being in the world.

So yes, I have a couple of those again. They're sweet, they're good students, and they make me feel like I'm good at my job--even though I know that their crushes are only partly about me and less about how successfully I teach.

But I also have a student of the rarer and more troubling kind, the fragile and needy one who responds to any off-hand kindness with waves of love so strong I can feel the breeze in my face. This particular student is going through a rough time in her personal life. She emailed me about it and I replied with a short sympathetic sentence, adjusted a minor deadline, but firmly reasserted a bigger one. After the next class she stayed after to thank me, all love and big, trusting eyes. I took two minutes to say something briskly supportive, make sure she was getting help elsewhere, and then suggest that keeping on top of her work during this rough patch might actually provide her with some useful structure and something to take pride in. Then I went home.

Today she again stayed after class, to thank me for the last time and to tell me that talking with me had made her whole weekend better. And she said some other things, about how much it meant to have someone so understanding, about how her mom kinda got it and kinda didn't, and maybe a few other sentences I'm now forgetting. Mostly I remember the semi-hypnotic power of that utterly open, vulnerable face.

This kind of student freaks me out. I'm torn between feeling genuinely glad that my passing kindness helped (and making a mental note to strive for patience and generosity with all future students, because You Never Know)--and feeling radically uncomfortable, almost repelled by the naked neediness. This student does not appear to be in crisis (it's not this kind of personal drama), so my concern is less about the specifics of her current troubles than about how easily such a person gets hurt, and how unwise it is for her to invest that much emotional energy in me, or in anyone.

Selling ourselves

2012-02-07T23:05:00.001-05:00

The job market is overwhelmingly about selling oneself, as the yearly dust-ups over such issues as appropriate job-candidate dress and comportment reveal. (And for the record, I think the advice to "just be yourself! if they don't like the real you you're better off not working there!" is only slightly more stupid than the insistence that, if you don't wear a tie/heels and an anonymous, conservative suit, then you'll never in a million years get a job anywhere ever.) But this year, as my department is in the midst of its blitz of candidate visits, I've been thinking harder about what it means for an institution to try to sell itself to a candidate.

My first few years on the job, I was excited when we had job candidates to campus and I made an effort to meet all of them, but I was mostly interested in checking them out. I wanted a good colleague, teacher, and scholar (and possibly a friend), and though I understood myself to be performing a service for or fulfilling an obligation to my department, I didn't really think of myself as representing the department in any meaningful way: we needed bodies in the room at the candidate's talk and at dinner, and it was good for some of those bodies to belong to friendly junior faculty, but no one needed for me, specifically, to be there. I went mostly because it was fun to meet the candidates, to have a vote, and to get a fancy meal on the department's dime.

Now I'm older and busier and everything feels like work. I don't particularly want the fancy meal; I'd rather be at home in my pyjamas. I don't really need to meet the candidates; we have a talented roster, I trust my colleagues, and anyone we hire I'll wind up meeting soon enough. But I'm also on the verge of tenure, I expect to be here for a while, and somewhere along the line I decided that what I did, personally, kinda did matter. Though I still identify strongly with the job candidate, I get that she won't particularly identify with me: she'll see me as her senior (usually), and as a reflection of my department's character and personality (definitely).

So I'm rousing myself at 7.30 a.m. and driving to campus every day we have a candidate visiting, making time for each one's job talk and teaching demo and either lunch or dinner. I'm donning a suit (to communicate respect for the candidate and the general professionalism of the department), I'm asking encouraging questions, and I'm doing my damnedest, through my interactions with my colleagues, to show as well as tell our candidates that we're a happy and collegial place where friendships extend outside of the office. I want our candidates to see how intellectually engaged we are, and how interested in other people's work. I want for our students to perform well, and for Cha-Cha City to sound and look appealing, and for the campus, ideally, not to be covered in a sheet of ice.

And in fact I'm not sure why having the department come off well matters so very much to me. The job market is terrible, our list is deep, and though we don't always get our our first-choice candidate we've never had a search fail and have always wound up with someone wonderful.

But I guess I wish to extend the sort of kindness to our candidates that the department extended to me on my visit--and, more selfishly, I wish for the people whom we don't hire or who don't accept our offers (and perhaps, by extension, their colleagues and friends and advisors) to have a warm impression of our department. There's nothing bad about good press.

Feeling the rhythm

2012-02-03T15:49:00.004-05:00

Every semester, in my Shakespeare class, I begin with two weeks on metrics. Partly this is a way of doing something productive on the first day of class, but it's also a way of establishing, early on, that our course is going to involve attention to sound and language, not just plot and character. I think that I teach it well and most of my students respond gamely, but there are always a handful whose response is hostile puzzlement. They seem equally displeased by the restrictions of metrics and by the fact that there isn't always a single right answer: they sigh, loudly, when we're scanning a poem in class and I acknowledge that a particular foot could be either a spondee or an iamb--or just possibly a trochee, depending on how the neighboring foot is accented.

I sympathize, of course, and I tell them that my ambition isn't for them to become expert scanners, but just to understand that meter can affect meaning and to be familiar with some basic terms. But I also tell them that if they do it enough, or simply read Shakespeare aloud enough, they'll come to feel the rhythm instinctively, even recognizing when a word must have been pronounced differently in Shakespeare's day because the logic of the meter demands it. Iambic pentameter isn't something Shakespeare imposed on his plays; in a culture of sonnet-writing and theatre-going, it was just the back-beat of daily life.

Still, it takes a while to fully inhabit any rhythm. This semester RU has shortened all its class periods in order to add another period to the day and to free up more classroom space: we've gone from 60 minutes to 50, from 90 to 75, and from 195 to 165. Such changes are tough. I went from 75 minutes at INRU to 80 minutes at Big Urban, and then the next year to to 90 minutes at RU, and both those changes were disorienting. Even five extra minutes threw my rhythm off, and ten felt impossible; I was always running out of things to do, or dragging on a discussion past its natural life in order to fill time.

Over the years, though, I've come to love the 90-minute period, especially in my Shakespeare classes: we can do real and detailed scene work, have a free-wheeling general discussion or two, and even fit in a quiz or talk about administrative matters. I was totally in control of those 90 minutes, and losing fifteen of them feels like a disaster. It's not about content, it's about rhythm. I don't feel a 75-minute period in my gut the way I do a 90-minute period, and so I'm slow to cut off one discussion to move along to the next.

I'm off my game and I hate it. These new periods feel clunky and awkward and totally unnatural. But I suppose that I'll grow into them eventually--and that my brain and body will come to respond as they do to da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum.

Hate-reading

2012-01-30T15:51:00.003-05:00

Guilty as charged:

[I]f a subject has absolutely no idea how they're coming off to readers, then it's all the more outrageous and, for me, all the more enjoyable. Some of my tried-and-true hate-reading regulars include an ex-roommate who refers to her significant other as "The Boyf" and brags about how she only eats at Michelin-starred restaurants; a former co-worker who extols the values of juice cleanses and composes lists with titles like, "The Top 10 Ways to Stay Present and Centered;" the friend-of-a-friend whose wedding site features a countdown ticker and engagement ring video montage; and the acquaintance who has a "fashion blog" even though she only ever posts black-and-white photos of herself in American Apparel leotards. I'm endlessly fascinated by how obnoxious these people are, and equally entertained by their ignorance of that fact.

I do this a lot. And when I say "a lot," I mean A LOT. But hey, at least now I have a name for it!

Random bullets of again with the start of classes

2012-01-25T20:10:00.006-05:00

Somehow, I got done everything I intended to get done over break. (Well, except for assembling an album of wedding photos.) I'm not sure this has ever happened in my entire life.

It's been strangely unwinterlike here in the land of winter--we've had virtually no snow this year. And it's light perceptibly later each evening. I dare to hope.

I'm teaching one entirely new, one totally re-designed, and one slightly reshuffled class. So far it feels like the right blend of the comfortable and the challenging.

I'm particularly pleased by my plans for my composition class, which I was rather dreading (I haven't taught comp for a few semesters, and the last two times were to Honors kids). But my old syllabus and assignments really needed shaking up, and the prospect of reading NEW THINGS does wonders for a bad attitude.

So far so good on my tenure case. There is, I think, only one more level of review that matters--after that it's just rubber-stamping.

I'm almost done with this round of book revisions.

I bought a second-hand raccoon coat (probably 1960s, mid-thigh length). It's indescribably awesome.

Our second bedroom is now fully furnished. The cats are happy. Any guests we eventually have may not be so happy.

The fact that I am not getting married, not co-organizing a lecture series, not preparing my tenure file, and not co-teaching a totally new class means the beginning of the semester feels calm, unoppressive, doable. (Remind me not to do all those things at once again, will ya?)

After the goofy, madcap, self-deprecatory shtick, what then?

2012-01-19T19:10:00.005-05:00

As my professional cohort moves up in the world (in terms of age and career stability), it's struck me that a number of people--maybe myself included--are still working with a self-image and a public persona that don't really reflect reality. I know many an academic on the verge of tenure or just tenured, on the verge of a book contract or with one just out, who are still presenting themselves as adorable but humiliation-prone kids, forever embarrassing themselves in front of the big names. It's professional life as screwball comedy.

Now, I love me a screwball comedy and a madcap heroine--and to judge by my spouse I also love me a relentless, obstreperous goofball--but within the profession and among my peers I find this particular shtick, and the insecurity and immaturity that underlie it, to be getting old. In the same way that the roles of ingénue and wunderkind have their expiration date, so too does the role of loveable screwup.

Here's a cheat sheet to let you know when you've outgrown the part:

-you have tenure

-you have a book in print

-you've had more than one tenure-track job (assuming more than three years total)

-you advise doctoral students

-you've been an invited or keynote speaker

-you're on chit-chatty terms with senior scholars in your field

-you meet random people at conferences who know your work

If any one of the above--but especially if more than one!--is true, it's time to move on. You can still be zany and fun, playful and self-deprecating, and you can still shut down the conference bar every night. You can also, of course, still be prey to deep fears and anxieties. But you can't act like the new guy or gal, the brash or naive youngster, the one who will never be taken seriously.

It's someone else's turn. You've made it. Give way to the grad students and new PhDs.

Weird pizza*

2012-01-13T19:45:00.008-05:00

Me: (just waking up) Man, I had a bad dream.

Cosimo: What about?

Me: (remembering) Actually, um. This may be the stupidest dream I've ever had. But it felt really upsetting!

Cosimo: What happened?

Me: I was at the supermarket trying to buy a frozen pizza. But they didn't have your basic pepperoni. The closest I could find was this weird double-sided pizza--like, two pizzas, almost back-to-back? But with a space in between so you could hook them over the oven rack: one on top, one underneath upside-down.

Anyway, it was a stupid pizza, but I took it and went to a register. But the cashier wouldn't check me out--he said something about how the weird box for the weird pizza didn't work with his scanner, and he didn't want to hold up the whole line, so he checked out all these other people instead. Then he just left. (plaintively) All I wanted was my pizza!

Cosimo: It's a book dream.

Me: You think so?

Cosimo: It's about your second reader.

Me: Huh. Maybe. He's the cashier? Like, a gatekeeper?

Cosimo: Sure.

Me: But in this analogy, my book is a weird pizza. You're saying my book is a weird pizza?

Cosimo: No, your book introduction is a weird pizza. Everyone's introduction is, right? You just want to do this straightforward thing, but you have to add all this other stuff you're not invested in, to appease the people who want your book to be something it's not--

Me: (not really listening) Poor weird-pizza book! No one wants to buy you! (confidentially) I'm sorry I said you were weird, weird pizza. If you exist and I see you in the store, I'm totally buying you.

-----------
*Latest in an occasional series.

The view from my break

2012-01-12T21:20:00.006-05:00

Apologies for the infrequent blogging around these parts. I didn't go to MLA this year, thus cruelly depriving you of what would have been my seventh consecutive year of blogging the MLA, and instead spent those four days writing/revising the first six pages of my book. Not especially speedy progress, I grant you, but necessary work--and periodically I checked in on my Facebook friends who were there and scrolled through the pileup of #mla12 tweets. Basically, it was like I was there, minus the jetlag and the hangover. And look what a view I had from where I sat writing on the sofa! Who wouldn't give up MLA for that?

Let's see that in close up:

The revising has gone more speedily since then and I'm happy with the progress I'm making, but it's really too dull to talk about--and so is everything else around these parts. I go to the gym; I putter around the house; at some late hour Cosimo produces a delicious meal; at an even later hour I pour self a drink; and still later we watch a t.v. show on DVD and go to bed. It hasn't even snowed yet (just the merest dusting), so all in all it's been a blissful winter break.

Classes resume in 10 days, though, and so too will the kvetching. Word of honor.

All scholarship is collaborative scholarship

2012-01-05T23:50:00.001-05:00

Tenured Radical's latest post on the value of collaborative work--which is also an exhortation to teach collaboration to graduate students and to find more ways to recognize such work within the profession--resonates with some of what I've been mulling over as I work through yet another round of book revisions.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that all our scholarship, and maybe all our work, period, is collaborative in a deep but also deeply unexamined way. However many pages our acknowledgments sections may stretch to--with thanks given to our peers, our friends, our dogs and our gods--we still prefer to think of the work that we and others do as the product of our own brains and our own brilliance: those other readers and interlocutors were just helping us to say, better, whatever we were always intending to say.

And that's true, to a degree. All the mentors in the world won't make a mediocre project a great one, and much of the best scholarship seems rooted in a radically individual intelligence: a mind that may have been trained in the same way as hundreds of others, but that has a fierce peculiar temper all its own.

But the thing is, we have all been trained in the norms of our disciplines, in more or less the same way, and we've all read thousands of works of scholarship; everything we do involves applying or building on the work of a multitude of forebears. We're none of us, really, advancing a radically new perspective or inventing a wholly new field--and none of us truly works in isolation even if she writes in hermetic solitude and never shows her prose to anyone until the day it hits the desk of an editor at one or another journal or academic press.

I haven't been much of a scholarly collaborator or sharer myself in the past; I didn't have peers who read my work in grad school, and I didn't get a lot of guidance from my dissertation advisor then or afterward. In the past few years, I've started sending bits and pieces of my work to friends, and I've been grateful for their feedback, but until recently I never felt that they were really shaping my work--just giving me things to think about, new sources to read, and that sort of thing.

But for whatever reason, in the throes of what I hope will be my last round of substantive revisions and after getting two thorough-going readers' reports from senior scholars, both of whom seem to be in subfields a bit aslant or adjacent to my own, it's hit me how absolutely impossible this book would have been to write without all the feedback I've gotten--major and minor--on my work over the years and all the panels I've attended and all the conversations I've had about the state of the field. The exact focus of my book is peculiar, and if I hadn't written it I doubt anyone else would have done so any time soon (which, uh, isn't a boast; it's weird enough that I'm not sure who will want to read the thing). But it is certainly not the case that I had a clear and lucid argument from the beginning, or probably even two years ago, and if I have one now it's only thanks to the pushing and prodding and sometimes enthusiasm and sometimes baffled irritation of my readers and interlocutors. I love that I've had them, and I love that I can drop three emails in three days to friends with different areas of expertise, just saying, "hey, I think this thing might be true--is it? or if not, can you save me from sounding like a jackass?"

I'm smarter now than I was when I started this project ten years ago. But if I'm ever to publish a second book, I know it will depend at least as heavily on the advice and expertise of others.

New Year's Meme

2012-01-01T16:01:00.003-05:00

(Fifth in a series. See also New Year's Day 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.)

1. What did you do in 2011 that you'd never done before?
*Took a research leave
*Directed an M.A. thesis and an honors thesis
*Bought a house
*Got married
*Went up for tenure

2. Did you keep your 2011 resolutions, and will you make more this year?
I didn't make any last year, but I have some modest ones for this year.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes, Evey (formerly my best friend in Cha-Cha City and now my most-missed friend from same)

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No

5. What countries did you visit?
Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
A book contract--or more to the point, a totally completed book manuscript that I never have to do anything to ever again. Or to put it more positively: I want to be substantially engaged by a new research project.

7. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Dude, I checked off half the boxes on the adulthood checklist this year; who can choose just one? But I will say that buying a house + getting married means suddenly and radically coming to terms with one's place in the bourgeoisie.

8. What was your biggest failure?
I don't think I had any big failures this year; my leave-semester resolution to meditate daily didn't even come close to happening--I may have meditated six times in four months--but I consider that less significant than my usual daily failures of kindness, patience, and charity.

9. Did you suffer illness or injury?
No, though I seem now to be in danger of monthly migraines (after the one I had a few months ago, which lasted 12 hours, many of them spent puking, I learned some avoidance techniques).

10. What was the best thing you bought?
Our house

11. Whose behavior merited celebration?
The members of my and Cosimo's families, who were supportive of our having a smaller wedding and who contributed help to exactly the degree (and of exactly the kind) that was useful. From what I hear about weddings, t'ain't necessarily so.

12. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
No one I know personally. But I'm constantly appalled by things like this.

13. Where did most of your money go?
Jesus, we spent a fortune this year, not just buying a house but furnishing/outfitting it; getting married; going to Europe. So the better question is where didn't my money go?

14. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer?
Happier; same weight; maybe slightly richer, insofar as my spouse and I actually have a little money in a savings account and now own a major piece of property. (But then again, maybe we're actually poorer, since a home loan means we're more in debt? Math is hard.)

15. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Slept. Read more (and better) contemporary fiction. Been more patient, generous, etc.

16. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Wasted time on the goddamn internet.

17. Did you fall in love in 2011?
Continually

18. What was the best new book you read?
None of the new books I read this year (apart from a few in my field) are good enough to merit mentioning.

19. What was your favorite film of the year?
I saw a lot of good films this year, but nothing stands out as AMAZING. Margin Call and Young Adult were two of the smartest and most satisfying, though.

20. What kept you sane?
My semester of research leave

21. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.
Last year I wrote that I'd learned how good it is to be a grown-up. I stand by that. Fuck the cult of youth and its eternal anxious questing after hipness.

My 2011 was pretty spectacular. May 2012 be equally good to all of you!

"Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it."

2011-12-28T23:34:00.007-05:00

While on vacation I re-read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which I first read years ago and remembered loving but of which I'd had no clear memory. It's a wondrous book, possibly a perfect one, built more like a poem than a novel. Here's a taste:

Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job's children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine. (192)

The book is also a better and more affecting meditation on loss than Didion's Year of Magical Thinking (which I read and liked) or any of the other recent memoirs of grief (most of which I've read only in long excerpts). This is Robinson describing what the rest of us might call, with clinical ugliness, "obsessional thinking"--the inability to let go of the past or the people in it:

[H]ere we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. They mock us with their seeming slightness. If they were more substantial--if they had weight and took up space--they would sink or be carried away in the general flux. But they persist, outside the brisk and ruinous energies of the world. (163)

But in fact, it's not really grief Robinson is writing about so much as the human condition: transient and marked by loss and hopeful of an escape which is also a transcendence. That's what's wrong, I think, with so many memoirs: they assume that their particulars are, if not universal, at least of universal interest--while not actually being able to capture the truly universal or imagine anything beyond the author's own experience. Maybe that's only due modesty, when the subject is oneself. Maybe fiction is a better place for reflecting on how personal pasts intersect with national ones, or for making claims about the human condition.

Those who have been reading me long enough may have divined that my only real subject, my only real obsession, is how we make meaning out of the past and how we grapple with our sense of loss (past, present, or anticipated); it's probably why I blog, and it is, after a fashion, the subject of almost all my scholarship. So maybe I'm a peculiarly ideal reader for this novel. But if you haven't read it, do. And if you haven't read it recently, read it again.

I'm dreaming of a white-sand Christmas

2011-12-20T21:45:00.006-05:00

My parents now live in San Diego county, in a small beachfront town. I can't tell you how awesome it is to spend an afternoon in late December walking barefoot through the surf with the sand pipers and the pelicans while the surfers leap waves and the Marine Corps helicopters swoop overhead.

I see your white Christmas, and I raise you.

Being a Christian means vaguely feeling some things are wrong

2011-12-16T14:19:00.001-05:00

This ad by Rick Perry has been getting a lot of outraged attention and a lot of ridicule:

(For a great round-up of parodies, see here.)

Perry's homophobia--and the fact that he's directing it, specifically, at the men and women who are protecting and sometimes dying for our country--is the obvious and appropriate target for most of the outrage. But I'm equally as offended by his vision of Christianity. Let's take a closer look at what he says: "[Y]ou don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school."

In other words, you don't have to be making any effort to lead a Christian life (going to church, wrestling with what's in the Bible, performing works of mercy) to call yourself one. Proof of your Christianity comes from your vague belief in traditional, religious values--which, ideally, someone else should be responsible for teaching. After all, if the principal of your kids' school leads them in prayer and there's a big crèche in front of City Hall, then you don't have to do any religious instruction of your own, much less model a life of faith for your children; you can just rest secure in your own rightthink.

Also, if you're uncomfortable with gay people? That's okay, because it proves you're a Christian! In fact, if you're uncomfortable with anything, that's probably because it's wrong. And wrong in a cosmic, Bible-forbidden kind of way. (Which is why, as I've noted before, so many Christians don't actually read the Bible: they already know that everything they believe is in there.)

According to Rick Perry, being a Christian means being part of a very special and persecuted minority on whom no real demands are ever made.

Resisting the urge to stage mom

2011-12-11T20:10:00.004-05:00

This semester I've been directing two independent projects: one M.A. thesis and one undergraduate honors thesis. It's my first time directing a thesis of any sort, and though I've been a second reader on at least half a dozen--and in some cases got pretty intimately involved in the project--being this up-close and personal with another person's thought process has been interesting.

On the most basic level, it's hard to guide usefully without guiding too much, and it's hard not to be disappointed when a smart student nevertheless doesn't quite get what you're saying or go as far as you think he or she could go. I spent a lot of time talking ideas through with both students, trying to help them to recognize certain connections that they seemed to intuit but couldn't quite express--and in both cases it was mildly frustrating to lead them right up to an idea and not have them able to make the final leap on their own.

That's fine, of course, and they both did some good work; when it comes right down to it, a thesis is more a skills-building exercise--a demonstration of growth and mastery--than something that needs to be lovely and perfect in itself. (God knows, this is how I came to see my own graduate seminar papers and to some extent my dissertation.)

So yes: it's satisfying to see students grow and improve and I certainly point out to mine the places where they've grown and improved and I tell them what I'm pleased with. But when you're interested in the project and you've got a restless, tinkering mind, it's hard to know what's good enough, or what's sufficient improvement, when it's somebody else's life and work.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be a parent.

Plagiarists are people too

2011-11-30T14:00:00.007-05:00

I catch an average of one plagiarist a semester, or roughly one per sixty students. Once in a rare while I've have two, in different classes, and a few times I've had none, but the average has remained steady over my six years at RU. I hate catching plagiarists and I hate being always on the alert for plagiarists, but it's a part of my job and I've more or less made my peace with it; I may still leap from the sofa and shout "goddammit!" when I find one, but I no longer take plagiarism as a personal insult. Plagiarism happens when students are lazy or scared or under pressure; it's about them, not me.

But not taking it personally doesn't mean that it's not still emotionally exhausting, and this semester has been a doozy: in one single class I've had two clear-cut cases of plagiarism, with two or three additional papers that I believe were influenced by outside sources--but in a relatively minor way and to a degree that I wouldn't be able to prove anyway. Moreover, they were all on the same paper assignment.

For privacy reasons, I won't go into details, but we're not talking about a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears freshmen, or lazy-ass non-majors. This is a smallish class with good energy, and I genuinely like all the students in it.

And that's what's hard about catching and prosecuting academic dishonesty. When you take it personally, it's easier to nail the kid; you've got the righteous (or maybe self-righteous) sense of indignation to carry you through: "Ha-hah! Play me for a fool, will you? Here's your violation report, asshole." But when you like the kids and have taken some pride in their intellectual growth--and especially when you have some knowledge about the shit going on their personal lives--the anger is different. You're pissed off at them for being stupid and for fucking up, and you're pissed off that they've trapped both of you in a legal process where it's hard to say what you want to say and where what you want to say probably wouldn't be heard anyway.

I gave my class a lecture in the quiet, Angry-and-Disappointed-Mommy voice, and it freaked them all out and maybe it helped and maybe it didn't; part of the problem is that "plagiarist," like "racist," is a term that doesn't allow for gradation or nuance, and no one believes he can be that thing. But although the reality is that not all forms or instances of academic dishonesty are equal, any suggestion that some might be lesser or more deserving of leniency could only come back to bite me in the ass.

So this is what I'd like to tell my plagiarists, and what I wish they'd hear and believe:

"You did something unethical, and you knew it was unethical; 'giving you a break' would be unfair to your classmates and it would be unfair to you; it's my job to enforce academic standards and to see that you wrestle honestly with tough intellectual tasks. You're selling yourself short when you think that you can't come up with good ideas or write a good paper on your own. You will fail this class and the academic dishonesty charge will go on your record. But if you repeat the class, the 'F' will disappear, and if this is your first violation--and you never have another--you'll get to stay at RU and there will be no indication of this on your transcript.
"This doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you a person who fucked up, and there are consequences when you fuck up. But you can make things right over the long term, if you want to."

This shit breaks my heart.

"And with your spirit"

2011-11-27T21:27:00.004-05:00

Today, the first Sunday of Advent, also marks the roll-out of the new English translation of the liturgy--the first since the end of Vatican II.

This new translation has been the subject of controversy for years (so many years that I first wrote about it in 2006, in something like Week Five of this blog's existence), but it boils down to this: the first English translation of the mass was put together relatively hastily, in the wake of Vatican II; it's simple and idiomatic, but there are a number of places where it neglects or misrepresents the substance of the original; a more faithful version had always been intended to replace it, and by the late 1990s "a richer translation that . . . hew[ed] more closely to the Latin without sacrificing clarity" had been completed and approved by every council of English-speaking bishops in the world. However, this translation was rejected by the Vatican. According to Rome, not only the sense of the Latin must be conveyed, but "every Latin word must be accounted for, and vocabulary, syntax, punctuation, and capitalization patterns found in the Latin must be reproduced as much as possible" (quoted text comes from this timeline of the history of English translations of the mass).

So disagreeing as thoroughly as I do with the Vatican's translation theory, I was prepared to hate the new translation. I'd gotten a preview of parts of the new translation in various articles and handouts over the past six months, and though I didn't think it was as awful as some commentators, I was still wary.

But listening and responding at mass today, I decided that it's neither a net gain nor a net loss. I actually like some of the new translation's circumlocutions and five-dollar words: as a literature teacher, I believe there's sometimes both aesthetic and intellectual value in language that draws attention to itself, that doesn't come totally naturally, that requires work to figure out. So while there's surely no meaningful difference between describing the second person of the trinity as "one in being with the Father" and describing him as "consubstantial with the Father," the second rendering is one that draws attention to itself, and hence to the doctrine it's articulating. In general, I like the way the new translation foregrounds a number of theological issues, like the incarnation, and in places its Latinate, archaic syntax does achieve a strange, reverent beauty.

On the other hand, there are at least as many awkwardnesses (Cosimo spent the second half of the service mouthing "oblations," with a look of comic disgust, following a particularly ugly new bit of prose that included the offending word), and lots of things that simply don't seem to matter. I don't know why the liturgy of the Eucharist now has the priest referring to the "chalice" Jesus drank from instead of the "cup" ("chalice" may be more faithful to the Latin, but surely it isn't a more accurate description of the actual drinking vessel), or what essential is being conveyed by having the congregation respond to the priest's "the Lord be with you" with "and with your spirit" instead of "and also with you."

Will the new translation lose congregants? Possibly, though I think not right away; regular church-goers are going to make a game effort to adapt to the new translation, and if it causes some people to feel more alienated from the church and to drift away, that effect will be perceptible only over time. But you know, the liturgy is the least of the reasons that people feel alienated from the church--and much as I enjoy fulminating, any energy I have would probably be better spent addressing those other reasons.

Gratitude

2011-11-23T10:56:00.003-05:00

Heading over river, through woods. While I'm cursing traffic on the interstates and by-roads of this great nation, I leave you with this article from yesterday's Times on the health benefits of conscious gratitude. So let's try it: I'm happy there aren't more morons on the road! And hey, it's pissing rain, but at least it's not snow!

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Those interested in metonymy must explain why metonymy is required

2011-11-17T22:00:00.005-05:00

Speaking of veterans, this just in:

The Department of Defense is now funding the study of metaphors. The full description is here (h/t G-Fav), but in brief, the DoD is interested in "exploit[ing] the use of metaphorical language to gain insights into underlying cultural beliefs"; i.e., to figure out what it means when a particular nation or political faction uses one kind of metaphor rather than another. Is life a journey, or a playscript?

The report includes this sweetly wonky explanation of what metaphors are:

Metaphors have been known since Aristotle (Poetics) as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (e.g., The world is a stage). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reflect cultural beliefs.

Metaphors shape how people think about complex topics and can influence beliefs...Metaphors are associated with affect; affect influences behavior. This association has been confirmed through neuro-science experiments.

(There's also a great description of metonymy, and later the stern warning, "Metonymy will be in addition to metaphors. Those interested in metonymy must explain why metonymy is required.")

The project's goal is to "automat[e] the discovery, framing and categorization of linguistic metaphors in large amounts of textual data in multiple languages"--in other words, to push a whole lotta text through a whole lotta computers--but since I'm skeptical that figurative language conforms to any pattern that can be modeled, I see huge potential here for us: when the computerized model fails, the Defense Department will be forced to hire a platoon of humanities PhDs.

Win-win!

"After surviving firefights, sitting on a college campus with someone who doesn’t like me is the least of my worries"

2011-11-14T16:33:00.003-05:00

Today's New York Times has a great article on Columbia's aggressive recruitment of military veterans for undergraduate study. Columbia now has more than 200 veterans enrolled, while its closest Ivy competitor, Cornell, has approximately 50. (We won't speak about the shamefully low figure enrolled at my own alma mater.)

I've thought a fair amount about veterans in the classroom over the years, for a number of reasons: I come from a military family; my former long-term partner teaches at one of the service academies (as he did for five of our six years together); and I've taught quite a few veterans myself at RU. But although there's a lot to say about this article, what most strikes me is the way it seems to align with the argument I made a while back about the limited kinds of diversity one can expect at elite colleges: it's not surprising to me that Columbia, which is located in a big city and already has a robust undergraduate program aimed at nontraditional students, and Cornell, which has the largest undergraduate population of the Ivies, are doing the best job recruiting students who are a bit older and have significant non-academic life experience.

As I wrote in that earlier post, elite colleges that are devoted to a residential model--and especially smaller elite colleges, located in smaller communities--seem to have a harder time imagining what it would mean to add older students (or married students or students with meaningfully different academic backgrounds) into the mix.

But there's no reason for this to be true. Although the student population at RU could certainly be more cohesive, quite a lot of our students, including transfer students or those who have taken several years off, elect to live on or right near campus, as a part of the academic community, and it's not uncommon for students to forge friendships with other students who are a number of years older. Surely elite colleges could preserve their academic standards, maintain a sense of communal identity, and diversify their student bodies in new and important ways--with veterans for starters, but perhaps also with other older or returning students--if they tried. Kudos to Columbia for showing them how.

Acceptance

2011-11-14T09:26:00.005-05:00

In early January, I start checking the time of sunrise and sunset every day, taking pleasure in each additional minute of daylight (and usually declaring to multiple people, multiple times a week, "Tomorrow will be two minutes and eight seconds longer!" or "We've gained six more minutes of daylight since Monday!"). I'm also fond of telling my friends in Boston and New York that the sun sets in Cha-Cha City 20-30 minutes later, year round. It's a way of getting through.

But as soon as we pass the summer solstice, I stop checking. And when it's fully dark by 9 p.m. I start noting morosely that it's all downhill from there. Throughout the early fall I grumble, taking the shortening days--every single one of them--very personally. Winter's coming.

Now that we've set the clocks back, though, I'm okay with it. It's dark early and it's dark long, and it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'm grateful for the warm, sunny days we'll still get through the end of this month, and I'm grateful for weekend days spent outside, when the dark comes on more slowly. We drink cider and whiskey and red wine, eat stews and nuts and root vegetables, and we light fires in the fireplace and have people over. I'll see my college friends at the football game this weekend, family for Thanksgiving the week after that, and the end of the semester is in sight.

It'll be okay, for a while. But talk to me again in February.

Hope for the humanities? (part 2 of 2)

2011-11-08T22:22:00.000-05:00

The big asterisk to my generally positive attitude about my institution's commitment to the humanities has to do with our foreign language department and requirements. Briefly, they're a joke. Like many institutions, mine is falling all over itself to proclaim its dedication to "global study," and to declare that it prepares its students for a "global workplace"--while doing nothing to increase the actual study of foreign languages or build its foreign language department. Spanish is the only remotely healthy program we seem to have, and I suspect that's a reflection not of any actual strategy on the part of the institution, but simply of the number of students who took the language in high school and who, of their own initiative, have decided to go further. Student demand has occasionally brought in an Arabic or Japanese instructor for a few semesters, which is nice, but there's no possibility of studying those languages past the beginner level. (Other than Spanish, the only language with tenure-line faculty, and hence some literature offerings, is French. But the most popular language courses on campus seem to be those for American Sign Language.)

I suspect there may be internal, departmental reasons that the foreign languages haven't been getting hires, but I also think it's the downside of student demand: for reasons that we in English and History aren't totally in control of, students want to major in our subjects, and that sets off a virtuous cycle in which more and better faculty get hired, which in turn attracts more and better majors. Students don't want to major in the foreign languages (and not enough make studying a foreign language a priority), so tenure-line faculty don't get hired, the programs languish, and the institution actually cuts the required number of semesters of foreign language study...thus decreasing the likelihood that students will get far enough to want to do more.

The lack of commitment to the foreign languages is an active concern in my department and in the history department, but as yet we haven't done much except complain among ourselves and urge individual students to take another year or two of a foreign language. But long term, I think we have to try to use our relative weight to put some pressure on the administration; we're neither going to attract the best students nor make our students into the best scholars they can be without a somewhat better foreign language department--and what's the point of being a robust department, anyway, if we can't help out other allied departments?

*

My smaller asterisk to my previous post involves my concern about what "raising our standards" does to the institution's mission. Our entering students are genuinely getting better every year, and the college is gradually transforming itself into a more traditional, more residential, liberal-arts-focused institution. The townhouses, the branding, the community ethos, etc., are all part of that effort. As a faculty member, it's hard not to be excited by a lot of this, especially since it hasn't been a case of "excellence without money": fundraising and alumni giving are way up, and faculty are pretty well-paid, with opportunities for merit raises in addition to cost-of-living raises every year. Who wouldn't want more smart students in the classroom? And who doesn't dare to hope that we might someday see course releases--or even a slight reduction in our teaching load--for faculty who are active scholars?

Well, no one doesn't want those things. And God knows, we'd all love to have our college recognized, statewide, for the strength of its humanities programs rather than having that be a pleasant surprise for the students (and faculty) who wind up here. But I worry a bit about the kind of smug self-satisfaction that I mentioned in my previous post in conjunction with the religious college up the road. One thing I love about RU students is how nice they are, how basically eager and hardworking and unpretentious; they're all here to get an education, and though the nature of that desire differs--some students just want a degree while others are intellectually ravenous--in no case is it about the cachet of the institution, or their own specialness for being here. (Our students seem happy to be affiliated with RU, and there's pleasure when one alumnus meets another alumnus, but it's not a self-congratulatory thing.)

And I wonder, sometimes, what the tipping point is: as we keep branding, and recruiting out-of-state students, and talking up our academics, will we lose some of what makes this institution so appealing? Will we lose the academically marginal students who are nevertheless full of eagerness and potential--only to wind up with a whole bunch of grade-grubbing, good-but-not-great students?

Maybe that's a foolish worry. But I think of all the spoiled, uncurious kids at middling colleges and universities, and it seems possible that for many institutions an increase in prestige--even specifically academic prestige--is accompanied by a decrease in intellectual vigor, especially in the undergraduate classroom.

Hope for the humanities (part 1 of 2)

2011-11-06T17:06:00.005-05:00

Historiann has put out the call for bloggers to respond to Tony Grafton's review of and reflections on the shitload--I believe that's the technical, historiographic term--of recent books on the crisis in higher education. Grafton argues that although there's no one single or simple explanation for higher ed's problems, there is a problem, which is the gradual divorcing of the college experience from real intellectual development: students go to college for the professional credential and the social experience, and colleges are increasingly complicit in allowing or encouraging them to "look for entertainment and easy grades."

But because most studies of the crisis in higher ed lump very different kinds of schools together, and generalize to the point that no clear picture of any college student's experience can be gleaned, Grafton ends his essay expressing a desire for more precise and particular descriptions of the state of higher education at a variety of different institutions--and it's this desire that Historiann has been marshaling bloggers to answer.

Both Notorious Ph.D. and Dr. Crazy have already responded, giving the perspective from their rather different public institutions, so I'll now give mine from mine. And I gotta say that, despite the problems that my institution faces and the things I'm displeased with (which will be the topic of my second blog post on this subject), I'm pretty impressed with the intellectual climate and the support for the humanities at my institution--non-elite though it may be.

I teach a 3/3 load at a public, comprehensive college with an undergraduate population of about 7,000 and another 1,000-1,500 graduate students. And in some ways, our college could be said to be among those that are focusing increasing energy and resources on improving our students' social lives: we're building an enormous special complex somehow devoted to student life (it's not a student center, and it's not a gym, and indeed no one has adequately described to me what it is); we've built a whole bunch of student townhouses as an addition/alternative to our dormitory housing; and there's been an increasing, exasperating emphasis on "branding" our college in various ways: new slogans, logos, advertisements, alumni networks, fundraising initiatives; you name it.

But the thing is, when a college with a significant commuter population and a significant community-college transfer population works to increase its students' sense of collective identity and to improve their residential experience (a surprising number of our community college transfer students elect to live in the dorms), those things aren't necessarily working against a commitment to the intellectual life.

Because here's the other truth: of those 7,000 undergrads? English now has 600 majors, and history has about the same. We're the two biggest majors on campus, and still growing. The bad job market has been good for us in those two departments, and we've hired great faculty. Our chief academic officer--a scientist by training--has consistently touted our two departments as the strength of the college, and the first new academic building to be built on our campus in decades will be a showcase for the humanities.

For our students, then, creating a social life--encouraging them to live on campus, to participate in social and extra-curricular activities--goes along with fostering an atmosphere of shared intellectual engagement. (I wouldn't go so far as to say that binge drinking on the weekends is a part of this community-building! But more moderate forms of non-academic recreation arguably could be.)

Because I'll tell you what: those 1,200-odd English and history majors aren't majoring in our subjects because of a belief in the ennobling or civilizing virtues of the humanities, or even, in some cases, because they're voracious readers or innately curious or whatever else is alleged to bring students to the humanities. A large percentage of our majors have selected English or history because they want teaching jobs--which is partly to say, they want stable, unionized, middle-class jobs. (In my state, unlike many of its neighbors, students can't major in "education"; even students who want to teach kindergarten have to major in an actual academic subject.)

But however they wind up in our majors, the sheer number of them means we keep hiring. And that, in turns, means they're being challenged by an increasingly strong cadre of teachers and scholars--which attracts better majors and makes many of the weaker ones better, too. And while it can be challenging to teach to a range of different ability levels in the same classroom, I believe I've seen the ways that a shared ethos and identity, a sense that being an English major (or being an RU student) is a thing, and that those other people in the classroom are potentially your people, makes students more engaged and interested in rising to the level of their peers and to the level of their instructors' expectations.

So, okay: many things are pretty good at my institution. The question is, are the phenomena that are responsible for the general health of the humanities at my non-elite institution replicable elsewhere?

I think they are, with a few caveats.

First, the humanities will never attract majors--and this is increasingly true, I think, even at elite schools--by blather about how these subjects allow us to think the greatest thoughts, engage with the greatest ideas, etc. Students may be compelled by those arguments once they are humanities majors, but it's not the way to attract first-generation college students or convince their parents. The humanities really need to sell themselves as a smart professional move. In my state, the teachers unions, like all the civil service unions, are still very powerful, so that's a draw. But we need to make a much more powerful and explicit case for the utility of a humanities major for careers in business and other professional fields (and not just by talking vaguely about "critical thinking skills"; our students are concerned about the bottom line, and that's not a failing on their part, but one we have to be able to address directly).

Second, administrators need to have the vision to recognize that the humanities are, at most schools, well-established, time-tested, and cheap to operate. It doesn't cost much to hire really good faculty in these areas, and then boast about the fact. Regional and poorer schools need to stop chasing after the next new thing, building expensive bio-tech centers (or whatever) from scratch because those things seem sexy and forward-looking, and build on their existing strengths. No, not every English or history department is great. But you can buy a strong English department a lot faster and cheaper than you can buy a strong computer science department. Ideally, if they got on board, the administration would help to publicly promote the notion that a humanities education builds an educated workforce and citizenry.

Third, frankly? I think regional public institutions may be structurally positioned to support a healthier undergraduate intellectual life than some of their peers--which isn't to say that they are healthier, by and large, but I think they have often-overlooked advantages. Let's start with teaching: at my institution, anyway, graduate students do not teach, and although we have as many adjuncts as we have full-time faculty, they teach composition almost exclusively; a 3/3 load means that our 20 tenure-line faculty--plus a handful of full-time lecturers--actually can teach 600 majors a semester, in discussion-sized classes. This is not possible at R1 state schools with lighter teaching loads, a larger student body, and faculty who are often wooed with explicit promises of course releases, time off for research, and teaching obligations that are limited to grad students and advanced undergrads.

Then there's the money. Even when state schools are hurting for money (and I'll admit that my state system is relatively healthy and that my institution has been conservative in its cuts, so I'm probably blither about those things than most public-university faculty), regional private institutions are often in equally bad financial straits. Moreover, they have a harder time attracting smarter-but-poorer students; have to justify their high price-tag; and can be prone to unhealthy levels of self-satisfaction (a friend who teaches at a private religious college up the road reports that her students are under the belief that, since School X is the most expensive college in the area, it must therefore be really prestigious).

And finally, there's the lack of big-time athletics. Yes, we have jocks, and yes, some of them got recruited with lower scores than their peers. That can be a drag. But the athletes aren't expecting to go on to careers as professional athletes, which means they know they need a college degree, and the relationship between the coaching staff and the faculty is pretty respectful (I've been asked about a student-athlete's anticipated course grade, but merely because the coach needed to know who would be stating the next season and the kid would be benched if his GPA was too low; there was no pressure involved). And we avoid all the ancillary negatives of being part of a big athletic conference: no mayhem on game day, no raging fans, etc.

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Obviously, I'm not saying that there aren't problems in higher ed; I'm not even saying that there aren't problems at my institution; I'll get to those, and to my concerns about the sustainability of what I've just outlined above, in a couple of days. But I do believe that there's a strong future for the humanities--even and maybe especially in non-elite colleges and universities--if we discard some of our outdated ideas about what motivates a humanities major and what he or she looks like.

Team teaching: mid-semester thoughts

2011-11-04T01:01:00.003-04:00

So I took very seriously all the comments that suggested that team teaching works best when the co-teachers trade off discussion-leading responsibilities or otherwise ensure that it's always clear who's in charge at a given moment. My co-teacher, apparently, got much the same advice from the people he'd consulted with.

And for our first few weeks, we did that. We conferred by phone the day before, talked stuff through on the drive to campus, and roughly divided up teaching responsibilities: sometimes one of us would lead virtually an entire class, sometimes the period would be more evenly divided, but while one of us was leading discussion the other would respectfully remain silent or speak only after raising a hand and being called on. Those classes all went well.

But then. . . we decided we just didn't care, or that we didn't have the time to do extensive pre-class prepping, or that we had compatible enough interests and teaching styles to just play it by ear

And it's been even better this way: we take 5-10 minutes to discuss a few things we'd like to do, and a possible order, and then we get in the classroom and just go, switching on and off as we feel like it, redirecting conversation, helping each other out, and inserting tangential observations as they seem useful.

A friend with much more co-teaching experience puts it like this: having a co-teacher is like having a roommate: no matter how much you may like a person, until you live with them, you have no idea if you can live with them.

It's not perfect. We tend to have slightly longer and slightly more awkward transitions than in a normal class, since before moving on we'll usually pause to make sure the other person doesn't still have something left to say; it's also harder to scrap or invent stuff on the fly.

And though our students are lively and engaged, we don't totally have a handle on how they experience our blended class, or how they feel about the fact that we'll get into conversations with each other in the middle of discussion, or correct each other, or interrupt to exclaim, "oh! that's so cool! I've always wondered about that!"

But, eh. We're having a good time. And I hope that our students see us learning from each other, and enjoying learning from each other--and that that makes up for the class's occasional awkwardnesses.