The Salt-Box

It’s a long story, but I have an office off by myself, away from the rest of the department.  The chair of the closest department is a friendly person, and we regularly joke about the relative importance of our departments, what I must have done to move all the way across campus, and the like.

Today, while I was standing in the bathroom, the chair walked up beside me and said, “So, Jason, what are *you* doing here?”

I froze.

After an interminable pause, he said, “I thought you English types didn’t have to prepare for the semester . . . don’t you just roll in the first day and say, ‘here read a bunch of books?’”

I chuckled, half from relief, and said, “*Oh* . . . I thought you were making a Larry Craig joke–’why are you in the bathroom,’ not, ‘why are you on campus.’”

Praise the merciful gods, he saw that that was a funny misunderstanding.

Academia

To pimp the fine young cadence
of the dying gasp's demented urge
to sentence
                           and to dumb back the ecstasies
that press up from, well, NOTHING--
this is our tiny calling,
our bungled ancientness.

–Joe Wenderoth, No Real Light (Wave Books, forthcoming in Sept. 2007)

Second-guessing ESPN columnists is more Erik’s thing, but I couldn’t resist this.  In his NFC preview, Gregg “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” Easterbrook blasts John Fox for blaspheming:

“We’re owed a little bit of luck by the football gods, if there is such a thing,” Panthers coach John Fox told Sports Illustrated during training camp. Fox doubts the existence of the football gods? He lacks faith, despite their many signs and wonders? Maybe Fox has been reading historical revisionism that claims folklore stories about football gods are just sociological accretions from prescientific times. But to start off the season questioning the existence of the football gods! Oh, they shall smite down the Carolina Panthers. Yea, verily, the Panthers shall be smote.

Apparently Easterbrook can’t disentangle basic syntax.  Let’s rewind the tape.  Here’s what Fox said:

 ”We’re owed a little bit of luck by the football gods, if there is such a thing,”

Fox here disputes the existence of *luck*, not “the football gods.”  Had he been denying the existence of the gods, he would have said, “if they exist.”  But it’s customary for coaches and other control freaks to look skeptically at luck, which tends to favor the well-prepared.  (Even Obi-Wan said, “In my experience, there’s no such thing as luck.”)

I’ll concede that, in a perfect world, “if there is such a thing” would follow “luck,” but not many people would do that when speaking off-the-cuff.

–

In other football news, my punishment for missing the fantasy league’s draft last Saturday was . . . LaDainian Tomlinson.   I *certainly* learned my lesson!  Suckers.

At the end of last semester, I was elected chair of a particular committee.  (I had been vice-chair.)  The committee has a two-year term, so I was also up for election to the committee.  Because this put the committee in a tight spot, I asked the elections committee to let me know whether I had been re-elected, so that we could have our officers in place going into the summer.  They said yes.  Huzzah!

Well.  You already can tell where this is going: Tonight I discovered that, oops, I in fact was NOT re-elected to the committee in general, and so, obviously, I can’t be chair.  Talk about your mixed bag:

• It’s frustrating.  This is going to be an interesting year on this particular committee, with initiatives that are directly related to my skillset, and I won’t really get a say.
• It’s embarrassing.  It’s not like the committee leadership elections were secret, and so I’d been approached all summer by various administrators about plans for the fall.  (Worse, I may actually have to continue to meet with these people until the committee sits and can elect a proper chair.)
• On the third hand, hey look–free time!  And lots of it!

The Wall Street Journal has an article up today (via 43folders) about managing your e-mail, which, if it isn’t anything groundbreaking, nonetheless usefully rounds up all the usual productivity experts for handy quotations.   In particular, Merlin Mann reminds us, yet again, that “checking email and not doing anything about it is the worst habit.”

This is my worst time management sin.  (Um, besides blogging.)

On days when I’m with The Little Man, for instance, I will use “let me just look at my e-mail for a second” as an excuse for a break, or, while I’m doing some chore on those days, I’ll extend it by looking at e-mail.  So I *see* the messages, but I rarely actually answer them then, because it’s time to play again.  By the time I can actually answer the messages properly, there’s more new ones–sometimes pushing the unanswered, but read, messages right off the screen, into the undifferentiated morass of “read, but unfiled” messages.  Whether those messages get answered is really a function of the level of crisis on any given day.
(While typing this, I clicked “refresh inbox” in order to pause and figure out how to say something.  It really is a disease.)

(Damn.  I did it again, on my other e-mail account.)

This semester, A and I are trying out a new strategy of scheduling our time much more explicitly.  Once we get our hours divided up* correctly, I’ll have to fill in specific e-mail times and try to stick to them.

–

*We divide up the hours such that someone is always with The Little Man.  So, there’s a complicated heuristic about prioritizing time: Who’s teaching, who’s got a conference, who’s got a writing deadline, who likes to work late, who likes to get up psychotically early and work, etc.  It’s not pretty.

Apparently, complaining about VitalChek, saying anything about RateMyProfessor.com, or linking to gay porn adaptations of Dickens novels = traffic gold. (Each of those posts has meant about 10 visitors/day in Google traffic.)

If I could just script a gay porn movie starring a student scrutinizing RateMyProfessors.com while having problems proving themselves to VitalChek, I’d be King of the Blogs.

Square brackets can be useful things: clarifying the referent in a particular quotation, filling in a broader context.  But look at this one, from this week’s Sports Illustrated, were Howard Wasserman is quoted about the possibility of Barry Bonds suing Curt Schilling for libel:

“If he does sue, he’s playing with fire.  A great example is Oscar Wilde, who was accused of [sodomy] and sued for libel.  It then came out during the investigation that he was gay, and he was ruined.”

I’ll not nitpick the casual use of “gay” in that sentence to name what even Wikipedia acknowledges is a complex issue.  No, my nitpick is with the editor’s interpolation of “sodomy” as the thing Wilde was accused of.

The card left by Queensberry called Wilde a “posing Somdomite,” and at trial Queensberry claimed he meant that Wilde was “posing as a Somdomite.”  (This 2000 review by David Jay addresses some of these questions.)    That’s gold–far more interesting, from several different points of view, than mere sodomy.

Dr. Crazy has yet another great post, this time on balancing the need to recruit students for classes vs. the dreaded over-enrollment problem.  I won’t comment in full about this here, as I actually got in some lukewarm water this summer about a flyer I made to promote a course with low (but, in the event, adequate) enrollment.

I’ll just note that a solution is at hand:

• Item: The average American reads 4 books / year.
• Item: My Modern British Novel course has 12 required books.  (Despite this, the class will be over-enrolled by at least 2 students.)
• Conclusion: Take my class, and be done with reading for THREE YEARS!!

You can’t beat that offer with a stick.  Not with a stick.

This is the latest Pottery Barn catalog, which arrived yesterday (I apologize for the low-res image that I’ve blown up here, but it’s the best I could find in less than 90 seconds.):

That would be an iPhone, an iPod, *and* a Shuffle sharing the front cover.

From the latest alarmist report on reading:

The Bible and religious works were read by two-thirds in the survey, more than all other categories. Popular fiction, histories, biographies and mysteries were all cited by about half, while one in five read romance novels. Every other genre — including politics, poetry and classical literature — were named by fewer than five percent of readers.

It’s like the old joke: “The food here is terrible . . . and the portions are so small!”