The Salt-Box

Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s evidence that ants read Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842 [1833]):

WORKER ants accurately gauge their life expectancy, regardless of their actual age, and take on riskier tasks as they feel their days ebbing away.

Here’re the relevant lines from Tennyson:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breath were life.

. . .

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

Who would’ve thought that the mighty Ulysses and the worker ant are cousins?

Dunkin Donuts has too many choices.  I don’t think I’d like to be able to order pizza at a donut shop (though my students tell me it’s pretty good for fast food pizza*).  I like Dunkin Donuts, and we drink the coffee at home.

If I’m at Dunkin Donuts, it’s an emergency.  I need coffee. I’m not likely to have a meeting there, or to work on my laptop for hours, or to have a proper meal, or anything.  I just want coffee.  If I buy coffee, I might also buy a donut or muffin.  Waiting behind someone ordering six complicated coffees, a variety of bagels, plus breakfast sandwiches, is bad enough . . . but now that people agonize over whether to have a pizza–it’s ugly.

Perhaps this is a staffing problem?  Maybe there could a dedicated “coffee [not coffee drinks, just coffee] and ready-to-serve pastries only” line?  Waiting 15 minutes in line at 2pm is not good.

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*Possibly the most lukewarm compliment ever.

Before dinner this evening, I was chatting with someone at the conference–not my designated conference buddy–who was still grappling with cuts in her paper.  Eventually, she came round to the view that, after all, no one in the room would know either 1) the Platonic ideal of her argument in its full, chapter-length form, or 2) what her abstract said she’d talk about.*

Wouldn’t that be hilarious?: Abstract Police, deputized to stroll the halls of conferences and check to be sure that the papers that are delivered closely match the abstracts as originally submitted.  (”Wait–your abstract said you would focus on the “The Song of the Shirt,” but, in fact, you only glance at it en route to an account of Jane Eyre.  10 demerits for you.”)

I think I believed in the Abstract Police until about my 3rd or 4th conference.

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*To be clear: She wasn’t changing her topic or anything drastic–just shifting emphasis a bit & cutting in order to provide a better presentation!

One of the funniest things about the conference I’m currently attending–which, I should add, is jam-packed with academic goodness–is that there are a pretty limited number of flights to the conference city, and so the last couple of days have featured planes full of academics.  And one thing I noticed is that I seem to bring more than many others.  Reviewing the contents of my bags, I see:

• 60 exams to grade
• A short-story collection & collection of novellas by the author I’ve just interviewed, so that I can write up the feature-length story
• The text I’m prepping for next week’s Honors class
• The next two novels that I’m reviewing for PopMatters
• Studies on Hysteria, which is the subject of my next PsychoSlut column

Perhaps I overpacked?  Even factoring in the 13 hours of travel time each way?

Meanwhile, what did I do last night?  Fell asleep at 5pm, woke up at 1am, and then went back to sleep until 4.30am, which my body interpreted as 7.30am.

And here’s the thing: The only thing I *ever* get done at conferences is sleep.  (Aside from conference-related stuff . . . paper-finishing, and the lot.) As long as we have a small child at home, all I’ll ever get done at conferences is sleep.

So, self, in the future: STOP PACKING ALL THIS STUFF YOU CAN’T DO!!  You’ll just feel guilty, and, besides, you need to sleep.

Bah.  If you want to see *one* thing I got done today, click here for the weekly Blog of a Bookslut post.  Ooh–and I got my beta invite for Sandy, the virtual e-mail assistant from the values of n people.  And, I guess, I wrote this whiny blog post.

The October issue of Bookslut is up, including installment 2 of Psycho Slut.  This month, I briefly discuss Volume 1 of the Standard Edition: “Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts,” before getting down to the real business of the column: An interview with Mark Edmundson about his most recent book, The Death of Sigmund Freud.  The book and the interview were both fascinating; particularly helpful, I thought, was the moment when Edmundson and I figured out why Freud’s so popular in English departments:

. . . that answer goes quite some way toward explaining why Freud’s popular in English departments… if he’s good on troubles in love, and good on problems with authority…

[Laughs] Because people in English departments suffer all those things!

Read the whole thing !

Next month, Studies in Hysteria, plus a feature-length interview, I think.

• WikiMindMap creates mindmaps of the links in Wikipedia pages.  Here, for instance, is how it represents the entry for Charles Dickens. (Thanks, Tom!)
• ZIPskinny pulls census data on a zipcode-by-zipcode basis.  Here’re the results for my ZIP code; while the household income numbers are startling, what’s really interesting–for a ZIP code that enfolds (though doesn’t quite include) a university–are the numbers about educational achievement. Of people over 25, slightly more residents graduates never made it to high school than graduated from college.  (Thanks, Mom!)

This week at Bookslut, I’ve posted an interview with Joe Wenderoth, author of Letters to Wendy’s and, last month, No Real Light.  We talk about YouTube and poetic performance, about political poetry, the fate of poets in the American University, and much else:

And most disturbing of all, from my point of view, is that so few people in the poetry world seem really disturbed about how poorly it’s going. That makes me cynical—makes me question whether these folks really care about poetry. It seems to me that if you really care about poetry, you have to be struck by how pathetic it has become. It’s almost completely subsidized, and the handful of poets who actually sell books outside of the “you are required to read this” realm—well, their notoriety seems more inexplicable than the academic subsidizing beneath them. Rita Dove? Robert Hass? It’s bizarre. As for the way in which the academic world “keeps alive” poetry in some fashion, I suppose that some of that is real, but your question remains. What could American poetry be if it was not owned/subsidized/authenticated by academia—would it dwindle to an even lesser phenomenon or would it begin to become more capable of judging itself seriously? I don’t know.

As ever, read the whole thing!