The Salt-Box

MLA ended yesterday, so we went to the Field Museum & Adler Planetarium in the afternoon before catching a flight back to CT.  I learned the following things:

1. At the Field Museum, we caught the Darwin exhibit, which made us very happy (since we’d missed it in NYC).  It was well done, although if you teach Darwin regularly there’s not a *lot* of new stuff.  In fact, I’d say that the main reaction is affective–seeing an intellectual hero’s stuff up close.
2. The Adler Planetarium is a #@@^*%! rip-off operation.   On a day when 4 out of their 6 shows weren’t working, they still charged full freight for a super-lame constellation show featuring questions that even the Little Man was calling out the answers to.
3. United Airlines is an abomination before the Lord, and I wish it all ill-luck in the future.  I didn’t even mind the 90 minute delay at takeoff, but I *did* mind their inability to tell a consistent story about the reason for the delay.  I didn’t mind the fact that it took an hour to deplane (because they missed the plane with the jetway, thus breaking it, requiring a tug to another gate), but I *did* mind that they didn’t use that hour to offload our luggage, so that we had *another* 45 minute wait at the carousel.  We were at the airport for two hours before getting out–and so drove home at 1am.  (TLM was astonishingly patient and flexible through this whole thing.)
4. On Sunday, during A’s panel, TLM and I went to Orange for brunch.  He had jelly donut pancakes, and, as you’ll see here, watermelon juice:

I’m not really at MLA; A is.  I’m just here to provide childcare during her paper.  But I did go to Dr. Crazy’s blogger meetup, and met another blogger the next day, and then last night had dinner with some colleagues from elsewhere.  At dinner, one of the colleagues asked our companion about making contacts with university presses about one’s first book.   He laid out a timeline that might be useful for people (and which  he thought was universally understood, though I’d never heard it), so, here goes:

1. Summer before a planned trip to MLA, investigate likely presses. (I.e., ones that publish in your field, maybe especially ones that publish books you like or engage with.)
2. Early in the fall, write the acquisitions editor at target presses, briefly (!) outlining your project and mentioning that you will be at MLA.
3. Some # of acquisitions editors will write back. Some of them might say, “thanks, but no.”  Others will say, “sounds interesting, let’s chat at MLA.”  Others might say, “sounds interesting, send me your paper or a chapter in advance of MLA, and then let’s talk there.”  Others might show up at your panel.

The advantage of this approach, as my colleague explained it, is that when you meet the person at MLA, they will know something about your work already, and can give you more practical/focused advice about whether the project is potentially suitable for the press.

This is obviously not the only model–I didn’t meet anyone at my press until after they’d committed to the book–but it might provide structure to the book expo experience, which can otherwise seem like a weird speed-dating exercise.

Tonight at the grocery store, I ran into a student who mentioned casually that he was looking forward already to his spring classes.  Normally, I’m equally enthusiastic–after all, next semester’s hypothetical classes are, almost by definition, more interesting than *this* semester’s weary, played-out classes.  That’s true for any given semester.

But what the student didn’t grasp is this: Our last finals were Friday.  Grades aren’t due until *this* Friday at 8am.  From my point of view, then, this semester ISN’T OVER!  We’re not on break until the 28th at 8.01am.

Two or three years ago, someone at the system office apparently decided that having grades be due *before* Christmas was too convenient and helpful.  So they pushed back the start of the semester to after Labor Day, with the usual consequences for the rest of the semester.  I simply can’t grasp the logic.  I’d start in July if it meant having grades done by Christmas.

(I’ll save for another fall the stupidity of having no break at all from Labor Day through November, until a 5 day break for Thanksgiving (Wednesday to Sunday), and then coming back for 2 weeks of classes before finals.  How energetic and focused students and faculty are in those last two “rump” weeks I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.)

On the plus side, I guess, the stress helps me keep off holiday weight!

1. If your spouse makes you buy BOTH of Neil Diamond’s Christmas albums so the family can play them on the iPod, then showing her this as a countermeasure is both funny and highly efficacious in decreasing the ambient amount of Neil Diamond. (If Rick Rubin’s not involved, Neil Diamond shouldn’t be gunking up my iPod.)

2. I have officially become my father. I have distinctive memories from childhood exclaiming with my brother over various gifts as we opened them, and my father peering over, apparently slightly confused, and saying “oh, right . . . ” as he remembered whatever it was made us so happy. In my 20s and early 30s, I came to think that this was a sort of performance, but this year, as the Little Man happily opened presents that I had almost no memory of buying, I found myself peering over, apparently slightly confused, and saying “oh, right . . . ” So, Merry Christmas, Dad!

3. If, on Christmas, your kid decides that “Jeebus” is a good nickname for your wife . . . who in the family, exactly, is doomed to Hell?

Just in time for the nation’s holiday travel, Stephan Pastis offers up an irrefutable moral truth: People who recline their airline seat when there’s someone sitting behind them are genuinely evil:

I’ve not–yet–slammed anyone’s head into a tray table, but once I rested my book on someone’s head, after he reclined his seat so far that I couldn’t otherwise hold the book upright.

Students grab pictures of you off of Flickr/Facebook and turn them into backdrops for their group presentations.  Here I am as the portrait of Duncan Edgeworth’s dead wife in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A House and Its Head. A holiday treat for the three people out there curious to know what I would look like with dreads.

So, I’ve been looking back over the wikified notes from this semester’s Brit Lit II class (the same class mentioned here), and have discovered that apparently one of our class discussions led me to allude to this scene from Weeds, which ineluctably led the students to memorialize the moment online.

That’s right . . . I invoked “MILF Weed” in a discussion of a Romantic poem.  (A free one-month subscription to this blog to anyone who correctly guesses the poem.)

An unlooked-for disadvantage of having students collaborate on class notes is having your stupidest moments enshrined for the whole semester.

The self-evident answer to “Rex Sayer”’s question, posed in today’s CoHE first person essay, is surely, No.  Taking care of children can be exhausting and expensive, is an excellent vector for disease (especially right now!), and, more positively, can be so fascinating that it diverts attention from one’s students or research.  And while *some* students respond positively to anecdotes about children, others won’t.

My slightly more complex response is: Why should they be?  Surely it’s ok that parts of our lives don’t line up neatly with our academic careers?   Merging one’s personal life and professional life in this way seems . . . peculiar.  (Said the person who’s married to someone in his department, and whose 4-yr-old has met something like 90% of his students at various points over the years.  But, and perhaps for that reason, the thought of justifying the boy through reference to my career had literally never occurred to me.)

And then there’s this:

And isn’t that why we teach? Isn’t every act of walking into a classroom or a library, fundamentally, an affirmation of our belief that things could be a little better?

Ah, romanticism.  There is, it has always seemed to me, a vanity to this notion, insofar as it envisions the professor’s role as inspirational.  By contrast, one could also teach from a desire to have a somewhat stable job doing things that you like, from a belief that things could well get worse, or, perhaps more defensibly, a belief that some things (texts, values, habits of mind, . . .)  are, after all, worth preserving or discovering.

I’ve been working a lot with wikis over the past year or so, which has, in the main, been very successful.  In particular, I’ve been evolving a new way to do class notes, which I’ll post about here sometime soon.

An aspect that’s still “in process” is an attempt to wikify exams: students contribute questions to a question bank over the course of the semester, and edit other students’ questions, until some prearranged date.  I’ve always pledged that if the questions were adequately good, I’d restrict myself to the student-generated questions.  And, usually, I make that exam available online in advance.  (Before people start thinking I’ve lost all sense of standards, my grade distribution in these classes is very close to what it used to be.)  The thinking has been that generating a good exam question is a cognitively richer engagement with the course material than merely cramming for an exam.

And that’s probably true . . . for a *good* question.  But this time, among many other excellent questions, I got this doozy:

What is the comparison between Dracula and the Broadview Anthology of British Literature?

On the one hand, I guess one has to admire the objectivity of this question: Both are published by Broadview; both feature works by different writers; the Anthology is longer, and has a greater diversity of sources.  On the other hand . . .

The New York & London-based poet Kathryn Maris, whose first book, The Book of Jobs, came out last year, was kind enough to talk with  me (for Bookslut) about that collection, her new work, and about the “hermetic co-existence” of British & American poetry.  Here’s a taste:

The title of poem of The Book of Jobs has a great phrase about the problem with adults: We are “bloated with identity.” Do you see poems as offering a kind of relief for this state? How would that work? (Did I just call poetry a diuretic?)

The phrase “we are bloated with identity” comes at the end of one of the earliest poems in the collection “After Visiting The Job Books.” But though it was one of the first poems I started, it was possibly the last poem I finished. And that’s because it was only after I got married and had children that I understood the downside of identity and responsibility—the way that you can feel like you might explode with all you must be: wife, mother, daughter, friend, writer, teacher—or whatever your identity happens to be.

As for poetry providing relief from that: poetry, for me, provides relief from uncomfortable psychological states in general.

Read the whole thing!