Lies, Traps, Fools, and Villains

It just so happens that yesterday morning I read this piece in the Chronicle, along with its lengthy comment thread, in which James Mulholland offers a rebuttal to the most recent in Thomas H. Benton's series of offerings, the gist of which one might somewhat ungenerously summarize as "only naive fools go to graduate school in the humanities and only evil and dastardly professors with the privilege of tenure who are totally disconnected from reality support them in doing so." I'd already posted about BES and her adventure in grad school applications before reading that rebuttal, but as fate would have it, a commenter directed me to the Benton piece to which Mulholland was responding, and since that comment, I've been mulling. Mulling and thinking. Both about the rebuttal, as well as about Benton's commentary on these issues, as well as another fine series featured in the Chronicle, too, the 6-part "Academic Bait-And-Switch" (links to parts 1-5 are at the bottom of the previous link) series by Henry Adams.

[Aside: Do any of the rest of you find it, well, troubling, that all of these columnists for the Chronicle are male professors of English who work at SLACs? And that when we see women columnists on the Chronicle's advice page that most often they don't get to talk about Big Important Issues like the "state of the humanities" but rather that they are enlisted to talk about the only things that women academics apparently care about, which involve the two-body problem, birthing babies, or mentoring those in need? Because I find that deeply troubling.]

Here's the thing. I've written countless posts (to which I'm too lazy to link) in which I have attempted to think through my position as a mentor to students in regards to graduate school in my discipline, and in which I have expressed my ambivalence and fear and general angst about the issues that all of the above columnists address. I don't believe that "there will always be jobs for the best and the brightest"; I don't believe that graduate school is some idyllic time of inquiry and Deep Thoughts in which time stops, material reality ceases to exist, and one leads a "life of the mind." I don't believe that graduate school is always the most emotionally or even intellectually healthy option for a life after undergrad, and I don't believe that it's generally the most financially responsible choice that any person can make. I don't find arguments about the moral or societal good of my discipline, or of the humanities generally, a terribly compelling rebuttal to the very real institutional and structural realities of the employment structure of higher education, nor do I think that there is something privileged and special about the life of a humanities professor if we're comparing it to the life of people in other careers.

And yet, I have supported students who want to pursue graduate school and who want academic careers. And I don't think that this makes me someone who tells Big Lies, who entraps the unsuspecting and naive, who preys upon the innocent and baits them with one thing and then pulls the rug out from under them. From the columns by Adams and Benton (aka William Pannapacker), it would seem, however, that I'm all of those things.

Or, if I read myself through the lens of Mullholland, it would seem that I'm a person who believes that pursuing an advanced degree in my discipline is akin to running off to New York to become a dancer or poet or actor, or, alternatively, who dreams of being in the NBA as a college player, and I don't believe that either. And the main reason that I don't believe that is because at its core, the job of a college professor, however difficult such a job is to obtain, is neither as awesomely bohemian nor as glamorous as the above have the potential to be. It's a bourgeois, middle-class, ultimately pretty boring sort of a career choice, and that's if everything works out as planned, which most of the time it doesn't. While it's true that most people who run off to be artists or actors or basketball players will not succeed in achieving those dreams, it is also true that if they do then the payoff is infinitely greater than if one "succeeds" at becoming a professor. While the competition to succeed may be similar, the reality of one's job if one succeeds is very, very different.

But so. If all of that is true. If I don't advocate for a modernized life of the mind in which we strive to "understand the pleasures of those who still choose to pursue" it (as Mulholland writes), how can I possibly argue that graduate school in the humanities is not a trap specifically designed to "[limit] the options of students and [to socialize] them into believing that it is shameful to abandon 'the life of the mind'" (as Benton describes)? How can I have a problem both with the initial assertion as well as with the rebuttal? How do I see these issues, and how do I justify my continued support of (a very small number of) students who want to pursue graduate school in the hope of securing full-time academic employment?

I suppose the first thing is that I think that this whole concept of a "life of the mind" is a red herring, and that it distracts us from considering the real value of the humanities generally, as well as, to get more personal, from considering the real value of the study of literature more specifically.

First, this reification of the mind/body split, whether one is arguing in favor of the concept of a life of the mind or against it, fails to account for the embodiment of subjects, and this has very real consequences in terms of how we position subjects in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. Here's the thing: the only subjects who may have the privilege of leading a "life of the mind" are straight, white, middle-class-to-upper-class, able-bodied male subjects. The moment that any of those "other" categories intersect a given individual's subjectivity, s/he has to contend with the ways in which embodiment compromises, or at the very least inflects, the intellectual work that one might perform. Don't believe me? Just think for a moment on my aside earlier in this post.

Second, by arguing either for or against the concept of a "life of the mind," one accepts as a given that the work that we perform as academics is somehow distinct from actual living. It is as if, in choosing graduate school, one is choosing to stop living actual life for x amount of years, as if that would even be possible. (I think when people talk about grad school as a "trap" this is what they're talking about - that somehow it robs people of their "actual" lives.) It also implies that those who secure tenure-track employment don't actually have actual lives, but rather, in their cushy ivory tower offices, they have surrendered any connection with actual living in favor of a "life of the mind." Not only do I not know of a single case in which this is true, but also I don't think that it's possible. Now, it may be true that the domestic and daily work that goes along with actual living might not be something that certain individuals have to focus much attention on, because they have partners who take care of all of that or because they have the material resources to pay people to do that stuff for them, but that group is by far in the minority. Academics have lives. They have televisions, friends outside the academy, hobbies, interests, families, worries, responsibilities, paperwork, conflicts in the workplace or in their personal lives, whatever. Actual living doesn't stop just because a person goes to graduate school or just because one becomes a professor. Actual living is not reserved for people who don't go to graduate school in the humanities or people who have gone to graduate school but don't succeed in securing tenure-track employment. Seriously.

But so while I do believe in intellectual inquiry and its value and the joys of it, this whole notion of a "life of the mind" totally rubs me the wrong way, and yes, I think that limiting our discussion to that concept gets in the way of really discussing why anybody should bother to study anything in humanities disciplines.

But so why do I believe in humanistic inquiry? Whether at the undergraduate or graduate levels? (And I should note that I don't believe this list is only reserved for the humanities, but it is what I think that the humanities offers.)

Humanities disciplines teach us:

1. To see outside of our own limited experience and perspective in order to understand viewpoints and experiences that differ from our own.

2. To interpret cultural artifacts in relation to our own experiences, viewpoints, and cultures.

3. To produce logical arguments and to support those arguments with strong analysis.

4. To understand that there is value in exploration, creativity, pleasure, and knowledge, and that even if an object of study resists quantitative, economic, or scientific approaches that it may still have value.

5. To think more deeply about our ethical, moral, and social responsibilities as members of various communities.

I could go on, but I think that's a pretty good list to start with. And here's the thing: each of those items on that list relate to how individuals live in, experience, and understand the "real world." And yes, I believe that education in these areas is valuable, and I think that study in these areas is valuable for all people, and I think that all kinds of people should have the opportunity to pursue deeper study in these areas, not because at the end of it they will get some mythical "life of the mind" but because, as with the study of law or medicine or engineering or math or accounting or plumbing or construction or whatever, such study gives us a greater ability to contribute to the world in which we live. Yes, there are many ways in which we can contribute to our world. Humanistic inquiry is just one in a long list. It is neither more morally good or better for society than the others, nor is it less "practical" than the others. It's just distinct from the others.

But, you may say, given the job prospects at the end of such study, how can you advocate for anybody to pursue degrees in these areas? Not only at the graduate level, but even at the undergraduate level? I mean, seriously: shouldn't everybody just get a college degree that will get them a job? What the hell will people do with a degree in English (or philosophy, or history, or whatever)? Well, first, let me say this: undergraduate majors in English go on to do many things that are totally unrelated to going off and getting a Ph.D. in English. They get jobs in editing, writing, human resources, teaching, administrative work, libraries, and I could go on. We have one of the largest majors on our campus, and the vast majority never pursue any sort of advanced degree in English, and they do go on to lead productive and fruitful lives. I know. It's shocking. Also, I will say that many of those people who pursue "clear job at the end of the degree" fields don't necessarily end with jobs in those fields either, especially in this economy.

At the graduate level, these issues are more fraught. There is a huge opportunity cost to pursuing a Ph.D. in English, even if one is fully funded, and a huge emotional and personal cost to pursuing an academic career. But. I ultimately believe that one of the things that my discipline, and undergraduate education generally, teaches people is how to evaluate information and to make thoughtful decisions based on the information that they have. If I didn't believe that, I think it would be unethical for me to continue as a professor, frankly.

So as I see it, it's my job to provide as much information as I can to students who approach me about the topic of graduate school, both in terms of their own personal aptitude for graduate-level study and in terms of what graduate study and professional life in the academy involve. Further, it's my job to talk honestly with my students about any questions that they have, about my own experiences, and about not only the negatives of that path but also how to navigate that path if it is one that they indeed choose. I also talk to them a lot about other potential paths that they might pursue, as well as how to professionalize themselves in order to position themselves for future employment, whether that employment is inside the academy or not. I don't stop mentoring my students about this stuff after I've written their letters of recommendation, or after they graduate. I don't just tell them "Graduate school - don't do it" and throw them to the wolves. I don't give them the impression that pursuing an advanced degree in my discipline is the One True Way to have a vibrant intellectual life, and in fact, I talk a lot about the ways in which working in the academy can get in the way of a vibrant intellectual life. I make it very clear that they will, if they really want to be a professor, most likely never have a choice of where they live, and I am very open about all of the different parts of the job, emphasizing all of the requirements beyond teaching, talking about literature, and working with students (the parts that are most visible to them). In encourage them to talk to adjuncts in the department, as well as professors besides me for other points of view. I direct them to blogs by people from a range of positions within the academic food chain and to the Chronicle - to the forums and even to some of the columns to which I've linked in this post.

Does this make me a villain? Does this make me somebody who's perpetuating lies, inequality, foolishness, and magical thinking? I don't know. Do we think that law professors do those things? Journalism professors? Professors in social sciences fields? Heck, even business professors? To what extent is it a professor's responsibility to devalue his or her discipline or field? To what extent is it a professor's responsibility to control the choices that his or her adult students make? To what extent is it a professor's responsibility to confirm anti-intellectual arguments that reduce education to something that is merely a means to an end?

I'm not arguing here that job prospects don't matter, or that we shouldn't see education as something that is crucial to future employment. I'm only saying that it is both that and more. As I see it, it's my job both to prepare students for jobs as well as to prepare them for the lives that they will lead beyond their jobs. It's not an either/or.

And yes, it's true that some people will always continue to think that they will succeed where others have failed, that they will be the exception that proves the rule, that all of the things I tell them don't apply in their personal case. I can say, however, that so far this has not been the way that my students have responded, with only one potential exception. And if that exception is bitter and disillusioned at the end of the line, that will suck, but that won't be for my lack of caring or effort, no will it be because he was told a Big Lie, Trapped, Fooled, or Maligned in some way.

Following Dreams, Etc.

So. BES has applied to graduate schools this year, and it's that time of the season where she's begun to hear back. The news has, for the most part, been utterly bleak.

Rejections to the left of her, rejections to the right.

Wait-listed at one place.

Silence from the remaining few schools.

Now, the waiting list news is really awesome (top 25 program and one of the most highly ranked programs to which she applied), but the rejections come from a range of types of programs and rankings, so when we talked yesterday, one of the topics we covered is that there is absolutely no logic to this process. We also covered the following: waiting sucks, rejection sucks, waiting and rejection are the central features of academic pursuits post undergrad, everything will be ok no matter what happens, and it's very important to keep in mind that none of this is about one's value as a person.

Here's the thing. This is a bad year to be applying for graduate school. Lots of programs are reducing their number of slots (ah, budgets) while at the same time there are record numbers of applications. BES is a strong candidate, but as we all know, strength of candidacy is not all in the crap shoot that is pursuing anything academic. One of the things that she's struggling with is that as much as I told her the worst possible scenarios for all of this, she'd never really believed they could happen to her. See, this is the first time she's ever faced this kind of rejection, the first time there has ever really seemed like it was possible that her merit and various talents would not get her what she wanted. On the one hand, this is a good lesson to learn at this point in the game. On the other hand, wow does it suck.

She was talking with her dad a few days ago about what's happening, and the topic came up of what she'll do if she doesn't get in anywhere, and she said to him that she wasn't sure if she'd apply again next year. Now, I really like BES's dad, but he gave her what might be the worst advice in the world about not "copping out" and "being a quitter" and if being a professor is really what she wants that she should keep applying every year until she realizes the dream of a grad school acceptance. Now, I see where he's coming from. He doesn't want her to accept defeat, and he wants to support her dreams. He wants her to be a person who goes after her dreams. But from my perspective, I'm not sure it would be the worst thing in the world if she held off and did something else for a bit, in order to evaluate whether, knowing now what she didn't know then, this really is her dream, and even if it is, if it's worth the opportunity cost of getting there.

This is not to say I wouldn't support BES if she did want to apply again next year. I would. I just don't believe that this is the only or best path available to her. And I don't think there would be anything wrong with her saying that she wanted to hold off on putting herself out there again, if the worst case scenario happens.

Here's the thing: I have every ounce of faith that BES is good enough to get accepted with funding into a good grad program. I have every ounce of faith that she'll excel if admitted. But I also know what's on the other end of that best case scenario: a job market that's brutal and that offer no guarantees of employment at the end of it. As much as this round of rejections sucks for her, subsequent rounds of rejections promise to be even more awful. And those rounds of rejections will come, no matter how great she is. And knowing that? Do I think it's the worst thing in the world if she doesn't single-mindedly and relentlessly pursue admission to grad school? No.

It's so weird being in the position of mentoring her through this stuff because I'm walking this fine line of cautious optimism and realistic pessimism. It's weird because obviously I'm a real-life example that following this path can actually work out ok. It's just I know that I'm the exception, not the rule.

So do I want BES to follow her dreams? Of course I do. But I'm not sure that there's any such thing as One True Dream to follow.

In other news, I've got minor revisions to do on a review essay that I completed months ago, I've got MLA panel submissions to review, I've got grading to continue, I've got preparations to make for class tonight, and I've got a bunch of research stuff to do so that I can return some library books. I've also got a paper that I need to look at for a student presentation, another paper that I need to comment on for a grad student from last semester, a conference paper I need to draft (the conference isn't for a hundred years, but I've said I'd present a version of it at a grad student symposium thing that is only a few weeks away), and god only knows what. Oh, and I'm still waiting on news re: The House (my realtor said they're optimistic we'll have a response by week's end, but we'll see). And my stupid Man-Kitty woke me up at 4 AM, and while in theory I could have gone back to sleep after giving him some breakfast, my mind was so clogged with all of the things that I've got to do that I just said fuck it and woke up, so that means I should crash sometime in the next two hours and need a nap.

So, So Behind

It is the official last day of spring break (though I have no appointments tomorrow, and I don't have to teach, so I do have a bit of a reprieve), and I have accomplished exactly nothing. I have approx. 20 lengthy things to grade for my online class (which I should have graded weeks ago), 25 short papers for one class, and approx. 15 medium-sized papers to grade for another class. How many of those things did I grade over my break? Exactly none. How many of them MUST be graded pretty much immediately? Exactly all of them. And yet, rather than grading, I'm Not Grading. And feeling guilty about it, and stupid, but I totally lack motivation to accomplish ANYTHING.

Oh, and on top of all of this, I blew off a deadline for an MLA abstract (not that it would have been accepted anyway, most likely, but whatever, I should have submitted something), I accomplished NO research reading or writing over the break, and basically, I'm a loser. No, really. Right at this moment, I am. Do not try to comfort me. I deserve to feel badly.

Well, except. Here's the part where I make excuses for myself. I've been waiting on House-Buying News, and that's taken a lot of energy. (I'm still waiting. Cyndi claims that the hope is that I'll hear by the end of next week. In the meantime, we're both scouring the listings to see if there's anything else to go see.) Also, my parents came this weekend to look at the House Upon Which I Wait. They love the house, but a weekend with the 'rents can be just the teensiest bit exhausting. First of all, talking to them can at times be like playing some bizarre game of "guess what I mean when I say something that makes no sense." Example: G. and I were having a conversation about how my mom refuses to buy him a certain kind of ice cream that she'd once bought for herself, but my mom has a thing where if you decide you like something she likes then she decides she'll never buy it again. But so then, the conversation turned more general, and George said something about Jim and Gary's, and it took me a beat and I was then like, "Do you mean Ben and Jerry's?" And he was all, "That's totally what I said!" Complicating matters is that my mom and G. totally understand this bizarre associative language in which they speak, and so I'm always catching up to conversations about 3 beats after they are over. It's crazy-making. Second, there's just my mom. I love my mom, but she drives me nuts when she stays with me, by doing things like "helping" by putting dirty dishes in a dishwasher full of clean dishes, refusing to be supportive when I need to ramble about things, etc. I know I'm an ungrateful little brat, but you try spending a weekend with these people! (Again, Mom and G. are grand, just a little much to take at times of high stress, such as this one.)

So. I should try to get some grading done, but I just can't face it. I can always grade tomorrow, right? (I hate myself for even suggesting this.)

Hmm. What else? I don't know. I think I'm a little in a funk because I'm coming up on the one-year anniversary of my dad's death. That's been lurking in the shadows of my brain since the beginning of the month. Whatever the case, this was the least restful, least productive spring break I've ever had. And I'm sort of mad at myself for not at least having it be restful, if not productive.

Sigh.

Waiting

I have accomplished exceedingly little, and Spring break is almost over. Waiting around is taking pretty much all of my energy. And patience is not really one of my virtues. But, I'm hanging in there. I'm waiting on two things in particular:

1. The House. The owner has accepted my offer pending bank approval. The bank(s) - for there are two, one with a first mortgage and one with a second - wanted my realtor to provide a closing statement from the title company with the offer, and so Cyndi took care of that, and now the bank has received everything. So now, it's just a matter of them deciding whether they will take what I've offered. The good news is that my offer would totally cover the first mortgage - it's the second mortgage that would lose money, but that's the smaller of the two, and if the house went into foreclosure the second mortgage would likely get nothing. So, I remain cautiously optimistic and would ask all to send whatever good thoughts they can about this finishing up positively and quickly.

2. To hear about an MLA panel to which I submitted an abstract. I had been hoping I'd hear back by now, as there is another panel to which I could submit something with a deadline of tomorrow, but I didn't want to have to put that together if I already knew I was accepted to the other. Of course, if I just did the abstract for the other panel, that would probably increase my chances on the first (cosmically, not in reality).

In other news, when I'm not waiting I'm procrastinating. I have a mountain of grading to do, I've got things to do around the house, I've got research stuff I really should be accomplishing. But I DON'T WANNA.

I'm giving myself an hour and a half longer to procrastinate, and then I MUST make myself do some things.

It Looks Like I'm Really Doing This

So, I've decided. Tomorrow morning I'm going to my realtor's office and I'm going to put in an offer on the house.

We went and saw another house this afternoon (HIDEOUS!) and then we went back to Crazy's Dream House. No, it's not quite as big or as pink as this one, but it is a Dream House nonetheless. We took care of some important matters, including measuring some spaces in the kitchen, as well as measuring the Nook of Ideas. First things first: the Nook of Ideas is really even bigger than I'd thought it was. One half of it (left side of the doorway) is a square area that is about 5 1/2' x 5 1/2'. Then there's the doorway space, and then the other half is about the same dimensions, with a chunk taken out because the stairs run underneath it. In other words, it is totally big enough for a desk, for some shelves, and to hold my file boxes. It has an electrical outlet, and a light fixture. It is a totally perfect and usable space that I can dedicate to the Ideas. Huzzah!*

Also, we went over the disclosures on the house. The furnace and water heater were replaced in 2000, and the furnace was repaired more recently than that, so both of those are good for the foreseeable future. The central air was installed in 2005, the floors and the roof were done and the ceiling fans installed in 2004. So that's all good. The basement was resurfaced and sealed in 2004, too. Oh, and the bathroom was totally redone, too, so awesome. And earlier today I called up the energy company, and I found out that the average monthly bill for gas/electric is ~130, which is totally doable.

And then, BES came by to confirm that this is a house that a person who knows me could see me living in. It may seem weird that I asked her, but she's my peep and she knows what I'm like - and I knew she'd tell me if she thought it was not me. Direct quote from BES: "I LOVE it!" Another direct quote from BES: "I can totally see us drinking wine on this porch." I wasn't so much looking for confirmation about whether it was a good house - I know that it is - I was looking to see whether somebody other than me saw me inside the house. And she totally did.

But so anyway, after all of that, I felt totally like, "of course I want this house!" and so I told Cyndi that I wanted to make an offer, and so we set up our appointment for tomorrow to sign, seal, and deliver this baby. I also set up a time for us to see it on Saturday so that my parents can see it (though the offer will already have been made, per my mother's advice), and I coached Cyndi about how to handle G. "Don't tell him what number I offered, but just emphasize that if it works out it will be an excellent deal - he cares a lot about making excellent deals." She then inquired about whether he'd be looking at the mechanics of the house, and I explained that he's a guy who once "fixed" a screen door by putting a glove in it so that it would stay shut, and this "fix" was in place for years, so he so is not the guy who is going to have opinions about the goodness of the house - indeed, he'll think it's a great house because it totally is - he just cares about me low-balling in an offer, which is why the "excellent deal" thing is so important.

I feel very calm and sure about the decision, and very excited about the possibility of it working out. I do not feel scared, nor do I feel like I might be making a mistake. I've got to say, I haven't felt this good or sure about a decision since I decided to change my major in college to English and to pursue graduate school after graduation. And that decision actually felt a lot like this one - lots of hemming and hawing and considering and list-making, and lots of talking it through with anybody who would listen to me, but once it was made, I felt very sure and comfortable and secure in it.

Now, it still might not work out, but the house has been on the market since July with no offers, so I feel like I'm not in an actively bad position. It's just a matter of the timing. And will I be upset if it doesn't work out? Sure. But at the same time, while I believe in love that is pure and true, I do not believe in One True Love, and I know I'll find another house if this doesn't work out. Just like I knew I would find a life I wanted if I didn't find a job as a college professor. So do I want this house, and want it badly? Sure. But I will be ok if it doesn't work out. And in fact, if it doesn't work out, then that means that it wasn't meant to be, whatever I might want right at this moment.

But am I putting an offer in on this particular house? Yes. And I feel totally sure and ready for that commitment.

I think I found my house. And I really think that I'm going to live in it and to have a fabulous life in it. Sure, there's always the possibility that this won't happen, but right now? I feel totally certain that this will work out and that it's perfect, like the house was waiting for me, in fact. And yes, that is totally cheesy, but it is how I feel.


*It occurred to me as I've been thinking tonight that it's about the same size as this tiny room off my childhood bedroom that was only big enough for some toys. Perhaps this is why I love the Nook so much, that it reminds me of my childhood?

Obsession

I am officially sick of myself. Yesterday, I stopped by a couple of open houses, but I wasn't enchanted by anything I saw. I should have gone to some open houses today, but I just couldn't get it up to go. I knew that the houses I'd see were not houses I'd want, and so instead I spent the day ruminating. Pathetic.

So after two days of thinking, and plotting and planning, I think that it's very, very likely that I'll put an offer in on the house I described in my last post. But that is a big decision, and one that does freak me out. I've done some more thinking about why not to put an offer in, but I am really not bothered by the negatives as much, now that I've thought them through more carefully.

• As for the dishwasher situation, the reality is that I could easily get a portable dishwasher if I don't want to begin my home ownership with renovations. There is totally space for a portable dishwasher in the kitchen, even though that wouldn't necessarily be my ideal first choice.
  
• Also, I've continued to think about the dark wood trim, and I think the problem really is just with the current owner's decor. Darker furniture/throw rugs would make the trim make sense (and would also mean that I don't have to fuss with painting it).
  
• I know that lots of people think one bathroom is just impossible, but seriously: when did we start thinking that every individual person needs their own flipping bathroom? My grandparents on one side raised 10 children in a house with one-and-a-half bathrooms. My other grandmother's house, in which she raised seven children, had one bathroom. I'm not saying that's ideal, but seriously: I'm one person, and one bathroom is really all I need. (Though I would ultimately would want to put in a half-bath downstairs, I do think, because it would be a nice thing to have that on the first floor.) Whatever the case, if I'm close enough to a person to let them sleep in my house, I think that we can share the bathroom. I'm not running a hotel for chrissakes. And the reality is that since this house has only two bedrooms, it's not like any potential buyer down the road who has a passel of children is going to want it anyway, nor would an old person who doesn't want to deal with stairs. So no, the one bathroom isn't perfection, but it's completely fine. (And I really like that bathroom that is there.)
  

The short sale status of the house is really the only thing that continues to freak me out. So. I think what I'm probably going to do is to try to get in to see the house with a friend over the next few days (as well as to go see a couple of other houses that could work), but if I think unless I notice something on that visit that deters me, this is a house I'm going to put an offer in on. That said, I also realize that the timing because of the short sale won't be ideal, so that means that I will keep my eye out for other houses through the time between when I put the offer in and the deadline for a response (likely about 3 weeks), so that I can bail and start this process over again at the beginning of April if necessary. I am not going to wait forever on this particular house, but I really do think that it would be a good house for me.

It does occur to me now, though, that it's going to cost me gajillions of dollars to move in. Well, not really. Just that I have a lot of ideas about purchases I'd want to make, which while not necessary would make it pretty and happy. So, for example, all of a sudden I want: a new toaster, a new microwave, new pots and pans, a new cabinet with doors for the dining room, new shelves, area rugs, doormats, a new mattress and box spring, new furniture for the porch and deck, a grill, a new sofa, a new armchair and ottoman.... Oh, and potentially a washer and dryer (I don't know if those are staying with the house).

All of the above is quite shocking, because I'd always thought that I was a person who really doesn't give a shit about home decoration. And, let's face it, historically, I haven't. But apparently now I have very strong desires to spend money on such things. However, of all of the above, I really don't need anything other than the rugs and some furniture for the porch and, if necessary, the washer and dryer immediately. I would just like it if I didn't move shit with me that I didn't want to keep. Ooh! But I just remembered something! Summer fellowship money! I will have a big chunk of money coming in right around May 1! Huzzah! Yippee!

Hm. Yes. I think this is what I'm going to do. I've made lists, I've checked them twice, I've thought about pros and cons, and really, what more is there to do? It just feels very big. But, I've done big things before. I've picked up and moved to a city in which I've never lived and known no one, not once but three times. I made the decision to go into debt for and to get a Ph.D. in a field where one won't necessarily get the job at the end of it. At the end of the day, buying a house is not as big as those things, keeping things in perspective. And I'm ready to move, and I'm ready to own the place in which I live. I'm ready to paint walls a freaking color!

You want to know something cheesy? After all of the practical ruminating, the thing that really made me feel like this is a good decision is that I can imagine this house being the place where I write that next book. Like, I can imagine myself really enjoying waking up in the morning, moseying down to the kitchen (I can go directly from bedroom to kitchen with the layout of the house), and bringing my coffee back upstairs to my little Nook of Ideas (yes, apparently I've named it) and starting my day. And I can imagine walking in that neighborhood, and on nice days hanging out with my laptop and writing on the front porch. I can imagine happily having dinner parties and, heck, just regular parties.

Now, if this house is not to be, then it's not to be. But it's time for me to take a leap. So, I'll call up Cyndi tomorrow morning and schedule a time to go back, and if I'm feeling certain, I shall make an offer. If I'm not feeling certain, my parents are going to come and see the house next weekend whatever the case, so I can wait for them if I feel like that would make me feel more secure one way or the other. (Hilariously, though, my mom told me not to wait if I'm feeling sure, even though G. wants me to wait so that he can advise, because, in her words, "G. will only nitpick and say no to everything. You know how he is. This is going to be your house. You don't need us to ok the decision.")

Enough of thinking about this for now, though! Enough!

House-Hunting, Day 1

Ok, so I went out into the world today with my realtor, who is just fantastic (and whom I found through the recommendation of a colleague, and who apparently has facilitated home buying and selling for many other colleagues as well). Let's call her Cyndi (not her real name, but close enough - she's got bleach-blond hair and is very energetic and direct, and I really like her).

Anyway, so Cyndi took me to see 5 and a half houses (the half is a for-sale-by-owner that is, in her words, "a doll house," but that we couldn't get inside of, so we only saw the outside of it - not the house for me, I don't think, but darling and, indeed, very doll-house-like). But so. I'd thought I'd known what houses would really interest me before I went, but wow, I was so wrong! House #1 turned out to feel very... cramped and problematic. Great neighborhood, maybe a great house for somebody, but not my house. House #2 turned out to be gorgeous and fantastic - even moreso than I'd dreamed it could be - but with it's high ceilings and likely lead painted closets, as well as what I imagine is a lack of decent insulation, too many rooms, and its need of fresh paint on the exterior... Um.... Well, look. I could be Miss Havisham in that house and creepily hang out in a wedding dress, or I could be Miss Hannigan and have a number of little girls live in it with me while I was drunk and abusive, but if it were the actual me and the kitties? Yeah, way too much house for me. But the pocket doors! The stained glass! The original woodwork and floors! The historic designation of the house! And yet, not my house.

So the ones I thought were my houses? Not so much. The others on the agenda for seeing I hadn't really imagined I'd be into, and for the most part I wasn't, but I was all about seeing what there was to see, if only to give Cyndi an idea of what I'd like. And then we get to the last house on the list.

Now, this house seemed to be totally out of the running from the listing alone. It had only 2 bedrooms (I'd wanted 3 so there'd be a dedicated guest room as well as an office), only one bath, and what seemed from the pictures to be a ginormous yard. Also, I'd really thought I wanted to buy a house in area B, and I was only looking in area F (where this house is located) just to get a sense of what I could buy in my price range. Area F tends to have a lot of wooded spots, and tends not to be terribly walkable in a lot of places, and tends to be very family oriented, which, there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm not a family. I'm a lady with two life-partners who are felines. (And yes, I just called the Man-Kitty and Mr. Stripey my Life Partners. Because here's the thing: they're not children, and yet I have committed to them for life. They manage bathing and potty-going on their own, as well as most of their other needs, and they also are available for consultations about big decisions - though often the only response is an irritated meow or a look of disdain. Life Partner seems like a much more apt title for them than "furry children" or "furry babies," though it is true that they both do have fur.)

But so anyway. The Last House.

• Well, it's true that it only has 2 bedrooms. But what wasn't clear from the listing is that it also has a nook off of one of the bedrooms that is totally big enough for a desk and some major bookshelves and to store my files. And that nook would make it possible to hide my work detritus while at the same time to have a cozy dedicated space in which I could actually do some work. I may not be in love with the house as a whole, but I am in love with that nook.
• The yard is not as ginormous as it looked like it was in the pictures. It is bigger than I imagine myself needing or using, but it's totally and completely flat. Which is a big deal given the rolling hills of my location. Yes, it's more yard than I'd choose, but it's not an undoably large yard, and I can imagine mowing it every two weeks and not wanting to kill myself. And there's space in the back that would be a perfect garden! A vegetable and herb garden! And fenced off to keep the deer at bay! (The deer are a big enough issue in this SUBURB that it's actually legal to hunt them on private land, land that is no more than 10 minutes from a recognizable city in America. In fact, this is the big dividing line between people who run for office in this town - whether it should be ok to hunt in a motherfucking suburb. I wish I were kidding.)
  
• There is only one bathroom, but it's a very nice bathroom. And if I ever wanted to do a half-bath downstairs, there is a space where that would be easily doable, and it wouldn't be a space that was off of the kitchen or the dining room, which, let's face it, is not appetizing.
• Did I mention that both bedrooms have walk-in closets? And that there's good storage downstairs, too?
• Both the furnace and the hot water heater are new-ish, and the entire house has new vinyl windows. And the basement is freshly painted and looking fabulous, and has a walk-out onto the backyard. (I still need the intel on the age of the roof.)
  
• The house has both a FABULOUS front porch (from which one could hang pots of flowers! And have a table and chairs! And maybe a glider! And gaze superciliously upon the neighbors!) as well as a FABULOUS deck in back (that you access from the kitchen! Dinners alfresco!)
• It has an open(ish) floorplan, but there is enough division between the rooms for it to feel cozy! Cozy!
• There is a lovely window seat in the dining room on which the kittens could nap in sunshine!
• The dining room is so huge that I can have A.'s boyfriend Matt build shelves that would be window-height for books, which would also serve as additional seating! For parties!
• Amazing windows! All over! Bright natural light!
• In the best school district in the general area, and located smack dab in between (and within walking distance of each) the post office/town square area and the bar/restaurant area where my vet also is (not that I'd be walking to the vet with the kittehs, but just they'd have a very short car ride, which would be better for their nerves).
  

Ok, so now for the down-sides:

• There is no dishwasher. I cannot live without a dishwasher. I would have to do some work in the kitchen to make a dishwasher happen, which would involve shifting the sink to the right, installing the dishwasher, and shifting the stove over about 6 inches. All of which would likely mean needing some new cabinets. This is not a huge project, but it is a project, and one that would need to be done nearly immediately, for I can pretend that I would wash dishes by hand, but the reality is that if I did pretend that, I would live in filth a lot of the time. A dishwasher is a total necessity for me.
• The woodwork in the downstairs is dark, while the hardwood floors are light. Ew.
  
• The yard really is more yard than I'd wanted. It could require me to hire lawn boys. Then, of course, I'd have lawn boys, though, and that could be a positive as well as a negative.
• No garage. Though in my region, no garage is so not a deal-breaker, as typically we don't get much snow.
  
• The house is next to a bank. Only two windows in the whole house (from the kitchen and from the nook) look onto it and its parking lot, and even that is mediated by shrubbery and space, and even in winter it's not a total eyesore. Now, let's just note, this is so not a problem for me. And it's a bank: it's not like it's a Taco Bell or something. But apparently this has turned off other house-hunters who've viewed this property. My thought is that what this means is that I have no neighborhood noise on that side of the house after 5 pm, that on the weekends I've got a whole lot of easy parking if I were to decide to have a bash, and that, seriously? Who cares. Now, I suspect that people who would be negative would be all, "but what if the bank closes and a taco bell opens? It is commercially zoned land!" But I feel like it's not a big deal. I could be stupid about that.
• The house is a short-sale. This will potentially drag out the process, and it will potentially mean that I have some trouble with negotiating. Let's note: the house is listed at a very good reduced price. But it's my first house. I want to try to negotiate. I don't believe in not negotiating. But I also don't believe in waiting for a month to hear about a house only to find I'm rejected and then to have to spend all of April doing this, too, and still potentially miss out on the first-time homebuyer tax credit.

As you might be able to surmise from the above, I REALLY like this house. But I told my realtor I needed the weekend to think, that I'd want to go back to see it next week, and I called my mom tonight to see whether she and my stepdad would be able to come down next weekend (viewing number three) before I'd ever make an offer. But this might be my house. It really might.

The Sun Is Shining, The Birds are Singing, etc.

So, the sun really is shining - and brightly, too, for the second day in a row, and the birds really are singing, for they woke me up and made it impossible for me to ignore the brightly shining sun.

ANYWAY.

This afternoon I will go and look at houses in person for the first time. I'm a little nervous, but also very excited. Yesterday I actually went and drove past the three that are true contenders (we'll be looking at more, but the others are ruled out for issues that no visit will change, like "no driveway" and "crazy-big yard and not enough rooms in the actual house"). Well, one of the "true contenders was ruled out by the drive-by yesterday, as it is located at the very end of a dead-end street at the end of a hill that then is wicked-steep right when you need to find the driveway of the house. I'm fairly certain that there would be a good many days each winter where I just literally wouldn't be able to leave my house. In addition, behind the house is a wooded area, and I feel like with the way the house is set at the bottom of a ravine, that wooded area would be a place where people would stash dead bodies or other criminal type items. In other words, the precise location of that house is a PROBLEM.

The other two that were true contenders remain true contenders, at least until I see them inside.

Other than that, next week is spring break, and I've got high hopes that I will be able to sleep and to catch up with work and to make good progress on the house-hunting front.

Seriously.

What Even to Say

Before I actually post about what I intend to post about, I accidentally deleted a comment about the motherfucking jameson because I was rejecting a spam comment and hit the wrong button. So, commenter whom I've never seen before, do come back! I didn't mean to reject your comment.

But what I'm really saying even though I don't know what there is to say is that apparently I'm really going to buy a house. Like, really. Like, I called up colleague-friend's realtor this afternoon, and all of a sudden I'm going to be going out to look at houses that I could actually buy, in person to look at them and all, on Friday. I've received listings in my in-box. This is really happening. And it's happening FAST.

Now, on the one hand, I already talked to the bank and everything and I'm pre-approved for a loan and all that, so this is fine. On the other hand, isn't this an awfully big step for me to take? I mean, it's an awfully big step. And sure, that's exciting and all, but it's also, well, a teeny bit horrifying. But apparently I'm really doing this.

In funny news, I trust my judgment not at all so I consulted with my mom, BFF, and with HS Best Friend about the listings I received. It was interesting, in that HS Best Friend and BFF both picked the front runners that I picked, while my mother chose as her front runners things that I wouldn't consider in a million years. I think this is probably a good sign, actually. My mom and I have very different priorities for houses, and at the end of the day, my mom really has no clue about what I like about anything. It's a weird thing: my mom and I are very close, but she seriously just doesn't understand what I like at all unless I explain it to her in detail. In contrast, my friends do understand what I like and what I am looking for, and they know me, ultimately, in ways that my mother just doesn't.

In other news, I spent much of the day doing research for the NB, and then I went and showed a film in my class. All in all, a pretty good day. Even if I'm really horrified that I apparently really am going to buy a house.

Ah, Sunday

Well, after days of struggling and ruminating and futzing and just generally wigging out, I have completed and submitted an abstract for a paper for an MLA panel. (You don't believe me about the struggling and ruminating and futzing? I spent like 4 hours and the front and back of a sheet of paper just trying to figure out a title, which ultimately I think turned out to be lame. And I'm not even talking about the actual time spent dealing with the abstract.)

I think that part of my anxiety about this MLA paper abstract had to do with the fact that this is the first time in an age where I've proposed something to a panel organizer whom I don't know, and also that the abstract is based on a projected path for one of the projected chapters of the NB, which I can't be sure of until I, I don't know, actually start with the actual writing of the book. Another part of the anxiety has to do with the fact that the focus of the paper is on something I've not looked at carefully since I was an undergraduate, so while I'm an expert on X generally (and yes, I'm just going to say that I am an expert, even though that feels pompous and stupid), I am totally not an expert on this small area of X studies. Which meant that before I felt confident writing the abstract, I felt like I needed to skim or at least think about skimming all of the scholarship on small area of X studies. And then to further complicate matters, while it's true that I am theoretically comfortable with the thesis statement for this imaginary conference paper (both comfortable with the theory I'll use and comfortable in theory with the scope of the project), I'm not entirely comfortable with the broader scholarly context of the idea, so that meant even more reading and more hand-wringing.

New scholarly paths are exciting and energizing and ultimately good, and don't get me wrong, I'm glad I'm not still dealing with the ideas of the dissertation/book or anything that links in an obvious way to them, but man, new scholarly paths are a heck of a lot of work. I will say this, though: I haven't been so excited about the research part of my job for a good long while, and this beats all of the bureaucratic bullshit I've been dealing with of late any day of the week.

After all of that, I was inspired and I vacuumed and cleaned the litter boxes and moved all of my anxiety (er, books and articles and notes and stuff) to the dining room table (so now instead of having the Living Room, Dining Room, and Bedroom of anxiety, I just have the Dining Room Table of Anxiety).

Tonight BES is coming by and we're going to have some wine and hang out. I feel like my Dining Room Table of Anxiety will be a comfort to her in this time of stressful waiting to hear on grad applications, but that may be a lie I'm telling myself to excuse my cluttered and slovenly ways.

You know what I'm most looking forward to about buying a house? Having a room that is solely dedicated to research stuff that only houses a desk, my books, my files, and music, which is not also the room where I keep the litter boxes and that pretends to be a second bedroom, even though nobody's actually slept in it for years. I look forward to having an actual dining room that does not become the repository of scholarly anxiety, an actual spare bedroom, and an actual location for filthy kitten places that is dedicated to kitten filth. This may be asking for too much, but a girl can dream.

But so anyway, enough of all of this. I need to feed the kitties and take a shower.

Cranky

So, I need to write this abstract, and I'm not in the mood to do it. And I probably should go to campus for this thing but I'm not gonna. And I've dealt with a flurry of emails today related to bureaucratic crap, and that has me in a snit. Blech. Ok, now I'm really going to go work on that abstract, even though I don't feel like it.

Generous Reading in the Classroom and Elsewhere

So I've got this course this semester, one I teach all the time and that happily I'm teaching in my preferred time slot for it (a time slot that gets really great mix of majors/minors/non-majors), and I just finished teaching a book for which students generally feel very little, if any, love. Now, I teach this book every time I teach this particular course (every semester for the past... oh... 3 or 4 years), in spite of the fact that students never love it. And it occurs to me that I teach a lot of things that students rarely love. (I also teach a lot that they do love, but I'm less interested in that for the purposes of this post.) So in this post I'm going to ramble on in a far more scholarly way than I typically do in this space about why I think this is a useful exercise, although that rambling will be an oblique answer to that question. And I'll close with something that brings it back to the blogosphere, so there will be a payoff that is relevant even to those people who don't teach literature.

But anyway, in class we were discussing a particular part of the book that a number of students found unsatisfactory, and I asked, "well, why do you think that the author included this if it's so irritating?" or something like that, and they all looked at me blankly. And then, without premeditation, I said something along the lines of the following: "Look, I'm not saying that I want you to talk yourself into believing this is a successful move on the part of the author. It may not be. But I doubt the author included it thoughtlessly. I think that when we encounter something in a text that frustrates us that we should attempt to engage with it generously, to figure out why that choice might have been made and to examine what significance the choice might have. We still might think that it doesn't quite work, but I think being generous when we're frustrated usually gets us farther than nit-picking about the various things that frustrate us, or than dismissing them. The nit-picking and dismissal is easy. The generosity is the hard work, and actually, being generous in that situation is the path to solid critical reading." And then we moved back to the unsatisfactory thing in question, and I modeled generous reading for my students.

The reason that this stood out for me is that I don't recall ever putting what I try to get students to do quite that way or so clearly before, either to them or to myself, and also because I was surprised that I called "generosity" a prerequisite for strong critical reading. I think it's much more common to characterize what we do as literary critics as suspicion as opposed to generosity (and I'm thinking of a recent talk given by Rita Felski that I attended, and her current project is to analyze the hermeneutics of suspicion, and I feel like I should point in her direction because she's doing some really interesting stuff interrogating this tendency toward "suspicious reading").

But so anyway. Suspicion vs. Generosity. Here's the thing. I think that "suspicious reading" is typically considered "critical reading," whereas "generous reading" is typically considered stupid or obsequious or in some way dishonest reading, at least in the way that we commonly would think of it. Think about it. If you say, "Well, that's a pretty generous reading of So-and-So's argument," you don't think much of the reading. Either you think it's stupid or obsequious or both. Or if you say, "If I'm being generous, So-and-So succeeds in doing X," you're not really being generous at all - you're actually indicating your general distaste for everything that surrounds X. I know that I internalized that dichotomy as a student, even though I haphazardly embarked on my most generous reading to date in two of my dissertation chapters, and I embarrassed myself in my defense in describing my reading practice for those chapters. (Apparently it took me all of my years as an assistant professor to figure out what I meant when I said that to read Author X you had to go to the "Author X Place," a place that my dissertation director then responded that he "would never want to go.")

What occurred to me when I used the word "generous" in my class, years after it would have been useful in my dissertation defense, is that I do not at all think that generous reading fails as critical reading, at least not how I mean it. I think that generous reading means taking a book on its terms and... how do I put this?... trying to get inside of the book to see how it works. It's easy to dismiss a book. My students dismiss the books that I assign them all of the time. I dismiss a good portion of what I read as garbage. Dismissal isn't actually a critical response. Nor, really, is suspecting that the texts that one encounters all harbor some secret, sinister, or deep meanings. I think that maybe too often we mistake dismissal or suspicion for criticism, with the counterpoint to those things being passive acceptance.

For me, generous reading does not equal passive acceptance, and in fact, a generous reading takes us as often as not to a negative evaluation of a text, either in its entirety or just in part. But reading generously means that you're not searching for what's wrong in the thing that you immediately despise on first reading, to uphold your conviction that this is a thing to be despised. Reading generously requires that you actively engage with the text itself and on its terms, not your own. You can't just begin with your argument and look for examples that support it (the typical undergraduate approach to writing papers in literature courses or to contributing in class, an approach that we professors, to our detriment, are responsible for teaching our students). Generous reading means starting with questions, not with arguments, positions, or theories.

Now, what I'm describing above might sound a whole lot like a reactionary return to New Criticism. I don't mean it that way. I don't believe that we can absent ourselves from our readings, ignore our personal inclinations and preferences, ignore cultural and historical context, ignore the author*, and then aim for One True Objective Reading of the Inviolate Great Work of Literature. I think that we can assume that an author who has written a text and brought it to publication probably made choices for various reasons, and I think that we are going to react to those choices. But what interests me about reading is not really the choices in isolation, nor my reactions to them. What interests me is figuring out how the choices work to produce a variety of responses. What interests me is trying to understand the text and all of the parts of it, whether I like them or not. I'm still there in the reading, and so are all of the other factors, but when I'm reading generously - whether I enjoy the text or not, though this is especially useful with texts I don't enjoy - I do my best to put those considerations aside until after I deal with what's in front of me on the page and map out how it operates. (In other words, "liking" a book passively does not constitute generous reading either. "Liking" is just liking - it's a beginning of criticism, just as "hating" is, but that doesn't mean it's generous.)

But so here's the thing. I have all these grand ideas about the reading of Lit'ratoor generously. But I struggle with this shit in my day-to-day reading life. See, I read this today, and I couldn't approach it generously: "Part of respecting diversity is allowing people the time and space to lead different lives. Some people go home to their partners and children. Some go home just to partners. Some go home to heaven knows what. And that's okay." I also had a hard time with approaching this generously: " is there is a huge difference between the cultural history and literary studies?"

I don't read blog posts or comments generously. I react. I think, in the moment, that people are fuckwits. What I've been experimenting with is pretending that I don't think that people are fuckwits, that I don't react in the moment, but rather that I read generously. The result of this mostly is that I don't respond directly to the items that enrage me. But that's not really generous reading, either. Because in my brain I disparage the writers of these statements as fuckwits. Generous reading would really be engaging with and accounting for the things that enrage me, which I don't do. What I do in my off-hours reading time is to think that people are fuckwits and then to ignore them willfully. That's not generous reading. That's being an asshole, really. And the fact that I publicly acknowledge that makes that no more acceptable than if I pretended it weren't true, let's just note. See, really, I'm not a generous reader. I only encourage it for my students.






*I'll admit, I'm not terribly interested in authorial intention, basically because I believe that writers of literature LIE, and in fact they're very good at it or they wouldn't be able to make up stories and poems and such, so how can we ever know what they intended. I am interested in an author's preoccupations, cultural and historical context, and stylistic tendencies, but we can actually trace those things without becoming the Psychic Friend of the author.

Oof. Just, Oof. But I Suppose I'll Write Some Scattered Things about The Next Book

So. I promised in my last post that I was going to do a longer post soon about the Next Book project. And I really do want to, except I totally don't. What I mean is that I'm just feeling sort of overwhelmed with the variety of tasks that I've got going on right now with work (Irritating (or just time-consuming) Service, Grading, other teaching-related things, recommendations for scholarships to write, general crankiness, etc.) and so I can't find it in me to put together something coherent about the book project. When I'm feeling coherent about it, I just want to work on it or think about it or whatever, and then when I think to write about it I'm not feeling coherent, if that makes sense.

But so anyway. I spend a lot of my time these days plotting and planning regarding the Next Book, most particularly because doing so allows me to fantasize about my upcoming summer free of teaching followed by sabbatical. This is not to say that I'm not excited about the NB project - I surely am - but I think I'm relating to it a little bit right now as a talisman that I can pull out and cling to whenever I want to punch people in the face for reasons related to all the other parts of my job. This is interesting, this feeling that NB is an escape.... I never really felt that about my dissertation/first book, for what are probably totally obvious reasons. This is not to say that I wasn't excited about the dissertation/first book, but my relationship to it was very different. It was more like this hurdle that had to be jumped, a mountain that had to be climbed, as opposed to being like an oasis in a desert of bureaucracy and nonsense (which, yes, is how my job is feeling these days).

And so when I'm feeling downtrodden, NB is like this bright and shiny thing about which I can feel excited. Of course, this also makes me feel anxious. What if I'm being overly ambitious? What if I make all of these grand plans and then I end up not meeting my goals? What if everything I think is stupid? Or, if it's not (and I don't actually think it is), then what if somehow in the execution it comes out stupid? (That is entirely possible, though I don't actually think likely.)

Now let's note for the record that I was not at all ambitious in the "plans" or "projected progress" that I put into my sabbatical application. I reigned myself in so that I would surely meet those markers without a problem. But what I'm doing now are the "real" plans, except of course they are likely way too much to do in between now and next January. What is most likely is that I'll end up accomplishing something in between the low set of expectations that I promised and the very high expectations that I have for myself. Which is fine, I suppose, but I'd really like it a lot better if I could accomplish everything I really want to accomplish as opposed to something short of that.

How I'm envisioning my writing time is this. Most of the time, I'll be at home (so not traveling fancy places like Dr. Virago will be doing with her sabbatical), and I think I'm going to adopt the schedule that I kept when I wrote the bulk of my dissertation. That schedule (Monday through Friday) is as follows: 1) wake up at like 9 or 10 every day, and spend like 2-3 hours drinking coffee and plotting and planning. 2) Head to coffee shop with only those items I absolutely need in order to accomplish that day's work by 1-2 pm. Spend the next 4-5 hours working/writing. 3) Return home for dinner and some reflection on the work accomplished. 4) Relax, do whatever I want, etc. Lather, rinse, repeat. Weekends will be off, unless I'm feeling totally in some sort of irreplaceable groove. I don't think that's an unreasonable schedule, and I also think that it does mean, if I really follow it, that I will be able to have a substantial draft of the monstrosity, er, manuscript, done by January.

But the above, of course, is assuming that I get a good chunk of the research for it done this spring. Which I've already begun, and which I'm inspired to do by a variety of conference-type things that will happen (or have the potential to happen) over the next 10 months.

Which brings me to the thing I'm actually trying to put together right now, which is an abstract for consideration for an MLA panel. The problem is, what I'd want to present on is related to a novel that I've not done a thing with since I was an undergraduate, which means that I have to do a boatload of research just so that I can put together a non-embarrassing abstract. And that abstract is due in a week's time. Ugh.

On the other hand, though, doing all of this research is a good thing, as I'm anticipating that this will be the first chapter of NB that I will write, and so doing all of this research puts me in a strong position to knock out that first draft chapter in May/June. Also, all of this research will be useful for a conference paper I'm giving in June, so even if I'm not accepted to the MLA panel it's not for nothing that I'm doing it. Except, of course, I'm totally ignoring the fact that I hope to be moving house somewhere around May through July, which of course means that I'm not going to be doing any sort of daily writing when (thinking positively) that comes to pass.

But so anyway, tonight I plan to sit down with my articles and books and to get some good work done while watching the women's figure skating. And yes, there are other work-related things I could be doing (like revising a document for an upcoming meeting, or editing some other documents for another upcoming meeting) but I will not be doing those things today.

But for now, I need to go and continue with dinner preparations. I've got a chicken roasting (am going to make stock later with the carcass) and I need to prep the brussel sprouts that I will roast to go with it.

Moving, Shaking

I have returned from my conference full with food and drink and exhausted.

On the negative side, I was kind of a lame conference attendee. I didn't attend as many panels as one probably should, and the paper that I gave was, in my estimation, definitely mediocre.

On the positive side, I met one of my Academic Heroes and got to have lengthy dinner conversation with zie because Fabulous Mentor Who is Fabulous and Works on All My Things (though in a totally different way from me) insisted I sit at the Fancy Table. Academic Hero also attended our panel, and had very complimentary things to say to BFF, which RULED. (BFF didn't realize prior to the question/answer period that AH was in attendance, which was even more awesome, as BFF was so totally blown away once she realized who zie was, though she also gave me what-for because she felt it was my fault that AH showed up, though in retrospect BFF retracted because clearly AH had to attend our panel given the topic of hir keynote talk, which, incidentally, totally made our panel not seem like the piece of fluff it primarily was.)

Did I mention that I got to spend quality time with one of my Academic Heroes? And that I'm filled with sparkly glee at the fact? Best. Unexpected. Conference. Happening. The only lame thing is that I really did give a mediocre paper, and AH witnessed that. Whatever. It was what it was.

But so now I'm home with the kitties and settling in for an early night. More to report very soon about The Next Book. I've got big plans, which become more solid as time passes.

I Did a Very Bad Thing

I inadvertantly alerted BES (who's in the throes of awaiting acceptances/rejections) to this website. I am a bad, bad mentor.

(And yes, these sort of websites do allow one to feel as if one has information when no information is forthcoming, but they also hurt one's soul, much in the way of job wikis.)

Conference Paper, Done

Is it good? I really don't think so. But whatever, it is finished, and it's not a "real" conference paper anyway (I mean, it's for a real conference, but it's not directly related to my actual research projects) and so it doesn't need to be the best thing I've ever written. And now that it's done, I get to focus on "real" conference papers that will contribute to my "real" book project, and I'm nerdily excited about that. So, off to conference with BFF and FBA, and then I get to really begin in earnest on The Next Book! WOOHOO!

Dealing with Weather

Buried under a mountain of snow, I've spent the morning revising (for the second time) my syllabus for my Tuesday/Thursday class. Between my grandmother's funeral, a sick day, and two snow days, well, as you might imagine, the schedule has had to change. I was able to shift things around in such a way that I haven't cut any material (yet - one more closing and we're fucked and that's when I'll have to just eliminate something), but the whole thing sucks. This class hasn't exactly been the most dynamic I've ever taught, and these cancellations are not helping to change the vibe in there. At this point, I think I may just need to accept that this class is not going to set the world on fire this semester. The time for me to change the vibe may have passed, if that time ever existed.

I posted a status update on Fb about the uncoolness of this latest cancellation, and a friend commented that this is the sort of situation where having part of the work of a course - if not the entire course - online can be helpful. I know that's the back-up plan our university pushed with fears about a massive flu outbreak, and as you guys might suspect, I'm comfortable with online stuff so my resistance to that as a solution doesn't come from some anti-technology stance. But I really don't think that the Internet solves the problems that I've got with this class, or could.

Because here's the thing: the issue is not actually about the material of the course not being able to be covered. I mean, it's a literature course: if you can't read when you're snowed in, then when can you read? The issue is more about getting students to dig deeply into the material, and in a F2F class, the place where that gets modeled is in the classroom. While in the online class I teach I've tried to find ways (and I think have somewhat succeeded) to produce a similar sort of active engagement and deep digging, what I've found in that environment is that it takes me about two weeks of the semester just to address the technology learning curve with those students, as well as to get them used to being active in an online environment. And this is with students who signed up for an online course.

And this is why I feel like the whole "but teh Internets are the future! No more changing of course schedules due to snow or the flu or whatever!" thing isn't realistic, at least for the students that I teach. Because in a F2F class, I don't take the time up front to acculturate students to working in an online environment, and so to spring that on them when the world becomes a snow globe wouldn't really be a reasonable substitute for what I'd have them do in class. In addition, there are two major impediments to the whole "let's move it online!" thing with my students:

• Most of my students don't really know how to use much of Blackboard. Sure, they can find course documents or they can check their grades. But they don't know how to use the discussion board, they don't know how to participate effectively in an online discussion, they don't know how to use the "online classroom" function.
• Many of my students don't actually have internet access at home. I know, right? But seriously: they don't. And it's unreasonable to expect that they should when they are not enrolled in an online course.

The fact of the matter is, if I've learned anything from developing and teaching an online course, I've learned that teaching effectively in an online environment requires different teaching practices than teaching in a F2F classroom. One has to rethink everything, including how one "lectures," generates and leads discussion, designs assignments, and gives feedback. I imagine that a similar rethinking would really need to happen if one were going to do the hybrid F2F/online thing effectively, too. And so the whole, "hey, just move it all online if there are too many cancellations" thing strikes me as really bad pedagogy and as a failure to acknowledge how much thought and care good teaching requires.

Now, some might say that I'm just being contrary, that nobody thinks "moving it online" is going to be as effective as teaching the course as designed but that it's the way to make the best of a bad situation. Well, ok. I guess. Maybe. But in what way is that better than shifting the course schedule around? I don't really think it is. And actually, doing it right would be a ton more work than just shifting the course schedule around, both for students and for faculty, a ton of work that would produce really weak results. I'm not into things that are more work when the results aren't worth it.

But I'm willing to entertain the notion that I'm being closed-minded here. So have you "moved it online" as a back-up plan? If so, how has that worked for you?

Not Dead Yet

I know, I haven't posted in an age. But I'm not dead (yet).




First, there was the snow. Then, there's this mysterious illness (also known as the common cold) that has had me sleeping huge amounts and feeling sorry for myself. Then, there's the fact that I got the pre-approval crap underway for home ownership. (Aside: why is it that learning that my credit score is "through the roof" made me think, "I am really a fantastic and attractive person!" as if having stellar credit is some sort of index of self-worth? I blame capitalism.) But so I've got a conference paper to write, an abstract for an MLA panel to write, crap to catch up on with two of my three classes, a boatload of job-related stuff to do, and then of course there's the whole, "now I probably really have to call one of the four realtors whose names I've got and actually start looking for a house to buy," which seems like an awfully big step, as far as I'm concerned.

But so anyway, sorry for the light posting. Have just been very exhausted and busy and sick and tired. I am not yet ready, however, to be thrown on the cart with the other dead.

Workload, Teaching Load

Tenured Radical wrote a post today about class size, and it couldn't come at a better time for me because I've been thinking a lot about workload issues particularly as they relate to teaching. In fact, I started a post this morning about just these things, but it was so boring that I just deleted it without posting. After reading TR's piece, I feel like giving it another shot.

Now, I've got to say, as a caveat, before I launch in, that when I read TR's piece one of the things about it that was so striking to me was how wildly different her teaching context is from my own. In her world, 19 is a "large" upper-level sort of a class. In my world, the smallest class size I've got is 22 (both for upper-level classes in literature and for writing classes - and let's just note that the recommended maximum for writing classes according to those who write reports about such things is 16 or something, and that 22 was a victory for my department because writing courses used to be capped at 25 in recent memory). In my world, full-time, tenure-line faculty teach 4 courses a semester (more on that in a minute), not just two. Now, it is true that the research expectation at my gig is not as high as that where TR works, so comparing our gigs is in many ways like comparing apples to oranges. But her post provides a nice jumping off point because while the settings in which we teach are very different, and while the specifics of the debate change because of those differing settings, the core question about workload is philosophically the same.

The core question is, as far as I can reduce it down, do more bodies in seats per each section = greater teaching productivity/efficiency? In these times of budgetary woe, it seems like my administrators at least think that the answer to that question is "yes." There's lots of talk about raising class maximums, about finding ways to have tenure-line faculty teach more and more students, about how to organize teaching in a way that costs less and that yields more profit. There is something to be said for this model of thinking about things. According to a corporate model, efficiency = fewer dollars spent and more students "served."

But this is where things get sticky. What does it mean to "serve" our students? Are students "served" by ever-increasing class sizes? Yes, more of them will be able to enroll in and to complete a greater number of courses under this model. But is teaching productivity measured (solely) by enrollment figures? Should it be?

And, further, in my institutional context other issues, that I would say are most definitely teaching issues, enter the mix. Faculty are being strongly encouraged to direct more undergraduate research experiences, and those departments with graduate programs also have the responsibility to direct student theses. This is all teaching, right? None of this counts in terms of how our teaching loads are calculated. Our teaching loads are still calculated under the 1970-come-teach-your-four-courses-and-go-home-and-no-you-don't-need-publications-or-community-outreach-for-tenure model. Further, advising is also considered under "teaching" for promotion and tenure (something that was a change after I was here for a few years - it used to be service), and yet advising duties are also not factored into our teaching loads. So all of the above are "teaching," and yet, faculty at my institution are expected to undertake those tasks basically out of the kindness of their hearts. Sure, we get to list those activities on our cv's, and I suppose they count for annual review (although raises are not something that we're going to see anytime soon, so what does annual review even mean at this point?), but at the end of the day it's 4 courses per semester, with the threat of class sizes in those courses increasing (it hasn't quite been mandated yet, although that possibility is clearly in the air), plus academic advising duties plus advising students in their own independent research (though apparently we just do these for the joy of it, and not because it's our job, except of course it is our job).

Is this the most "productive" or most "efficient" learning environment for any student? I'd say no. No, not at all. I'd say faculty are half-assing it on all of their teaching because although the teaching load has remained "the same" since the university opened its doors, it has, albeit invisibly, increased. And faculty don't half-ass it because they don't care about students, or because they're not accountable, but because they're still expected to conduct research and to do loads of service (department, university, professional, and community, thank you very much), and if they let those other areas slide, they're fucked. The truth is, it's a lot more sensible to assign one fewer paper, to meet with fewer students, to do a crappy job advising student research projects, than it is, in terms of one's own professional future, to drop research or service in order to be a better teacher. As much as we are a "teaching institution," our institution doesn't appear to value teaching all that much. The institution definitely values student enrollments and retention, but that is not at all the same thing as valuing teaching or valuing learning. It is entirely the case that one can do a piss-poor job in the classroom and as long as the enrollments remain stable that one will be just fine at this institution. It is entirely the case that one can be a crap adviser of student research projects and that one's crappy work counts (or doesn't) exactly the same as somebody who does a great job with such duties. And my administration has absolutely no interest in changing this from being the case. It would wreak havoc on the budgetary bottom line if they did.

So some colleagues and I have been strategizing about ways that within our department we can try to address some of these workload issues. The reality is that we can't do anything about the number of courses that we teach per semester (we put forward a proposal for a new way of looking at workload that was quickly shot down), nor do we have total autonomy over the number of students per course. All that we do have control over are those "invisible" teaching duties that don't technically count within our workload. And so basically our ideas are all about very boring procedural departmental policy sorts of things, but that is our starting point. We're trying to find a way to make a statement (and to spread the work out around the department) without impeding our students. It's not an easy task.

But it's the only practical solution I've been able to think of regarding these issues, because seriously? I don't see any institutions (and definitely not my own) chomping at the bit to change. To reduce the expectation that faculty advise independent research projects, the number of courses that tenure-line professors teach, or the number of students per course in these bleak times of reduced budgets and with the threat of further cuts looming. Those things are clearly here to stay for the foreseeable future.

This is not to dismiss what TR calls for in her post, nor is it to disagree with it.** It's just to say that while I entirely endorse TR's rhetorical position, such positions don't do anything to change people's (my) working conditions, nor do they do anything to change (my) students' learning conditions. Right now? I'm more interested in practical strategies that might improve my student's ability to learn and my ability to teach them as well as I possibly can. And that involves boring policy work, not (really interesting, and really powerful) sweeping calls for change.




**Well, or I don't totally disagree with TR's post, but I do disagree with some parts of it. I do think that fewer than 10 students in a course can actually be a bad thing if there's a bad dynamic between the students. I also think that spending lengthy amounts of time reading and writing extensive comments on student papers is not generally a good use of one's time and won't typically or regularly produce better student writing across the board. This is born out by research in composition and rhetoric that basically reports that students are likely only to respond to around three main comments on a paper and to internalize them and to use them in future writing situations to improve their writing, and my experience, having done it both ways, has born this out. Reading/commenting quickly but with a purpose can often achieve much more than mulling over a student paper and responding at length. The issue is that faculty across disciplines need training to respond to student writing most effectively, which is a topic for another post. More time spent by the instructor does not equal more effective writing by students. If only that would solve students' writing issues, I'd gleefully spend hours reading their papers. But the fact is that this just doesn't work.

Must Stop Being Lazy

A winter storm's a-coming and I've got much writing to accomplish. I've done the necessary research, I've cleared my schedule, and really, if the weather is what they're predicting, I'm all set to hunker down. But I've accomplished nothing yet with my day, because I know that I really won't be doing much of anything this weekend. Dumb.

But so anyway, must start writing. Writing is easy. All you have to do in order to write is to write. Right?

How Soon Is Friday?

Oof.

I have a to-do list a mile long, and let's just note that I can't make myself do anything today. I'm exhausted. I'm done. I'm pissed off and irritable and feeling overworked and underappreciated. Woe is me. And let's just note that It's only week 4.

If I can make it to Friday, I have high hopes that this weekend will offer ample time for me to rejuvenate and get myself back on track in some sort of fashion. Looking at things objectively, my life is really not so awful, but work has just been.... Ok, you know how people talk about how rewarding being a professor is? Well, most of the time, for me it is that. But there are also times (as in any job I know there are) where the work just seems harder, more stressful, more thankless, and more work than others. This is one of those times.

Luckily, one of my major service things of this year is over as of yesterday, so that is a good thing. And also luckily I'm teaching a book that I know backwards and forwards tonight, and another I know backwards and forwards tomorrow. And I'm getting my hair cut tomorrow, which will surely provide a boost. In other words, I need to stop whining and just make it through to tomorrow afternoon.

I also have tentative plans with BES tonight, and if those come to fruition, I think that will be a fun respite in my otherwise lame and stressful week, even though of course she's feeling very stressed and in need of an ear. I think it will do me good to help her with her stressful things as opposed to thinking about my own stressful things. Just like the bright spot in my day yesterday was meeting with a recent grad to help her think through her teaching presentation for Teach for America.

See, that's the thing: the things that are filling me with crankiness having nothing to do with teaching or with scholarship. Nor do they have to do with my personal life (such as it is). No, they have to do with all of the other bullshit crap that is my job. If I could just erase all of the bullshit crap, then things would be grand. The problem is, the "bullshit crap" is not eraseable, much to my dismay.

Ok, time for me to accomplish at least a few of the things on my list so that I'm not cranky when I teach this evening and so that I am a good teacher as opposed to a stressed and lazy one.

Literature, In the Classroom

Ok, so I'd written a novel-length comment to the last post, and then I stupidly closed the comment box instead of posting the comment. Don't you hate when that happens? I know I do.

But so I figured I'd do a post instead, given that the comment is lost and gone forever. Here's the thing. I love the conversation in the comments in response to that post, because the trajectory of the comments is all about saying what people like and don't like, making additions and subtractions and corrections and suggestions, and just generally entering the conversation about what counts as literature.

Guess what, folks? What's happening there is exactly what I strive to make happen in the classes that I teach. I think a version of the literature classroom that is about forcing students to read Books Educated People Should Have Read is entirely wrong. I think that it's wrong to force students to "identify" with a particular character, or to "like" a particular book, canonical or not. Seriously. I really think those things.

Maybe that's how I think because nearly all of the things that I have published on are things that I first (a) loathed, (b) resisted and loathed, or (c) didn't really respect as worthy of commentary (even if I liked those things). That's right. My life's work as a professor is based on writing about things (and also teaching things) that I initially disdained. I now love some (though not all) of these things, but what makes the study of literature interesting to me - as opposed to just reading some books, it's all about having the freedom to engage deeply with literature whether we like it or not, or whether we feel ambivalent about it. In fact, ambivalence may be the most awesome response, as it means that we are having a complicated aesthetic reaction.

But that's also the reason to study literature rather than just to read it on one's own. The point of a literature class is that it allows you to see things that you wouldn't see reading it on your own - if you got it all on your own, then you should just go the public library and be done with it. The point of taking an English class is that you're going to get more than you'd get on your own, even if you don't like some of what you get. This is a speech that I need to make in every general education class that I teach, and it's one that I've felt like making a lot in regard to various comments I've heard in the wake of Salinger's death. I can entirely get why somebody would think Salinger is useless if they just picked the book up on their own. I can also get why somebody would think Shakespeare is useless if they picked up his plays on their own, except that doesn't happen with Shakespeare, ever, because we make everybody read Shakespeare in school, and we teach everybody how to read him. I get why people think James Joyce is stupid when they've tried to read Ulysses without a net (i.e, an expert at the helm), and I get why people think that Erica Jong is stupid (even though she's really not) when she's rarely taught in a college classroom.

See, this is the whole point. Classes in English, or literature if we want to be more accurate, are about giving people the tools to read critically and about giving people the tools to get things with which they don't identify or don't in terms of their own personal tastes like. To read with a purpose, and to analyze, and to get it. They are not about just making people internalize the plots of "great books," or to give them a list of "great books" that they can say they've read, but rather about giving them the tools to actually read as they go on with their lives. If they like a "great book" along the way, that's fantastic, but that's not actually the point. The point is really to show them how to get the most they can out of the latest Dean Koontz or Danielle Steele novel that comes out.

I don't care really at all whether my students "like" the books I teach. I care that they engage with them - give them a chance, and give them respect. If they like some of them along the way, that's a bonus (and it does help with the "respect" thing). But studying literature isn't about liking. Just like studying biology isn't about "liking" cells.