My life, in six words

Adjunct Whore tagged me for this one, which at first struck me as futile (what is this blog, if not autobiography? And if I could condense that autobiography into six words, why the hell would I be blogging?)--but after several conversations with friends this past week, I think I actually can tell you everything you need to know about me in six words:

I'm always sure I know better.

By which I primarily mean, better than everyone else. Evey and I have concluded that this is at least partly a big-sisterly trait: the conviction that you know how to do a thing properly--and are, moreover, obligated to explain that method to everyone else.

I can understand that some people might find this irritating, but I have a hard time seeing it as a character flaw. I mean, I give a lot of thought to the best, clearest, most efficient, and (where relevant) kindest ways of getting things done--so why wouldn't I want to share that information with others? And why wouldn't they want to learn those best practices from me?

The sentence, though, also applies to myself: whenever I do something dumb, I'm always sure that I do or did know better. I tend to believe that I understand my own motives and feelings nearly perfectly--or that I can, with just a bit of reflection. When I err or misread a situation, then, I'm angry with myself for not being smarter or paying closer attention.

Maybe what I'm really saying is that I believe there are right ways to do things--and that though one may err, one also can learn from advice and experience.

Or at least, as long as I'm around to help out.

Making the life of the mind earn its keep

Back when I was organizing for the graduate student union, there was a certain crusty old professor whose opposition to the union was legendary. Whenever confronted by the idea that graduate students might be otherwise than perfectly happy, Dr. Crusty would smile, shake his head, and say, "But you're living the life of the mind! If you want to get paid like an investment banker, go get a job as an investment banker!"

It made no difference to Dr. Crusty whether the students' grievances actually involved money; as far as he was concerned, there were two kinds of people in the world: those who valued the life of the mind, and those who were money-grubbers. The fact that his own Life of the Mind had been underwritten first by family money and then by a job he'd slid into during the boom hiring years of the 1960s (and had somehow managed to keep and get tenured at)--and that it might be awfully hard to live The Life of the Mind when worried about paying the gas bill or getting evicted--never seemed to occur to him.

Within the union, then, "the life of the mind" became shorthand for the position of those who Just Didn't Get It, and I still use the phrase today, usually in sentences that begin "So I guess I'm living the life of the mind, and shit, but--" and then conclude with a complaint. Sometimes it's about overwork, or another encounter with a bald-faced plagiarist, but usually it's about money.

So when I found out this week that I'd been awarded two of the four short-term external fellowships I'd applied for, the progress of my reactions went something like this:

1. Oh thank God. I wouldn't have been able to face my recommenders if I hadn't gotten something (the first letter I'd received had been a rejection, and many weeks elapsed before I heard from the other institutions).

2. Ooh, it'll be fun to get back in some archives.

3. Hey, I have a 12-month salary. And these awards are on top of that? I totally don't need this much to rent a sublet in X City or Y City. Holy shit--that's like THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS!

Now, it's true that some of that money will, in effect, just be helping me to pay for those conferences that my departmental budget doesn't cover--and that the rest will quickly disappear into the black hole that is the debt I incurred while in graduate school--but for at least a few minutes I considered talking about the Life of the Mind with a little more respect.

Returned, if not refreshed

Apologies for the lack of further updates from my adventures abroad, but after the arrival of my travel companion and then our relocation to Florence, my internet access became more sporadic and my free time less free; you'll be happy, however, to hear that my emotional erraticism also declined with those twin events--or perhaps it's more accurate to say that I settled back down to my usual oscillation between Hectoring Enthusiasm ("How much do you love this? I mean, love this?") and Vague Irritation ("I need for you not to talk. Can you just. . . not talk?").

It was a blast, though, and worth my being now even further behind in everything and having to teach for 10 hours today on four hours of sleep and jet-lagged all to hell. I'd been told by just about everyone that Florence was more fun than Rome, which after five days in the latter I thought couldn't be true. . . but, well, they were right. Dante! Michelangelo! Ferragamo!

I bought a beautiful green leather handbag. And a ring. And visted the temple of the master (see above). Drank Limoncello. Learned about Brunelleschi and Michelozzo and how to identify St. Peter Martyr in paintings. Concluded (unoriginally) that the Medici were pretty badass. And decided that I needed a teeny-tiny, single-volume edition of the Commedia to carry around with me at all times--like those old ladies on the subway with their New Testaments.

It's true that my Italian is just about good enough for me to translate newspaper horoscopes. But if I keep Dante in my pocket, surely that will all change.


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Updated 3/28/08

The purse (it's a brighter green than it appears in the photo):



The ring (which is Venetian glass despite my not actually having gone to Venice):



The itsy-bitsy Dante:



And heck: I wasn't going to post any photos from the actual trip (since I figure you've all seen pictures of Italy before), but this I couldn't resist. From the Piazza della Signoria:

Travels with the emotionally erratic

It's the end of my second full day in Rome. I'd forgotten how exhausting traveling is--by which I mean emotionally more than physically, although there's always plenty of the latter (I think I hiked up and down every one of those seven hills today, and have the shin splints to prove it).

There are lots of little vexations to traveling, it's true, but I'm not even talking about those: missed plane connections or getting lost or not speaking much of the language. No. For me, there's something about traveling--maybe a sense of being geographically and temporally unmoored--that brings out a bit of the crazy: I find myself bursting into tears or skipping around and singing, either full of manic energy or suddenly unable to unroot myself from my hotel room. Last summer I had to bolt from the British Library manuscript reading room twice because I started crying.

And so it was today. I woke up to Palm Sunday churchbells ringing all over the neighborhood, lept out of bed with a full list of things to do and places to see. . . but by the time I was dressed I was almost in tears and had a hard time getting myself to the train station and out to the Vatican. Being in Saint Peter's, though--and later the Pantheon, which I just turned a corner and found staring me down--provoked such insane euphoria that I couldn't bear to get back on the Metro and so charged up and down several more hills and to every remotely proximate historical site on the long route back home.*

I'm not like this normally. It's overstimulation, maybe, or being cast completely out of normal life, or just being alone for too long. Starting tomorrow, though, I'll be joined by an unexpected travel companion, so we'll see if I settle down then. If not, said companion may be in for an unpleasant surprise.


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*Flavia is minorly obsessed with the Jesuits--and has been, since she was a child--so of course one of the stops she had to make was at Gesù church, home of the order. Not only does it have the tomb of my boy Ignatius of Loyola, and a Bernini bust of Cardinal Bellermine, but in one of the transepts is this awesome statue of religion overthrowing heresy. Damn. I love me some implacable nun-like women with whips.

Escape!

The past couple of weeks in Flavialandia have featured weather grim even for this time of year and this part of the country: in addition to a heckuvalotta snow and punishing temperatures, we've also experienced what wunderground.com has evocatively described as "ICE PELLETS" (their caps) and "freezing fog." Just what those things are, I don't know--I only recently learned the difference between sleet and freezing rain and can't say I'm the better for it--but I know this: DO NOT LIKE.

This, however, I think I like: in less than 48 hours--or as soon as I grade, oh, 14 more papers, read an M.A. thesis, and write and administer a midterm--I'm off to Italy for 10 days.

If I can find my way to a computer and can come up with something more interesting than "oooh!" to say, I may blog. If not, not.

(In the meanwhile, amuse yourselves with this, courtesy of a gentleman friend.)

Another linguistic casualty

When I was younger--let's say fifteen years ago--I recall reading the occasional lament for the loss to the language of "gay" in its original sense. But although I recognize that it once meant something that wasn't quite merry or joyous or glad, much less happy or content, I never lived with the word in that earlier meaning and so don't particularly regret its loss.

A few days ago, however, I was trying to explain a manual operation in which the role of the fingers was important--but my describing the task as needing to be done "digitally" did not bring my audience to quite the desired comprehension.

Factoids ≠ devotions

At Borders the other day I came across a display for something entitled The Intellectual Devotional.

Back copy:

Millions of Americans keep bedside books of prayer and meditative reflection--collections of daily passages to stimulate spiritual thought and advancement. The Intellectual Devotional is a secular version of the same--a collection of 365 short lessons that will inspire and invigorate the reader every day of the year. . . . Impress your friends by explaining Plato's Cave Allegory, pepper your cocktail party conversation with opera terms, and unlock the mystery of how batteries work. . . . Offering an escape from the daily grind to contemplate higher things, The Intellectual Devotional is a great way to awaken in the morning or to revitalize one's mind before retiring in the evening.

Subtitle:

Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class.

If there's such a thing as "the cultured class," you and I, dudes, surely belong to it. But whether there's a large number of people who believe that they do not belong, but who wish to (or even just want roam alongside us occasionally), I'm in more doubt.

Now, I went to the kind of college where people said--often laughingly, but in all essential seriousness--that a good reason to take Art History 101 was that it would allow you to make cocktail-party conversation someday. The exact set of circumstances whereby I might find myself at a party where suddenly everyone was talking about chiaroscuro were no more clear to me than why I would stay if they did--but, like my peers, I took the possibility seriously. In high school or college I might even have bought this book or given it as a gift to a friend.

But if anyone searching for the book's website has landed on this post by mistake, lemme tell ya: no one cares if you've read Ulysses, or know exactly what an aria or nuclear fission is--and trotting out your two-paragraph factoids on those subjects among actual Joyce scholars or opera singers or nuclear scientists isn't going to impress anyone. What do you do when you start "roam[ing] with the cultured class"? Uh, you hold intelligent conversation. You show that you have an interest in something, and are as eager to share your interests with others as to lean about theirs.

So pursue the things that actually interest you. Go to the exhibitions that come to your local art museum, or befriend a master woodworker, or take a series of pastry-making classes. Whatever. And if this book inspires you to learn more about some of the subjects it treats, awesome. But the only people with a fetishistic list of Things Everyone Should Know are those with screaming class and/or cultural anxieties themselves.

Trust me. The academy's full of 'em.

The wingable and the unwingable

I've been thinking, lately, about the things one can wing.

The list of Things Wingable probably varies by individual, but I suspect that everyone's list grows with age--as we develop more confidence and a greater store of knowledge (of our subject area, of our audience, of ourselves). Still, I feel comfortable asserting the following:

All performances may be winged (or, following Dr. Virago, wung). Thus a class, a meeting, or conceivably even a talk--though your Flavia is not remotely expert enough for that last one and suspects she never will be. Anything done live and leaving no permanent record can be carried off without a great deal of formal preparation if one has enough charm and bravado.

Written things cannot be winged. They're permanent. They should reflect, if not careful thinking, then at least careful writing. Those things take time, and although time alone doesn't guarantee that they'll be good, writing can't be faked in the same way that a one-off performance can be.

Grading also cannot be winged, and for the same reasons.

Administrative tasks, alas, also cannot be winged. They require paperwork, meetings, paperwork, email exchanges, paperwork, phone calls, and more paperwork. And while writing can be almost infinitely deferred, paperwork WILL NOT BE IGNORED.

So, when something has to give, you know what it is. I've been winging a lot of classes lately, and I hate it. I hate the fact that, because I have forms and applications and committee work with absolute deadlines, I come into the office, spend four hours on that stuff, read or skim the books I'm teaching the next day, and show up in the classroom without more than a few dogeared pages to guide me.

I've also been doing precious little writing, here or elsewhere. But I'll tell ya: getting paperwork in on time? Returning students' papers promptly? That's all you need to do to aquire a(n entirely undeserved) reputation for efficiency.

A dream deferred

In case you're wondering?

The description "whiskey-voiced" is entirely accurate.

If you have, let's say, gone out three nights in a row and had, let's say, three or four glasses of whiskey each of those nights, you will wind up with a huskier and more sultry voice than you began with.

And if you were already a low alto, this might just make you start contemplating a career as a blues singer.

Until you recall that, oh yeah: you can't carry a note in bucket, or even a totally cute handbag.

Professing literature it is.

Thirty-three

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.



That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go merry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.

(Herrick, "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time")

Hello! Adult in the room!

I'm really not cut out to be an authority figure.

Before class the other day, several of my students began discussing one of my colleagues--initially by way of recommending him as a teacher, but sooner or later you know what happened: they started gossiping about him. They traded stories about which of their mutual friends were in love with him and which friends thought that idea was totally gross. Then they started dissecting his mannerisms and wardrobe.

I tried to pretend that I was NOT HEARING this, keeping my eyes down and feigning great seriousness as I scratched notes in the margin of my lesson plan, but it was hard to keep a straight face. Finally, after one particularly outrageous statement, I looked up, made eye contact with the student who had just spoken, smiled wickedly, and said, "You guys know that he and I are friends, right?"

This abashed them not at all. "Oh, you won't tell him this!" said one. "Is he married?" said another. "Any kids?"

They kept talking. And then, to my shame, I heard something that made my mouth twitch, and then I snorted, and then it was All Over.

But karma'll get you. Last night I was out with several friends at a largely empty wine bar, 20 miles from RU. We were being really loud--laughing and shouting and arguing with each other and writing limericks on the back of napkins.

And? In walked one of my students.

Questions epistemological and existential

Taped to the bottom of my laptop screen are two fortune-cookie fortunes.

The one on the right is the more recent; it's been there for about six months, and reads, "Be assertive when decisive action is needed."

The one on the left has been there for at least two years. It reads, "What's the fucking point in any case?"*

I often sit here, wondering how one knows: when is decisive action needed? What is the fucking point?

When I know, you'll know.



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*At the Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross one of the souveniers was a Chinese take-out box with fortune cookies containing lines from the play.

Course-design bleg

Next semester I'm teaching a new course on sex and gender in the Renaissance. It's a 300-level class, and one that will be cross-listed with Gender Studies. I've already submitted all the paperwork suggesting that I know what I'm doing--giving a rough course outline and bibliography and all that--but of course, I don't actually know what I'm doing.

That's where you come in. If you work on the Renaissance (or more generally on issues of sex and gender), what would you teach? I intend to structure the course topically, and I have a good sense of the primary texts I'll assign. . . but since it may be obvious even to those who don't know my secret identity that I don't work on anything remotely related to sex, sexuality, or gender (or indeed anything remotely sexy), there are probably plenty of works I'm not thinking of.

More important than primary texts, though, I'm looking for what y'all would consider essential works of scholarship (theory, literary criticism, historiography) that are either a) accessible to undergraduates in a non-capstone-level class, or b) totally, totally necessary for me to read over the summer so's I'm competent to teach this thing.

Assume I know nothing. Now help me fill that void!

Why I teach literature

New Kid tapped me for this one, which began ages ago with Dr. Crazy and has been around the blogoverse and back (AWB's response being one of my favorites) while I've been off doing God-knows-what.

There are plenty of reasons why I teach literature, including the fact that I get paid to do it--to read and reread material I enjoy. But the reason that I wound up here in the first place, which is to say, the reason I went to grad school and stuck it out, is because I believe that reading literature critically gives us the tools to make sense out of our lives. And as a result, to live better.

I don't mean that in the usual "whoo! art is uplifting and we become more human and more humane through reading great literature" kind of way, and I don't mean that I want my students to seek out parallels between their own lives and the works we read. What I mean is that learning how to analyze and interpret texts teaches us to exist in the world in a more thoughtful, engaged, and critical way.

That's why I went to grad school, although that's also what many people would consider the worst or at least the most naive of reasons: I went, basically, because I felt I wasn't done studying literature, and I wanted to do more of it and to do it better. And even during my unhappiest days I felt that I was learning something valuable--not socially valuable, but personally valuable.

Early in my second year I went to see a movie with a friend, and during the ten or so minutes that it took for him to walk me home afterwards we chatted about what we'd seen. The conversation wouldn't now strike me as remarkable, but it did at the time: even as I was speaking, I realized that I had, somewhere in the previous year or so, learned to see differently. I had a vocabulary to talk about what was going on in the movie narratively--and even though I didn't really have a vocabulary for what was going on cinegraphically, I was still noticing things that I wouldn't have noticed before and fumbling toward articulating those things and their effects.

Recognizing how textual narratives are constructed allows us to understand the other narratives we're confronted with--whether told by our families and friends, our politicians, or ourselves. And although I just said that I found what I learned to be personally rather than socially valuable, I actually think it's both. I believe that understanding how narratives are shaped and manipulated allows us to reflect more fully on ourselves and the scripts we live by (and who's writing them). This in turn gives us greater confidence, competency, and agency in the world.

That, at any rate, is why I study literature. It's why I teach it, and it's one thing I hope my students gain from it.

Disenfranchised!

My state holds its primary elections tomorrow. In my county, the polls are open from noon until 9.

I, however, will be on campus from 11 until 9.30.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but the silencing of Renaissance scholars with 3/3 loads and 30-minute commutes is one seriously underreported electoral scandal.