Boring technical update

I've been told off and on that some readers have had trouble subscribing to my blog's feed. To the best of my knowledge, this problem only affects Mac users, and only those using certain feed aggregators or subscription services (Bloglines, I think, works fine for everyone).

One solution: This blog has an Atom rather than an RSS feed, and it's routed through Feedburner, which means its address isn't intuitive. But most people who have had problems subscribing should be able to plug http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeruleFescue into your subscriber or aggregator or feed folder or whatever and have the problem resolved.

If you're still having trouble after trying that, though, could you let me know? I'm mostly technically incompetent, but I'd like to know the extent of the problem. More importantly: if you yourself ARE technically competent, are there other fixes you'd suggest or changes I could make?

Seeking scholarly LTR. Hand-holding a must.

Over the past couple of years I've talked to at least a dozen friends about exchanging work. Sometimes this happens over margaritas, as one of us is moaning about a project that seems to be going nowhere and the other replies, "well hey: I'm always happy to read for you." Other times (though likely still over drinks) we've mutually if vaguely declared that we really ought to form a support group to keep ourselves on task and read through each other's stuff from time to time.

And sometimes it's even happened: a couple of friends have stepped in at key moments to read the draft of one or another of my articles, and I've read a draft or two in return. I've also read a series of short introductions for a colleague's critical edition.

But that's been it. I think we're all sincere in our professed desire to help each other out--I know I'd read a draft for any of my friends at any time, and I'm not overly shy about asking for help myself, especially when I'm on a deadline or have gotten really stuck. But I think I've outgrown the scholarly booty call. I'd like a committed, long-term (though not necessarily exclusive!) relationship.

Part of the problem is mutuality. I do have a couple of mentor-type people who have volunteered to look over my manuscript "anytime," but apart from how terrifying those offers are (and although I will pursue them--I may be terrified, but I'm not stupid), those relationships would be unidirectional; I don't have much to offer in return, at least at this stage in my career. And even among friends, it's hard to know whether one is imposing too much, or if the vision of the relationship that one of us has is the same held by the other: would we be in touch weekly? monthly? less frequently? Would one of us need more hand-holding than the other? And what if we just, you know: had different values?

I'm hopeful that a supportive scholarly relationship or two will coalesce in the future, as it's hard for me to imagine being either particularly happy or a particularly good thinker working in isolation. Plenty of solitary workers are--both happy and damn fine scholars--but the older I get the more inefficient it feels to work alone and venture my ideas into public only in conference papers or article submissions.

It's funny: I used to be anxious about letting anyone see anything I was working on before it was polished to a high gloss--even if I knew I'd still be doing tons of revision afterwards, I couldn't bear the idea of showing my imperfect or unfinished thoughts to the world. But somehow, in the past few years, that fear has dissipated. I have a job. I've published articles I'm pleased with. I'm pretty sure my friends will not think I'm an idiot if they encounter a weak argument or an awkward paragraph (or ten).

More importantly, there's a lot of shit I don't know--stuff I haven't read, ways I don't think, ideas I haven't encountered. Given an infinitude of time, might I learn all those things on my own? Maybe. But wouldn't it be more efficient and more pleasurable to learn them from others--and help them learn stuff in return?

So yeah. That's what I'm looking for. You can keep your candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach. I want something intimately. . . textual.

Just sayin'

It's a strange profession that involves my running out of the house on a Saturday morning, a couple of times a year, in a little black dress and with my arms full of poofy medieval robes--then driving self and robes across town, parading around in them for a few hours, and driving back home.

Words known only to students (an incomplete list)

All kinds of strange words and word usages show up on individual student papers, usually the result of haste, personal idiosyncrasy, or an imperfectly developed critical vocabulary. Sometimes these malaproprisms are funny and sometimes they're not. But there are other words or expressions (or nonstandard usages) that I see all the time--which suggests to me that they're part of a wider student vocabulary that hasn't yet filtered up to the rest of us.

Here are a few that come to mind:

Portrays to mean is or is depicted as.
Ex. "The character Othello portrays a jealous man."

Incite, which has a wide and flexible range of meanings that I don't yet grasp. It seems to include motivate and inspire and sometimes entice.
Ex. "The Scottish throne incites Macbeth."

Call out to mean shame. I know that this is a colloquialism--that one may call someone out for cowardice, or hypocrisy, or whatever--but it's used by my students without that explanatory prepositional phrase.
Ex. "In this speech Lady Macbeth calls out her husband."

Moreso, which appears to mean something like additionally. I love this word because, although I see it often, I don't really understand it.
Ex. "Macbeth is motivated by the witches' prophecy, but moreso he's ambitious."

What would you add to this lexicon?

Envy

I'm not sure whether envy is actually the besetting sin of our profession--pride is an obvious challenger, with gluttony, wrath, and lechery making strong showings come conference time--but it may be the one that most of us wrestle with the most often. I know I do.

Envy isn't always destructive, and I've gotten better at limiting my envy to specific, tangible things: I envy my friends at other institutions the amount of travel funding they receive, or the frequency of their research leaves. Granted, this may not be a productive way to spend my time (although I suppose, for people who are not me, it could lead to redoubled efforts to conserve or use more wisely one's own time and money), but it's an expression of frustration with my institution's more limited resources rather than resentment of my friends for what they have.

I hope I'm smart enough not to envy most people their jobs, much less their lives; all jobs have trade-offs, of course, and it's impossibile to assess the quality of anyone's life from the outside. Some of my friends at research schools have more grading than I do, because when they teach lecture classes they don't get TAs (or they get only one for a class of 80). Others may indeed teach only a few dozen students a semester, but are swamped with orals or dissertation committees. When it comes to teaching/research balance, and to the health, happiness, and sanity of one's department, I've got it extraordinarily good.

Nevertheless, I still experience occasional fits of anger, frustration, or bitchiness that only later reveal themselves to have been partly motivated by envy. I'll be ranting about someone doing something SO UNACCEPTABLE or being SO CONDESCENDING, and then stop myself, wondering why I care so much--and realize that my anger was rooted in some presumption about how great that person's personal or professional life must be (with the allied presumption that, if I were in the offending party's place, I'd be much nicer or more generous).

As I say, it's something that I wrestle with, and nowhere more peculiarly than on those occasions when I've felt myself on the receiving end of other people's envy. Each time it's dawned on or been suggested to me that envy might be the reason a professional friend is suddenly making snide remarks or gossiping about me behind my back, my first reaction is to exclaim, "but why would anyone envy me?"--and then produce a list of all the ways in which that person's professional life is even better than mine.

I should know that that's just the way envy works--that since it's all fantasy and projection, I'm as reasonable an object as anyone--but it's disconcerting to think that someone might waste as much energy on me as I do on others.

It could go either way, really

Is the fact that I have received an entire essay on Shakespeare's use of the end-stop in a single sonnet evidence that I am doing something horribly wrong. . . or horribly right?

Memento mori

Two weeks ago, I was worried that I might have a detached retina. Last week, I thought I was having a heart attack.

Neither fear was wholly unprovoked: I'm quite nearsighted and I have floaters in both eyes, which means I'm at a higher risk for detachment. The day after Easter I saw two quick flashes of light in one eye. Nothing else seemed wrong, so I forgot about it until a couple of days later when my peripheral vision seemed oddly blurry in that same eye. Granted, it was late and dark and at a bar, and the experience wasn't repeated. But those two events were enough to make me intermittently hysterical until I could get to my eye doctor a few days later.

Then last week I hopped into my car after a long day on campus. My left arm and shoulder felt uncomfortable, as if I had pulled a muscle, so I stretched around a bit at first one stoplight and then another as I headed for the highway. Then my chest started feeling tight, and then my other arm felt tight and a little tingly--and it seemed that first my right and then my left legs were becoming similarly tingly, as if they were falling asleep. I kept driving, trying to decide what to do, but by the time I got to the highway 10 minutes later I concluded that, eh: if I hadn't passed out yet, I probably wasn't going to.

I don't think I have a tendency toward hypochondria, but it's also true that I rarely have things to be a hypochondriac about: I've had maybe one cold in the past two years and nothing more serious. So maybe it's the unusualness of these two episodes that alarmed me.

Or maybe it's this: my grandmother has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. My father just turned 70. I'm dating someone new and thinking about how people always say that they want to find the person they'll grow old with--which is to say, the person we will watch die, as they will watch us.

That's not a terrible thing, necessarily. But it's still the best-case scenario.

In case of emergency

In my campus office, I have the following emergency supplies stashed in my desk:

Ibuprofen
Mint gum
Band-aids
Over-the-counter nasal spray
Deodorant
Moisturizer
Mascara
Two lipsticks
Concealer
Clear nail polish (for repairing runs in my stockings)
Opaque black tights
Safety pins
Hair mousse
Teabags
Granola bars
A spoon and fork (hotel silver from the Waldorf-Astoria)
Lightbulbs
Hammer and nails
An unopened picture frame

If I were to die unexpectedly, and someone else had to clean out my desk--I wonder what they'd think.


What do you have in your emergency drawer?

Inside the bubble

I was noodling around on the internet today when I came across a document I'd never seen before: an internal study of INRU's graduate program in English. Once I saw it, I remembered having completed a survey a few years back--but I'd already graduated and never received the final product.

It's a satisfyingly comprehensive report, describing the shape of the program and how it's changed over the past 10 or 15 years to address various problems or meet various goals (and recommending new changes going forward). Everything's covered, from funding, recruitment, and matriculation rates to requirements, retention, and job placement. Probably the most interesting parts are those last two, retention and placement, and there's a ton of data--not just numerical summaries (how many people got jobs in which years and at what kinds of institutions), but also detailed, gossipy information in spreadsheet format naming names and tracking professional progress from degree date to the present.

But among the report's many unobjectionable and often quite perceptive remarks is one that made me shriek aloud. The committee observes that, although the department isn't displeased with its placement rates, it would still like to increase the percentage of graduates who get jobs at research universities and decrease the percentage who leave the academy involuntarily. They continue,

Some faculty worry that mid-level graduate students at INRU are not engaged in research that is ambitious enough to win them places at major research universities--although we realize that not all students seek careers that place an emphasis on research. Some faculty are pleased at our success in placing our graduates in liberal arts colleges, and this surely does indicate one of our strengths: that we train our students in the broader field of literary studies rather than producing narrow specialists.*

There, in one paragraph, we have an implied causal link between not having research ambitions and not getting a job at "a major research university"--after all, if you were doing the right kind of research you'd get the right kind of job--followed by the suggestion that only some INRU faculty consider liberal arts colleges to be good jobs (and that although the committee finds this position mildly eccentric, they're dutifully reporting it).

Now, on the one hand, this doesn't surprise me: probably the vast majority of us encountered some version of this attitude at our graduate institutions, wherever we attended. But although I never doubted that many of my professors held such beliefs, my department nevertheless did an excellent job of professionalizing us. My first year I attended a job-market roundtable featuring some recent graduates who were teaching at a wide range of institutions. One of the speakers had only just landed a job after six or seven years on the market--and although he jokingly presented his talk as "everything you should NOT do in your job search," his underlying message was that the job market is a mess and unpredictable, and it might take years to find a job even if you are doing everything right. At the same event I remember one senior faculty member telling us not to rule out community colleges--that they not only had growing student populations, but were at the forefront of pedagogical innovation.

In other words, the fact that the job market is random and terrible (and that, market notwithstanding, people are happy and productive at all kinds of institutions) has finally filtered down to pretty much everyone. But although our advisors and mentors see these proofs and even speak these truths, what they still believe is that there's a single hierarchy, that everyone wishes to scale--and that it's a meritocracy.

-----------------------------
*I've altered the wording slightly, but both the sense and tone remain.

SAA: beaten with a stick

Conference partying is well and good, but its wages are, if not death, still pretty grim: I always wake up on the last day feeling like I've been beaten with a stick. My lower back aches from hours of standing around gabbing in heels. My shoulders are cricked from an equal number of hours hunched over a notepad. My skin is ghastly from too little sleep and too much drink and overly rich meals out on the town.

Maybe this is why so many of our departments provide so little travel funding: like taxes on cigarettes, it's intended for our own good.

SAA: ain't nothing but a party

On Tuesday I reminded my Shakespeare students that our Thursday class was cancelled, and I explained that I'd be out of town at a conference. I'd intended to make a light joke of it--saying something about how while they were all napping and playing video games I'd be partying with 800 Shakespeareans--but no sooner had I said the words "Shakespeare Association of America" than the entire room burst out laughing.

I paused, puzzled. This class does tend to find my jokes hilarious, but I hadn't gotten to the joke yet. Attempting a recovery, I arched an eyebrow and said something about what a crazy scene it was going to be, and how lucky they were to have me bringing them bulletins from the front.

They laughed harder, and I realized that I didn't need to make a joke: the mere fact that 800 Shakespeareans existed (and that we get together and talk about Shakespeare and shit) was sufficiently hilarious to them.

* * * * *

I have no interest in my students knowing just how fun conferences are--how full of gossip and drunkenness and bad behavior--and if they did, surely the idea would fill them with terror and pity as much as laughter. But it's my own feeling that parties have only gotten more fun as I've gotten older and the people have gotten more interesting, and the ability to mingle work and play (and to play with such smart people) is one of the wonderful things about this profession. It's our students, really, who have an impoverished notion of what partying is.

Conference shakes ass; capital quails

From early tomorrow through late Sunday I'll be among the other ass-shakers in Our Nation's Capital. I'm pleased by both the location and the company, but irritated, once again, that SAA is always scheduled over Easter and usually over Passover.

I mean, everyone knows that academics are a bunch of family-hating atheists--but is it really in our professional interests to be so obvious about it?

Belles lettres

I've mentioned before that I used to be a devoted letter-writer--not just in high school and college, but for many years afterwards. I didn't engage in paper correspondence with all my friends, but for a long while there were five or six people (not always the same people, and some cycled in and out) with whom I regularly exchanged letters.

There were many reasons for this. When I started college in 1993, email wasn't widely available outside of the universities, so not everyone we kept in touch with had access to it--and neither did most of us when we were away from campus. Growing up in a pre-internet age also meant that many of us had developed a letter-writing habit before we got to college, so it seemed natural to continue sending letters through the post, at least occasionally, even to people whom we also emailed.

Indeed, most of the letters I sent and received were probably written after email became more accessible, between the ages of about 20 and 27. That too makes sense: first there were college summers spent in our boring home towns or struggling in strange cities on minimally-paid internships; then there were new cities and new jobs or graduate or professional school. My friends and I moved a lot during those years, and our newer friends came and went and so did our romantic relationships. I remember my 20s as being a lot of fun, and they were--but in retrospect it strikes me that we spent a lot of time in our heads, trying to figure stuff out. Our letters reflect that.

Around age 28, my friends started getting married, and that ended or at least severely curtailed some of my correspondence. When my friend Dave got married, I was in grad school and, uninspired by anything I could afford on his registry, I decided to give him and his wife copies of all the letters and cards I'd received in the 10 years we'd been friends. It wound up being an insane project: I spent hours photocopying--sometimes in color, and on high-quality paper--all of Dave's letters and their envelopes and pasting them into an enormous album. I'm sure it cost more than I'd have spent on a gift, and it took ages and ages. But Dave had always written long, thoughtful letters in an elegant hand, choosing stamps and greeting cards with care, and it struck me that his wife might want to know his younger self more fully, and that Dave himself might enjoy revisting it.

Even those of us who haven't married are now in a more stable phase of life, at least emotionally and psychologically, and we have less need (or maybe it's just less time) to puzzle out our feelings in longhand. I suspect we've also finally gotten so accustomed to email that we miss having the ability to edit and rephrase and adjust our writing as we go.

And yet, after two or three years in which my correspondence was limited to Christmas cards and thank-you notes, in the past few months I've sent half a dozen actual letters. One was to an old friend with whom I've reconnected on Facebook; two were to my grandmother, who's been very ill; and the rest were to my new fella. In all cases, writing an actual letter was what I wanted to do, damn the inefficiency, crossed-out phrases, and all the rest. The letters sent to my gentleman friend were hardly love letters--I'm not sure I could write a love letter if I tried--but with him as with my long-lost friend and my grandmother, there was something I wanted to say or do not adequately served by email, IM, or the telephone.

I'm not sure what that something is. Maybe I just spend too much time, these days, in front of a computer, so emailing friends doesn't feel sufficiently distinct from emailing students and colleagues or typing up quizzes. But whatever I was missing and whatever I've found, I'm enjoying it.

Bad news/good news: semester half gone edition

I spent my entire spring break grading. I did not write. I did not read the books I'm reviewing. I did not jet off to a tropical location or even see a bunch of movies or curl up with a good novel. I hung out with my gentleman friend and I graded midterms and essays and more midterms--and 11 days were over like that.

Today I returned to campus, feeling grumbly but more or less prepared. I walked into my Renaissance drama class, Revenger's Tragedy under my arm and skull in my hand--only to discover that a) I'd actually assigned The Roaring Girl, and b) my students are better at reading my syllabus than my mind.

We got through 90 minutes (during which the skull was not particularly useful), and I returned to my office to find a package from the U.K. containing a CD with digital images of this manuscript, which I've been trying to get first photographed and then sent to me for almost two years. I gasped when I put the disk in my computer: I've never worked with digital images of early texts, and these are gorgeous. I'm not sure they'll make checking my transcription any more fun, but seeing them made me excited all over again about that particular project (which has suddenly started moving forward and I hope hope hope will be under contract soon).

In sum: there are still seven goddamn weeks in the semester. But if I learn how to read a syllabus, I might just make it.

Dead metaphors

I often find myself explaining metaphors to my students that I don't even consciously recognize as metaphors until there's a failure of understanding. When I teach Brit Lit I, for example, I typically have one or two students for whom "lord" always and everywhere means "God"; they'll raise their hands and start talking earnestly about what a religious man a given servant or flunkey or knight must be--because the author keeps talking about his relationship with his lord. A related problem is "mistress," which not every student recognizes as the female equivalent of "master." In both cases, I have to explain that our usage of Lord to mean God or mistress to mean "extra-curricular lover" are actually metaphors derived from courtly culture.

Those particular misunderstandings don't surprise me any more, but there are always new ones. When I taught my Milton seminar a couple of semesters ago, I had a student ask me what I meant when I referred to the rabbinic tradition that the captive Samson was put out to stud.

"Oh!" I said. "You know: like a racehorse. There's a tradition that he was used to impregnate the Philistine women, so they'd produce warlike sons."

"Okay," she said. "But put out to stud. . .?"

"When we call a guy a stud, today, we mean he's sexually virile, right?"

My class nodded, uncertainly.

"Well," I said. "When we say that, we're comparing him to a stallion, or uncastrated horse--there's usually only one on a farm, right? The others are mares or geldings."

I paused. No one seemed to have any idea what I was talking about. "I mean, didn't any of you grow up in the country? Okay. Well. Take my word for it. Lesson over!"

The discourses of sex and romance probably do produce metaphors (and euphemisms and ultimately clichés) at a greater rate than others. Lately, the dead or nearly dead metaphors that I've been noticing are endearments. I've taught a couple of pre- or early modern texts this semester that have succeeded in reinvigorating "honey" for me--an endearment that I not only have never used, but have always regarded as particularly cheap and inane. But coming across endearments like "sweet honey-comb" and "sweet honey dear," I realized that, hey! honey is sweet! and good! And that's really a nice thing to call someone!

Such reinvigorations are pleasurable, but it may be just as well that most endearments are now largely divorced from their metaphorical significance. If you think about them too hard, many aren't just cutesy or tired, but actively icky. I'm profoundly glad that "mommy" and "daddy" are no longer common romantic endearments--though of course we still refer to sugar daddies and mommies in circumstances where we intend to foreground the relational inequity. Even the ubiquitous "baby," though, carries some of the same baggage.

This may be why endearments that are dated enough to seem strange have always been the most appealing to me: various of my female friends and I have gone through periods of addressing each other as "darling," "sweetheart," and "dearest one," and I briefly dated (and was completely charmed by) someone who had an easy, arch way with "buttercup," "honey lamb," and the like. Such usages are always semi-ironic, or at least conscious of their own absurdity--and that's probably what makes them appealing.

So in the absence of evocative metaphors, I suppose there are worse things than dead ones.