Thirty-seven.

Once, in the 1970s, I was young. And I stood beside enormous rocks, and I wore orange and blue (and strikingly short shorts), and life was good.

Now I'm older and less skilled with the color blocking--but life is still good. I've spent a fine holiday-birthday weekend in New York City and now I'm off to a boozy brunch with some friends.

I raise a glass in all y'all's general direction.

Happy cathexis day!

Like most teachers, I have a few students every semester who have some kind of obvious crush going on. It's usually women and it's usually low-key; to the extent that I can translate their smiley delightedness into words, it amounts to this: "Omigod! she's so funny! and smart! and NICE! I love her!" I had a lot of those crushes myself in college, and I understand that the students who cathect on us are really just working through their own stuff. They're looking for nerdy aspirational models, figuring out what kinds of relationships to the intellectual life are possible, and generally seeking ways of being in the world.

So yes, I have a couple of those again. They're sweet, they're good students, and they make me feel like I'm good at my job--even though I know that their crushes are only partly about me and less about how successfully I teach.

But I also have a student of the rarer and more troubling kind, the fragile and needy one who responds to any off-hand kindness with waves of love so strong I can feel the breeze in my face. This particular student is going through a rough time in her personal life. She emailed me about it and I replied with a short sympathetic sentence, adjusted a minor deadline, but firmly reasserted a bigger one. After the next class she stayed after to thank me, all love and big, trusting eyes. I took two minutes to say something briskly supportive, make sure she was getting help elsewhere, and then suggest that keeping on top of her work during this rough patch might actually provide her with some useful structure and something to take pride in. Then I went home.

Today she again stayed after class, to thank me for the last time and to tell me that talking with me had made her whole weekend better. And she said some other things, about how much it meant to have someone so understanding, about how her mom kinda got it and kinda didn't, and maybe a few other sentences I'm now forgetting. Mostly I remember the semi-hypnotic power of that utterly open, vulnerable face.

This kind of student freaks me out. I'm torn between feeling genuinely glad that my passing kindness helped (and making a mental note to strive for patience and generosity with all future students, because You Never Know)--and feeling radically uncomfortable, almost repelled by the naked neediness. This student does not appear to be in crisis (it's not this kind of personal drama), so my concern is less about the specifics of her current troubles than about how easily such a person gets hurt, and how unwise it is for her to invest that much emotional energy in me, or in anyone.

Selling ourselves

The job market is overwhelmingly about selling oneself, as the yearly dust-ups over such issues as appropriate job-candidate dress and comportment reveal. (And for the record, I think the advice to "just be yourself! if they don't like the real you you're better off not working there!" is only slightly more stupid than the insistence that, if you don't wear a tie/heels and an anonymous, conservative suit, then you'll never in a million years get a job anywhere ever.) But this year, as my department is in the midst of its blitz of candidate visits, I've been thinking harder about what it means for an institution to try to sell itself to a candidate.

My first few years on the job, I was excited when we had job candidates to campus and I made an effort to meet all of them, but I was mostly interested in checking them out. I wanted a good colleague, teacher, and scholar (and possibly a friend), and though I understood myself to be performing a service for or fulfilling an obligation to my department, I didn't really think of myself as representing the department in any meaningful way: we needed bodies in the room at the candidate's talk and at dinner, and it was good for some of those bodies to belong to friendly junior faculty, but no one needed for me, specifically, to be there. I went mostly because it was fun to meet the candidates, to have a vote, and to get a fancy meal on the department's dime.

Now I'm older and busier and everything feels like work. I don't particularly want the fancy meal; I'd rather be at home in my pyjamas. I don't really need to meet the candidates; we have a talented roster, I trust my colleagues, and anyone we hire I'll wind up meeting soon enough. But I'm also on the verge of tenure, I expect to be here for a while, and somewhere along the line I decided that what I did, personally, kinda did matter. Though I still identify strongly with the job candidate, I get that she won't particularly identify with me: she'll see me as her senior (usually), and as a reflection of my department's character and personality (definitely).

So I'm rousing myself at 7.30 a.m. and driving to campus every day we have a candidate visiting, making time for each one's job talk and teaching demo and either lunch or dinner. I'm donning a suit (to communicate respect for the candidate and the general professionalism of the department), I'm asking encouraging questions, and I'm doing my damnedest, through my interactions with my colleagues, to show as well as tell our candidates that we're a happy and collegial place where friendships extend outside of the office. I want our candidates to see how intellectually engaged we are, and how interested in other people's work. I want for our students to perform well, and for Cha-Cha City to sound and look appealing, and for the campus, ideally, not to be covered in a sheet of ice.

And in fact I'm not sure why having the department come off well matters so very much to me. The job market is terrible, our list is deep, and though we don't always get our our first-choice candidate we've never had a search fail and have always wound up with someone wonderful.

But I guess I wish to extend the sort of kindness to our candidates that the department extended to me on my visit--and, more selfishly, I wish for the people whom we don't hire or who don't accept our offers (and perhaps, by extension, their colleagues and friends and advisors) to have a warm impression of our department. There's nothing bad about good press.

Feeling the rhythm

Every semester, in my Shakespeare class, I begin with two weeks on metrics. Partly this is a way of doing something productive on the first day of class, but it's also a way of establishing, early on, that our course is going to involve attention to sound and language, not just plot and character. I think that I teach it well and most of my students respond gamely, but there are always a handful whose response is hostile puzzlement. They seem equally displeased by the restrictions of metrics and by the fact that there isn't always a single right answer: they sigh, loudly, when we're scanning a poem in class and I acknowledge that a particular foot could be either a spondee or an iamb--or just possibly a trochee, depending on how the neighboring foot is accented.

I sympathize, of course, and I tell them that my ambition isn't for them to become expert scanners, but just to understand that meter can affect meaning and to be familiar with some basic terms. But I also tell them that if they do it enough, or simply read Shakespeare aloud enough, they'll come to feel the rhythm instinctively, even recognizing when a word must have been pronounced differently in Shakespeare's day because the logic of the meter demands it. Iambic pentameter isn't something Shakespeare imposed on his plays; in a culture of sonnet-writing and theatre-going, it was just the back-beat of daily life.

Still, it takes a while to fully inhabit any rhythm. This semester RU has shortened all its class periods in order to add another period to the day and to free up more classroom space: we've gone from 60 minutes to 50, from 90 to 75, and from 195 to 165. Such changes are tough. I went from 75 minutes at INRU to 80 minutes at Big Urban, and then the next year to to 90 minutes at RU, and both those changes were disorienting. Even five extra minutes threw my rhythm off, and ten felt impossible; I was always running out of things to do, or dragging on a discussion past its natural life in order to fill time.

Over the years, though, I've come to love the 90-minute period, especially in my Shakespeare classes: we can do real and detailed scene work, have a free-wheeling general discussion or two, and even fit in a quiz or talk about administrative matters. I was totally in control of those 90 minutes, and losing fifteen of them feels like a disaster. It's not about content, it's about rhythm. I don't feel a 75-minute period in my gut the way I do a 90-minute period, and so I'm slow to cut off one discussion to move along to the next.

I'm off my game and I hate it. These new periods feel clunky and awkward and totally unnatural. But I suppose that I'll grow into them eventually--and that my brain and body will come to respond as they do to da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum.

Hate-reading

Guilty as charged:

[I]f a subject has absolutely no idea how they're coming off to readers, then it's all the more outrageous and, for me, all the more enjoyable. Some of my tried-and-true hate-reading regulars include an ex-roommate who refers to her significant other as "The Boyf" and brags about how she only eats at Michelin-starred restaurants; a former co-worker who extols the values of juice cleanses and composes lists with titles like, "The Top 10 Ways to Stay Present and Centered;" the friend-of-a-friend whose wedding site features a countdown ticker and engagement ring video montage; and the acquaintance who has a "fashion blog" even though she only ever posts black-and-white photos of herself in American Apparel leotards. I'm endlessly fascinated by how obnoxious these people are, and equally entertained by their ignorance of that fact.

I do this a lot. And when I say "a lot," I mean A LOT. But hey, at least now I have a name for it!

Random bullets of again with the start of classes

• Somehow, I got done everything I intended to get done over break. (Well, except for assembling an album of wedding photos.) I'm not sure this has ever happened in my entire life.
• It's been strangely unwinterlike here in the land of winter--we've had virtually no snow this year. And it's light perceptibly later each evening. I dare to hope.
• I'm teaching one entirely new, one totally re-designed, and one slightly reshuffled class. So far it feels like the right blend of the comfortable and the challenging.
• I'm particularly pleased by my plans for my composition class, which I was rather dreading (I haven't taught comp for a few semesters, and the last two times were to Honors kids). But my old syllabus and assignments really needed shaking up, and the prospect of reading NEW THINGS does wonders for a bad attitude.
• So far so good on my tenure case. There is, I think, only one more level of review that matters--after that it's just rubber-stamping.
• I'm almost done with this round of book revisions.
• I bought a second-hand raccoon coat (probably 1960s, mid-thigh length). It's indescribably awesome.
• Our second bedroom is now fully furnished. The cats are happy. Any guests we eventually have may not be so happy.
• The fact that I am not getting married, not co-organizing a lecture series, not preparing my tenure file, and not co-teaching a totally new class means the beginning of the semester feels calm, unoppressive, doable. (Remind me not to do all those things at once again, will ya?)

After the goofy, madcap, self-deprecatory shtick, what then?

As my professional cohort moves up in the world (in terms of age and career stability), it's struck me that a number of people--maybe myself included--are still working with a self-image and a public persona that don't really reflect reality. I know many an academic on the verge of tenure or just tenured, on the verge of a book contract or with one just out, who are still presenting themselves as adorable but humiliation-prone kids, forever embarrassing themselves in front of the big names. It's professional life as screwball comedy.

Now, I love me a screwball comedy and a madcap heroine--and to judge by my spouse I also love me a relentless, obstreperous goofball--but within the profession and among my peers I find this particular shtick, and the insecurity and immaturity that underlie it, to be getting old. In the same way that the roles of ingénue and wunderkind have their expiration date, so too does the role of loveable screwup.

Here's a cheat sheet to let you know when you've outgrown the part:

-you have tenure

-you have a book in print

-you've had more than one tenure-track job (assuming more than three years total)

-you advise doctoral students

-you've been an invited or keynote speaker

-you're on chit-chatty terms with senior scholars in your field

-you meet random people at conferences who know your work

If any one of the above--but especially if more than one!--is true, it's time to move on. You can still be zany and fun, playful and self-deprecating, and you can still shut down the conference bar every night. You can also, of course, still be prey to deep fears and anxieties. But you can't act like the new guy or gal, the brash or naive youngster, the one who will never be taken seriously.

It's someone else's turn. You've made it. Give way to the grad students and new PhDs.

Weird pizza*

Me: (just waking up) Man, I had a bad dream.

Cosimo: What about?

Me: (remembering) Actually, um. This may be the stupidest dream I've ever had. But it felt really upsetting!

Cosimo: What happened?

Me: I was at the supermarket trying to buy a frozen pizza. But they didn't have your basic pepperoni. The closest I could find was this weird double-sided pizza--like, two pizzas, almost back-to-back? But with a space in between so you could hook them over the oven rack: one on top, one underneath upside-down.

Anyway, it was a stupid pizza, but I took it and went to a register. But the cashier wouldn't check me out--he said something about how the weird box for the weird pizza didn't work with his scanner, and he didn't want to hold up the whole line, so he checked out all these other people instead. Then he just left. (plaintively) All I wanted was my pizza!

Cosimo: It's a book dream.

Me: You think so?

Cosimo: It's about your second reader.

Me: Huh. Maybe. He's the cashier? Like, a gatekeeper?

Cosimo: Sure.

Me: But in this analogy, my book is a weird pizza. You're saying my book is a weird pizza?

Cosimo: No, your book introduction is a weird pizza. Everyone's introduction is, right? You just want to do this straightforward thing, but you have to add all this other stuff you're not invested in, to appease the people who want your book to be something it's not--

Me: (not really listening) Poor weird-pizza book! No one wants to buy you! (confidentially) I'm sorry I said you were weird, weird pizza. If you exist and I see you in the store, I'm totally buying you.


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*Latest in an occasional series.

The view from my break

Apologies for the infrequent blogging around these parts. I didn't go to MLA this year, thus cruelly depriving you of what would have been my seventh consecutive year of blogging the MLA, and instead spent those four days writing/revising the first six pages of my book. Not especially speedy progress, I grant you, but necessary work--and periodically I checked in on my Facebook friends who were there and scrolled through the pileup of #mla12 tweets. Basically, it was like I was there, minus the jetlag and the hangover. And look what a view I had from where I sat writing on the sofa! Who wouldn't give up MLA for that?

Let's see that in close up:

The revising has gone more speedily since then and I'm happy with the progress I'm making, but it's really too dull to talk about--and so is everything else around these parts. I go to the gym; I putter around the house; at some late hour Cosimo produces a delicious meal; at an even later hour I pour self a drink; and still later we watch a t.v. show on DVD and go to bed. It hasn't even snowed yet (just the merest dusting), so all in all it's been a blissful winter break.

Classes resume in 10 days, though, and so too will the kvetching. Word of honor.

All scholarship is collaborative scholarship

Tenured Radical's latest post on the value of collaborative work--which is also an exhortation to teach collaboration to graduate students and to find more ways to recognize such work within the profession--resonates with some of what I've been mulling over as I work through yet another round of book revisions.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that all our scholarship, and maybe all our work, period, is collaborative in a deep but also deeply unexamined way. However many pages our acknowledgments sections may stretch to--with thanks given to our peers, our friends, our dogs and our gods--we still prefer to think of the work that we and others do as the product of our own brains and our own brilliance: those other readers and interlocutors were just helping us to say, better, whatever we were always intending to say.

And that's true, to a degree. All the mentors in the world won't make a mediocre project a great one, and much of the best scholarship seems rooted in a radically individual intelligence: a mind that may have been trained in the same way as hundreds of others, but that has a fierce peculiar temper all its own.

But the thing is, we have all been trained in the norms of our disciplines, in more or less the same way, and we've all read thousands of works of scholarship; everything we do involves applying or building on the work of a multitude of forebears. We're none of us, really, advancing a radically new perspective or inventing a wholly new field--and none of us truly works in isolation even if she writes in hermetic solitude and never shows her prose to anyone until the day it hits the desk of an editor at one or another journal or academic press.

I haven't been much of a scholarly collaborator or sharer myself in the past; I didn't have peers who read my work in grad school, and I didn't get a lot of guidance from my dissertation advisor then or afterward. In the past few years, I've started sending bits and pieces of my work to friends, and I've been grateful for their feedback, but until recently I never felt that they were really shaping my work--just giving me things to think about, new sources to read, and that sort of thing.

But for whatever reason, in the throes of what I hope will be my last round of substantive revisions and after getting two thorough-going readers' reports from senior scholars, both of whom seem to be in subfields a bit aslant or adjacent to my own, it's hit me how absolutely impossible this book would have been to write without all the feedback I've gotten--major and minor--on my work over the years and all the panels I've attended and all the conversations I've had about the state of the field. The exact focus of my book is peculiar, and if I hadn't written it I doubt anyone else would have done so any time soon (which, uh, isn't a boast; it's weird enough that I'm not sure who will want to read the thing). But it is certainly not the case that I had a clear and lucid argument from the beginning, or probably even two years ago, and if I have one now it's only thanks to the pushing and prodding and sometimes enthusiasm and sometimes baffled irritation of my readers and interlocutors. I love that I've had them, and I love that I can drop three emails in three days to friends with different areas of expertise, just saying, "hey, I think this thing might be true--is it? or if not, can you save me from sounding like a jackass?"

I'm smarter now than I was when I started this project ten years ago. But if I'm ever to publish a second book, I know it will depend at least as heavily on the advice and expertise of others.

New Year's Meme

(Fifth in a series. See also New Year's Day 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.)

1. What did you do in 2011 that you'd never done before?
*Took a research leave
*Directed an M.A. thesis and an honors thesis
*Bought a house
*Got married
*Went up for tenure

2. Did you keep your 2011 resolutions, and will you make more this year?
I didn't make any last year, but I have some modest ones for this year.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes, Evey (formerly my best friend in Cha-Cha City and now my most-missed friend from same)

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No

5. What countries did you visit?
Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
A book contract--or more to the point, a totally completed book manuscript that I never have to do anything to ever again. Or to put it more positively: I want to be substantially engaged by a new research project.

7. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Dude, I checked off half the boxes on the adulthood checklist this year; who can choose just one? But I will say that buying a house + getting married means suddenly and radically coming to terms with one's place in the bourgeoisie.

8. What was your biggest failure?
I don't think I had any big failures this year; my leave-semester resolution to meditate daily didn't even come close to happening--I may have meditated six times in four months--but I consider that less significant than my usual daily failures of kindness, patience, and charity.

9. Did you suffer illness or injury?
No, though I seem now to be in danger of monthly migraines (after the one I had a few months ago, which lasted 12 hours, many of them spent puking, I learned some avoidance techniques).

10. What was the best thing you bought?
Our house

11. Whose behavior merited celebration?
The members of my and Cosimo's families, who were supportive of our having a smaller wedding and who contributed help to exactly the degree (and of exactly the kind) that was useful. From what I hear about weddings, t'ain't necessarily so.

12. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
No one I know personally. But I'm constantly appalled by things like this.

13. Where did most of your money go?
Jesus, we spent a fortune this year, not just buying a house but furnishing/outfitting it; getting married; going to Europe. So the better question is where didn't my money go?

14. Compared to this time last year, are you: a) happier or sadder? b) thinner or fatter? c) richer or poorer?
Happier; same weight; maybe slightly richer, insofar as my spouse and I actually have a little money in a savings account and now own a major piece of property. (But then again, maybe we're actually poorer, since a home loan means we're more in debt? Math is hard.)

15. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Slept. Read more (and better) contemporary fiction. Been more patient, generous, etc.

16. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Wasted time on the goddamn internet.

17. Did you fall in love in 2011?
Continually

18. What was the best new book you read?
None of the new books I read this year (apart from a few in my field) are good enough to merit mentioning.

19. What was your favorite film of the year?
I saw a lot of good films this year, but nothing stands out as AMAZING. Margin Call and Young Adult were two of the smartest and most satisfying, though.

20. What kept you sane?
My semester of research leave

21. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.
Last year I wrote that I'd learned how good it is to be a grown-up. I stand by that. Fuck the cult of youth and its eternal anxious questing after hipness.

My 2011 was pretty spectacular. May 2012 be equally good to all of you!

"Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it."

While on vacation I re-read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which I first read years ago and remembered loving but of which I'd had no clear memory. It's a wondrous book, possibly a perfect one, built more like a poem than a novel. Here's a taste:

Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job's children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory--there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine. (192)

The book is also a better and more affecting meditation on loss than Didion's Year of Magical Thinking (which I read and liked) or any of the other recent memoirs of grief (most of which I've read only in long excerpts). This is Robinson describing what the rest of us might call, with clinical ugliness, "obsessional thinking"--the inability to let go of the past or the people in it:

[H]ere we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. They mock us with their seeming slightness. If they were more substantial--if they had weight and took up space--they would sink or be carried away in the general flux. But they persist, outside the brisk and ruinous energies of the world. (163)

But in fact, it's not really grief Robinson is writing about so much as the human condition: transient and marked by loss and hopeful of an escape which is also a transcendence. That's what's wrong, I think, with so many memoirs: they assume that their particulars are, if not universal, at least of universal interest--while not actually being able to capture the truly universal or imagine anything beyond the author's own experience. Maybe that's only due modesty, when the subject is oneself. Maybe fiction is a better place for reflecting on how personal pasts intersect with national ones, or for making claims about the human condition.

Those who have been reading me long enough may have divined that my only real subject, my only real obsession, is how we make meaning out of the past and how we grapple with our sense of loss (past, present, or anticipated); it's probably why I blog, and it is, after a fashion, the subject of almost all my scholarship. So maybe I'm a peculiarly ideal reader for this novel. But if you haven't read it, do. And if you haven't read it recently, read it again.

I'm dreaming of a white-sand Christmas

My parents now live in San Diego county, in a small beachfront town. I can't tell you how awesome it is to spend an afternoon in late December walking barefoot through the surf with the sand pipers and the pelicans while the surfers leap waves and the Marine Corps helicopters swoop overhead.

I see your white Christmas, and I raise you.

Being a Christian means vaguely feeling some things are wrong

This ad by Rick Perry has been getting a lot of outraged attention and a lot of ridicule:



(For a great round-up of parodies, see here.)

Perry's homophobia--and the fact that he's directing it, specifically, at the men and women who are protecting and sometimes dying for our country--is the obvious and appropriate target for most of the outrage. But I'm equally as offended by his vision of Christianity. Let's take a closer look at what he says: "[Y]ou don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school."

In other words, you don't have to be making any effort to lead a Christian life (going to church, wrestling with what's in the Bible, performing works of mercy) to call yourself one. Proof of your Christianity comes from your vague belief in traditional, religious values--which, ideally, someone else should be responsible for teaching. After all, if the principal of your kids' school leads them in prayer and there's a big crèche in front of City Hall, then you don't have to do any religious instruction of your own, much less model a life of faith for your children; you can just rest secure in your own rightthink.

Also, if you're uncomfortable with gay people? That's okay, because it proves you're a Christian! In fact, if you're uncomfortable with anything, that's probably because it's wrong. And wrong in a cosmic, Bible-forbidden kind of way. (Which is why, as I've noted before, so many Christians don't actually read the Bible: they already know that everything they believe is in there.)

According to Rick Perry, being a Christian means being part of a very special and persecuted minority on whom no real demands are ever made.

Resisting the urge to stage mom

This semester I've been directing two independent projects: one M.A. thesis and one undergraduate honors thesis. It's my first time directing a thesis of any sort, and though I've been a second reader on at least half a dozen--and in some cases got pretty intimately involved in the project--being this up-close and personal with another person's thought process has been interesting.

On the most basic level, it's hard to guide usefully without guiding too much, and it's hard not to be disappointed when a smart student nevertheless doesn't quite get what you're saying or go as far as you think he or she could go. I spent a lot of time talking ideas through with both students, trying to help them to recognize certain connections that they seemed to intuit but couldn't quite express--and in both cases it was mildly frustrating to lead them right up to an idea and not have them able to make the final leap on their own.

That's fine, of course, and they both did some good work; when it comes right down to it, a thesis is more a skills-building exercise--a demonstration of growth and mastery--than something that needs to be lovely and perfect in itself. (God knows, this is how I came to see my own graduate seminar papers and to some extent my dissertation.)

So yes: it's satisfying to see students grow and improve and I certainly point out to mine the places where they've grown and improved and I tell them what I'm pleased with. But when you're interested in the project and you've got a restless, tinkering mind, it's hard to know what's good enough, or what's sufficient improvement, when it's somebody else's life and work.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be a parent.