Bad writing ≠ bad writer

I've been thinking a lot about Dr. Crazy's two recent posts about student writing. They're mostly pushing back against the idea that "students today" (especially students at regional public institutions like hers and mine) just can't write, are graduating from high school with basic skills that are abysmally bad, and that there's nothing for a professor in a writing-intensive field to do but throw her hands up and grade generously since there's no hope for improvement now.

I've always been with Dr. C on the last part--one of the reasons I'm a tough grader is that I believe in my students' ability to improve (and if they don't, it's on them)--but I have to admit that I've always assumed that those students who write badly write badly because they're starting out with poor skills. I mean, it stands to reason, right? If a kid turns in a paper with ungrammatical, incomprehensible sentences, it must mean that his skills are pretty bad (or that he wrote the paper in 35 minutes or while drunk). But Dr. Crazy makes a persuasive case that this isn't necessarily so. She writes:

I teach upper-division English majors, and sometimes they still, unaccountably, submit writing that is wordy, awkward, ungrammatical, and BAD. Bad like there aren't coherent paragraphs. Bad like they don't appear to recognize the meaning of the "sentences," if you can call them that.

Part of this is laziness, but that's not the whole story. Most of the story is usually that you are expecting them to encounter ideas that they don't know how to handle, ideas that are new and scary and difficult. They might be great writers with things that they are comfortable with, but once you challenge them? The whole thing becomes a hot mess. This doesn't mean that they are bad writers--it means that they are out of their intellectual depth. If you teach them the ideas, then the writing can catch up. But the writing has to catch up to their thinking--the writing isn't a stand-alone thing.

This strikes me as exactly right, and it explains how it is that an obviously smart student--someone I've emailed and chatted with during office hours--can turn in a 5-page paper with a 2-page introduction, no thesis, and prose so convoluted that, if she hadn't already outlined her ideas to me, I'd have no idea what she was trying to say. Sometimes student writing regresses because the kinds of writing a particular student has mastered don't feel adequate to the more complex ideas, longer forms, or different authorial personae she's trying on. The fact that a student "can't express herself clearly" doesn't mean that she can't write a coherent sentence. It may mean only that she doesn't have a coherent way of articulating the particular issue she's wrestling with.

But it's not true only of English majors. Although I tend to assume that my majors are capable of improving, sometimes very quickly, when stylistic and grammatical problems are pointed out to them, I haven't always been as generous or as hopeful about my non-majors. But my freshman comp class this semester has been going surprisingly well, and Dr. Crazy's analysis has, I think, given me the patience to make it even better.

As I've mentioned, I'm teaching freshman composition this semester for the first time in three semesters, and it's my first "regular" (non-Honors) comp class in more than three years. Although I've always felt that the work I do in comp classes is important, and I've always derived certain satisfactions from teaching them, I'd be lying if I said that I loved doing it. Comp is the only course I teach where I've ever felt my students didn't have a basic respect for me and my expertise. Sure, I always had some good kids, and I never had a Class From Hell or anything, but in each there was always a big enough handful of students who were totally checked out to sour my entire experience: kids who showed up late, who didn't bother to turn in their papers, who disrupted class in minor but persistent ways, and who ultimately didn't care if they failed the course.

This semester is totally different. I might have gotten lucky, or the caliber of our incoming students might really have improved as much as our PR office claims, but whatever the reason, my students are all good, hard-working kids whose occasional complaints or protests are always playful and good-humored. They're also, on average, better writers than I've often had. . . but this isn't to say that they're all equivalently good, or that reading the first drafts for their first assignment wasn't a deeply painful experience. Because it was.

But I started noticing that all was not always as bad as it seemed: that kid whose introduction was such a fucking nightmare that I thought maybe he'd slipped between the cracks and really belonged in a remedial class? had actually written a lucid, well-organized, and even rather well-phrased second paragraph. The other kid whose essay was a mass of sentence fragments? Was able to fix 95% of them on her own, after the problem was pointed out to her. Reading their first drafts was awful. But their final drafts were pretty good--and I just read through the first drafts for their second assignment, and they're dramatically better, maybe because it's a very different kind of assignment.

None of this is to say I'm sorry it'll be a few semesters until I teach comp again. But I think I'll be a better teacher of composition, and of writing in all my classes, if I can just remember that students who write badly aren't necessarily bad writers.

Plenty of fish

As this hiring season draws to a close, I'm still thinking about what the courtship process looks like from the departmental rather than the candidate side. The dating metaphors that are so often used to describe the job market are apt, not least because each party is usually pretty much in the dark about the other's motives, intentions, and ultimately their true character.

In saying that I don't for a minute mean to imply that there's any functional equivalence between the positions of candidate and hiring department; close to 100% of the power lies with those doing the hiring, and although I guess a candidate can still break a department's heart, heartbreak is a lot easier to get over when you've got eligible ladies and gents throwing themselves at your feet. (And when you're in no danger of being evicted, having the lights turned off, or moving back in with the 'rents.) So don't flame me: I'm not suggesting that hiring departments are ever in need of pity, especially when compared with job candidates themselves.

But since I've thought about the job market almost exclusively from the perspective of the candidate (even as my own department has been hiring rather steadily), it's startling to notice how we on this end use much the same language as those on the other--language that is reminiscent of the alternately boastful and abasing language of single guys and gals looking for love: I deserve so much more! I'm not going to settle! But. . . do I really have anything that anyone whom I would want, would want? I should set my sights lower. Oh God, please love me!

Departments like my own, which are stronger in fact than they seem on paper--like the men and women who are better catches than the photos on their match.com profiles would suggest--are probably especially prone to these kinds of mood swings. (Look at the CVs of our faculty! What, you think we're not good enough for you? But, we do have a 3/3 load. Whadda we expect? Maybe we should be content with a nice person who will be a solid citizen and never leave us.) Still, every hiring department gets emotionally over-invested in at least some of their candidates, going through periods of anxiety and self-doubt and the hope that the object of their desire feels the same way about them.

But although there may be more status anxiety lurking beneath the surface of our hiring process than we'd willingly cop to, one of the nice things about being in a strong but not immediately eye-catching department is that we tend not to overestimate our own judgment and we don't buy into the fiction that there's some absolute and objective way to rank our applicants--that Candidate A somehow is the best person on the market this year in his field, and that therefore we must get him at all costs. We have plenty of experience hiring our second (or third or fourth) choice and having her turn out to be amazing. So although we make a careful and a thoughtful assessment of everyone's merits, and we vote down some candidates as unacceptable, our collective attitude seems to be that it doesn't necessarily matter if we get our first choice or our third--or even if we have to go back to the general applicant pool and start over.

Because you never know. You don't know whether your list of MLA interviewees really comprises "the best" candidates from among the applicants, and you don't know that the people selected for fly-backs are truly the best of the semi-finalists. You don't know what you're missing if you've already missed it, and you don't know how someone will perform until they perform; some people deliver on early promise and some don't, while others have late growth spurts. Not always getting your first choice reminds you that assessing merit isn't as clear-cut as many pretend--as does finding out that someone you ranked sixth or tenth got offered a far better job than the one you had on offer.

And that kind of perspective is the real advantage that those doing the hiring have over those seeking jobs. It's often said that hiring committees in the era of the jobs crisis can afford to be picky, but the truth is that they can afford to be careless: they can wait and see, they can be modest about their own achievements, and they can keep an open mind--they can even change their mind--about what matters most. Because there are plenty of fish in the sea.

Stockpiling

For reasons that are mysterious even to the all-knowing Ladies of Sephora, there's been a nationwide shortage of the foundation that I've used for the past year or two, that I adore, and that I'm the more fanatical about because it took me ages to find one that worked after my previous foundation (which had taken me even longer to find) stopped being manufactured.

Not available on-line. Not available in stores. In fact, when I was in NYC a few weeks ago, I went to four different Sephora locations--not with any real expectation that they'd have it in stock, but just to beg the staff for samples.

Finally, in desperation, I found someone selling the stuff on eBay at a 30% markup. So I bought a bottle. A week later sephora.com finally got in a shipment. I bought another bottle, because you never know. Since I still have a few weeks' worth of samples left, I now have approximately five months' worth in readiness.

And they say that male shoppers are the ones who stockpile.

Place and class

Several of the comments on my last post have been pursuing the connection between class and geographic mobility. And if we understand "class" as being about more than just income and education level, then yes: the perceived ability to move far away from where one grew up does correlate with class; it's about how many and what kinds of connections and opportunities one has.

If your college friends come from all over the country and then fan out to jobs and graduate programs all over the country once they leave, then you have a different sense of what's possible in your life (whether or not you personally choose to leave the city or state in which you grew up). Some of my students literally do not know anyone who lives more than a few hours away, and though our region does feel the gravitational pull of Boston and New York (their baseball and basketball teams are the ones locals here root for), the students who actually move to those cities after graduation--or indeed to any others, or who move out of this state--are almost exclusively those who already have family or friends there.

So in thinking about what it means to be rooted or rootless, I'm partly thinking about class. But one peculiarity of being an academic is that, unlike most people in "our class," we actually do up and move anywhere. The other people in our class? Not so much. They move to the coasts, basically, and in lesser numbers to places like Atlanta and Chicago, Austin and Houston, Minneapolis and Denver, and the bigger, wealthier college towns. I guess I had always known this, and it's certainly true of my college friends--but I still think of my class as figuring out their lives and as not having settled down yet. But at Cosimo's (ahem) 20th college reunion last summer, I realized that no one apart from the academics and a few quirky entrepreneurs lived anywhere but those places. I met person after person, waiting in line for the ladies room or making small talk at the bar, and they all lived in Fairfax or Fairfield County, or in Newton, MA, or in metro L.A. or S.F. And though they were all friendly and interested in who I was and what I did, they all seemed puzzled by where I lived. Like I said: it's not a place that people move to.

So my point, if I have one, is that even the class that seems to have infinite geographic mobility, doesn't. There are real restrictions on where, say, a high-powered corporate lawyer can have a career, and hence where he can live, but there are also cultural and class restrictions that operate to keep us where "our kind of people" live. If we're not living near our actual families (and of course I do know people who have moved back to their childhood homes), we're living near our families of affiliation: people with similar educations, professions, and interests. I'm not interested in criticizing that choice; indeed, if one can't or doesn't wish to go home again, it makes sense to choose one's new home based on the relationships one has or expects to build with the people there.

But those roots are relatively shallow, even for those who live in major metropolitan areas. And as Shane noted in his comment, those of us who live in more unlikely places often wind up doing a version of the same thing, which is to say, socializing primarily with other transplants. I have a few friends who are locals--former grad students, people I've met through arts organizations, or people I know from my church. But the people I'm closest friends with are others who moved here for jobs (mostly in academia or the medical sciences); some have put down roots here and some haven't, but none are likely to retire here. Sometimes I feel like a real local, or at least a civic booster and aspiring local; at other times I feel like I'm part of a community of expats.

Rootless

Although I've loved each of the four cities and regions in which I've lived and every one felt (and still does feel) like home, it's only recently that I've started thinking about what it means to be rooted in a particular location in the way that most people seem to be rooted. I've never had that kind of relationship to place and I'm not sure I ever will.

My parents weren't natives of the state in which I grew up, and neither were most of my friends' parents; indeed, on the rare occasions when I met someone whose grandparents lived across town or whose parents had attended a neighboring high school, I was astonished. Although the families I knew were all well-anchored in our community--our parents bought houses, joined churches, ran for office, and stayed put for 20 or 40 years--it just seemed to be the natural order of things that each generation moved elsewhere. Every summer of my childhood featured a rolling temporary diaspora as my friends and their families traveled to one state or another, or even overseas, to visit their grandparents and cousins.

And sure enough, I moved across the country for college--and moved again, to Manhattan, then back to grad school, then back to Manhattan, and finally to Cha-Cha City when I got this job. That's more or less what all my friends have done, though some have moved farther and some less far, some more times and some fewer. We've moved basically by choice: for school, for a job, for a partner, or just for a change of scene; our choices weren't infinite and were usually circumscribed in various ways, but moving somewhere new always meant doing something new, and usually something better. Haven't Americans always been a people on the move?

But as it turns out, Cha-Cha City isn't a place that people move to. In my first year or two here I was continually getting asked--by shop clerks, tradespeople, my students--why I'd moved here. When I told them cheerfully that it was for a job, they'd repeat the question. At first I thought this was about the local residents' modesty, or maybe low civic self-esteem: they didn't realize what a cool place this was! And so I talked up all the awesome things about the city, and why I loved it, and why I was happier here than I'd been elsewhere.

But then I realized that that wasn't it. It's that, for most people--not just here, but across the country--it's odd to move around a lot and even odder to decide to settle down in a random location to which one has no personal connections. Most people I meet find it strange that Cosimo and I grew up on opposite coasts, strange that we each at different points attended schools 3,000 miles away from our families, and even stranger that, now that our schooling is done, we live close neither to school nor friends nor family.

I'm tempted to call this a class difference, but it isn't, or at least not in the usual sense of that word: there are plenty of prosperous, educated, well-traveled people in this city and cities like it, people who may have lived elsewhere at various points in their lives, but who are here, now, mostly because they're from here. (And, of course, there are just as many people in my own "class" who have fled their childhood homes but now can't imagine leaving their adopted homes of New York, Boston, or D.C.; L.A., Chicago, or San Francisco; Austin, Portland, or Denver.)

It's that kind of rootedness that feels foreign to me. I'm ready to settle here. I could live here for twenty years. But at any point I could probably still leave on six month's notice--because I'm not from here and because being with my spouse and having a satisfying career is more of a priority than living in a specific place, even one that I love.

The thing is, I love lots of places. Lots of places could be home. But that means there isn't one, in particular, that is home.

Self-improvement without the "self"

Today is Ash Wednesday and I'm thinking about the provocative series of posts that Anastasia wrote last year about fasting.

Although I've never fasted on days other than Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, I'm considering adding in one fast day per week this Lent; Anastasia makes a compelling argument that fasting is a different discipline than just "giving up" something for six weeks, since the point of Lent isn't merely to sacrifice a few pleasures or to find a little more time to attend to the spiritual.

As she writes:

It's about finitude. It's about death. It's about the limits of a body that is dying. There's nothing that makes a person aware of her limits like fasting. And on top of that, fasting exposes the deficiencies of character that exist when one is stripped of ordinary comforts. It's about stark naked mortality. And unless you need the internet or chocolate to live. . . then you aren't getting it.

This is what I feel, too, when I fast (even in the very modest ways that I do fast): my deficiencies of character. Fasting makes me tired and cranky and low-energy, and that means it's more of an effort to be patient with and pleasant to the people I encounter. However, since fasting is something totally within my control, and since I'm very aware of why I have a shorter fuse, it's easier to be courteous than on days when I've accidentally skipped meals. Ideally this makes me more mindful, on other occasions, of what others deserve from me no matter what my mood, my preoccupations, or my state of health.

But there are problems with fasting, too. Anastasia talks about the misuses that fasting can be put to by those with eating disorders or who otherwise find pleasure in pain, but for most of us the temptation is simply toward satisfaction with our own virtue. We live in a culture that easily converts any form of self-discipline into a commodity, a challenge, or a sign of personal merit: take this 14-day juice fast and feel extra-specially virtuous! know your superiority to those who merely eat sensibly and go to the gym! you, my friend, are winning the self-improvement sweepstakes!

And that's what's hard about Lent, in the end: making it about one's limits while not making it about oneself.

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.