Promissory note

I have Things To Say--about teaching, about tenure-applying, about the fact that a "standard" bridal bouquet (which I am not getting) costs $85--but dudes. My wedding is a week from tomorrow. My tenure file is due three days later. Nothing longer than a tweet is getting written until all that's past.

Stupid and contagious

The recent spate of articles commemorating the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind has reminded me that I was once, inadvertently and without really trying, extremely hip in my musical tastes. See, I went to high school just outside of Seattle in the early 1990s, and although I didn't go to concerts I listened to the local alternative radio station for hours every day. This meant that when I arrived at college I didn't know shit about the Beatles--but I could talk about Mudhoney and Candlebox, Jane's Addiction and The Sundays, and I owned every album by the Smiths. If you'd asked me, I've had said that Nirvana and Pearl Jam were okay, but they so saturated the airwaves that they didn't seem particularly cool. Knowing about them said nothing special about one's musical taste.

In the spring of 1992, my junior year of high school, I toured a liberal arts college in the northeast and stayed overnight in the dorms. The woman who was hosting me had an album playing on her stereo as we chatted. I hadn't really been listening to it, but it struck me as boring and rather square: some woman singing and playing the piano. Then I though I recognized the lyrics: was that--it couldn't be--"Smells Like Teen Spirit"? I exclaimed aloud, and said something like, "Oh! This is a cover. What a crazy version."

"You know this song?" said my host. "Yeah, I didn't know it was a cover until like last month. I hadn't heard the original. I just really like Tori Amos."

It was actually and literally impossible for me to believe that someone hadn't heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" almost a year after the song had been released--or that some weirdo acoustic version (it would be a few more years before I discovered that Tori Amos was cool) might be someone's first point of contact with Nirvana.

But as I would learn, hipness is a moving target.

Tedium and terrorism

I narrated my 9/11 experiences on this blog five years ago, and I can't retell them any better now, nor do I wish to try.

But here's what else I remember: amidst all the fear and anxiety and what-the-fuck-do-we-do-now, I remember feeling exasperated. I was exasperated when I couldn't get through to my friends in New York because the phone lines were jammed. I was exasperated that I might not be able to visit the city the next weekend, as I'd planned. I was exasperated that my then-partner (a heavy, late sleeper) wouldn't wake up when I called him repeatedly that morning, and I was exasperated that my parents, whom I did wake up, didn't seem to understand what I was telling them.

I was exasperated because I didn't know what to do, and exasperated because I did know what to do, and that included reconciling with people I didn't want to reconcile with. Late at night on September 10th, I'd written an email to someone I hadn't spoken to in a while and who I felt at the time had wronged me. It was a cold, hard message, laced with sarcasm and self-righteousness. I rewrote it several times, but had second thoughts about sending it. I hit "save" and went to bed. When I rediscovered the message a day or two later, my first response was annoyance: the recipient had family in New York, and now I couldn't send even a mild version of my original message. I deleted it and wrote a short note asking after the recipient's family and friends and saying that we should be in touch.

Fucking terrorists, I thought, and hit "send."

But we were all exasperated. Exasperated that our loved ones lived far away, that we couldn't travel to see them, that we still had to study for our orals and teach classes when we didn't know whether any of that mattered any more--but also because we wanted badly for those things to be all that mattered: our everyday concerns and preoccupations. We wanted to be able to be self-absorbed, as always, and not vaguely and ineffectually focused on everyone else, on the country, and on whatever was going to happen next.

Exasperation might be a selfish response, but ten years out it strikes me as a better one than fear or rage, at least for those of us who weren't directly touched by loss. It's better, certainly, than the maudlin, luxurious catharsis we're invited to engage in every time September 11th is mentioned (and which I succumb to as much as anyone, but with as little right as most). To be exasperated is not to be paralyzed, and not to be rash. Exasperation measures the distance between how things are and how we wish they were, and if it's not the noblest of emotions it's far from the most venal.

Fucking terrorists.

Getting It Published, Part 5

When last we left our heroine, she had sent her book manuscript out to a publisher, gotten a somewhat ambivalent outside review, and was asked to revise and resubmit. She revised, she resubmitted, and they sent it back out for review. (Previous installments here, here, here, and here. At the rate things are going, this enthralling series will run to 27 parts. Cancel your subscription while you still can.)

Earlier this week I heard from the editor, who told me they'd sent the revised manuscript back to the original reviewer, who gave it a positive report--and they would now proceed to send it to a second reviewer.

So, yay! Or I think yay. On the one hand, I'm surprised and maybe a little embarrassed that it's been this easy: that one of my fantasy, top-choice publishers was interested enough to want to see the full manuscript, that they remained interested after it got a good-but-not-ready-for-prime-time review, and especially that the original reviewer wound up liking my revisions enough to recommend publication. (For various reasons, I did not think they were sending it back to that reviewer, and if I had known I would have spent the past three months with a deadly knot of anxiety in my innards.)

On the other hand, this process is looking to drag on a good while, and half of me wonders whether this isn't just a postponement of the inevitable: maybe the second reviewer will be lukewarm, and maybe then they'll send it to a third, and around the time of oh, say, my 40th birthday, the press will reject it definitively and I'll have to start over somewhere else.

So if there's a take-away lesson here for those who have yet to try to get a book published--which I think was why I originally began this series?--it's that academic publishing is super-duper slow, even when it's not actually that slow (the turnaround time for my reader was 4 months the first time and less than 3 months the second time), and even when all the news is basically good and even when you have a product you're confident about.

Because to recap: I first developed the germ of the idea for this book ten years ago (almost to the day: my orals were on September 7th, 2001, and we had to open our orals with a 60-second bullshitty account of what we might write a dissertation about). Five years ago I finished the dissertation. A year and a half ago I sent out book proposals to a few presses--and even if I get the best news in the world in December, it'll probably still be another two years before my book is in print.

I don't need an inked contract for tenure. But right now I feel like a parent whose moody late-adolescent kid is still living at home: I love the kid and all, but I'm ready for him to get the hell out of my basement.

The dignity of work

There are a lot of reasons that I'm (still) a practicing Catholic, and though I don't generally feel it necessary to enumerate, explain, or defend those reasons, here's one, in honor of the day:

Economic life is not meant solely to multiply goods produced and increase profit or power; it is ordered first of all to the service of persons, of the whole person, and of the entire human community. . . . In work, the person exercises and fulfills in part the potential inscribed in his nature.*

The economy must serve people, not the other way around. Work is more than a way to make a living; it is a form of continuing participation in God's creation. If the dignity of work is to be protected, then the basic rights of workers must be respected--the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to organize and join unions, to private property, and to economic initiative.**

Happy Labor Day, all.

----
*From the Catechism of the Catholic Church
**Statement by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

One down, thirteen to go

Made it through the first week of classes, though not without some reentry problems.

My first day of classes, I not only forgot to pack a water bottle, but also food of any sort. Indeed, when I left my house at 11 a.m. I thought, "I ate a real breakfast--I don't need to bring a lunch!" This, although I knew I wouldn't be home until at least 7 p.m.

And then (without having eaten lunch or dinner) I drove 150 round-trip highway miles to pick up a pair of shoes being held at a mall in the next city over. Shoes that, in the end, do not work with my wedding dress and will have to be returned.

I also forgot to order one of the required texts for one of my courses. A text that my students need to start reading immediately.

And I forgot how insufferably, unbearably hot it is the first week or two of classes--or maybe the stuffy rooms are the result of RU's cost-saving electrical curtailment program. In any case, my Shakespeare class is crammed into a tiny room that's a million degrees even with the doors and windows open, and my team-taught class, though it got assigned to a gorgeous new experimental classroom, is also a million degrees.

And, oh yeah: there's that whole six-hours-of-teaching-on-Thursdays thing. (Two ninety-minute classes back-to-back, then a break, and then 195 minutes all at a go.) I used to teach this schedule all the time, but it's been a couple of years and I'd forgotten why I'd petitioned so passionately to be moved to a Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday schedule.

Maybe next week will be easier. And if not, I've still got a bunch of gin and a bunch of tonic.

More on rooming with others

Today's New York Times opinion page features an essay that makes nearly the opposite claim regarding randomly-assigned roommates as your humble blogger (and some of her commenters) made two weeks ago. According to Dalton Conley, the kids today are over-managing their lives! they need more serendipity! and if it doesn't come in the form of a randomly-assigned roommate, they'll never be able to play well with others or appreciate diversity!

Okay, I exaggerate. Slightly. But Conley's essay, in addition to not taking the problems inherent in randomly-assigned roommates very seriously, just isn't an accurate imagining of young people's lives or even the college experience (this, despite the fact that Conley is a professor at NYU). Rather, it's a nostalgic look back at the benefits that Conley himself received from rooming, in the 1980s, with someone very unlike himself--confusedly conflated with a larger and basically unrelated worry about the ways that The Modern World has eliminated serendipity. Conley speaks about how he knows people "who can't bear to eat in a restaurant they haven't researched on Yelp," and laments that "Google now tailors searches to exactly what it thinks you want to find," but from where I sit it sounds like he's mourning the diminished opportunities for serendipity in his own life, or the lives of those in his peer group (do 18-year-olds fetishize Yelp? I think not), rather than providing a realistic picture of life as a young person living among thousands of other young people.

As we age, we do indeed tend to associate more and more with people like us or at least already known to us. We have fixed groups of friends, we have families, we have partners, we have colleagues, and we tend to be fixed more stably in a community or at least in a personal and professional identity. But college freshmen meet people unlike themselves all the time: in the dorm, in the classroom, in extracurricular activities, in the dining hall. Many of them (though certainly not all of them) are actively looking for new interests, ideas, identities, and they turn to their peers (and, yes, to technology) to help them learn more about a particular band, movie-maker, political position, or religious belief.

Moreover, any roommate is different from oneself, just by definition. Even someone who shares all one's tastes is likely to have different habits, personality quirks, and simply to manifest his or her presence at inconvenient times. It's hard for me to believe that a randomly-assigned roommate is actually significantly better at teaching one how to live with other people than a roommate one has had some limited say in choosing. The number of people I know who lost friends over shared-housing drama indicates that "difference" isn't always recognizable from the outside.

Yes, as Conley cheerfully notes in his closing, most people who wind up with "the roommate from hell" do survive, and some may even wind up with "great stories to tell [their] future spouse." But that's hardly an argument in favor of random roommate assignment.

Coming soon to a theater near you

As I've mentioned before, I'm co-editing a scholarly edition. It's to be the first volume in a multi-volume "complete works" published by a major press, and the work we're editing is the author's best-known. It's well-beloved and frequently taught, but there's never been an edition that adequately addresses the work's multiple versions and composition history. If we do it right, ours will become the standard critical edition.

Fucking impressive, right? That's some hot shit right there!

Our contract confirms my self-regard: there are pages and pages itemizing our royalties for hardcover, paperback, e-book, online, and book club versions--modest percentages, but not when you expect to sell millions--concluding with a paragraph that details where the really big money comes from:

All Other Subsidiary Rights not mentioned above (including without limitation Anthology, Quotation, Mechanical Reproduction, Serialization, Broadcasting, Television, Dramatic, Film, Video, Microform, Digest, Strip Cartoon Picturization, and Merchandising Rights).

Book club sales? I say yes.

Film adaptation? Totally.

T-shirts, lunch boxes, and action figures? No doubt.

But the idea of a strip cartoon version is just silly.

Rooming with others

Students the land over are packing up their things and heading away to college. And seeing those heavy-laden station wagons on the interstate always makes me wonder: taking eighteen-year-olds, removing them from family and friends and forcing them to live with a complete stranger in a tiny room--who still thinks that's a good idea?

Most shared-room situations don't end in tragedy, as the pairing of Tyler Clementi and Dharun Ravi at Rutgers did last fall. Some people (and I'm one of them) make fast and lifelong friends with their randomly-assigned roommates. But even those people who don't have serious problems with their freshman-year roommates can still find the ordinary stressors attendant upon going away to college compounded by the stress of trying to figure out how to live with another person.

And I think it's bizarre how sanguine we adults are about this process, and indeed how little thought we give to it. We tend to talk about rooming with strangers as useful and character-building, a way of learning to negotiate adult responsibilities. And that's certainly true (and it's also true that most young people will live with roommates or housemates well into their twenties). But I have plenty of students whose first weeks of college are made infinitely more complicated, and sometimes acutely traumatic, as a result of living in close quarters with someone they don't like, or who doesn't like them, or simply someone who has a radically different schedule or set of habits. Just sharing a room with someone you don't know and don't connect with--when you're already homesick and uncertain and wondering if you'll ever make any friends--can feel profoundly isolating.

Most young people going away to college today have never shared a room with another person. And we can say that this is a sign of class privilege, or that it leads to kids who are spoiled or selfish or maladaptive or whatever, but it's not a sign of being spoiled not to be prepared to do something that you've never had to do before. Once upon a time, the young men who went away to college tended to have gone to boarding school--or they'd lived in barracks in the military or were expecting to live in them after they graduated. Once upon a time, it was common for siblings to sleep two or three to a bedroom. But that's rarely the reality these days.

Don't get me wrong: I think dormitory living is useful for all the reasons other people allege, as is being thrown in with people you haven't elected to live with (and whom you might never elect to live with again). But there are smarter and less smart ways to organize freshman dorms. I'd argue that no freshman should ever be placed in an isolated double. Quads or sextets--two or three doubles with a common living space or some combination of singles and doubles with a common living space--make the most sense to me. That way students aren't stuck, alone, in a room with just one other person.

I'd also like to see us be more attentive to the difficulties of adjusting to dormitory life. Most roommate complaints aren't serious, in the sense that they don't require any intervention, and most such problems will pass. But that doesn't mean that there aren't real emotional and sometimes academic costs.

The rich and educationally advantaged reply

The subject of this post has replied. Comments to that post are now closed (I have comments sent to moderation for all posts that are more than a couple of weeks old, to cut down on spam), but I published Ms. K's because it's only fair that someone who discovers she's being discussed by a bunch of random people on the internet--in a discussion that will turn up whenever people Google her name--be permitted a public response.

However, further comments to that thread will get deleted. If Ms. K's NYT letter was already a bit of a fish, barrel situation, that barrel is now crammed full. I don't take much pleasure in unequal contests.

Late papers and guests will be penalized at instructor's discretion

Planning a wedding liturgy is an awful lot like designing a syllabus. There's a set form with a variety of constraints, but so many moving and movable parts. What readings? What prayers? What hymns? In what order, and done by whom? And once you settle on all those individually-appealing parts, you have to decide if they work well together and add up to a coherent whole. At least there are no assignments to devise, no stern policies to articulate, and no anticipatory weariness at the thought of all the grading that awaits.

Ladies who change their names: feminist traitors? (Now with data!)

As a long-time reader of the New York Times Sunday wedding page, I like to think that I have a strong, albeit impressionistic sense of the mating and marriage patterns of the ruling class. Since the mid-90s, for example, I've seen a steady decline in pairings between investment bankers and grade-school-teachers-with-art-history-degrees-from-Brown, and a corresponding rise in the number of couples who met in law school or on the job and who seem to be professional peers. I've also kept a general eye on such things as age at first marriage and the frequency with which a woman takes her husband's name--but those are harder to gain an accurate sense of without tracking the numbers.

So this weekend, my dears, I decided to do some valuable procrastination in the service of collecting cold hard marriage data. I skimmed the 500 most recent NYT wedding announcements, from May 1st until yesterday, and recorded how many women in heterosexual partnerships kept their last names, took their husbands', or did something in between. I also recorded their ages.

And I'll state up front that I came to this project with a strong prejudice in favor of women keeping their birth names. About half of my own friends have taken their husbands' names, and that's cool: it's their choice, I'd never tell anyone what to do, blah blah--but I'm not going to pretend that, internally, I've had an entirely neutral reaction to what the women of my acquaintance chose to do in this arena. Moreover, it's been hard not to notice that lots of the women who submit announcements to the NYT and do take their husbands' names are women in their 30s and even 40s, women who went to fancy schools and seem to be high-powered doctors and lawyers--not just, as I would have assumed (and as actual real studies have found), younger women or women with less fully developed professional identities.

So armed with a primitive spreadsheet, I decided to investigate. I can break the numbers down in detail in the comments if anyone cares, but the short version is this: of 450 heterosexual marriage announcements, 75% clearly indicated whether the bride was changing or keeping her name. Of that number, 30% kept their birth name outright, with an additional 10% "continu[ing] to use [their] name professionally"; hyphenating their last names with their husbands'; forming a new shared surname; or indicating that they would be using their maiden name as a middle name, à la Hillary Rodham Clinton. The remaining 60% took their husbands' names.

Moreover, from this sample, there is not a strong correlation between the age of the bride and her decision to keep or change her name. Women who got married at age 26 and younger showed almost exactly the same 40/60 split as the data set as a whole.

*

The number of women keeping their own names surprised me; it was higher than I'd expected. But more importantly, the process of skimming 500 announcements, including an increasing number celebrating same-sex unions, made me. . . kinda not care any more. There's nothing I can imagine that would make me want to change my own name--but then, I'm in a profession where name-changing after one has established some kind of professional identity is extremely uncommon. However, I'm coming around to the position that for most women this isn't a major feminist issue.

This is not to say that I think the choice is negligible, or that it doesn't relate to important feminist issues (see this post by Historiann for a marriage in which the wife's decision not to change her name revealed what an insecure douchebag her husband was). But perhaps we shouldn't insist on its symbolic importance in every instance.

Here are factors to consider:

1. Women don't lose their maiden names or identities upon adopting a husband's name as completely as they once did. The internet has a lot to do with this. I've noticed that most of the women whom I went to high school with, virtually all of whom changed their names upon marriage, now identify themselves on Facebook according to the formula "Firstname Maidenname Lastname." This doesn't mean they've actually retained their maiden names legally, or that they use them professionally (my own mother, who has never to my knowledge used her maiden name in the 40-odd years since she got married at age 21, identifies herself thusly on Facebook). However, this informal retention of one's birth name is, I think, part of a larger, pragmatic trend: if adopting their spouse's name seems important to many women, so does retaining a clear link to their birth name.

2. The rise in legally-recognized same-sex unions. Though the sample size here is even smaller, and it's hard to tell what trends will develop over time, right now it's pretty rare for same-sex couples to change their names upon marriage (and when they do, it's usually by linking both names with a hyphen). How gay and lesbian couples choose to communicate their commitment is bound to have an effect on the rest of us, if only by making a wider range of options seem normal.

3. It's not all-or-nothing. Related to both of the above, I'm interested in the various compromises I've seen in the selection of wedding announcements I perused: women who continue to use their names professionally, women who merged their names somehow with their husbands', and a tiny minority of women who chose entirely new surnames for both themselves and their husbands. This strikes me as an age in which there's a lot of experimentation with naming conventions. So, you know: let a thousand flowers bloom.

4. Retaining one's birth name upon marriage may remain a minority custom, but it's now a well-established one. Thus it's unlikely suddenly to die out, be thought of as irremediably bizarre, or cause serious, regular problems for women who don't change their names. (Note: I reserve the right to retract this claim if, in a few years, I encounter such problems.)

So in sum: if you're fighting the good fight at home or in the workplace and making generally gender-conscious decisions? I really don't care what you call yourself.

But as always, readers, I trust you to tell me how I'm wrong

Team teaching bleg

This fall a colleague and I will be team-teaching a course of our own design, as well as running a related series of public lectures, readings, and other events. I expect it to be a breathtaking amount of work (during the same semester that I'm also getting married and going up for tenure!), but I'm really looking forward to it.

The course is keyed to the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, and it focuses on Early Modern readings, rewritings, and adaptations of the Bible. It's an exciting course largely because it's one that neither of us could confidently teach alone--he brings the Bible, I bring the Renaissance--but it's daunting for exactly the same reason that it's exciting. How do we mind-meld successfully enough to make this a coherent class? And how do we prevent this one course from taking over our entire lives?

This, dear readers, is where you come in. If you've team-taught before, what practical strategies did you use (before the semester began, during your weekly lesson planning, or in the actual classroom) that made your class work? Or what do you wish you had done that you didn't?

Flavia's guide to foreign travel

(Note: I do not always follow my own advice.)

1. Unless you're traveling for research purposes and/or have a place of your own (i.e., not a hotel room), the ideal trip is 12-15 days long.
2. Never stay for fewer than three days in any one city.
3. Never visit more than two different countries in a single trip. This is especially true if those countries involve different languages.
4. Your first 12 hours in any new city will be annoying and cranky-making, even if you're not suffering from jet lag. Roll with it.
5. Sight-seeing is exhausting. If you're walking all over tarnation every day, budget more than 8 hours of sleep per night.
6. You must learn how to say at least "please," "thank you," "excuse me," and "the check" in the local language.
7. Every country has its own marvelous wines, liqueurs, and/or beers. Get to know them intimately.
8. Tourists are a(n extremely tedious) breed unto themselves. Happily, American tourists are generally no more annoying or offensive than anyone else.
9. If you dress well, you will get treated better.
10. Don't just see sights. Do stuff.
11. If service industry personnel routinely address you in a language other than English, you're doing it right.
12. If you're traveling in a tourist-rich environment, and especially in a (European) country with a minority language, your best bet when squeezing through crowds, etc., is to say, "Pardon!" in as French an accent as you can muster. Everyone understands it, and you can be as peremptory as you like.
13. Don't worry about doing it all. Assume that any trip to a new place is merely your first visit.

Interruption in blog service/commencement of tweet service

Cosimo and I are in NYC for all of 36 hours--just long enough to catch Mark Rylance in Jerusalem, hit the McQueen show, take advantage of Restaurant Week, and grab drinks with a few friends--before flying to Prague tomorrow night. (I know! I'm glamorous like that. We tear up the Long Island City Howard Johnson.)

I'm unlikely to be blogging while abroad, but it's conceivable that I might be tweeting. I haven't been impressed with Twitter to date, but all the fuss about the boring Google+ made me wonder whether I might be missing something. So I signed up. If you long breathlessly to follow my every move (or, let's be honest: a few very occasional, selected examples of my moves), check out the sidebar or add me to your designated twitsters.

It may all be a terrible mistake. But you'll get to say you were there! Catch ya on the flipside.