Highly Magnified, Thoroughly Educated

Progress, comma, not so much.

I've been feeling like I'm treading water in a swamp instead of leaping boldly upstream in a salmon-like way towards my future, as I anticipated I would do during this leave. I have not had an epiphany in which I found something I really like to do and declare it My Métier. I have not experienced a sudden rush of affection and energy for my academic work, either my writing or planning next year's teaching. I have made significant progress in figuring out what the parts of the b**k I've been writing are about and how they hold together, but they are not much closer to being a book-sized project than they were. I still get weepy around other medievalists, despite what I told NK. I have not been going boldly about, having informational interviews and taking real steps towards a new career, as I thought I might when I was in Mom City this spring. Honestly, I think I have been just depressed enough to quash any instincts towards networking or self-promotion. I have been sedentary and house-bound through the winter and it shows about my person. Le sigh.

In truth, the year so far has not been utterly without accomplishment:

• I got a puppy and he is housetrained and adorable.
• I kept ED alive.
• I do have enough substance in the parts of the b**k I've written for one or maybe two substantial (by my standards) articles, and they're not totally stupid.
• I eliminated one possibility, or category of possibilities, about what I want to do next....I think.
• I pretty much decided I am ready to sell my house and thereby commit to moving on to the next phase of my life, whatever the hell that may be.
• I've made significant progress on getting things fixed around the house that need to be done prior to sale.

The summer looks moderately promising from here, or at least I can conceptualize how it might be productive and manageable:

• After I get back from Mom City next week, I have two uninterrupted months, which - epiphany of yesterday - is enough to sign up for an exercise class at the city rec center. There is a twice-a-week Pilates class that I think might be the best thing to address creeping chronic back pain and general schlumphiness.
• I think what I need to do on the academic work front is:
  • wrap up what I've been writing into two article-sized packages and get them sent out.
  • pull out the file that contains the revision of my thesis into a book that I started several years ago and see what's there that could be framed as a book proposal in which I use great quantities of already-written prose but reorder it all under a radically different rubric.
  • draft a fellowship proposal based on the reinvention of the diss as something unrecognizeably chic.
• Plough through the rest of the house to-do list and get the realtor ready to go.

In other words, look for the endless whingy navel-gazing and marginal to-do lists to continue. Perhaps I will redo my blog template to keep my readers engaged :-)

Bullet-free Bullets of Belated Update

Yikes, it's been two weeks since I posted! I'm back in Mom City after a very happily social Kalamazoo and a remarkably smooth flight given the weather systems we were flying over yesterday. Kalamazoo included, in addition to the blogger meetup, many meals out with NK,  ADM, and meg, as well as many old RL friends, though it culminated with me going into socializing-overload panic at about three on the last day and going back to my room to hide out in the dark before I started screaming in public. Apologies to those from whom I fled and to those I didn't manage to spend enough time with, especially Janice, with whom I shared only the briefest hello at the breakfast meetup.

The rain here is relentless; streets of the city were flooded down near the river as we left the airport yesterday. Fortunately, mom lives on high ground, and miraculously, her basement is staying dry - a particularly good thing since that's where my room is.

I'm here for another week or so. We have a full slate of social engagements (family friends here from England, etc.) and some business engagements (trusts & estates lawyer this morning). Meanwhile, I'm on the verge of deciding that I'm not going to do the Rare Book School course to which I've been admitted for the middle of next month. It would have been an excellent career exploration and networking opportunity, but the venture was predicated on mom dogsitting again, and the whole 5-dog circus thing proved a bit overwhelming while I was at Kalamazoo. The puppy is not as ready as I though he was to stay alone at grandma's without wreaking havoc. He would be manageable if Cousin Doggie's seizures were under control, but they're not; he's currently transitioning from one medication to another and we're hopeful that this will provide good control eventually, but meanwhile mom is too stressed to have three extra dogs in residence. Not going to RBS is truly ok; as soon as I said to myself that maybe I wouldn't be able to go, I was relieved, because I have way more than enough to do on the fixing-up-the-house front and the actual-work front. Not going means I have eight uninterrupted weeks in the old house, which is a much saner way to spend the middle of the summer than dashing about.

Hope everyone out there has nothing worse than really lousy weather and isn't being hit by any of the signs of the apocalypse that are happening this week.

Where I am (paper-wise)

• I hab a coad and, therefore, no energy and a woolly head ill-suited for thinking.

• My Kalamazoo paper is not unstarted, but I have now typed in so many passages I want to talk about that any attempt at a word-count at this stage will be meaningless.

• Over the next two days, I will hope the woolliness clears a bit and will make sure the two or three main things I want to say are in comprehensible sequence, and I will put the bits of quoted passages that I don't plan to say out loud but do want to be able to refer to into footnotes, so I can word-count the main text.

• I am driving down to Mom City on Friday. I expect that during my drive a stunning opening paragraph will come to me.

• I am flying from Mom City to Kalamazoo on Wednesday next week. Before then, I will grab one day in the convenient Classics reading room at a Mom City library to check references and beat the text into readable shape. It will get done and it won't suck. Such is always the way. I am the last paper in the last session of the afternoon, so nobody will mind if it's a bit short, right?

• I am very much looking forward to seeing blogfriends at as many meetups as happen. I am trying to focus on being thankful that this year, the cold has come before Kalamazoo rather than during it, which should make me more fun to be around than in some years. Also, my paper is the first day, so I can enjoy myself for the rest of the time.

I need this book.

I am grateful to Dame Eleanor Hull for mentioning Mary Catherine Bateson's Composing a Life, which I hadn't known about. I'm going to go get it from the library this afternoon. I've just read the introductory chapter on Google Books and was particularly struck by the following:

    The model of an ordinary successful life that is held up for young people is one of early decision and commitment, often to an educational preparation that launches a single rising trajectory. [...] We don't expect long answers when we ask children what they want to be when they grow up, any more than we expect a list of names in response to questions about marriage. In fact, assumptions about careers are not unlike those about marriage; the real success stories are supposed to be permanent and monogamous.

    These assumptions have not been valid for many of history's most creative people, and they are increasingly inappropriate today. [...] Just as it is less and less possible to replicate the career of a parent, so it will become less and less possible to go on doing the same thing for a lifetime. [...]

   Many of society's casualties are men and women who assumed they had chosen a path in life and found that it disappeared in the underbrush. They are easiest to recognize in areas where continuity used to be thr greatest. [exx. of disappearing industries...] Others do not become visible casualties, because they are protected by contracts or union rules from facing the challenges of change. What they lose, and what the society loses through them, is the possibility of learning and development.

    In the academic world, the tenure system still supplies a high degree of security and campuses still project images of continuity. Young teachers who choose or are forced to leave often feel that their lives are ending, like foreclosed farmers and displaced homemakers. But watching men and women who have left as they reconstruct and redirect their lives, I have become convinced that for many of them this discontinuity has been a move from stagnation to new challenge and growth, just as divorce often represents progress rather than failure. (pp. 6-8)

Bateson sounds like a wise aunt (and I have something of a deficit in the wise aunt category) telling me what I already know about myself, and maybe providing some validation that academic aunts can't offer. The comparison to divorce rings true, too, at least in part - not because I feel in any way that my career to date was a mistake in the first place, as my marriage undoubtedly was; but because I can see myself now replicating patterns from the end of my marriage, in which I dragged out the separation far too long. When I did move on, it was into the career I have now - and to a city of great fabulousness - and it was exhilarating and very good for my health. It made my 30s immeasurably superior to my 20s. Somebody please remind me not to take most of a decade to make the transition this time.

A very miscellaneous miscellany from around the web

How could I possibly not have known about Etsy??

Glockgal has painted a splendiferous Dumbledore.

OMG I have to visit this.

Via RS Nokes: LOLMSS.

Via the wonderful i love typography blog, Stephen Fry on Gutenberg!

I have been enjoying – and learning from – the Digital Campus podcasts.

Observations of a Sunday evening

I had dinner on Friday with an old colleague/friend who is now chair of my old department. We talked about many things, but among them was his assurance that I could have my old job back if I wanted it. Now that's food for thought. I was strangely buoyed by the idea.

Trees are busting out all over! Here's the one that peeps through my dining room window:

The whole world was in church today! Here's the view of Africa from where I was sitting:

I have to confess that it was a really long service (confirmations, non-scintillating bishop), so I spent a lot of time contemplating how incredibly big Africa is.

Here's the world filling the transept, after the service.

At one point it started to melt deflate on top of the clergy while they were greeting people. Talk about global warming! One could go inside it, sort of like a moonbounce, but given my lingering fear of blimp-like objects I opted just to take pictures from a safe distance.

Minor life update

I feel like it's been ages since I posted something substantive about life, but I don't really have much to say. Spring is here and it's glorious. Progress is being made on getting the house ready to put on the market; see sidebar. I'm cheered by the fact that I seem to be feeling happy about getting ready to part with the house, because it feels like the first step in moving on to the next phase of life. I definitely didn't feel that way yet about this house last year, so I'm glad I held onto it and got to spend a few more months in it, even at the cost of many months of mortgage and having missed whatever brief bubble occurred on my block in late 2005. On the real estate market front, things are surprisingly not so terrible: two houses on my block went on the market right after Easter and both sold within two weeks! I guess we have a little micromarket here that has some insulation from the wider mess in this area. Very cheering! (Oh, and I should add that WN was right in an earlier comment that when things are in leaf out front, the house doesn't look anywhere near grungy enough to need an exterior paint job. I do, however, really need to do something about the current leak in the basement floor.)

Progress is being made rather more slowly on my Kalamazoo paper; see sidebar again. Actually, I'm rather enjoying that paper as a break from the larger, much slower project, because it's simply a little whisp of literary criticism. I am offering an 18-and-a-half-minute reading of a couple of conceits in a very minor text and am making no effort at all to master several hundred years of criticism on the author, text, and genre. Nobody wants to hear all that crap in a conference paper anyway.

The Chosen One, now six months old and in deepest adolescence, had select Boy Parts removed yesterday. He's full of beans again today when he's supposed to be resting. Sigh. The operation came not a moment too soon, though, since he was sending off such boy vibes that he was starting to provoke other neighborhood dogs on our walks, just by walking by. I'm eager to start socializing him to the dog park, but I knew that had to wait till he was a little less hormonal.

I've been feeling generally like I'm accomplishing less than I had hoped to in terms of finding my métier, deciding on my future, etc. But I suppose I've come some to some very useful negative decisions, like knowing I don't want to be a graphic designer, coming back around to the thought that maybe my artistic impulses could be satisfied avocationally, deciding I don't want to make my future back in sabbatical location but do, emphatically, want to move to Mom City or elsewhere nearby in the urban midatlantic. I'm not much closer either to having a book-sized chunk of prose or to knowing for sure that I will leave my job after next academic year, and if so for what, but I can see where things are trending.

And now I need to see if I can advance my word count at least a bit.

Domain name registrar bleg

Oh wise blogfriends, is there anything to recommend one domain name registrar above another? I am thinking of registering a couple of names in connection with possible future directions. I don't want hosting at this point; I just want to claim and park a name.

Observations from Profession 2007

The recent flurry of blogland discussions about tenure – and the fact that I recently stopped by my office to collect the last four months of mail – prompted me to sit down and spend some quality time with the truly excellent 2007 issue of Profession. I'm heartened by the amount of thoughtful reflection it contains, and I was particularly interested in Lindsay Waters' "Tenure, Publication, and the Shape of the Careers of Humanists." Two other things jumped out at me from elsewhere in the volume, though, one disheartening and the other revelatory:

Disheartening: The astonishing congruence between the kinds of scholarship rated "not important" by some substantial number of departments in the "Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion" and the kinds of scholarship I'd be interested in producing, namely:

• translations
• textbooks
• books and articles oriented towards classroom practice
• bibliographic scholarship
• books for a general audience
• scholarship in new media

Revelatory: Gerald Graff's take on why students have so much trouble generalizing from what they learn in one class to the whole curriculum (soi-disant). Students (he says) see the codes of academe as random and indecipherable, and the modes of academic discourse as varying without limit, rather than as a(n admittedly very complex) system susceptible to inductive reasoning:

As students go from one disconnected course to the next, they tend to form a highly exaggerated idea of the differences between teachers and subjects. For this reason they often have to ask us teachers what we want – a question that implies that what you learn in one course provides no clue to the next, that academia is essentially unreadable as a collective culture, that teachers can be decoded only one at a time. As teachers we are largely oblivious to the problem, isolated as we are from one another by our classroom walls. No wonder taking courses becomes for most students a business of psyching out their successive teachers and giving each of us whatever we seem to want even when it is contradictory. ("Our Undemocratic Curriculum," 131-32)

This reminds me of two discipline-specific observations I've heard from experienced teachers. Once, when I was complaining to a friend who teaches developmental writing at a CC about students who turned in written work that bore virtually no relationship to English As She Is Spoke, my friend observed that students often don't even see academic prose as English at all - that is, they don't understand it as a variety of a language they already speak fluently. (It's like when I was tiny and had learned to print but hadn't yet learned joined-up writing. I saw script all the time in the Babar books, though, so I thought I'd try it myself. I drew lines and lines of loops across a legal pad and then insisted my mother read it out loud to me. I threw a monster tantrum when she said it wasn't actually writing and she couldn't read it.) The other subject-specific place where this has come up for me is in foreign-language teaching. At a workshop for teachers of one of the dead languages I teach, the workshop leader in her introductory remarks noted that our students can go for years assuming that they are supposed to be learning how to decode a mysterious, secret system, without in any meaningful way believing that it is a language. As a result, they fail to make use of any of the very rich store of what they already know about how language works. I see this in my classes All. The. Time. Since this was made explicit for me, I've tried to make this explicit for my students and to teach - and tell them I'm teaching - starting from what they know already. I have not previously thought about doing this with reference to the whole curriculum. I do routinely talk to freshmen, especially, about the subject content of their other courses, but rarely about the ways of knowing and arguing in other disciplines. There's much to think about for next fall's first-year course. I wonder what I might usefully do with this information in my course for the first-year graduate students I'll have in my other course.

JSTOR rant

The most important thing to rant about is that I have access to this and many other online full-text journal resources, while many of my colleagues at other institutions do not, but that will not stop me from ranting about user interface matters.

Bullets of JSTOR stupidity:

• If I want to access JSTOR at all, I must go to my library home page; try to decide whether to click "articles" or "databases"'; having correctly chosen the latter, find that JSTOR is not in any of the disciplinarily-categorized database lists; click on "A-Z list of Databases", scroll to J, and log in with my university ID. Why four clicks before I even get to the screen where I can search?
• JSTOR has changed its interface. It has become prettier, but now, instead of being able to click on an article title in the search results and being taken to a page of download options for that article, one is given a "PDF" button that spawns a popup containing some kind of user agreement. FOR EVERY SEPARATE GODDAM ARTICLE ONE WANTS TO LOOK AT IN A WHOLE SEARCH. Clicking ok on the user agreement (which of course I have not read, because I want to get the goddam popup out of the way of my search as quickly as possible) automatically starts the PDF download. There is no way to force the PDF to open in a new tab (if it is to be displayed in the browser) or to download as a file, because control-clicking the PDF box in the search results causes the popup user agreement to be downloaded as a file. Clcking the PDF box and then OK in the popup results in two new open windows spawned for each hit one wants to pursue.
• There are no stable urls for JSTOR articles, so if I want to send a friend or student a link to an article, we're both s.o.l. and s/he has to search from scratch, like I did. Life is too short to click that many times.
• Meanwhile, if JSTOR articles show up in a Google search, as they so often do, and I click on that link, JSTOR tells me I am not authorized to access the article, despite the fact that I AM LOGGED INTO JSTOR IN ANOTHER TAB OF THE SAME BROWSER RIGHT NOW. If I click "log in", I am taken to a login screen that has nothing to do with authenticating with the i.d. I use at the university library's site.

/rant