20141115.0802

There are days I want to sleep a bit more than I usually do. Today was one of them, and I feel better because of it. For the most part: I was roused not long after one o'clock this morning by Ms. 8 crying out in her sleep. She remained asleep entirely, so I did not disturb her, but she very much disturbed me. And I was jolted awake again not long after four this morning by a sharp cramp in my left calf; it is still a bit sore, in fact. Aside from those interruptions, though, I had a good night of sleep, and I let myself doze later into the morning than I normally do.

That I do not usually sleep so long as I did for my last sleep is something I have repeatedly discussed. I am normally a morning person, working best in the quiet hours around the dawn, and attending to Ms. 8 and her needs means that I cannot simply decide to sleep in on a weekend morning with the impunity that was once mine to wield. Too, I usually dislike the fact of my need for sleep; there is so much more that I could do with the time, and I seem to miss out on things while my body forcibly replenishes itself. I rather dislike missing out on things, and I like even less seeing things unaddressed that my efforts ought to address fully, but needs must.

From time to time, however, when I am ill or I am greatly weary, and other circumstances align exactly right, I do let myself sleep more. Instead of the six or so hours I normally get, I sleep for eight or nine, and wake more fully refreshed. I do not leap straight to work, as I usually do (and most mornings I start to work before I start to write in this webspace), but take my ease for a bit. It is something some might suggest I do more often, and they are likely right that I ought to do so, but I know that I will feel guilty for the spent time before today is done. Even now, there are things to do, and I am not doing them. Nor will I likely do so for a while.

For a moment, though, I can set such concerns aside and sit with a cup of coffee in the chilly morning, writing idly and contemplating the state of the world. I can enjoy for a brief time having woken at my ease and refreshed before I gird myself up and plunge yet again into the mind-work that I do to support my wife and daughter and the tending to the latter's needs (since she, still not yet nine months old, cannot do so for herself). It does not happen often, after all (although part of me still says "more than it should"), and I think that I may be forgiven the occasional indulgence of this sort.

20141114.0658

It makes sense that I seem to do my better writing--I find that I have more to say and an easier time of saying it--when I am writing about the things I read and have read. Multiple degrees in English ought to be good for something after all, even if they do not make me immune to the occasional typographical error. (Those who read this blog know that it makes use of its own earlier entries from time to time. Poring over the blogroll for them reveals points of authorial inattention to details of usage. They doubtlessly indicate laziness or too much haste, and those who will engage in the fallacy fallacy--among whom are many pedants I know directly or by report--will perhaps be better served to read otherwise.) And it seems to be the case that I have more readers when I do make such comments than when I do not, if the readership statistics this platform offers me constitute anything like a reliable indicator.

There are times, though, when what I read chokes my throat with anger and knots my hands into claws that an old and angry part of me wants to wrap around throats and squeeze. I feel my chest tighten and a grimace creep across my face, and I know that my pupils open further the blackness within my eyes. And it is not at fictional exploits that this happens; I get annoyed, of course, and voice that annoyance with keyboard and tongue, and I am extravagant in my annoyance. But I do not react to that the way I do to reports of the all-too-real stupidity of the world, stupidity that, once permitted (and almost certainly permitted because we have to think of the children--and I am a father who rails against it), often spreads until it threatens to choke out what little intelligence finds purchase in the thin and rocky soil offered to it anymore. (Yes, I know I near falling down the slippery slope into something like an appeal to tradition. Note the qualifiers. There is some small hope, even yet.)

I do not do well to address the issues that provoke such reactions while amidst such reactions. I am not doing so now. I am, instead, attempting to distract myself from them for a bit so that my unconscious or subconscious mind can work to find some redress to the problems presented. (I follow the Good Doctor's "The Eureka Phenomenon" for this idea.) Perhaps, in time, I will return to them with a clearer mind and find a way to speak against them that does not make of me the kind of ravening idiot that I believe many of those who perpetuate such stupidities to be. But it is more likely that other concerns will shove them aside, new indignities piled upon them, and they will be pressed down into the substrata from which, in time, distilled bitterness may be pumped or hardened, cutting bits of it mined out and polished to a brilliant sheen.

20141113.0630

It seems that more people read what I write when I write prose than when I write verse. That they still read when I write verse tells me I am not so far gone as a Vogon, but it still suggests that more lines on the page ought to be sentences than free verse or iambic pentameter. (Not that I do much of the latter.) For today, at least, I will take the hint.

I have on occasion noted histories of things on my shelves and in my home. I do entertain the idea that I might put together some collection of creative nonfiction that discusses a number of them, but that will have to wait until a large number of other projects are completed (including a freelance project I really need to write today). In the meantime, though, I can relate a bit about one of them (and it *may* make it into the hypothetical later collection, although I will doubtlessly amend it and improve it; the kind of writing I do in this webspace is not exactly as polished as I would have it be to be in print):

I often note that I "cut my teeth on Asimov," and it is more or less true; an early memory has me looking at the expanded collection of Foundation novels my mother had just after Foundation's Edge came out, thirty years after the Foundation Trilogy. Even now, I have copies of a number of the Good Doctor's books on my shelves, including paperbacks of the Foundation series--including Forward the Foundation. It is a first paperback run of the work, and it is battered and abused through repeated reading, the sweeping art-insert behind the front cover long since gone. (I know that I will at some point need to replace it. I do not look forward to doing so.)

That copy is one of two I received when I was ten or eleven. Both my parents and one of my grandmothers had bought a copy for me, the former as part of a complete set of the Foundation novels (which says much of who and what I have been and still am, as well as the support for it I was provided), the latter as a single item. I recall being happy to receive both as well as confused as to whose gift to keep; I no longer recall whose I did, which copy still manages to be on my shelf more than twenty years later.

It does not matter, really. The important thing is that I have had as many years of enjoyment from the piece--which I contend betrays the Good Doctor's awareness of his impending death from complications of AIDS (he had several surgeries and thus several transfusions in the 1980s, after HIV emerged in force but before physicians knew to screen blood for it)--as I have. I have said that I will need to replace the copy at some point; the day will come when the binding fails and the pages flutter away, or the pages will tear and no tape will save them. But a volume held for decades is not one so easily set aside, and I am something of a bibliophile in any event...I do not relish the thought.

20141112.0637

I spent most of yesterday marking papers. There are times I do not know why I do so; few if any of the students read the comments, and fewer yet actually work to correct the problems identified in their work. My efforts on the students' behalf in that regard are therefore frustrating.

Now that I think on it, though, I do have an idea why I work grading as I do. It provides evidence that I can use to defend myself in the event of a grade appeal. It affords me a paper trail I can use to rebut student assertions that the way I have treated their papers is wrong, somehow; it allows me to reassert my authority when it is challenged.

There will be some, of course, who will say that the idea of professorial authority is flawed, that in a student-centered classroom it is the students who have the authority--and that more because of numbers and purportedly democratic ideals than because of any authority that inheres in a position. I doubt that many if any of them change grades on a student's say-so or that they acquiesce to grade appeals without contestation, though. I have never heard of such a thing happening, and I have read much of the theory and reports of its purported application. Because it seems to me that proponents of wholly student-centered, antiauthoritarian teaching would report doing so as a way to enhance their own ethos, the lack is, to my mind, telling.

Others will say that the idea of professorial authority is flawed for other reasons entirely, namely that the professoriate as a whole (but particularly in the academic humanities) is a corps of the fraudulent. We are parasites sucking at the public teat for the most part, either treading over ground already well trodden, finding clues to things that they were never taught where the footsteps of others have destroyed any evidence--or we are wasting our time with modernist trifles and dragging the young along with us as we indoctrinate them into some brainwashed cult of hyper-socialist personality directly and specifically aligned against the "values on which this country was built." (And since quite a bit of that involved genocide and slavery, yes, most scholars of the academic humanities I have known have problems with the "traditional" narrative of US history; genocide and slavery are bad, remember? Ignoring their presence is also bad. Why do people want us to be bad and to endorse badness?) I have to think that many of them did badly in their coursework, and even if they succeeded later on, they still carry the marks awarded them. (I intend the pun.)

Well do I know that old wounds hurt long.

Flawed or not, I do operate in a context that requires me to present an air of authority. As such, I do have to maintain that authority, and so I have to be ready to meet challenges to it. Hence the grading and the work--long and vexing--I do to enact it.

20141111.0709

It is Veterans Day in the United States. (The usage still bothers me.) This year, I think I will re-blog a comment made by a colleague of mine, himself a veteran of the US Navy:

Tomorrow when you get the urge to thank a veteran, instead call or write your politicians and tell them 2 things: fulfill our government's obligation to provide excellent care for those injured and make damn sure to not send another into these endless, unnecessary wars. That's better than a "thank you."

He is right, of course, and given how many people who are on their way into office claim, loudly and repeatedly, to care about armed services personnel, things damned well ought to get better soon. The kind of thing where backlogs of care cases happen and are covered up due to a lack of appropriate support should end.

If, you know, those who have the power of the purse will actually open it so that the nation can meet its obligations and, you know, take responsibility for fulfilling the terms on which it took the lives and health of those who volunteered to serve.

If.

20141110.0636

Today is my father's birthday, and I am glad he is around to see it. I have said so once or twice before, even if not as eloquently as I ought to have or as often. I have not, after all, always been a good son and diligent; it took entirely too long for me to begin to treat decently a fundamentally good and decent man who has done little but work for the betterment of my mother, my brother, and me in the last thirty-something years. But I am better, now, and I am thankful to have had such a man in my life.

Sentimentality aside, today promises to be a busy day. A colleague and I have planned to exchange observations and letters of recommendation based on them, the idea being that doing so will help us to get jobs. One of the advantages to my current work setup is that I am in close, sustained contact with other academics who are not in my field of study; we all teach classes other than those to which we are optimally suited, and so we function as peers not in competition with one another. In theory, our comments about each other's scholarship and teaching should carry some weight because we are sufficiently skilled as to be able to assess one another yet sufficiently detached to be able to offer some reasonably objective commentaries. So there is that.

The observations are in addition to the usual work of teaching, which includes some grading that needs to get done. I spent several hours on the task yesterday and cleared out one assignment, but there was already another one waiting, and I have yet another coming in today. Freelancing picks up again tomorrow, so I have a bit of leeway on that score, but I also have my own scholarship to attend to, including trying to put together another post for Travels in Genre and Medievalism (please go read it, and if you have any ideas, let us know). I have a notion about some music I'd like to write up, but the idea is as yet too nebulous in my head to take treatment. And there are always other papers to write, other pieces I am called to compile and create.

Somehow, of course, it will all get done as it should. If nothing else, I need to be sure that Ms. 8 has what she needs, and I cannot do that without attending to the work laid out for me; she is a powerful motivator, my little octopus. And I retain some hope that my efforts will allow me to find a position that enables those efforts yet better, that the work I do will help me to find more and better work to do (which sounds silly, I know, but there it is). I have to; the alternative would not exactly be a credit to the example set for me by today's birthday boy, and he deserves some credit.

20141109.0822

Freelance work continues, which is good because I need the money.

I have commented before (here and here, for instance) about the ways in which the freelance work I have been doing has expanded my reading repertoire. (It is an odd thing for someone who studies and teaches literature for a living would speak of such a thing or feel the need to do it, admittedly.) Although I cut my teeth on Asimov and read his Foundation corpus and Tolkien's Middle-earth corpus on a more or less annual cycle, and such works are increasingly part of the main stream of US popular culture (more the latter than the former, as it happens), and although such writers as Chaucer and Shakespeare and such works as Beowulf and Le Morte d'Arthur remain known if not exactly enjoyed by most, the stuff that I read and study* is not normally regarded as being really part of popular literature. What I read for my freelance work, however, is.

Most recently, I read for the freelance write-ups Gillian Flynn's 2009 Dark Places, and I found it strangely compelling. The protagonist is hardly a sympathetic character, although she is positioned such that she really should be; typically, the victim of substantial physical and emotional trauma evokes a level of pity almost inevitably associated with sympathetic portrayal, but such is not the case in the text. Instead, the character wallows in the effects of the trauma, not so much because she cannot surpass it as because she is unwilling to surpass it. She is offered ample opportunity, both in the narrative as it unfolds and in the presumed back-story, to seek help and find a way to navigate trauma so as to enter more fully into the world and help herself to be more than the victim of circumstance. She repeatedly refuses, accepting her status as acted upon throughout the text and only loosely moving into being the actor.

Part of me recoils from the character, likely as a result of the deeply ingrained habituation of my upbringing and my participation in the main stream of US popular culture noted above. (Being defined as several ways Other** by that main stream requires engagement with it.) Another part recognizes the characterization as an echo, probably unintentional, of Donaldson's characterization of Thomas Covenant in the first three novels of his series. Still another part of me, likely that which has grown up as a result of my training in the academic humanities, reminds me that I do not have enough grounding in trauma theory to be able to untangle the understandings of horrific events embedded in and transmitted by Flynn's Dark Places. Having neither the situated ethos of having suffered trauma myself nor the invented ethos of long study of trauma as trauma and the effects it has on those who have endured it, I perhaps ought not to say so much about the presentation of it in text as I otherwise might.

Although I recognize that the last part of me is more likely correct than the first, I recognize also that the former will have much more currency in the prevailing culture of the United States. I can easily envision many of the people among whom I grew up, and indeed among whom I now live and among whom I lived in The City, seeing such a person as Flynn's protagonist and thinking "Pull it together; something bad happened to you, yes, but you have to get over it and move on." I can easily envision them looking at her failure to do so and seeing only weakness that deserves condemnation. Perhaps there is something in the novel that seeks to force upon the reader the question of how to handle such people as Flynn's protagonist, people who are shaped by their circumstances in ways that they cannot or will not set aside and yet unfit them for "normal" life. Or perhaps there is something in the novel that uses the protagonist to frustrate what "normal" means. But most readers will not seek for such a thing; they will see instead that the work thwarts the easy and comfortable expectations they have as a result of reading repetitions in the genre, and they will turn aside from it utterly.

I did not, though, not only because of the paycheck, and I am glad of it.

*I am well aware that the study of literature is fraught, that many will suggest it is not worth studying at all, and that others will chafe at the inclusion of Asimov and Tolkien alongside Chaucer and Shakespeare. Tolkien generates quite a bit of scholarship, including what I curate here; Asimov prompts somewhat less, although he ought to get more, since he was himself an academic. And I maintain that the rejection out of hand of "popular" work by scholarly bodies is a large part of what prompts the rejection of scholarly bodies by the readership of "popular" works.

**I am aware also that my Otherness is less in scope and scale than the Otherness imposed on, well, others. I make no claim to being particularly or especially excluded / abjected. I have a small taste of it, though, and I can make inferences about its extrapolation, perhaps.

20141108.0653

To what end all this?

To what end the daily writing,
Online to few views and little money,
Offline to little readership and less money?

To what end the work of research,
Or what the humanities calls research,
Reading what has been written,
Trying to find out what was going on at the writing
And what it may mean now?

To what end the work of teaching
When students value credentials over knowledge
And know that they will be more successful without,
The next Zuckerberg or Jobs,
When they do not want their minds opened,
For they look at those who have perhaps begun to do so,
Those who look at things deeply,
Who plumb their meaning,
And see no smiles on their faces,
When they see no sense in any of the knowledge
And see no sense in learning how to get it
For there is no way ahead as they define it?

20141107.0659

The irony
Of students at state supported schools
Schools set up by national law
The land-grant schools
Complaining of government overreach
Of federal programs going against Constitutional dicta
Remains a hammer to my forehead

No wonder I cannot get a raise

Clearly, I have failed and continue to do so

20141106.0645

This span of November, the first couple of weeks of it, is rife with birthdays. Mine was Election Day. A cousin and a friend share Guy Fawkes Day. My father's is just before Veterans Day. This tells me something about when people enjoy one another's company. It also reminds me to celebrate as autumn gathers and winter begins to threaten some parts.

And I have been celebrating, although I have not celebrated all events on all days. My wife and I did celebrate Día de los Muertos, harkening back to our Texan upbringing (we both grew up in the state, although neither of us was born in it) and her deep Hispanic heritage; we set out ofrendas and prayed. Whether we were heard, though, I do not know; I do not know how well I can claim to know my own dead, and I never met or little met most of hers.

I celebrate, too, such small triumphs as are given to me. That I continue to have work to do, and that it continues to pay a bit, eases me, if only a little. That I continue to be called upon to help with things does, as well; I appreciate being told thusly that I am valued (although I would not mind being told by a raise or a continuing line job).

I celebrate greatly the continued development of Ms. 8, who grows daily and commands more of herself. She crawls proficiently, now, and her babbling is beginning to show patterns. So do her gestures, which my wife and I are figuring out. Being able to understand what she asks for and thus provide it more efficiently is helpful; it reduces the frustrated crying for needs of food and diapering. But that does not mean she gets all of what she wants. That would be irresponsible of me, and with as much as I have complained at such irresponsibility in others...