20190306.0430

It should come as no surprise that I have a personal library; I was for many years engaged in formal study of English languages and literatures, and I spent no small amount of time trying to be a professor in those same fields, and they call for books more than most. Even before that, I was an avid reader, given to spending money on books instead of on the kinds of things that others of my age, when I was of such an age, spent money on. And while I have made much use of the libraries where I have been, and I have at times pruned items out of my collection, I have tended to hoard the printed pages. There are several reasons, of course, and I may come back to them in another post, and it may even be that some of them still apply. But I think I may be about to go through and rid myself of some of the books and magazines and journals I have acquired over the years; I think they have outlived their usefulness to me, and the sentimental connections they embody and reinforce are not what I need them to be.
Clearly, not all of my books and suchlike fall under such rubrics. There are the fancy copies that my wife and I keep in the living room, decorations for it and advertisements to those who visit us that we read. (Yes, it's a bit snobby.) There are the copies of books I still use for what research I do, their pages stained by the oils of my hands as I've flipped through at high speed, looking for that one line to quote or that one passage to summarize. There are the copies I've been given as gifts, tattered from age and use by now and falling apart, but kept because they came from people I still value. And there are no few that I use in the recreational activities I still undertake--because I am a raging nerd, and the things I like to do involve reading even when they're not typically thought of as "reading."
But I also have boxes and boxes of academic journals, as well as many issues of them still in their wrappings. Some, such as CCC, College English, PMLA, and Profession, I no longer subscribe to; I am not a member anymore of the organizations that produce them, and I have no reason to be so. I will never be a real college professor; I will never be a full-time teacher. So there is no need for me to align myself with the MLA or the NCTE; they do not represent me, and they should not, so I should not give my time or the representation of my time that is the money I earn to them. And I probably ought not to continue to give space to works that I no longer use and am not likely to open again.
To be fair, such a thing feels like quitting. It feels like another admission of defeat, another acknowledgment that I have been wrong. It is not, at least not so much; when I undertook to get such things, I had honest hope that I might be one of the fortunate folks who picked up a professorial job. If I am wrong, it is in holding onto a hope that will never be; letting go of the things that informed that hope and that emerged from pursuing it is more a correction than an error. Such a correction is good to have, even if the reminder of error that it necessarily is is not the most comfortable thing to have provided.

20190303.0430

In the past, I have done a fair bit of summary and response in my online writing--not only in this webspace, but in others I have maintained and currently maintain. Sources have ranged across CCC, College English, Profession, the New York Times, the San Antonio Express-News, and others, some of which I no longer read with anything approaching regularity. And I have benefited from doing the reading and thinking about the reading that are needed to write summary-and-response pieces; I have had to keep more abreast of things to do so than I would otherwise be likely to do, and that has helped me to be more engaged with the world around me, even as it has annoyed me greatly at times (because the world is not as I would have it be, and for reasons I tend to think bad).
I am not doing that exercise this month, at least not consistently in this webspace, although I may well return to it. It is, after all, good for me. But thinking on it does lead me to think about the reading that I no longer do. I've let quite a bit of reading go along the way, which is something that is strange for me to consider despite the fact of my doing it. I have always prided myself on my ability to read both quickly and deeply, and I have long worked--successfully--to incorporate what I read into what I do. But much of what I used to do, I do no longer, or do so little of that it makes no sense for me to maintain the subscriptions that facilitated my reading. Thus, I have let go of a number of my professional journal subscriptions, and I am rarely in the kind of library that would let me get around that lack with any real skill.
Oddly, however, I feel that I am doing more useful work with my reading and writing now than I did when I was doing more such reading. What I note seems to be taken more seriously, and I feel I am writing that kind of writing with greater skill and nuance than was formerly the case. And it seems I am doing more writing, overall, whether in this webspace or in others, or in my personal journals, or for other projects entirely. It would seem that I was getting in my way with what I was doing to try to get my way; I no longer do as much of that, so I am not as much in my own way, and more gets done. It's a good thing, although it is still strange for me to think on.
I had thought that my identity would be as one thing, one particular thing that it has not been allowed to be. But after being pushed aside from that thing, I seem to be doing more to approach that thing than I had done before. It is a paradox, perhaps, but not one that I think I will work to puzzle out so much as to enjoy.

20190110.0430

I am running again into the issue of finding it challenging to find things about which to write in this webspace. Given the orientation of my other webspace and my desire not to duplicate work, I am not working on even casually scholarly projects here, things like my Skyward Sword bit (that gets used as a sample in my classes) or one of the occasional pieces I've written on L5R. I still dabble in that work in other places, of course, but much less frequently than I used to do--and not at all here, since this webspace does not speak to the same purposes as the others I have maintained have and do. As I've noted before (though where does not emerge so easily for me as I might like), this webspace is for more personal reflection and occasional artistic endeavors than the other. It seems a bit off to have my more scholarly musings here.
The reverse is also true, I find. There have been times I've tried to post more "artistic" work in the other webspace, whether things that tried to become serial novels or snippets of verse meant to laud other authors through sincerely flattering imitation. They have not gone as well as might have been hoped, and not as well as similar efforts in this webspace have gone. My limerick sequence may not have been ideal, but it did attract some favorable attention, by report; the hymns against the stupid god got a lot more consideration. So I have to think that it is not a matter of skill so much as how that skill interacts in my own mind with the specific online locations of writing. (And I know I've been on that topic before, considering my lone CCC publication back in the days when I thought I might actually be a full-time academic, as well as pieces on my office spaces [here, here, here, here, here, here, and here].) That is, something about the different platforms prompts different responses from me in them, and trying to work against those prompts goes less well than might otherwise be the case.
I am not sure why. There's not much of a difference in the physical locations where I access the different online locations; I write in both while seated in the same chairs, working at the same keyboards. Sometimes, I even attend to them on the same days. So, if the circumstances are largely the same, I have to wonder why it is that I can write decently (I know "well" is a stretch) in one form in one venue but not another, while doing decently in the other form in another venue but not the one. I do not know that finding an answer will do me any good, because I do not think that having an answer will make a difference in how I act. I'll still write what I write, where I write it, and I hope I will stumble further into proficiency as I do so.

20160523.0827

Over the past few days, I have been trying to rest up after recent events. The trip to Kalamazoo was fun, but it took more out of me than I had anticipated it doing. Being sick immediately after returning from Kalamazoo did not help matters. Having to crank out a freelance order and pack against the upcoming move--we leave Sherwood Cottage forever on Friday--have only added to my situation. While I am making sure that what needs to get done gets done--meaning that I am offering some small help in getting things done to my most excellent wife, who is much better at this kind of thing than I am--I am also taking advantage of the fact that I have few scheduled demands from now until the relocation is done (and nothing comes to mind about afterwards; I have not heard anything about jobs). I do not think I am as well rested as I need to be, but I am better than I have been in a while, and I appreciate it greatly.

Doing so has thrown off my writing schedule, to be sure. I am erratic and irregular in making posts to this webspace and to the others with which I am involved, as well as with writing in the pages of my journal--and much more so than is usual for me. Too, I have ideas that I want to sit and write, but I am not able to attend to them, in part because I do have to help with packing and keeping an eye on Ms. 8 as the packing goes on, and in part because the packing has disrupted and disordered the space in which I would do the writing. That is, my home-space is all out of whack, which makes it hard for me to write. I have been concerned with writing and working spaces before, as a CCC piece and an old teaching blog piece both attest, and I wonder now if I there is something else for me to say about places of writing as a result of having mine disordered and disrupted once again, particularly since I have been complicit in occasioning the disorder and disruption.

If there is, though, I will have to wait to write it. For now, there are errands to run and other work to do; even though we are leaving at the end of the week, we have to make it to the end of the week, and that means we still have to have food at Sherwood Cottage. We still have to keep the lights on and the water flowing, for a few more days, at least. I have a little that I can do, yet, to help with such things. I probably ought to get to doing so, rather than spending the day writing, as I might perhaps otherwise prefer to do...

20151006.0628

The papers I am having my students write this term are, in large measure, prescribed by program dictates. That is, there is a required sequence of major assignments in the class I am assigned, one established in the interests of normalization. The idea is that all sections of the class will be largely equivalent to one another, demanding much the same tasks of the students within them, so that those who teach them afterwards can make stable, reasonably reliable assumptions about what skills and training the students have had. The idea is not a bad one, overall, in part because there should be some consistency among iterations of a single course within a single semester, and in part because the normalization allows for some structured guidance for the novice teachers who most frequently teach the course. (That the course is largely ascribed to novice teachers is a problem in itself, I admit; I am convinced by several CCC and College English pieces that argue the point. And I am suddenly reminded that I need to read more from those journals.)

The paper my students are currently assigned is a textual analysis. They are set to pick apart a piece of writing (something recent from the Opinion section of the New York Times), looking at it in terms of its overall effectiveness at fulfilling its evident purpose for its presumed audience. I have to wonder what would result from such attention to my own writing--which is not something I can reasonably provide, being too close to the composition of it to be able to assume the necessary perspective. (Also, I am minded of the...issues attendant on self-critiquing work. Poe's "Philosophy of Composition" comes to mind as an easy example of how such endeavors can go wrong.) That does not mean I am not aware of certain things in my writing, to be sure. My prose entries to this webspace, for example, are usually 500 to 550 words or thereabouts, and they tend to include both a single link and the statement that "work continues." The word count is something I set out to do, as I believe the length is useful as a sort of warm-up for a day of reading and writing, as well as teaching of the same. The others, as well as other features I have seen and do not note here, are largely organic, authentic products of my writing process and development. What they suggest about the audience I explicitly and implicitly try to address, about my expected primary and imagined secondary readership, about what I am trying to do for each, I am not certain--although I know that they are revelatory of things of which I am normally unaware. Whether I succeed in any of it for any of them, I am also unsure. It is to uncover such things that my students are set on the current paper. I have no small hope that they will succeed, even if the pieces they read ultimately do not.

20150710.0740

One of the benefits of maintaining a series of writings is that doing so allows for some ease of finding topics. There are always things left untreated in writing that has been done, loose ends that can be tied off later or toothing stones that can be used to build more walls and rooms. It is not proof against not having things about which to write, of course, but it is helpful. Today, it confronts me with two easy possibilities, for one of the ways in which having a body of writing to look over helps can be to look at what was written on similar days in the past. I have twice posted to this webspace on the tenth of July: 2010 and 2014. Either could well be a springboard for further work.

In 2010, I still lived in The City at Bedfordside Garden. My writing was less polished then than it is now, or so it seems to me; I wrote in choppy paragraphs with unreasonably complex sentence structures. I was still at work on dissertation materials at that time, though, and it is possible that that work infected my other writing. Dissertations are consuming, as those who have written them can attest, and since they represent the ability to enter into prevailing academic discourse standards, they tend to be more...complicated in their syntax and lexicon than many other works. Too, they also tend to treat ideas difficult for their writers, a tendency that puts me in mind of Ian Barnard's piece in CCC 61.3, "The Ruse of Clarity." I write in fuller, more developed paragraphs now than I did then, and I like to think that I am better at adjusting my usage to suit my audiences now. That is not to say I dumb things down in this webspace, but I do not write it as I write when I write only to those whose training is like mine.

Last year, I was at Sherwood Cottage, considering the lawn and the social (and legal, as it happens) demands of attending to it. Then, as now, I did not look forward to working with the grass, although I am better equipped to do so now than I was then. I am in better practice with it, and I have more tools with which to perform the tasks, thanks to the kind gifts of family. Then, as now, I struggled with negotiating "traditional" masculinity and my own inclinations, and I wrestled with the idea of presenting a good model of adulthood to Ms. 8. I struggle less now than then, which may be because I either have better ideas now or have given up a large part of the fight to do so. (The former would be better. I worry that the latter is more likely.) My writing was more like what it is now in 2014 than in 2010, both in form and content--understandably so. What that indicates, however, is still not clear to me. More consideration will be needed. Fortunately, I can return to this post in the future, as well.

20150707.0704

Yesterday was something of a busy day, involving getting Sherwood Cottage back together from the week with company and the weekend away. It also saw me head up to the library at the school where I work, where I took care of some paperwork that needed doing. I also took the chance to look myself up online, using a computer not already habituated to me from being mine. As I did, I also stumbled across a few other things to read, one of which was Judith Sherven's 5 July 2015 LinkedIN article, "What Does Your Desk/Office Say about You?" In the piece, Sherven gestures towards the idea that the décor of a workspace is revelatory of the persona of the person who occupies the workspace. In the gesture, she relates an anecdote about her dissertation before posing a series of questions to her readers. The short piece ends with calling "attention to the power of [personal decorative] choices," marking it as more of a note that such details are telling than as a guideline to effective professional self-presentation--which might work better for the more junior professionals on LinkedIN than what is presented.

Even though the article is perhaps not as helpful to its primary audience as could be hoped, it does make good points--which I know are good because I have addressed them before. In the December 2014 issue of CCC, I have a short piece titled "Where Writes Me." In that piece, I interrogate the décor I had put into the office I had at the time (I have suffered some reversals since), questioning whether it depicts me as a young but accomplished professional (given the awards and degrees festooning the walls, as well as portions of my nascent scholarly apparatus) or as insecure of myself and my station (given that such things could function more as security blanket). Since the students I taught in my earlier position were as they were, I had to question whether the second was more true than the first. Even in my current position, taken after "Where Writes Me" was accepted for publication and its text finalized, with such décor on the walls near my desk in the office pool to which I am currently assigned, with a student body much more traditional and at an institution much more "normal" than that where I worked in The City, I have to wonder how much of the décor is an attempt to assert my validity as a scholar rather than a celebration of what I have done.

I suppose, then, that the thing Sherven misses most in her brief online treatment (and I would love to read the dissertation, actually) is that, in addition to offering room for interpretation of the worker who works in the workspace, the décor of a workspace offers room for multiple interpretations, possibly conflicting with one another. It is only one of a number of such things that can do so, only one of a number of areas in which some people focus to great effect as others neglect them and likely have their prospects curtailed therefore...

20150426.0837

I noted yesterday that I recently completed a volume in the journals I have been keeping for some ten years, now. I started another one yesterday, as well. In the past, I have told myself at each new beginning that I would be better about keeping up with entries than I had in the previous volume, and I have been disappointed with myself in each volume. I skip days, sometimes for weeks at a time, and a journal that should take me some two months to fill eats more than twice that. The journals I currently use are hardly thick, so the delay in filling them is not something that argues strongly in my favor. This time, however, I have told myself no such thing. After a decade of limited success, I think it is time to recognize that I am not going to be better about the thing than I am and to accept that my level of performance is as it is. It is a lesson I will doubtlessly have cause to learn about other things.

My current journals contrast with those in which I started my formal journaling (not the binder-bound legal-pad pages from before), although I buy them from the same store. They are more elegant, certainly, more refined, but the disjunction annoys me for reasons I believe I have noted. Admittedly, they hold less, and they cost more. But my current journals, unlike the kind I used to use, are at least in part made in the United States, while the cheaper ones I used to favor are imported entirely. And I do appreciate having the nicer volumes in which to write. It seems to me that they will endure longer than the cheaper ones, and the impression they create is more like that to which I aspire (admittedly without so much success as I should like) than the earlier ones. That my shift to them more or less corresponds with my moving from pre-professional to "professional" status reinforces the impression, of which I approve.

It could be the case, though, that some of what I discuss in my December 2014 CCC piece applies, that I look for the particular impression to be created serves as a sort of security blanket for me, helping me to believe in my own abilities rather than reflecting those abilities to others. That my journals are not on pubic display--as the office accoutrements I discuss in the scholarly publication were--reinforces that idea. They are secreted away, kept where only I and a very few others can see them, and although those people are the ones about whose opinions I ought to care most, they are also the people who are already convinced of my excellence and value. They are not the people I need to assert myself to as being who I am and want to be--with one exception whose identity should be obvious at this point. And that one seems to need much, much more convincing.

20150224.0654

I noted yesterday that I had another job interview (which was welcome, as I received several emails telling me I had been turned down for other jobs). As is common in such circumstances, I wore a suit to sit for it--and because of the timing of the thing, I wore the suit throughout my teaching day. Like many men, I look good in a suit, even if it is one that I got on the cheap from a resale shop and thus probably does not fit me as well as it ought to do. (Of course, being able to button the pants is a benefit, and there are clothes in my closet I cannot button any longer. My exercise regimen has...fallen off somewhat. Surprisingly.) I was even more or less comfortable in the thing, although I am never pleased to be wearing a tie.

That said, I found myself aware of the masquerade I was carrying on as I ran around my building in a pinstripe suit. My position is not a lofty one; I a contingent academic laborer, although I am at the higher end of contingency. I do not have a private office anymore--but I recall having one (an experience enshrined in CCC, as I have noted)--and few if any even of my senior colleagues show up for work in suit and tie. Certainly, those with whom I share office space do not do so much, if at all; they and I more typically teach in jeans, possibly in sport coats or the feminine equivalent. And I do not come from circumstances conducive to wearing suits to work. While one grandfather, who was a teacher for decades, did do so, I did not grow up near him; instead, I was raised among tradesfolk, and a worsted wool jacket does not wear well when chipping trenches through caliche or crawling under mobile homes to connect electrical services. Thus, neither my upbringing nor my current professional context conduces to my going about in a suit. I know it, so I feel myself an impostor when I do wear one, despite seeing that I look good in one and knowing that my dressing in such a way has effects on my classroom--and perhaps on my job prospects, as well. "Dress for the job you want," after all, and I want a job that is more secure and pays at least as well as what I am getting now.

Whether I ought consciously to dress better more often, I do not know. I do appreciate feeling good, and looking good--looking like a professional--does help with that. Taking on the trappings associated with being more nearly elite also increases the perception of my authority, in the classroom and outside of it, and I do not deny that I like my authority respected; such as I have, I have worked hard to earn. But I am not certain how well it sits with me to carry out that particular type of performance--and I am not sure that my finances will allow me to get more suits that fit decently...

20150216.0719

The weather around Sherwood Cottage decided to issue a reminder that winter is still the season here; I woke up to find a blanket of white on the ground and the school where I work delaying its start until noon. (This means I still teach two of my three classes today.) I had honestly hoped that a full stop would be in order, but the administration evidently decided that things will be safe enough to permit travel to the school by noon. Whether that will actually be the case, and whether my students will believe it is the case, I do not know. I expect not, though; when even I wanted a snow day, I could hardly be shocked that my students, already reluctant to be in a class that they "don't need" with a professor who "doesn't know what he's doing," would take one. But I may be wrong; it remains to be seen.

In the event, I get a few extra hours to work on my own materials rather than those demanded by the classroom, and I appreciate it. (I do still need to get to the office to do a bit of grading before the classes that do meet today.) Freelance work continues, and having time to read for it helps (although I will note that the book I am reading now is really bad). I imagine that the Mrs. and Ms. 8 (who turns 1 this week) will be happy to have me around a bit longer, too, although they seem to be enjoying sleeping in. (I remain annoyed at having to sleep, although I seem to need to do so more of late. I do not know why; it precedes my head-cold of last week.) I do have a better work setup at Sherwood Cottage than in my current office, although thinking on it reminds me of the setup I had at my previous job (documented in the December 2014 CCC, I might add) and which I miss greatly. Being home, then, allows me to get a bit more done than might otherwise have been the case, although not as much as was true in other places I have been.

The online L5R Winter Court game I am helping administer is winding down at last. I will have a bit more to do after formal play stops, but it will nonetheless be nice to have one less thing to which to attend. I do wish that I had had more presence of mind with it, both in administering it and in using it to further my research--I have gotten a little bit out of it, but not as much as I might have preferred. Such is life, I suppose, and I can hope to archive or otherwise record some of what happened on its boards so that I can make some use of it in the future. Maybe. For while RPG materials come up in a short talk I am giving via video, they have not much informed my research since my undergraduate days. It is another thing I miss.

There are many such things.

20140907.0850

After a couple of conversations yesterday, I have had occasion to think about the kinds of things we leave behind. It is not a new circumstance for me; I have given some thought before to the stories of the stuff we have (as well as before that), and I have long since read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, although my own experiences are far different from what the author reports, as have been the events of my life. And they have been different from those people whose papers formed the bases of those conversations I noted, the records of which contained in those papers are now gone away.

Parsing and poring over papers is a delicate process, I know. Were I to pass on now, I know that my wonderful wife would have some...interesting times trying to figure out what to keep and what to discard of the papers I have collected through my life of study and few years of writing. For those who must treat what is left by those who have had longer lives of study and teaching, I imagine that the task is more difficult yet. How can one decide what to keep privately, what to keep publicly, what to donate, and what to discard? Upon what bases are the decisions made?

And when it is known that such decisions have been made, what does it suggest that the choices made are made? When things are hidden, what is it that makes them worth hiding? When they are discarded, what makes them worth being thrown away, cast aside? What makes things worth display, and what does the display show about the one displaying? I find myself asking such questions, wondering about the lives of those concerned and what I now will never know about them. The choice is not mine to make, of course; the materials are not mine to handle at this point, and I have to respect the choices of those whose they are. (I recall some of the readings I have done in CCC, and I remain convinced by them.) But there is a part of me that will burn to know what I will never be able to know on this side of the grave.

I have to wonder who will ask questions of me after I have gone and what answers they will be able to find after I am no longer able to answer them mouth to ear and face to face. What I have left in this webspace will be available, I know, an archive that once established is like to endure long. But of my other writings, I know not what to say. Some, perhaps, will persist; I have a few things in print or on their way to being in print, and someone may at some point read them. Of my journals and other papers, though, what will endure, and what will be done with them, and what will be made of them, I do not know. But it is a thing that I will have to consider, and I think I am not the only one.

20140825.0630

The weekend just past was not the best for me, as could be guessed from the annoying brevity of my posts. For various reasons, I found myself less able to write than I prefer, a situation I found vexatious and which colored the rest of the days' events. Already, however, I feel better in that regard; I feel more able to write, and that gives me some hope and confidence for the day ahead.

How much of either I will need, I do not know. It is a teaching day, and I will be going in early so that I can more effectively mark papers. I am not recording grades, as such, but I will need to see what my students' writing looks like so that I can push them as they need to be pushed. If it follows the usual pattern, the proofreading will improve but the content and argumentation will not.

As a teaching day, and what looks like will be a long one, it is not necessarily a difficult thing to face. I have been at the front of the college classroom since 2006, after all, and after eight years of doing the work, I am relatively sure of my material and my professional identity. I may still be a bit behind in my readings, but only a bit; my information is not so far out of date yet that it does not apply.

I am aided in keeping current by the fact that I am contributing to those emergent understandings. I received word today that the issue of CCC in which I am to be published is going to print soon; I will have proofs before long. I may also have a chance at getting another book chapter out, although that will take a bit more work. And I have work for conferences yet to attend to, so I am still on the front edge of my field.

Less formally, I contribute to disciplinary knowledge in this webspace and others. My efforts for the Tales after Tolkien Society blog, Travels in Genre and Medievalism, are a bit slower than is best, perhaps (if you are interested in contributing, let me know), but they continue, as do those for a professional social network and other writing work I do. So there is that to consider.

Today, then, I face my regular work bolstered by a better feeling informed by my resumed ability to write--and that ability finds support intrinsic and extrinsic. All that remains for me to do is to seize upon it and use it in such a way as positions me to support those who depend upon me, two in particular, while balancing the other responsibilities I have to them. There is nothing about which I need worry; it is not as if I am the only one facing such a thing, and others appear to manage without trouble. Surely if they can do so, I can do so; surely I have the wherewithal to make it happen...

20140721.0720

Along the way back from Texas to Sherwood Cottage yesterday, my wife and I talked about my journal-keeping. As I think I have noted, I have kept a journal for some years, switching from gathered legal pad pages to inexpensive bound volumes in spring 2005 and upgrading from them to nice leather-bound, gilt-edged volumes while I lived in the Best of the Boroughs. (Brooklyn treated me well; I feel obliged to sing its praises even living away from it.) I am nearing the end of another such volume, the twenty-fifth in just over nine years (I did not say I was good at keeping a journal), and as I want to continue to keep one, I have to see about procuring a successor volume. And that means I have to think about what type of volume I want for the next volume, either to maintain my current practice or to change it, and if to change it, how to do so.

Determining how best to proceed requires that I contemplate what I want to do with my journals. It is a task to which I am giving attention...in the journal. But similar questions obtain here; how ought I to proceed with the entries on this blogroll, and to what purpose do I make the posts that I make? In answering the latter and more fundamental first (because it is more important, and it is easier), I look back at the earliest entry in this webspace. In it, I write of the same kind of impetus that prompted my switch in journal-writing: the desire to offer my comments in a socially-privileged form. What I had been doing before, making status updates (now lost) on a vanity site (that still exists but that I do not maintain as I ought to do), seemed no longer to suffice for my purposes. Although it was not until late last year that I began to make daily or near-daily posts (and some of those, I admit, are made more to post daily than to post well), there seemed to be a difference in presentation that pushed me to do a better job of writing for this blog. If nothing else, it has equipped me to better carry out the work I do for the Tales after Tolkien Society here.

So has the work in public intellectualism--if I can call it that--begun early in this blogroll and continued intermittently throughout. Whether or not it has done any good for me to offer summaries and responses to the piece I have read in, say, CCC, College English, the New York Times, PMLA, and Profession, I do not know. They have helped me to better understand what I have read, certainly, and that has helped me to be better in the classroom, but I am not sure that they have been of benefit in fostering conversation about the kinds of things that need to be discussed better than they generally are. I have tried to encourage it as I can; it has been another of the standing projects of this blog that I do so. I have to wonder, however, at the effectiveness of it. Perhaps it is another thing at which I need to keep working. Perhaps I have my answer to the earlier point, as well; I ought to keep doing what I have been doing, hoping that it will make some kind of breakthrough and practicing for other writing venues whether it does or not.

20140718.0730

I wrote yesterday of working to catch up on my journal reading (among other things). I continued to work at it after making the blog post (in and among writing pieces for online distribution, of which one is here; yes, I engage in shameless pluggery). As I did so, I read Chris M. Anson's 2013 CCCC Chair's Address, "Climate Change," in CCC 65.2 (December 2013): 324-44. (How much catching up I have yet to do should be obvious.) Despite what the title connotes, the piece is not about meteorological concerns; instead, it treats the climate of higher education. While it does invoke the doomsday metaphors associated with the emergence and explosion of online learning (such as are invoked here), it does not stop at them as so many other pieces do. Rather, it offers through a pleasant, quiet narrative a palliative for them; Anson calls upon the reader (and the earlier listener, since the piece as printed is taken from a convention address) to emphasize in the classroom what cannot be gotten anywhere except the classroom. The raw information many introductory classes provide is available elsewhere. Conversations, deep and engaging multi-party conversations, can be had online. But what cannot be had outside the classroom are the hands-on things required of work in many of the sciences or of the arts; what cannot be had outside the classroom are the immersion in the learning environment, the consideration of learning as learning, the immediacy of feedback verbal and otherwise. In reminding the reader of such things and suggesting that they can be emphasized, Anson offers hope, and that is of remarkable value when job sites speak of the doom of schools and senators call the humanities wasteful.

There is the problem, though, that it is not only the teacher who is responsible for making the classroom a place where such things can happen. Yes, the teacher does have to provide a space in which inquiry can happen, a time in which students can work through things in their heads and in collaboration. But the students have to be willing to make the engagement. They have to be willing to ask questions and to voice ideas that may end up not working well. And they are sometimes not. I have had classes in which students sat and stared blankly at me when I asked them for comment; on occasion, one or two would tell me that they wanted me to lecture at them. (I have worked to forestall the desire by labeling the practice an "infodump," as if what I offer them is the digested remains of what I have learned, squeezed out into an insufficiently critical receptacle and flushed away at the earliest opportunity. Metaphors matter.) When I have refused to "give the answers," students have complained, and I have found myself chastised by my institutional hierarchs for the complaint. When I have given them what they "want," they have not really learned, and I have reinforced the very problems that typify my working conditions. Such students view my class as a hurdle, concordant with Anson's assertion, and in the fifteen weeks I see them, the forty-five hours their faces and mine point at one another, there is not much I can do to correct more than a decade of carefully inculcated instrumentalist views. I continue to work at it, certainly, because there are always students who are willing to engage, but I only have so much of myself to give in the classroom; there are other claims upon me that supersede those my students make.

I do what I can. I can only hope it will be enough.

20140612.0837

As I was contemplating the grotesque inequities of the world yesterday evening, a thought occurred to me regarding the aspersion with which those who work in the academic humanities are held. One of the criticisms leveled against us--and I write "us" for the very good reason that I work in the academic humanities, if not so well or so long as have others--is that what we write is unintelligible to the layperson. We write removed from the realities of those outside the ivory tower, speaking each only to each and judging ourselves based upon how well we make writing that nobody will read. We write to impress one another, using words nobody else would consider and stringing them together in sentences long and torturous such that nobody else can stand to look at them, and then we condemn as uneducated Philistines those who are not willing to endure the pain of going through what we write to see the truths therein.

I will not say that there is not truth in such accusations. I am minded of a piece by Ian Barnard, "The Ruse of Clarity" (CCC 61.3 [February 2010]: 434-51), in which the author asserts that clarity cannot be had in writing that wrestles to make sense of difficult concepts. The work of the academic humanities is the identification and interpretation of sign and symbol, searching therein for images of truths of human experience, and all of them are difficult concepts; it is not to be wondered at, then, that the writing that seeks to uncover them, to walk the reader through the process of arriving at them (for the writing of the academic humanities is didactic at its heart), is a challenge to read. And those of us in the field do write for others in the field to read. It is those others in the field who offer us jobs and promotions, who offer us opportunities to go to other places and see what can be seen; of course we write to impress them.

We do so just as accountant write to other accountants, engineers write to other engineers, physicians write to other physicians, and so forth. Yet we are condemned for our doing so, while other specialists, not more professionalized than we, not more credentialed or embedded in their work than we, not more called to their work on their part of The Work than we, are not. It is the case that those of us working in the academic humanities need to do a better job of making our work accessible to those outside our fields of study, as do those working in other fields. We do not do enough outreach, really; we do not do enough to justify to the others from whom we derive enough support and sustenance to be able to work on The Work instead of working directly to make our food and goods. But it is also the case that those outside the field need to consider why it is that they hold us to a different standard than others whose knowledge is ultimately not more arcane than ours, whose work may be or more immediate practical benefit but which does not work to understand the activities that make us who we are.

20140119.0719

This afternoon, my wife's coworkers are hosting a baby shower for her.  Several members of the family have made the trek from their natural state or hard by the meanest of greens or in the lands that gave rise to Cimmeria to this place where the wind comes sweeping down the plain to celebrate the upcoming birth of our child (due at the end of March, thank you) and the burden my wife carries in nurturing the child within her body.  It is good to see that so many others are excited about the child; my beloved wife is working hard to support the baby within her and is enduring much on the child's behalf, and she deserves praise for doing so.

(I do not mean to say by this that those who choose not to have children are deserving of censure by dint of that choice.  They may well deserve censure for other reasons; many people do.  But the informed and deliberate decision not to have a child despite the biological and societal pressures to do that very thing is also praiseworthy.  I do not think I need to seek forgiveness, though, for lauding my wife.  I think I would very much need to seek forgiveness for not lauding her--and not just for her motherhood.)

I am aware of the shower as a distinctly feminine space, however.  The event it celebrates, although yet to occur, is one with which women are most intimately concerned, and understandably.  It is the woman's body that suffers in the process and the woman's body that is put to the nurturing of the life hopefully released into the world thereby; that women are the ones to celebrate the thing in which they are the principal actors is sensible and appropriate.  And in this place, the separation of gender roles along "traditional"* lines is far more in force than in The City or in other places I have known or known of; showers is fer wimmin, or some such thing, and several of the comments that I have overheard bandied about have indicated that the men who have come and are coming along with the celebrants are not expected to attend themselves.  "Burping and farting" seem to be the expected activities, and they are to take place somewhere else entirely.

That this is so forces me to pose some questions, and their nature demands that I attempt to do so delicately, for I really do wish to know, and I truly am curious, but I realize that I can easily come off as the ass in this, and I do not intend to do so.  (I know the sentence is ridiculously complex.  So is what it tries to express.  See Barnard, "The Ruse of Clarity.")  Have I, accustomed to enjoying privilege without necessarily explicitly exerting it, found myself in a position to have had my privilege checked?  Or, rather, am I experiencing in my reaction to the event (which reaction I admit to be childish and petty, particularly since I benefit from the event in several ways) some vanishingly small semblance of the systematic and too-much institutionalized discrimination those in unadvisedly marginalized groups experience on a regular if not continual basis?  (Please do read the question in full before castigating me for it; the qualifiers are in place for a reason.)  And that leaves aside what it says of me that I can and do frame my experience in such terms, something with which I still struggle...

*I use the term advisedly because I know full well that it is problematic--and I know that some who read this know enough to call my on my error if I do not tread carefully with it.  I am aware enough of the problem to be chastised if I do not act with at least the awareness of it, even if I lack a good solution to it.

20131017.0926

Having taught writing for a number of years, I am familiar with the call made by many composition textbooks to find a useful place and set of circumstances in which to write (and I have a piece forthcoming in CCC that speaks to places of writing).  I am also familiar with counter-claims asserting that relying on any one place or set of circumstances to write ultimately serves as an excuse not to do so; the place cannot be reached, nor the circumstances attained, and so the writing is allowed not to happen.  I understand the counter-claim, and I have seen it prove true for many people, but I nonetheless have my own places of writing, my own circumstances--and the different writing tasks I do call for different sets.

For example, the blogging that I try to do every morning (and to which I attend later today than I would prefer) happens in my home, in the part of Sherwood Cottage that my wonderful wife and I have set up as our shared office space (with thanks to our wonderful folklorist friend who suggested the arrangement).  It faces away from the door and from windows, minimizing distractions from outside (there are already too damned many available on a computer), focusing my attention on the generation of this kind of text.  And, as now, I write my blogged essays in the quiet, whether of the early morning when others are asleep or later after others have gone to work and I have not yet had to.

Blogging is not the only writing that I do, however.  Evaluating student work involves much writing for me--I leave many comments for the improvement of my students' work and, hopefully, of the thinking that underlies it, although I know that many will not read what I write in such a way that they can benefit from it.  That writing, I hate to do at home (although I have been having to do so more frequently of late).  Instead, I prefer to find myself in the library or in my office, hunched over a school-supplied desk with papers spread out or staring at a screen and navigating document after document after document to try to piece together what students have written and to respond to it in a way that maybe, maybe, one or two of them will look at and realize how to make things better.

It is true that I am not always diligent in my writing.  There have been days I have not blogged.  I certainly have not been as good about getting my grading done as I ought to be.  And I suppose that it is in some part the case that I have failed to be as diligent as I should be because I have not been in the conducive circumstances.  But there have been many times I have been at home and have not blogged, and there have been others I have been at my office and have not graded, so it is not only place and circumstance that permit the writing to take place.  The will to do so, to look about and within and tie the two together in knotted strands that are thence woven onto the page, is sometimes lacking even in the best of situations.  More than any other concern, it is that will that is needed--and the cultivation of it is ongoing.

20130831.1411

Having resumed reading pieces from the New York Times the other day, largely because I once again have access to its online version, I decided to do a bit more such reading to support my ongoing writing on this blog and in other places.  That led me to Tyler Cowen's 31 August 2013 article, "Who Will Prosper in the New World," which had just released when I looked at it.

In the article, Prof. Cowen asserts that the increasingly automated and always-accessibly-online means of production and transmission will not benefit all persons equally, but certain groups will do particularly well.  Cowen lists the groups, explaining why and how each of those listed will find special benefit from the direction he sees matters going.  The article is reported as an adaptation of material from a book, Average is Over, and it is perhaps one with the adaptation that the explanations are not as detailed as they perhaps could be to be truly informative.

And there is a problem in the worldview that seems to underlie Prof. Cowen's assertions.  The article seems to take as given that the increasing mechanization of production of materials and information is a good thing; while I am happy to have access to diverse information and am on record as a supporter of work in the digital humanities (sometimes despite the words of far more senior scholars), I do not have quite so optimistic a view of the encroaching computerization of all things as Cowen seems to have.  Indeed, I view what he asserts as being good things as dehumanizing--and as a scholar of the humanities, I do not know that I can endorse those things that tend to the excision of what is human, and potentially some of the best parts of what it is to *be* human.

For instance, Cowen comments on online coursework, using Coursera as his example (I focus on his comments about teaching and about evaluating writing because they are areas in which I may claim some expertise).  While Cowen points out that the motivated will be those who benefit from such coursework, it may be argued that the presence of a professor in the classroom, of a living human being to whom one is accountable, does much to motivate people who might otherwise not be motivated and who, in finding such motivation, end up discovering a greater purpose for themselves than that of which they otherwise would have conceived.  And it is also the case that those who have already proven themselves to be good students find it difficult to maintain motivation in online courses.  Steven D. Krause reports himself as being one such in his contribution to the June 2013 issue of CCC.  Presumably, as someone who holds a professorship and was therefore good at the thing called school, and who describes himself as interested in the course for several reasons (689), he would be one of the more motivated participants.  Yet this was not the case; he reports that his interest wavered soon, and in large part because of the nature of the course itself (690-94).  The same was true for Jeff Rice, who notes that "Even with eagerness to learn about MOOCs by doing them, even with an overall interest in music [the subject of the course], and even with the minimal requirement of two to three paragraphs per writing assignment and relative ease of watching video lectures created in advance, [he] failed to follow through on the course" (699).  Again, someone with reasons to be motivated and a demonstrated past history of being a motivated student--for Rice is also among the professoriate--has difficulty maintaining motivation in the absence of actual human contact.  Rice asserts that it is a lack of emotional involvement that drove his failure in the class (702)--and physical presence and direct connection between people, such as that within a well-run traditional classroom, fosters emotional involvement in a way that no more remote medium can.  As Krause notes, "a textbook is not the same as a teacher," and education is not simply the provision of information (694); it is a series of interactions among people, and the removal of people makes those interactions less possible.  Cowen's assertion that we will have the best education ever available because of the ease of content delivery, that teaching will be better for being less human and more digitized, is therefore not entirely sound, and I must wonder if the rest of his statements are similarly suspect.

Perhaps it is because I have read as much science fiction as I have in my life that I have the opinions I have regarding the values and dangers of thinking devices.  I nearly cut my teeth on Asimov, and if I am going to be living in a world where the machines are doing most of the work of the mind, I want at the very least to see that those machines have something like the Three Laws, or their corollary Zeroth Law, built into them.  And even with them in place, one only need look to the Spacers to see what an overreliance on the machines will foster...

Works Cited

• Cowen, Tyler. "Who Will Prosper in the New World." NYTimes.com. New York Times, 31 August 2013. Web. 31 August 2013.
• Krause, Steven D. "MOOC Response about 'Listening to World Music.'" CCC 64.6 (June 2013): 689-95. Print.
• Rice, Jeff. "What I Learned in MOOC." CCC 64.6 (June 2013): 695-703. Print.

20130214.1230

Yes, I know that it is Valentine's Day.  I have already told mine that she is my Valentine--not that she needed the reminder.

This blog post is not about that.

It will be no secret to those few who read this blog with even as much regularity as I update it that I devote quite a bit of thought to my teaching.  The argument could even be made that I think about it too much, that I am wasting mental effort on something that is not my "real" work of humanities research--or that I am wasting my life on several things that do not matter ("Why do we need to teach this crap, anyway?  And what good is it to look at a poem like that?  Who cares?").

I am not going to address the issue of such arguments at the moment; I bring them up only to acknowledge their existence and use them as context for what I do want to discuss: a perhaps not so strange idea I had about my teaching.

One of the things that I tend to do in my classrooms is to bring in examples of the kinds of writing I want from my students.  In my remedial and developmental classes, I am obliged to explicitly teach expository modes such as description, narration, and contrast.  I therefore bring in passages from my own understanding of English-language literary canon and more mainstream publication that I find illustrate those modes.  In my more "normal" first-year composition classes, I bring in examples of short literary-critical essays, so that students can actually look at what one ought to look like, rather than trying to guess based on preconceived notions that are almost always wrong.

In my technical writing classes, I bring in examples of technical writing that I come across in my own (entirely too slow) readings.  Sometimes this is in the form of committee reports published in Profession, CCC, College English, and the like.  Sometimes it is in the form of reports and proposals I have had to do, although redacted--there are some things about which it is not appropriate for students to know...

One of the things that I hope to point out to the technical writing students with the examples is that technical writing ought to be clear and explicitly instructive.  It focuses primarily on the efficient transfer of information, rather than presenting knotty concepts that tease the reader to think through them or attempting to foster a specific range of aesthetic response (as much literary writing does).  And that means that it ideally supplements clear and lucid presentations of evidence, solid explanations of how that evidence functions, and an explanation of any unusual terms in it with clear graphics and paratextual features (subject headings and sub-headings, for instance) that guide reading effectively and facilitate quick reference.  Sentences will be of mixed length, usually simple in structure; parenthetical phrases and subordinate clauses are minimized.  Vocabulary will be of a somewhat but not fully formal register, with jargon in place but (in most cases) defined either upon first use or in a glossary at the end of the work.

It occurred to me as I was looking over materials for my play of the Legend of the Five Rings RPG that the gaming materials are themselves fine examples of technical writing.  The core book for the current edition of the game offers a fair bit of data--simple explanations of game-play mechanics and examples of the kind of narratives that drive the game*--with explications of game play and discussions of how the core rules interact with themselves.  Graphics abound, including art meant to impart understanding of cultural norms and mores and tables that neatly encapsulate the evidence that is described in detail in the text, and the information throughout is neatly divided by clearly distinguished hierarchical chapter and subject headings and sub-headings.  They join an extensive index in facilitating quick reference, and that index joins a substantial glossary that clarifies a great many terms that are unfamiliar to those newly approaching the game--the jargon of the RPG experience.

I have nursed the idea for some time that I ought to do some kind of paper on the topic (have I ruined my ability to do so by making this blog post?)--sometime, when I have time and the other projects I already have on deck are done.  But I had the thought within the past day or two that I might use the game as an example of technical writing for my classes.  I am already quite the nerd--who else would teach English?--so that I would risk little abrogation of my teacherly identity by bringing in such materials, and the example would serve to highlight the extent of the socio-cultural space which technical writing can occupy.

The only question I have, then, is about the manner in which the material would be received, both by students and my colleagues.  Would I be excluding students yet more by bringing in materials from a sub-culture which I occupy but which many if not most of those in my classroom do not?  Would my colleagues look at me (even more than many do now--"You're young; you'll feel like I do when you have some experience") as frivolous?  Should I worry about either?

I welcome the input of those of you who do look at this from time to time, however many you may be.

*I suppose that comments about this will be required at some point, but one of these per day is enough for me, I think.

20121011.0947

I have complained repeatedly about academic journals getting to me late, and the September 2012 CCC did not give me cause to stop; I did not receive it until the first of this month.  I know that I have been reading slowly to only now be discussing it, but I am reading it, and I do find that I have something to say about it--or, for the moment, one article in it.

That article is "Institutional Ethnography as Materialist Framework for Writing Program Research and the Faculty-Staff Work Standpoints Project," by Michelle LaFrance and Melissa Nicolas.  I was immediately drawn to the article by its authorship; I studied under Nicolas for a time, early in my graduate career (I am not so old as the phrasing makes me sound), and I regard the time working under her direction as well spent.  Accordingly, I was interested in seeing what she had been up to, and I read the article she co-authored eagerly as the subway dragged me away from home and to the office.

In the article, LaFrance and Nicolas discuss institutional ethnography (IE), a method for investigating how workplaces form themselves and situate the people who work in them, arguing that it is a valuable means for interrogating institutional practices that are often overlooked.  They outline the ways in which IE works to point out how institutional practices differ for people who perform different functions within an organization; they call it situated variability.  To do so, they give a brief overview of the history of IE and of its undergirding concepts before situating it in relation to already-existing methodologies.  Throughout, they deploy examples from their own experiences within institutions, using them to develop a particular ethos that speaks well to the common audience of the journal, and making the article a particularly effective call to use IE as another tool for those involved in the teaching of writing to look into how the context in which they teach influences the teaching they do.

As good an article as it is, though, there is a point at which I find myself calling the piece into question.  LaFrance and Nicolas comment that they are "drawn to IE because it takes into account this situated variability of experience within institutions, casting individuals as active and interested, mindfully negotiating the competing priorities and material conditions of their work day" (133).  In the comment, they seem to make assumptions about the faculty and staff of an institution, assumptions which many people hope are true but which are not always the case.  For it is not true that all of the participants in an institution are mindful of their work or particularly interested in it.

It has not seldom been my experience that there are people working in schools who are the very models of those types held up by opponents of teachers' unions and public school systems, those who come into the school simply to draw a paycheck and not with the idea of helping students to make their lives better.  I have seen it among the tenured professoriate.  (To be fair, many of them are invested in the development of knowledge--which is an aspect of the university that many among the public fail to recognize as being vitally important to the mission of the academy generally.  But that is another discussion.)  I have seen it among people traditionally classified as lecturers (full-time continuing faculty off of the tenure track).  I have very much seen it among the swelling corps of adjunct and contingent faculty as they scramble among classes and institutions to make enough money to live.  I have seen it among the staff, who do as little as they can get away with.  I have certainly seen it among administration, for whom the institution becomes a gathering of dollars and cents rather than a means to develop and augment good sense.  And I see it among all too many students, who paradoxically strive to be passive in their "educations," waiting to be short-term deposit accounts or pre-paid debit cards in the banking model, with "learning" deposited into them and rapidly spent on "the test."

It is true that such people are not the only ones to be found.  I do not know if they are the majority.  But I know that they are there (O! how I know!).  Something in the impetus LaFrance and Nicolas cite therefore sits ill with me, even as they make quite the case for deploying IE.

I shall have to give it more thought.

Work Cited
LaFrance, Michelle, and Melissa Nicolas. "Institutional Ethnography as Materialist Framework for Writing Program Research and the Faculty-Staff Work Standpoints Project." CCC 64.1 (September 2012): 130-50. Print.