20140430.0710

Hooray! I got my pay today!
My being broke did flee away!
Yet there are bills I have to pay!
But still, I got my pay today!

The rent is due; I cut a check.
Insurance, too, and, what the heck,
My student loans, pains in the neck,
And credit cards, lest credit wreck,

I paid them all, and what is more,
There is actually some left o'er!
But there's not much, so I am poor.
So there's more over which to pore.

But, dammit, I got paid today!
Despite the bills, I have to say
That there is happiness in pay--
I take my pleasure where I may.

20140429.0754

The run-up to exams and to conference travel continues. Yesterday, I sent copies of my exams to the school's testing services so that, at the appropriate times, students who need separate accommodations can have them. For the rest, I am waiting a bit to print exams; I do want to make sure there is not so much in the way of advance notice of individual, specific questions that students can more or less cheat on the thing. And I suppose that means I need to have one more quiz in each class, just to give the students a last bit of practice on the things I expect from them next week--and that means I have more grading to do. Joy.

Preparation for conference travel is ongoing. Sherwood Cottage happens to have a nice little shuttlepod ready for launch--after it gets a bit of maintenance (it is time for the car to get an oil change). I probably ought to get a haircut, too. But the paper I mean to present at the International Congress on Medieval Studies is written and ready to go; I need to print it, but that will not take long, so I am not at all worried about it. I may need to whip up some kind of proposal for one or two of the professional societies in which I participate, but I do not anticipate that taking too much time or presenting too much trouble.

As I write, Ms. 8 is sitting next to me, sleeping her little baby sleep. That is to say that here eyes are closed and she is not quite screaming, but she is making some entertaining grunting sounds, as if she speaks in dream, and at odd moments, she acts as though startled. I imagine that she will need more direct attention before too long--and I am happy to offer it. If nothing else, my doing so now allows my lovely wife to get a bit of more or less uninterrupted sleep, and I think she needs it. Again, our persistent schedules work out in favor of a division of labor. If this will continue to work is not clear.

As I write also, this place where Sherwood Cottage sits seeks to live up to its description in song. I know that I refer often to the lyric, but I am not aware of many other things that actually discuss this place. I suppose I could invoke Steinbeck; a copy of Grapes of Wrath graces my bookshelves, certainly, but what the Joads endure hardly argues in favor of the place. Still, perhaps I ought to see about broadening my field of reference. It would not do for me to grow too formulaic, although there are certainly uses for formulae in writing. Patterns set up expectations, which can then be employed directly or exploited through deviation. And that greatly helps the writing.

20140428.0644

Over this past weekend, my wife and I hosted my parents at Sherwood Cottage. It was good to get to see them, and it was particularly good to see them with Ms. 8. I am glad to know that they love her as they do, and I am glad to have gotten to renew some of the connection I have had with them.

Now, however, the weekend is done, and it is time to return to the working world. For me, this means a return to the front of the classroom for a week before exams--and that means, too, that I am doing some kind of exam prep with my students and that I will need to grade the papers they turned in just before the weekend began. (That I did not grade over the weekend may be excused, I think.) Some of the work will involve me sending copies of my exams elsewhere, since I have students who need such things done, and I do much for my students. Fortunately, I already have the exams drafted in full; they are ready to be distributed to students, although I am perhaps not as ready to grade them. (I am never really ready to grade. That part of the job is not unlike jumping into cold water--without the reinvigoration.)

The grading will take place on a bit of an...interesting schedule. Aside from the irregularity imposed by some students taking the exam at other times than those scheduled, I will have to negotiate it among my attendance at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. I am having a proctor cover the Friday exam I am scheduled to give (and I have thanked the person in question repeatedly and profusely), and I believe grades for the term are going to be due at about the time I get back from my trip. It should be interesting to try to get everything done that will need to get done in the days I will be at home and the days I will be away as the term ends. I will, at least, be done with things for a while afterwards, as I am not teaching over the summer this year. (It remains odd, although I have done it before. But I will not be traveling this time, or not as much as I did last; there will be a conference trip, but only the one, and my paychecks are still going to come in as they ought.) I will be able to focus on my work on The Work and on attending to Ms. 8, both of which have decided attractions for me; it will be interesting to try my hand at being a house-husband for a while.

All I have to do is get through the next couple of weeks. Things ought to slow down a bit at that point (although there will be other people coming over and staying at Sherwood Cottage), and I ought to be able to get caught up on things at last. It is something for which I am quite eager.

20140427.0735

A band from Topeka sang in the 70s
Of commanding the lightning's hand
Of a storm rolling in that might be the end
It may not have been rain of which they spoke
Whether they knew it or not

Rolling clouds and driving winds
Hail and ice and thunder's parent
Are not always meteorological
They may not have uniformed workers
Wearing gold braid on sleeves and on shoulders
Tracking them and tracing them

Storms of rain and hail sweep across the plain
Driven by the song-noted winds
But they are as nothing to the storm that is coming
And the lightning's hand will strike where
A mightier bids it

20140426.0718

My wife and I are more or less naturally on different sleep schedules. I have repeatedly noted being a morning person--even if I do sleep in from time to time. My wife is a night owl. Early in our relationship, this caused some unpleasant friction; we had a fair bit of time to spend together, but she would start grumpy and I would get cranky. Over time, we have negotiated the difference, and it has worked out fairly well for us.

The difference has had benefits with Ms. 8, too. Because I am up in the morning, I am able to take care of a number of things that my wife had been doing so that she can take care of Ms. 8 later on. Because my wife is up in the evening, I can find my bed fairly early many nights, so I can get several hours of sleep without interruption. As it happens, there are only a few hours where my wife and I are both naturally or habitually out, so there are only a few hours during which caring for Ms. 8 requires particular effort. My wife and I both get almost enough sleep to be comfortable, and actually enough to be fully functional, and that has been helpful over these past months.

I am sure that there is some kind of metaphorical reading possible in there, something that conforms to somewhat traditional associations of masculinity and the sun, femininity and the moon, and the accord between them as key to the stability of the cosmos. It would not be the first time that the home has been read as the universe in miniature, of course, nor that geocentrism has governed the iteration of an idea. And to consider such a thing, I have to wonder how Ms. 8 fits into the celestial systems. If I am the sun, and my lovely wife the moon, what planet is Ms. 8? Is she Terra, slowly building from initial trauma to the ability to bear life? Is she Venus--a question I ask after having changed certain of her diapers? Is she Neptune in an extension of the pun on her name? Or, rather, is she some new world altogether?

Such questions are the kinds of things I contemplate at odd times, and, truly, most times are odd. It is for such reasons that life in the academy attracts me as it does; only in the storied and derided ivory tower are such musings not only accepted but encouraged. Despite my uncomfortable chair in the basement or the lobby level of the edifice (and why ivory, that tower?), I am attracted to my place within it. Thus I continue to seek a more permanent position in it than I have at present, hoping that I can find a better room than I now have and not have to move again.

20140425.0658

Hurry, hurry, hurry!
Don't miss the sale!
Christmas is only eight months away!
Shop now and beat the rush!
Shop now and get the deals!
Shop now and we'll save you money!

You want to save money, right?
You want to save people, too?
You do know you really can't do both?
We can only cut prices by cutting labor costs,
And we can't cut what we pay at the top, right?
That'd be un-American.

And why would you want to save people?
If they are in trouble, they did it to themselves.
If they get saved, they will compete with you.
They will take some and so you will have less.
They will have a thing and so you will have to get a better thing.
Come buy! We have all the things!
Brightest and newest!
Show that you have it to spend by spending it!
Otherwise, nobody will love you.
You know we only love people for their toys;
The more, the more;
The better, the better;
And better is what costs most.
You get what you pay for,
And you pay for us to tell you to pay for us.

But don't miss the sale.

20140424.0841

I have enjoyed teaching this term, largely because I have gotten to teach in my area; I have gotten to teach Survey of British Literature I, which spans roughly 450 to 1785. I admit that I am not at my best across the whole thirteen-hundred year span, but I do pretty well, and I enjoy myself thoroughly. It helps that I have a good set of students, including one who was recently accepted into graduate school. (She will be concentrating in contemporary American literature, in which she means to focus more narrowly on African-American literature and cultural studies. It is outside my area, but for those of you who are up on such things, information about any reliably scholarly references or standard works would be welcome; I would love to pass them along.) Congenial materials and congenial students make things work a damned sight better than their lack.

As part of that teaching, I had the pleasure of covering materials by the inimitable Jonathan Swift, whose Modest Proposal is standard reading in high schools and colleges, and whose Gulliver's Travels is often given to children. Indeed, I worked with both (treating only the fourth part of the latter, given time constraints). In doing so, I necessarily treated the related ideas of cannibalism and anthropophagy--people-eating. The shock-value of A Modest Proposal comes, of course, from the assertion that eating year-old children is a good idea, both gustatory and economic, and in the fourth part of Gulliver's Travels, the eponymous narrator is only able to leave the Houyhnhnms by sailing a boat made of Yahoo--feral human--skins and caulked with Yahoo tallow. Both narrators, the one explicitly and the other tacitly through modeling actions, engage the idea that the consumption of people is a right and just thing--and that has interesting implications for postcolonial analysis of the works.

I am not a Swift scholar; my emphasis is on earlier works. But I do know that Swift is intimately engaged in colonialist practices perpetrated by England and the United Kingdom on Ireland, and that those colonialist practices were echoed--admittedly with some modifications--in the English colonial efforts in the Americas and elsewhere. One of the ways that those later colonists justified their destruction of the people they encountered and the ways of life those people practiced was the assertion that those people were cannibalistic; eliminating them eliminated a visceral threat, as, aside from the vore community, being eaten, reduced to fodder only, is a primal human fear and an abnegation of sentient identity. In Swift's works, though, the colonist presence, the center from which Otherness and therefore fitness for subjugation or abjection is typically determined in colonialist discourse, is the perpetrator or proponent of anthropophagy. The usual trope is inverted utterly--and the inversion reads as authentic, representative of the observable world. What this implies, I leave to others to discuss for themselves (I have already gone over the idea with my students), but I cannot help but think that the relevance of the inversion is part of what should serve to keep Swift among those works studied as standard. (What does is that "we've always done it that way," which is a crappy reason.)

20140423.0702

I do make a fair bit of reference to my daughter in this webspace, calling her Ms. 8 in a bit of a pun on her name. (I have also been asked about who Ms. 8 is.) I think it a nice way to do so without oversaturating my writing with her name--or oversaturating the internet with it. (I have expressed reservations about doing so before.) And as I have looked at other references people make to their children online, I am glad I have taken the tactic I have taken. The Foglios of Girl Genius refer to theirs as Experiments 1 and 2, for example, which seems like the kind of thing that will come to bite them in the ass later. (I can see the adolescent angst now: "So I'm just an experiment to you?" And I can see it growing much darker entirely too quickly.) The Reluctant Father denies the child the dignity of capitalization--but offers it to the dog. Neither strikes me as being particularly appropriate or helpful.

Two examples out of the plethora of child-references on the internet do not a representative sample make, I know, and I cannot say that they are in fact representative of trends; I would have to do a lot more to look into (heavily gendered as feminine) parent-blogging to be able to do so, and I do not know that I want to do such a thing. But they do serve as counterpoints, even if they are not representative of overall tendencies. If a pseudonym is used, it needs to be one that is actually respectful of the little person made pseudonymous, and "Ms. 8" at least reflects the name of the person concerned. (Indeed, I take the view that pseudonyms should reflect the actual names of the pseudonymous somehow, even when they are used to replace the names of protected populations in research studies. If any of you have information about the practice, I would appreciate it.) And if the real name of the person is deployed, it needs to be handed well--not in a way that suggests disdain. (Unless that really is the point of reference. But I am not sure that such a thing is good for the kid involved--at least not until the kid is a fair bit older.)

And, while I am on the topic, a bit about Ms. 8's progress. She is growing nicely, seemingly larger by the hour. Her appetite is healthy; she takes around four ounces every three to four hours (including one in the midst of my writing this piece), which may well be a total volume greater than that of her body. The other ends of her digestion seem to be working as expected, too, something to which I can most certainly attest. Too, her lungs, about which we were concerned due to her early arrival a little more than two months ago, are in fine form--something else to which I can certainly attest. Whether or not pictures of her will pop up in this space, I do not know. I think it unlikely, given how little I use the things generally...those who need to see her will. (And probably many who do not; I am a proud poppa, somehow.)

20140422.0800

It was at around this time last year that I found out I was going to be out of work for the summer and began the frantic hunt for a job. As it happened, I was recalled to the school from which I had been laid off improperly, and I think that the union of which I was part forced the institution not only to bring me back (at least for a term) but to offer me a sabbatical for which I had applied not long before getting word that I would be laid off. But the experience was still markedly unpleasant for me, not the kind of thing that I care to repeat, and in the time since, I have continued to scramble to secure what I hope will be continuing employment--still without success. (I do have a comfortable spot at present, with better benefits than many contingent faculty can claim and the assurance that I have another year of paychecks upcoming, and I do not complain, but I do not forget that I can be not renewed.)

I have been trying to work to view things in a better light, to be more optimistic. (This is largely on behalf of Ms. 8, who does not need a depressed daddy.) I am not always successful, as those who know me know, and I imagine I have given evidence of that from time to time in this webspace. But I was considering the issue as I wrote in my journal last night; I sometimes look back over the older volumes of my journals to see what record I have left of who I was and what I was thinking in years past. Knowing that I have not always been good about keeping up with the journal-writing is hardly flattering, and as I looked back over the volumes I have penned, I confronted that knowledge again.

I also saw that, as I had worked to address my then-pending joblessness, I had stumbled into unexpected benefit. If nothing else, the experience has pushed me to do a lot more writing. Work in this webspace got much more frequent and much more extensive beginning at the end of April 2013. My journal-writing has been more regular and fuller, as well. Too, I have been much more productive as a scholar, churning out paper after paper for conferences and book chapters, and more such things are on the way. Further, I have gotten a great deal of practice in letter-writing, having sent out at least two hundred cover letters for jobs within academe and outside of it in the solid year I have been really on the job market. (While some of the text has been copied over from letter to letter, much of it has not, and as I have done more things, even the copied stuff has needed adjustment.) Each has helped my writing to get better, and since my livelihood depends largely upon my ability as a writer, any improvement my writing is an improvement in my ability to support Ms. 8 and my Mrs. I regard this as a good thing, indeed.

20140421.0651

The cats eat noisily
Slurping at the special wet food
I put in their bowls
Moving them around so that they scrape upon the floor

I thought cats were supposed to be quiet

They are not the only strange sources of noise
Nobody in the cities talks about how loud the countryside is
And how many sounds come through thin windows at four in the morning
When somebody is lying
Awake and alone
Both wanting to sleep and wanting not to

True quiet is not a lack of noise
It is a lack of caring about the noise
It is not having no sound
But the right sound
Ableist as that may sound