English professors are cool!

I just found this, which may be old news to all y'all, but will be useful in my early Brit survey, in which students must jump through the recitation hoop (a hoop I'm including because I enjoyed doing it years ago):

Collateral damage

My leave ends as of tomorrow at 12:05 pm. Sigh. Got some stuff done, banged out most of a book, and though its chapters do not yet transition one into another, at least the guts are there.

Still, some things became the innocent victims of my full-bore dedication to writing.

* My yard: mowed the lawn maybe 4 times this summer. Never weeded the grass. Raked leaves in the front yard, but never in the back, so that I must have piles of molding blackness under all that snow out there. And speaking of snow, I shoveled two tire-tracks up my driveway every time it snowed, and that's about all. I weeded the garden haphazardly, and watered when I remembered. It's looking a little unkempt around here.

* My festivity: I put up one string of Christmas lights on my porch--didn't climb up on the house to do the whole shebang--and I didn't carve pumpkins, and I didn't put a wreath up in my gable, in fact a brass sun is still shining bravely there.

* My hair: Haven't cut it since April.

* My fingernails: Heh. At least they're UNIFORMLY nubbish. That makes it look intentional.

* My ass: Let us not discuss my ass.

* My record-keeping: Baby books, photographs, journals for Things all utterly forgotten in the past year.

* My cultural awareness: Haven't seen a movie in a year. Except Black Swan, which I saw with a friend, and liked. But then, I have very little to compare it to.

* My professional engagement: I swore off conference papers until I've finished this book, so I haven't even looked at a CFP since last January. Also, haven't attempted to get a poetry reading anywhere in that time.

* My mountains: I hiked twice in the last year, and have not yet XCskied this winter but for one time, and all with the Things, because if I didn't have the Things, my butt was in this chair.

* My good humor: Occasionally, but also

* My sense that my value as a human being was tied to this book. Not sure how that happened, or where along the way. Perhaps just the doing it, the seeing that it could be done, helped me to understand that it's just something one does, not something one is. Hoping to place this book, certainly, and hoping to place it well, but maybe I've finally shed my conviction that I'm a dilettante, a poseur, a fraud. Because I did, in fact, write a book.

Happy new year, all.

Throwing darts

Flavia has been generous in documenting her progress through the process of submitting her book to academic presses. Reading her characteristically insightful accounts of this process has caused me to reflect on something I've started to figure out, maybe, on good days. I have spoken before (though I can't remember when) about the difference for me between publishing academic work and publishing poetry, and about how publishing poetry is just so much less stressful for me--in part, because rejections are (at the level of the professional) so obviously about a lack of aesthetic sympathy between writer and rejecting editor. Some folks are just never going to dig my work, period. Just as there are any number of poets who just don't do it for me. I can't get too worked up about someone not loving one of my poems. It's like throwing darts: sometimes you hit the target of the reader's taste, and sometimes you don't, and if I miss this time I'll just submit to someone else until I hit. Whatever.

But academic publishing has always felt much more objective, more about the inherent quality of the work, to me. The article, or in my case, the book, either succeeds or fails to make its argument, and if it's not accepted, it's because it has failed. However, some experiences over the last years have perhaps softened that perspective: having edited a collection of essays and having rejected a well-known scholar's work because it just didn't fit, having received a blistering reader's report from one journal on an article that was soon after accepted at a top journal in my field, having incurred the utter invective-laced wrath rejection of an editor (who later apologized and accepted) because my article caught him on a bad day.... These experiences have suggested to me that there may be more of the subjective on the academic side of things than I'd been willing to believe before.

I have sent out four book proposals in the last 6 weeks. Three to top-tier presses, one to a second-tier press with a top-tier list in my field. I'd be happy to be at any of them. Here's the run-down so far:

Top-tier Press 1: Three years ago, when I produced an infant proposal, an embarrassing and almost mock proposal based on the dissertation-based book I thought I was writing but have now abandoned, I sent to this press, and quickly received a rejection stating, in effect, "No way. I'm sure this would make a very nice article, but we're not interested in such thin soup. Good luck, amateur." In pretty much that tone and language. This time around, I got another rejection from them, but this time the tone was entirely different. An almost-quote: "This is a worthwhile and fascinating project, and we're sure it will land at a very good press, but our humanities resources, recently cut, are overcommitted. We look forward to reading this project when you place it elsewhere." So, still a rejection, but I've decided to take it as a major confidence booster. They didn't scruple to scorn me last time around, so I'll take their compliments as sincere.

Top-tier Press 2: Thanks to a scholar (whom I met via this blog!) who was willing to recommend me to hir editor, I am meeting with said editor at MLA. I'd LOVE to be at this press, and I'm sure I'll spend the whole flight to CA in a panic attack, obsessing over whether I've worn the right color shirt or should have put my hair in a ponytail.

Top-tier Press 3: Form letter rejection from an assistant by email. Though a scholar-mentor of mine who publishes with this press is convinced that hir editor never saw it and has vowed to speak to that editor on my behalf and insists that the tale is not ended, I'm considering it ended.

Good in my field Press: These guys were keen on the fetal proposal I sent years ago and expressed excitement about seeing the final MSS (they don't contract on spec), but then the editor in my field died. I've resubmitted to them, recounting the history of my conversation with them and reminding them of their prior interest, but I'm really just starting from scratch there. No idea how it'll play with a new editor--don't even know who the new editor is yet (not listed in the press's info). But they're not talking at MLA and I was told I'd be hearing from them in the new year. Sigh.

So. That's how it is right now. And the thing is, I'm no longer frantic about it. I think it's a decent project, and I think someone's going to take it. And if the dart doesn't hit one of these targets, I'll throw again. I only have to hit one.

Milton-L

Oh. My. Hell. Shut. Up. All. Of. You. (I know this post has a very narrow target demographic, but can I get an Amen?)

Regifting.

So a friend of mine is having a bday party this weekend. She has requested that we bring no gifts, but she is welcoming bottles of cheer.

Someone recently gave me a bottle of sherry. As a non-drinker, I'll use this for cooking, but it'll take me a while to get to it because I've got a couple of bottles before this one.

My question: can I take this bottle of sherry to the party? Even when I used to drink, I only drank gin. Is sherry uncool? I don't want to be uncool.

Burnt.

I finished the Donne chapter at the end of November, and immediately took off for 2 weeks with Neruda, doing a brief research stint at the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana (hee! so much fun!) and then getting the hell out of the city of my Hephaistian incarceration to Florence (sigh of relief),



and then to the utter silence and desertion of this other place, a medieval hilltop walled town.


I've been home for a few days, and I have to say, I am just not feeling the urgency of my leave's ending like I should be. My brain is worn out. I should be ligamenting a couple of chapters together, but I'm just fried, just done. And I'm not even sure I can work up anxiety about my done-ness.

Instead, I've been trying to find shoes that will go with the irrationally excellent outfit that Neruda decided he wanted to buy me for Christmas. As you know, I don't shop. But we had an usually fabulous time clothes-shopping for me in Florence, and I came home with this extravagantly beautiful skirt and coat, requiring extravagantly elegant shoes. I think I found them today.



I've made fagiolini soup and golden beet salad, I've made glitter ornaments for the tree with the Things, I've Skyped Neruda, I've read a little bit in an Icelandic mystery. I've had some printed pages from the chapter I should be working on within arm's reach all day. Haven't touched it. Probably I should be getting worried, time's winged chariot at my heels and all that. But I'm sick of the inside of my damned head.

Hwaet Medievalists!

So in my Early British Survey, which you may recall I'm teaching for the first time next term, I have ONE DAY into which I can fit Gawain. Should I excerpt? Narrow focus on some particular point or passage? Or a few? Or is there another text you'd privilege over an excerpted Gawain? Advice, please.

Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear

ON TIME.

FLY, envious Time, till thou run out thy race;
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace;
And glut thyself with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more then what is false and vain,
And merely mortal dross;
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain.
For when, as each thing bad thou hast entomb'd
And last of all thy greedy self consumed,
Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss,
With an individual kiss;
And Joy shall overtake us, as a flood,
When every thing that is sincerely good,
And perfectly divine,
With truth, and peace, and love, shall ever shine,
About the supreme throne
Of Him, to whose happy-making sight, alone,
When once our heavenly-guided soul shall climb,
Then all this earthly grossness quit,
Attired with stars, we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time!

I made a cake!

As some know, I don't really do desserts. I don't have a huge sweet-tooth, and I don't like to measure when I cook. But I came into some beautiful local quince, and wanted to honor them with something worthy of their high-maintenance prep.

My SFAM sent me her recipe for an excellent upside-down cake, which adds cardamon and other spices. I stuck to that basic cake recipe, but baked it over a bottom layer of poached quince and dried bing cherries rehydrated in a mix of sherry and grape juice.

Just got it out of the oven. It's beautiful--the peach-pink of the quince, the dark cherries, the ooze of caramelizing all over the whole thing. I can hardly wait for it to cool. But I will, because the caramelizing will be even better.

I say if you're only going to make one cake every year or so, it should be a good one.

3 signs I am a Real Poet

1) Almost got in a wreck on the freeway today, because I was getting a line down on a passenger-seat scrap of paper.

2) Wanted to spend the evening catching up on some administrative stuff, but went to a poetry reading, just because the reader is the editor of a significant journal, and I thought it might be good strategy to be attentively present.

3) There's a song on the new Hornby/Folds album, which I got today, about a contemporary American poet, a couple of years older than I am, whom I know slightly. Not about her work, of which the song disclaims any knowledge, but about the euphony of her name. Four minutes of PR thanks to her natal assonance. My response?: (envious mutters and grumbles.)