The Churn.

I spend most of my time balancing a cheerful focus on my many good fortunes against my achievement gland. I'm finding that balance is getting unbalanced this term, and the gland is acting up.

In part this is because (good fortune!:) I've finished my new book of poems, and now I need to begin considering what I want to happen with it, which makes me more aware of the Po Biz than I characteristically care to be. In part it's because friends, in some cases grad school buddies, of mine keep showing up on Fresh Air or on the NBA list or getting MacArthurs or some such laud--news that I register not with bitterness or even jealousy but with a consciousness of how I, you know, need to get my ass in gear.

And in part it's because I am increasingly forced to realize that I am one person. Just one. Which means that, in a 24-hour day, I actually CAN'T grade all the papers I need to return AND prepare for class AND spend two hours at the doctor's office AND build a new fence. Moreover, I CAN'T replace my burnt-out taillights, AND work on the anthology I'm editing with a quick-approaching deadline, AND write my RSA paper before I hit parent-teacher conference at noon. And, to my surprise, I CAN'T read the thesis my grad student is defending tomorrow morning AND arrange to have my dead tree cut down and carted away AND figure out why my car is leaking oil AND spend most of tomorrow doing something Awesome & Special because the Things have no school.

How can I get my ass in gear on scholarly obligations when my I may need to surrender my car to the shop? How can I turn in the anthology on deadline when there's a giant dog that keeps lurking into my unfenced yard to shit his monuments to trespass everywhere? How can I publish a manuscript when I have three theses to defend this week?

I'd like to think that many of these responsibilities are delegatable, but they're not--there's no one to delegate to. And I'd like to think that all of us who were stupid enough to go into this gig can commiserate, maybe form a kind of academic support group, but at times it just seems very isolating.

The right equipment

As some who've read this blog may know, I'm a serious nordic skier. One might be tempted to say fanatical. It's no surprise; I'm as close to biologically predetermined for it as can be imagined: I'm tall and most of my height is legs, I'm what may generously be called gangly, and I'm a distance runner who trains at at least 5200 feet every day, so I have strong legs and good lung capacity and lots of stamina. I'm sorta built for it. And if I may say so, I'm very very good.

I'm also frugal, of that "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" philosophy, and so I have for many years been using equipment I got a long time ago. I have been using the same classic skis, boots, bindings, etc., for maybe 25 years. My skate equipment is likewise over 20 years old. It has all served me very well.

Last year, I bought myself new skate skis. Last week, I splurged on new boots to go with them. And yesterday, I went and test-drove the whole kit.

The difference was jaw-dropping. Like the difference between upgrading from bald tires to snow tires. My high-performance, competition-grade new stuff is so technologically advanced over my old equipment that it improved me as a skier instantly. Whatever plateau I had reached previously got shattered. The new equipment is so responsive that I was able to ski more efficiently, which means that the energy I might have once expended on, say, turning, is now free to be used toward greater speed.

This is the point I've been trying to make to my students about the importance of having a lucid prose style. It's not merely a matter of my finicky readerly taste; it's that if your prose is laboring to be understood at the level of the sentence, then you can just do so much less at the level of your argument. Prose is a site of ideational development, and if the prose is resistant, unclear, convoluted, obstructive, then the ideas get clogged in both the writing and the reading of them. Working on developing a good prose style is the argumentative equivalent of investing in new skis: it makes you a more efficient thinker, which frees you up to think more complexly, more subtly.

Having cool ideas is like my being physiologically suited to XCskiing: it's a good start. But raw biology can only go so far and so fast; the right equipment magnifies the innate, frees up the natural to become its best.

No Fear.

I was thinking about the end of Squadratomagico's New Year's Meme (to which for some reason Blogger won't let me link), the question that wonders what fears one has overcome during the previous year. I would say that 2011 was the year I learned to stop worrying and learned to love the bomb. I've always been a risk-taking personality, with a serious penchant for adrenaline and altitude and activities that smack of precariousness. But I think 2011, probably not coincidentally the year I turned 40, was when I finally stared down the inner fears that have aided me nothing over the course of my life: what if people don't like me? what if I can't do the task I've set for myself? what if that person says something hurtful to me? what if that person does something other than I would have hoped? what if I have to say something hard and potentially hurtful to someone else? For me, these questions are way scarier than jumping out of an airplane. I don't know whether it's that I've moved chronologically into undeniable adulthood or that I've lived through more of these crises of the secret self and survived. That doesn't mean I don't register these situations in my guts, but that I refuse to valorize that clench as a legitimate response to a challenge of the soul. I've come to feel that fear is, for me, the opposite of integrity, and I no longer wish to give it a platform.

Another day another, ahem, learning opportunity.

Got an email today from a big deal journal asking me to write a review essay. It's on a new book that addresses a (the?) topic near to my heart. Indeed, it's by the Scholar Formerly Known as my Nemesis. Of course I jumped at the chance, dazzled (and let's be honest, flattered) as I was by having been asked in the first place.

And now I have to actually, you know, write a review essay. Guess I'd better learn the conventions of that odd genre. Shit.

In praise of difficulty, part two.

One of my students came to my office today, this last day of the term. She is graduating, and this morning made the last trip to campus that she will have to make in her college career.

She lives high in the mountains, in a rural outpost of Wyoming, a full state away from my institution. She has a ranch there. During the summer she clears firelines for the forest service. Otherwise, she's been in school, which makes for some long days. Every morning she wakes up at 330 to start getting the cattle fed. They sledge out the hay to the far-flung herd. It takes 3 or 4 hours. At 530 on her class days, Tues and Thurs, she gets on the road and starts driving, so that she can make a 930 class. She stays all day, hitting the library between classes to do her research. Then when her last class ends in late afternoon, she drives back up to the ranch. Sometimes her truck breaks down, because sometimes extreme cold can make an engine uncooperative, and in many spots out here in the region where we live, there's no cell phone service, so she has a full truck-repair box. Sometimes the winds blow snow over the roads. She takes heat and food, just in case. And then she does it again the next week.

Today, she got a little choked up in my office because she was so damn proud of herself for, as she put it, sticking with her dream to graduate from college. A couple of men in her family had been to college, she said, but no women--the men didn't see any need for their wives to go to college, and so they didn't. She said that she was proud to have spited all those generations of "controlling men," and was proud to be the first women to earn a college degree. And proud to have done it on her own terms, balancing the demands of school against, or with, the demands of the life she's chosen to pursue. And the difficulty of her endeavor was both intellectual and physical, the very topography an impediment to her intentions.

And then she thanked me for teaching a difficult class, because she knows that the only things she's ever valued in life are the things that she's struggled to achieve.

That blows.

By which I mean, the wind. Which hit 100 mph in these parts last night around 3am. What was that crashing noise that shocked me from my slumbers? As it turns out, the fence demarcating my backyard, or rather, the fence formerly demarcating my backyard and currently demarcating hither and yon, the general breadth and depth of the gale. If our inland hurricane stops tomorrow, I guess I'm going to have to go build myself a fence in the next few weeks...

Bloxistential crisis

So. Not a lot of blogging of late. And I'm not really feeling exercised about that. I'm not really sure what this blog is for anymore. As you may recall, I started it as a valve for book-writing anxiety. But now my book has been burnt down and reborn and rebuilt and submitted and somewhere along that way the anxiety got jettisoned. I'm not really interested in journaling, and even if I were to treat this blog as a journal, my days are pretty much all the same, as I imagine all of our days are, and those departures from routine are probably more interesting as experiences than as reports anyway. I could blog about academia and its issues, but other bloggers do that far better and with far more thoroughness than I have interest or time to do. I could blog about teaching, but what's to say?: I love teaching, and, Grading takes time. I could easily focus on the food-porn, but again, other people already do that well and also I won't trouble myself to take pictures and besides I run out of interest and it starts to sound like I'm just congratulating myself on eating good things. (On tap for tonight: pumpkin gnocchi with a browned butter and brown sugar sauce, raisins, and crisp-fried sage leaves.) I could de-anonymize and turn this blog into some sort of PR organ to complement my real website, but I don't actually care about the Po-Biz, so I'm not sure what I'd say beyond promoting readings which my website already does.

The thing is that I have really valued the perspective of folks I've got to know through this blog, and I'd hate to lose that. But it's hard to justify the time-expenditure of blogging, and hard to commit to making a public utterance that's worth someone else's reading time.

Maybe I'll just stop feeling like this is an obligation, and post something when I feel moved to do so.

Juiced.

12 quarts of grape juice bottled and stored. Next up: apples.

From the Department of Shortsighted Civic Zoning

Just got back from Neruda-town, where on the main thoroughfare there is a crematorium next door to the Holocaust Museum.

My last month.

Grade, grade, race to keep up with reading for my classes, grade, homework with kids, grade, sneak time to write, grade, five days with Neruda here, catch up in both grading and reading after that pleasant but ill-timed lull, grade, get neutered, grade, cook some amazing soups, grade, finish conclusion, send manuscript off to cool editor at Big UP, grade, skydive.






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* I don't mean to be crass or glib or TMI re: the "get neutered" thing; I had this procedure done, relatively recent in development, technically called "permanent transcervical sterilization." So noninvasive, such quick recovery (which is to say, immediate), and so freaking humane. I think its development constitutes a real and qualitative advance in women's reproductive health, and I'm really, really impressed. I have this impulse to let all the women know about it, because I wouldn't have known it existed if I didn't go digging for options.