A genius confined to an office chair must either die or go mad.*

Some of what I love:

• Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
  
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
  
• Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (love love love)
• Flaubert, Sentimental Education
• Maugham, Of Human Bondage
• Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
• Isak Dinesen
• A.S. Byatt
• Nabokov
• Proust
  
• Rilke

and

• My husband's hazelnut ice cream, just served in a small brown dish.**
  

You look at my reading list and think that I went into the wrong field.

And yet I'm in the right place. Hi-ho, European Lit Seminar, Spring 2010! Hurrah for Brit Lit/European Generalist jobs! I never thought I'd like you, but I do. (And why am I thinking about next semester's courses now? What possessed me to order my books this afternoon? Lest you think I'm on the ball: I'm not, otherwise.)

These novels, they make me weep. I am in love with them. Deeply. Reading them is like reading back into my younger self, my 20-year-old wild poet self, my self of desires and resistance, my buzz-cut braless barefoot savage self--o God, how am I going to teach these books [some of them; not all: Proust and Mann are too long; Byatt, Maugham, and Eliot too English; I'd have them read Nabokov's Ada but it's too too] if my students fail to love them as deeply as I do?

*The quote's from Lermontov. The sentiment is universal.

**Also married to the right man. Yum.

Shake it, baby

A propos of nothing:

Last night I had a dream that TM and I had formed a two-person improv troupe that would go to inner-city schools and perform in order to try to keep kids off drugs and out of jail. We had both done some time and apparently knew what we were talking about.

As a part of this program, I was repainting a gabled attic room with a large, rather ugly purple pine tree motif. While I painted, I practiced freestyle rapping, since that wasn't a skill that I had yet developed particularly well, but that was going to be an important component of our show. I was working on a song about walking around the city and going into different buildings; most of my lines were pretty weak. But I was delighted when I came up with the following little couplet:

You walk into the Y and put on your bathing suit-y;
It was in your backpack, now it's on your booty.

To emphasize the final word, I intended to point at my butt. And I distinctly recall the divine realization that adding a "y" to "suit" opened up startling new rhyming possibilities.

I woke up at about 3:30 this morning with the words still in my head. Of course I had to awaken TM to share them; what if I hadn't been able to remember them later? He would've missed out on so much!

Honestly, though, I'm kind of impressed. Not because this even approximates good hip-hop, but because the lines actually do scan, more or less.

This has nothing to do with anything, but

I just got off the phone with my mother, and it has me feeling very slightly low.

This often happens when I talk to my mom--and my mom, don't get me wrong, is fabulous. Truly. A wonderful, warm, funny, smart woman; a very loving and supportive mother.

But why, why do I pick these stupid fights? Tonight I could see so clearly that it had everything to do with me telling her not to tell me how to live my life. It's such a cliche. I actually raise subjects simply to assert that I'm going to go about X thing my way and she'd better not tell me otherwise. It's ridiculous, especially because she's actually pretty good about not telling me how to live.

She never seems too upset by it, either, and I'm left feeling even more ridiculous.

I know that I have to let go of any fantasy I have about The Perfect Relationship With My Mom (or with anyone, for that matter). But I would also like to simply not do that. Or at least, not do it so often. I think that I can make that happen, most of the time. I think that I'll try, anyway. Because I love my mom, and I don't want to feel sort of baddish about talking to her.

You'd think that you'd outgrow this kind of thing, wouldn't you?

Hm.

There is the smallest of possibilities...








...that I will be teaching only two classes next semester.

It might be awesome

The subject line refers to the feeling that I have about this semester's advanced seminar. Truly. Rockin'.

I have 5 students (maybe 6, but I'm actually suspecting that the sixth has absconded). I know them all from previous classes, and have a good rapport with four of them; the fifth had some troubles in my class last semester but has been working hard and seems on board now. So that's a good start. One of my absolute favorite things about Field College is these seminars where I already know nearly every single student; it makes such a difference and we tend to have a lot of fun in class. I'm lucky that I get to teach one of those pretty much every semester.

And I am so excited about the topic--so excited that I might sabotage the course, because I keep thinking up new assignments and cool stuff that we could do, and I'm afraid of overloading them. The topic is related to book history but from a literary perspective; today we spent most of the hour looking at various book-like documents and talking about whether we thought they were books or not, and why. (The answers were complex; there was much disagreement.) I have them performing an experiment wherein they need to observe and document how they read one book--in detail--and how the physical form of the book affects their reading. We're going to read a bit of really tough theory, and an Onion article, and some cool pomo novels. And Chaucer. Of course, Chaucer!

And we have a course blog. (See what I mean about overloading?) It will be awesome. I hope.*

Anyway, I'm pretty thrilled about this class, and we didn't even get through half of what I had planned for today. Less prep for Tuesday--I love being behind!

*If you know me and would like to take a look, email me and I'll send you the link. Sorry to be a little exclusive about this; I'm leery of sending it out to people I don't know, partly because it will reveal my Mysterious Identity, but mainly because my students are on there, too (or will be soon).

Unplumbed

Conditions:
1. My office is in a pretty neat historic building.
2. Said building, being historic, has no elevator.
3. Nor has it any plumbing.
4. My office is on the third floor.

5. My body carries its anxiety in the digestive system.
6. Although I did not feel nervous this morning, the first day of classes apparently made me anxious.

Result:
No fewer than three dashes from my office, down two flights of stairs, across a green, and into the nearest plumbed building in the seventy minutes before today's first class.

(More than you needed to know, I know. But the mere fact that I'm sharing it with y'all indicates the extremity to which I was pushed this morning.)

The Semi-Annual Time of the New Leaf

Here we go again, here we go again. Classes start tomorrow.

I'm a little shocked by the extent to which this has failed to sink in--as in, I'm not really prepped for my classes, although the syllabi etc. are printed. (And there's a huge giant error on the 36 comp syllabi: I left in a note to myself and forgot to change a due date, so it no longer makes sense. I shall manually correct these tomorrow. I do not want to ask my students to cross out the note to myself.) But, you know, I'm not too worried. Two years ago I was terrified. Last year I was resigned. This year: Hey! I'm teaching a cool new seminar! Comp sort of maybe makes some sense, and I've already written a lot of the prompts! I've done Brit Lit I twice now, and know it pretty well! No worries!

We also have a new dean who seems pretty awesome so far. I think that that will make a difference in the feel of the year. Our (two-day, mandatory) retreat had a much more optimistic feel to it than last year's; I think that even the skeptics, including many of my dear friends, are convinced that things are looking up. There are a lot of cool new ideas bouncing around; I'm having colleagues do guest lecture-type things in all of my classes; the Honors program that I run might get to do some really exciting new stuff. It looks good.

But the real point is that, again, I have pledged to have a sane year. I've changed my blog sub-heading for the first time since I picked this thing up (and this is post no. 400, by the way): Instead of "do thi werk," a quote from The Cloud of Unknowing that sounds rather resigned (although it's not, really, in the original), I am now committed to Living Well with a 4-4 Load. Damn straight, y'all. I'm gonna own that 4-4.

However: I'm not entirely sure what that involves just yet. Eating well. Exercise. Not completing most of my work in a frenzied chaos of panic. Staying on top of things. Taking time off. And finishing that accursed article.

It's going to be a busy year: on top of the usual, I'm giving a major lecture on campus in mid-October and will soon have the book proofs to deal with. (I am blocking the word "indexing" from my mind until the time actually comes to do it.) The aforementioned exciting new ideas will take a good bit of work if they're to get off the ground, too. But, well. I like my work. Maybe if I can just do my work calmly, the rest will follow.

So, it's a new leaf.

I have a memory of making little boats out of leaves when I was a child, and casting them off into the overfull gutter outside my grandparents' house after a storm. The water glinted in the light and swept down the street swiftly and smooth, like a shining ribbon.

Maybe I'm mixing metaphors for no reason, but off we go: the new leaf is about to set sail.