Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Birthday--and Molly Ivins' Too!

Since I blogged about Percy Shelley's birthday awhile back, I feel compelled to notice here that today is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's birthday. And interestingly enough, it's also the birthday of Molly Ivins, who was one of our wittiest writers/commentators/op-ed crafters, well, I would say, wittiest ever. Yes, ever--let the pondering begin. If you can think of any writer, male or female, who is as clever and smart and witty and warm as Molly Ivins, I'd like to discover him/her. When she died of breast cancer, I felt like someone punched me in the gut. She felt like a constant friend throughout the Reagan years, when I knew very few people who thought Reagan had a few screws loose. But she did, and she expressed it all so much better than I could hope to do as an adolescent/young adult.

I discovered Mary Shelley later, in graduate school. My undergraduate training as an English major was fairly traditional: lots of dead, white guys, with a token female here and there, and even fewer token minorities.

I loved Mary Shelley once I discovered her. And my students have loved her too. Frankenstein teaches really well, even for non-majors (not many 19th century works can make this claim). I've had the most resistant readers lose themselves in Frankenstein--it still seems so relevant.

My dissertation director, Paula Feldman, did important work on Mary Shelley, and she had a portrait of Mary Shelley on her wall. I remember meeting with Dr. Feldman, handing her new pages, and feeling agonizing stress watching her read them. I'd focus on the portrait of Mary Shelley that hung on the wall beyond the desk. I'd imagine Mary Shelley saying soothing words to me. I'd think about Mary Shelley's life and reflect on how much more fortunate I was, even though I had a dissertation to write and an uncertain job future--until this year, the 1991-1992 hiring year, the one in which I finished my Ph.D., was the worst in history.

I love that we live in a time period where we no longer have as fierce a fight in justifying that women and minorities can write as well as men. We forget that we haven't been living in this time period very long. I could make a solid argument that Mary Shelley wrote novels that were every bit as accomplished as those of Charles Dickens--I could probably make the case that her novels were stronger. I can say what I said about Molly Ivins without fear of sounding silly. Some forty years ago, I'd have had to fight a fiercer battle to prove that women were capable of writing anything of worth at all.

We're not where I want to be just yet. Look at who has the majority of the full-time jobs in English departments--still men, mostly white. I suspect that if we did some comparisons, we'd find out that more men win book publication competitions than women (go here to read Kelli muse about the recent winners for the Tampa Poetry Prize)--I know, I know, they're judged anonymously, so I can't prove any sort of bias. Well, not with the time constraints in my current life I can't. I'll leave that to intrepid exploring journalists, like the kind I fancied that I was while I was in undergraduate school.

No, we're not living in the world I'd love to see ideally. But we're closer--and I think the works of writers like Mary Shelley and Molly Ivins have helped move us there.

All We Love Will Be Lost--The Coral Reef Edition

Yesterday, I went Scuba diving and snorkeling in the marine sanctuary off Key Largo. Part of it was job related--tough gig, I know--as I was there to do an observation of a field trip that one of our Science Faculty has created for her classes.

On the boat in the morning, I overheard one of the dive guys say that he'd just heard on the radio that the ocean temperature at Molasses Reef was 91 degrees, the hottest ocean temperature ever recorded at that location. The normal temp would be 83 or 84 degrees. But we may be looking at the new normal. This summer has seen the hottest recorded ocean temperatures across the globe. Should these temperatures remain as the new normal, we're facing severe consequences. Most of the marine life that we like best, whether to look at or to eat, cannot survive those temps. What can survive? Jellyfish, and other creatures we find unpleasant.

As I swam the rest of the day, I looked at all the beautiful fish, so many of them, awed at such variety. I felt like I was part of some gorgeous movie, as swarms of fish came towards me and swam around me. I felt oddly at home in this quiet environment (quiet to me, at least), which is strange, of course, since I can't remain submerged there long without a tank of oxygen on my back and other bulky equipment that weighs me down on land but becomes more weightless in the water.

I felt a piercing sorrow, since these creatures may be doomed, and I hate that helpless feeling that it's much too late, and I can do nothing about it. I thought of what John Dufresne says in his wonderful book about writing, The Lie that Tells a Truth: "But death is the central truth of our existence--the sadness at our core. Everything we love will vanish. We can't hold on to anything. It is this tragedy that accounts as well for the beauty and nobility of our lives because in the face of this knowledge, we go right on loving, trying to hold on to what we cherish, defying death with hubris and with faith" (p. 61).

Some day, perhaps I will be that old woman who tells youngsters what the seas used to look like: "Before the seas became so enswamped with jellyfish that you can't swim through them, there were beautiful creatures in such a breathtaking variety of color and shapes. You don't believe me, but I swam there, and I tell you that it was true."

Maybe the question that future generations will ask is not that old classic: "What did you do in the war?" Maybe it will be "Why didn't you do more to save these threatened environments?" Or maybe no one will be around to ask these questions, no one human at least.

I think that one of the most important jobs that we have as writers is to be observers who write things down. I've noticed that in my own life, things that I don't write down tend to be lost. Of course, throughout human history, the act of writing doesn't ensure against the loss of what we love. But future generations have a record.

I love the coral reef and all its beautiful (and ugly) inhabitants--even jellyfish have a strange beauty. I love old-fashioned vinyl records and typewriters and the summers of my youth. I love the music of the 80's, even the music that I hated during that time period. I love the Appalachian mountains and the museums in Washington D.C. The list of all I love is so long and getting longer. My life is so short and getting shorter. Nothing to be done but to write it down.

Amidst the bills and junk mail . . .

Being away for a week means a pile of mail (and even huger piles of e-mail) to sort through upon return. We got tax bills, which didn't look out of whack to me--but I'm still staggered by the amount we will owe. I'm lucky to own a house and to have a government which will provide services--that will be my mantra as I move money around (from my bank account to government coffers). The scarier news is that my windstorm insurance will not be automatically renewed.

For those of you who don't live in hurricane country, you may not realize that here at the coast of Florida, we pay for regular homeowner's insurance, which covers normal disasters, like fire, and we pay windstorm, which will pay us something should a hurricane wipe out our house. I say something, because it's a complicated formula--and because most of us are insured by the state of Florida. I can do basic math, and I know that if a big storm hits a big population area, like the one in which I live, there won't be enough money for us all. But we pay our money--lots of money--and take our chances.

When I lived in South Carolina, I paid $300 a year for a policy that would pay what it cost to rebuild my home, no matter what the cost of the building materials and the labor to put my house together. I had replacement costs.

Down here, I will get a lump sum, once I pay a huge deductible. Maybe I will. Maybe I'll get a portion of the sum. Maybe the state of Florida will declare bankruptcy and give me an IOU.

I've worried about continuing to live here for many reasons, most of them apocalyptic, having to do with global warming and sea level rise. But realistically, the cost of living is likely to motivate me to move long before the ice shelf melts into the sea.

Happily, my mail was not all bad news. I've been getting some delightful poetry postcards--some people are even creating their own post cards! How cool is that? Original art and an original poem!

And I got a poem accepted. Chiron Review had a call for submissions for its upcoming punk issue. I was surprised at how many poems I had that fit the theme, so I sent them a packet. And they accepted one. When it's published, I'll print it here. Let me just give you a foretaste of the feast to come: it's one of my Jesus in modern life poems. I'm beginning to think those poems aren't so bizarre after all. I'm beginning to see a book coming together.

Summer Reading Synchronicity

The books I read on my summer vacation last week seemed to all go together. I've had this experience before, but it's completely unplanned and always surprises me. I took the books that I took with me because they were in the library. The fact that they had surprising links to each other was a delightful synchronicity!

I started by reading Resistance by Owen Sheers, a book that imagines life in Wales in 1944 if the Allies hadn't succeeded in the Normandy invasion. The ending haunted me all week. I love alternate histories, so the premise didn't bother me as much as it has bothered some other people who reviewed the book.

Then I read one of the books on my 2009 Reading List, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, about the discovery of a rare manuscript. Brooks then weaves various chapters that tell the stories of all the people who have handled the manuscript. I enjoyed all of the various tales; she made a wide cast of characters come alive. One substantial chunk of the book dealt with characters living in the early years of World War II (hence the link back to Resistance). Like Resistance, the book spent considerable time with characters who must deal with some limiting circumstances, most of them through no fault of the character's own. And I found the description of various occupations fascinating, particularly that of the scholar who specializes in rare, ancient manuscripts. It made me want to quit my academic job and find another one.

The next book I read was set in more traditional academia: Susan Choi's A Person of Interest. It's about the set of events that unfolds when a Computer Science teacher at a Midwestern university receives a bomb in the university mail. The main suspect might be his office neighbor, an Asian man. Choi excells at using real events as the basis of her fiction (I loved her book American Woman which uses elements of the Patty Hearst kidnapping). Even though I figured out the mystery early on, it didn't destroy my enjoyment. Like People of the Book, part of the fun was in the intertwining parts of the puzzle and seeing how the author pulled off the stunt.

The next book was Lady of the Snakes by Rachel Pastan, which I zipped through. It, too, was set in academia, as a young Slavic Lit professor works towards tenure, while trying to balance home life with a toddler, teaching, and research. Like People of the Book, it made me wonder about roads not taken. I have consciously chosen to focus more on my own creative writing and less on writing scholarly work about the writing of other authors, but this book made me yearn for my grad school days. Ah, to lose oneself in the library and to transport oneself back into another literary century!

I'm still working on the last book, Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills. It, too, explores creativity and the sacrifices that we make for our art (like Lady of the Snakes and like People of the Book), although she explores the world of Hollywood, and the other books do not. I need to plow through it, while I still remember who all the character are, since there's an extensive cast in this book.

What a treat, to have a stack of books and to read straight through them. How lucky I was not to have any of them turn out to be a dreadful slog. How lucky I was to be travelling by car, so that I could take a huge stack of books with me. How lucky I am to have a job that gives me vacation time and to have the ability to actually take my vacation time.

And now, back to my regularly scheduled reading of endless e-mails (only some of which have anything much to do with me) and the numerous documents that we're generating for our accreditation reviews and our various assessment documents. It could be worse, I suppose. I don't have any dreadful student essays to read--although reading dreadfully written documents by people who have gone to school and should know better than to make the horrible mistakes that they make is no picnic either.

Reading, Computers, and the Demands of Work Life

What a heavenly vacation I just had: I spent most of it reading a pile of books. I got up early in the morning and read (while feeling slightly guilty that I didn't have any desire to go out to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic). My mom and I went to AquaAerobics every morning, and then I took my book to the pool, where I read most of the day.

I always feel a bit of relief when I return to reading books. I read a lot during the course of a week, but much of it isn't anything I would choose to read. Reading a week's worth of e-mails upon my return to the office reminds me of that fact. I read a lot of online things, and much of it I treasure: the ability to read The Washington Post online, a variety of blogs, intriguing articles from magazines that most libraries wouldn't carry. But I also spend a lot of time reading absolute drivel.

And then I worry that my ability to concentrate has been shot. Going on vacation reminds me that the problem isn't with my concentration skills.

I used to think that television was the problem. But now, when I watch T.V., I fall asleep almost instantly. Likewise, I used to watch a lot of movies. Now I tend to watch in binge sessions while quilting.

So, is it my computer or the demands of work that sap my ability to read whole books? Some of both, I suspect. I sit down to read The Washington Post and The New York Times, and then I bop around from blog to blog, and before I know it, my morning is over. Then I go to work, and my reading options dim and die for the day.

Being on vacation meant that I didn't have to work for 40 hours last week--and I filled that time with reading. Heaven!

I didn't want to be that person that I saw who brought his laptop down to the kiddie pool so that he could do whatever computer things needed doing, while his kids played in the pool. I declared a computer moratorium last week. It was quite refreshing. I wanted to be more present than I usually am to the humans in my life. One day when I slipped and checked my work e-mail (just for a few minutes!), I woke up at 2 in the morning thinking about work issues. Grrr. I don't even have a job that makes too many demands, so I can't imagine how I'd be if I had one of those jobs that requires a constant online presence in addition to the office presence.

People always ask me why I don't read in the office, but I've found that if I'm reading on the computer screen, people assume I'm working, whereas if I'm reading a real book (even if it's a book that addresses educational issues or a book that keeps me current in my field), people seem to assume that I'm shirking my work duties. So, if I have a bit of free time at work, I'm likely to read online things.

If I was a smarter time manager, I'd work on poetry at work. Poetry publication can be seen as professional development for me, and working on a poetry document looks like working to people who walk by my office. I did go through my old poetry notebooks to flag the poems I want to use in a manuscript that I want to assemble in the fall. Other than that, I didn't focus on writing. I just immersed myself in delicious reading. It's good to know that I can still do that.

Tomorrow I'll write a bit about what I read. It wasn't just beach-trashy reading. I feel fortified and refreshed. I wish I had a job that paid me real money and benefits to read by the pool--don't resorts need to hire people who will pose as tourists and report back to the parent company about how their resorts are run? I would be willing to be that person!

This Blog Is On Vacation

It's time for me to wander off again, to spend time with family and friends, to stay away from work and electronics, to ponder the waves and the future, and to read some good books. I'll be back to blogging around Aug. 25. (The people in the picture are my husband and my nephew, who are staring out at Hollywood Beach).

Shop Class, Soulcraft, the College Classroom, and Assessment

Dean Dad has an interesting post over at his blog, Confessions of a Community College Dean. He's been reading Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft, which those of you who read my blog regularly know that I've been reading too (and in fact, our school's book club just discussed it this week). Dean Dad comes at the book from an interesting angle, talking about teaching in higher ed and where it fits into Crawford's paradigm. He also talks about assessment issues, or as he calls it "evidence-based policy in higher ed."

For those of you who are blessed enough to never have heard of assessment, let me just report from the front lines. Those of us who teach in higher ed are under pressure to prove that we're actually doing what we say we're doing in the classroom. I suspect that if George Bush had had another four years (shudder), we'd have seen No Child Left Behind for the college classroom.

Many of us in higher ed want to prove that we're successful so that the Feds don't feel any pressure to impose standards upon us. Why would the Feds feel any pressure? Because of the massive amounts of student loan money and other Federal dollars that flow through the nation's colleges and universities. And of course, because so many employers have been hiring college graduates, only to be horrified to find out that they can't write, can't think critically, can't do basic math, that kind of thing.

As Assistant Chair of my department, I'm responsible for helping create an assessment initiative. Luckily my Chair has the vision and the knowledge, and he can lead the assessment push. We've faced some push-back from faculty, but we're facing some challenges with accreditation, so most of our faculty are fairly cooperative, even though we all understand that when we went to grad school, we never realized our lives would come to this.

I've come to favor a pre-test, given on the first day of class, and then a post-test (the exact same test) given near the end of class. Many faculty resist at first. They say, "But they don't know anything on the first day!" Exactly. It would have interesting implications if all your students knew all the material from day one.

Many faculty worry about the morale of the students, but I remind them that these assessment tools don't have to be part of the grade. We'll be interested to see if students take the assessment tools seriously if there's no grade attached.

Of course, turning learning into data that can be quantified and scrutinized is a bit soul deadening. My Chair reminds us that our larger purpose is to improve student learning, but sometimes, it feels like we're in the business of generating statistics, not the business of improving students' brains and abilities. And Statistics is the class that convinced me not to pursue my love of Sociology beyond the B.A. (I was a double major, Sociology and English).

One of the commenters on Dean Dad's post reminds us that you can have the most fabulous teaching in the world, but many of our students are underprepared. Grossly underprepared. I think that many faculty are distrustful of "evidence-based policy" for fear that they'll be held accountable for the lack of success of these students. We all know that there's only so much we can do during the term, especially as we're competing against all the other things which snag students' attention.

Our book club all expressed frustration with Crawford's lack of solutions. We agreed that he did a great job of analyzing the problems with our modern work lives, but how many of us can just give it all up and open our own motorcycle shops? I've already blogged about the gender issues that Crawford doesn't address (go here and here), but most of us, male or female, aren't fortunate enough to have hobbies and passions that can be translated into money generators. And many of us have gone into fields that can be outsourced to developing nations. I fear that higher ed is on that path too. As more and more of us move our teaching online (and our assessment online), what's to keep us employed? But that's a blog post for another day. Or for a past day (go here to read a past blog post on the topic).