Remembering Comprehensive Exams

Last night, we went out to celebrate a friend and colleague who passed her Comprehensive Exams. It took me back to my own days of Comprehensive Exams.

I spent the summer of 1991 writing my dissertation and studying for Comps. Summers were tough for grad students. Our grad assistantships ended in May, and we cobbled together work while cutting down expenses as best we could.

My husband and I didn't use our air conditioner. It made our electric bill unaffordable. So I would get up and write in the cool of the morning, and then, as the day and the apartment heated up, I'd shift to reading and sketching out notes for Comps.

The English department at the University of South Carolina gave us a test bank. Two questions (or was it four?) would come from the 20 question test bank, and two (or four?) would be brand new. I spent the whole summer pondering the test bank questions (one bank for nineteenth century British Lit, and one for twentieth century British Lit).

I also spent the summer reading and rereading "The Waste Land." By the end of summer, I decided that my test taking strategy would be to avoid discussing "The Waste Land" in any sort of detail at all.

As I recall, the Comprehensive exams were held on a Tuesday and a Wednesday in early October. We showed up to a conference room, wearing comfortable clothes, and we sat there, writing by hand, all day. We couldn't use notes, books, or a dictionary. It was just us, our brains and our hands, and the paper.

How life has changed. My friend who passed her Comps also received questions, but she had a week to write them. She could use any resources she wanted, provided, of course, that she used proper citation and documentation. She could have other people proofread, which I did. And then, she sent them in electronically.

When I finished my written Comps, I felt fabulous about what I wrote. But I also felt terrified. I had gotten questions that were perfect for my interests and my knowledge. If I didn't pass, I couldn't imagine that I'd have circumstances that were any more favorable the next time.

And then, the waiting, the agonized waiting. I remember getting the phone call that the results were in our campus mailbox. My spouse and I headed to campus in the late afternoon of a late October day. We took the unopened envelope outside, to the back of the building, so that if the results were bad, fewer people would see me crying.

I opened the envelope--success! I whooped and hollered and my husband hugged me hard. I felt such a sense of euphoria.

A month later, I felt a similar sense of euphoria when I passed my Orals. My friend and I went to the Fresh Market (an upscale precursor to Whole Foods and that ilk), and we bought anything we wanted. Anything. We went home with gourmet coffee and gourmet chocolate and goodies from the bakery and candies and all sorts of treats.

Dissertation writing and defending was a different thing, long and drawn out with lots of revisions and the exhaustion that comes from trying to shape a piece of writing into something that all the members of the committee wanted. By the end of that process, I had gone on to my first full-time teaching job, and I didn't feel euphoria or even that sense of success, so much as I just felt relief to be done. I kept thinking about Vietnam and wars of attrition.

I was very young then, only 27 years old. I wonder if that writing process would feel different to me now, if I went through a grad program and wrote a dissertation again. I like to think that I've been through so many writing projects now that it wouldn't feel like such a drama. I like to think I wouldn't feel so persecuted. I like to think that I would get notes for revision and thoughtfully consider them as I worked to make my work stronger.

My friend who just passed her comps still has dissertation writing ahead of her. But she's got a great idea and she's already done some research. I almost envy her. But I'm also happy to have my time free to work on the writing projects that I want to do these days. I wish I had more time to do them. I look back on that last year of grad school, and I'm amazed at how much time I had, time to focus on my thoughts, whole days, several of them a week, with nothing expected than that I would be working on my dissertation. That's such a rarity these days. I'm lucky to carve out 45 minutes here, 20 minutes there. But bit by bit, the work gets done.

Happy Birthday, Emily Bronte!

Today is Emily Bronte's birthday. I remember the first semester I taught Wuthering Heights. I was teaching an upper level Brit Lit class, and overall, it was probably the best class I ever taught. When I remember teaching Wuthering Heights, I remember one woman gushing about how romantic Heathcliff was. Several women in the class turned to the gusher in disbelief.

I asked, "Did you read the book or just watch the movie?"

She confessed that she hadn't read the book. But I already knew that. No one who reads the book sees Heathcliff as someone you'd want to be involved with, at least no one in my generation.

I am fascinated by the Bronte sisters, or I should clarify, since there were five Bronte girls, that I'm fascinated by the three of whom survived to adulthood. I'm fascinated by their childhood practices of creating whole imaginary worlds.

I'm most fascinated by the abusive patterns that we find in the works of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Heathcliff, for example, acts just like we'd expect an abuser to act. He kills and ruins everything that his wife, Isabella, holds dear; most memorably, he hangs her puppy as they're leaving to get married (or was it as they're leaving on their honeymoon?). She's been warned.

I remember reading Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in a Victorian novel class in graduate school and thinking, how fascinating--the abusers act just like we know abusers act and the victims act just like we know victims act--and these women wrote before we had years of sociological research to help them understand. When I was in graduate school, these novels were often treated as fantastical, Gothic-tinged romances.

So, in my dissertation, I set out to explore this strain of realism, in the form of domestic violence, in so many late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century gothic works. I'm still mostly proud of that dissertation. Occasionally I wonder if I should have done more with it, but I would have needed to write at least 150 more pages to turn it into a book--and I just didn't have that much more to say.

So, Emily Bronte, today I raise my glass to you. Thank you for being so fiercely loyal to your literary visions. Thank you for blazing that trail and leaving it free and clean for future female writers.

A World Made by Computers and a World Made by Hand

Yesterday, my day was book-ended by administrative duties of the best kind, observations of faculty in action. I'm always happy to leave my office.

In the morning, I watched a Computer teacher teach about operating systems. In talking about the functions of Cut, Copy, Paste, and how they came to have those names, she talked about the old newspaper business, where people actually cut the text into strips and laid them onto layout sheets.

Ah yes, I remember those days. In my student journalism days, we gathered together to do precisely that as we got the Newberry Indian ready to go to the Newberry Observer offices, where the paper would be printed on huge presses. It was a thrilling process, even though I always cut myself at least once with those X-acto knives.

I remember the first time I did layout on a Mac, and what a revelation it was. We worked in the PR office, and my friend Michael had persuaded them that they needed an Apple. In the after hours, we laid out the student literary journal on that Mac. It was astonishingly easy. I knew that I was glimpsing the future, but I had no idea of the ways that those computing abilities would change us all.

At the end of the day, I went with a class on a field trip to Girl's Club, a gallery, where we saw an exhibit of authors who created their works by hand, mostly. The works were a mix of exquisite--one woman etched shapes with a silver wire into a surface of titanium white and the resulting silver swirls were amazing. She said it took over 500 hours.

There was one piece that was a collection of small, clear jars stuffed with yarn and other trinkets, like a wooden spool in one jar, a string of shells in another. From a distance, it looked like leftover paint. Up close, I found myself captivated.

The whole show captivated me, with its different textures, its bright colors, its interesting conglomerations of objects. One piece was flattened silver (platters, teapots, baskets, flatware) hanging from fishing line from the ceiling. One piece had a lot of layers, cut away and covered, with a variety of colors and textures. One piece had lots of creatures and wreaths made out of yarn scraps and fabric scraps and found items.

If you're in South Florida, you've got until September 30 to see the show, although the gallery is closing for the month of August. Go here for more information.

The show made me want to pull out my yarn and fabric scraps, to see what I could do if I did something more tactile. Of course, the fact that my computer is still not right doesn't inspire me to want to do much more on it. Fiber never betrays me the way that electronics can.

Celebrate Sprung Rhythm Today

Today is the birthday of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In many ways, he reminds me of Emily Dickinson. They're both poets who seem to prefigure a future world of poetry (Dickinson, our modern poetic world, Hopkins, the Modernists). They're both poets who seem to be living more intensely (and sometimes more miserably) than their fellow humans. They're both poets of intense importance, but as a teacher, I have trouble helping students see why so many people are so enthusiastic about their work.

I never read much Hopkins when I was in school. He was still a mostly forgotten poet when I was in undergraduate school, and my graduate training left a hole where the Late Victorians should be (and he's an early Late Victorian; there's really no excuse). I turned to Hopkins in a sort of desperation when I taught a Late Victorian Literature class a few years ago and realized how few poets I could draw on. My students, for the most part, hated him. Why would they hate him and not someone like Wordsworth? I have no idea. Probably for the same reason that Hopkins' contemporaries didn't like his work. They found it weird.

Or maybe they found his personal life offputting. Here's a guy who kept going to further and further extremes. He leaves the Anglican church to become Catholic, and then he decides to become a priest, and then he embraces the hard-core Jesuits. The Writer's Almanac website puts it this way in today's post: "Even among a campus full of Jesuit seminarians in rural Wales, he earned a reputation for being particularly odd and eccentric." He was never really happy, with his work or his life or his setting; he spent much of his life miserable as he tried to teach inner city youth around Britain. Like Wordsworth, he never recovered from an early life immersed in nature--unlike Wordsworth, he never really found a physical environment that suited him as a grown up.

Last summer, I read Exiles by Ron Hansen, a book about Hopkins and his obsession with the sinking of the Deustschland, a ship with five young nuns aboard. It's a small book, only 212 pages, a haunting book. It gives a fascinating look into the lives of poets and the lives of people living in religious orders. It makes me glad to be alive in our current age of central heating. It makes me look at my life and wonder if all the passion has drained out of it.

Of course, Hopkins' life serves as a cautionary tale against adopting the idea that poets should lead emotionally tempestuous lives. Hopkins died of typhus at age 44, which leaves many of us to wonder what would have happened had he lived longer, or how his work might have evolved had he found more satisfactory living conditions. A boring, stable outer life gives us space and time to write. A tempestuous life might give us more to write about, but less circumstances in which to do it.

Numbers and Me

Yesterday, a student who came to my office said, "You used to teach English, didn't you?"

Even though I still teach, those kind of comments cause a brief emotional panic. Yesterday, I wanted to say, "Yes, I used to teach English, but now I do assessment."

Happily, I don't do assessment all the time. But yesterday was one of those days given over almost completely to assessment. Our department has a test that we give graduating students to try to determine how successful we've been in meeting our department objectives (objectives like acquiring communication skills, analytical skills, that kind of thing). Every so often, I need to set down with the test results and crunch some numbers.

Yes, there's probably a computer program that would do it for me, but I'm guessing that inputting the data would take almost as much time as just crunching the numbers myself.

So, much of yesterday, I counted right answers and wrong answers, and then I tried to analyze what it all meant. Should I be upset if only 55% of the graduating students got the Math questions right? Students can do the Math question that deals with measurements, but not the word problems. Should I look at the questions again? I'm resolved to rewriting the test only once a year. On and on I went in this vein.

I went home bleary-eyed and cotton-headed. So, I did what anyone would do: I made a batch of brownies.

Yes, I pulled down my Moosewood Cookbook, with its perfect brownie recipe. How many years have I been making these brownies? Well, almost 30 years, if you really must know. And I've never made a bad batch.

I settled down to my supper of wine and warm brownie bits. Unconventional, sure, but when you've spent countless hours staring at columns of numbers, you deserve a treat.

Today is our quarterly General Education Festival, which has morphed into a huge event, that showcases not only tie-dying, but student clubs, the library, and this month, a hurricane awareness event. Our Culinary Club sells delicious food. It's a wonderful day.

The goal of assessment is to quantify, so that we can be sure that we're actually doing what we say we're doing. The goal of assessment is to attach numbers to goals that could otherwise be vague and theoretical, and to track those numbers, so that we know for sure what we're doing.

A good brownie recipe does the same thing; it takes the abstract and ties it to the earthly realm. So does our tie-dye event.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, my father used to say. As a grown up, I understand far more fully than I did as a child.

Some day, I plan to write a poem about the modern numerology, our faith in numbers and data and quantifiable items, and our belief that we can use those to foretell the future. But not this morning. It's time to start thinking about dyes and how they interact with white fabric!

The Joys of Apocalypse in a Day where the Computer Acts Up

Yesterday was another trying computer day. The virus that haunted my Wednesday was back yesterday morning, so I redid the fix and then the computer wasn't recognizing the mouse. After some fiddling with a different mouse, I got the computer to work oh so slowly.

I went to a Microsoft site and left the computer scanning for viruses while we went to church. When we got back, the screen was frozen. When we turned the computer off and on, no mouse. No fix worked. I was about to lose my cool.

My spouse let me be the one to choose the movie that we'd stream from Netflix. I chose 2012. Yes, I understand all of the scientific stupidness that pervades the movie; you can almost hear the screenwriters saying, "Use the word neutrino. It's such a cool word. No one will know what it means. Who cares whether or not we're accurate!" My spouse noted that in the scene where the man protests he can't possibly fly this plane because he's only flown single engine planes--well, it's a single engine plane in the scene (and later, it's a different plane with more engines--definite continuity issues). I decided to just suspend my disbelief and let the apocalypse wash over me. It suited my doomed mood. How lovely to watch the world go smash on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Throughout the afternoon, I periodically turned the computer on to see if we had mouse function. Nope. Finally, by night, I tried other things, like starting in safe mode and selecting an option that I could toggle down to, the position that told the computer to go back to a time when all the commands were working and the system was configured properly.

Success! And I was able to run some scans from the Microsoft site. This morning, the computer seems to be back to its zippy self, but I won't be surprised if it's just temporary. Still, I'm grateful for the reprieve, even if it turns out to be temporary.

What is it about having computer issues that sends me so quickly to an apocalyptic mood? We've had home repair issues and a condo that we can't sell for many years, and I'm able to keep these things in perspective. But let the computer go wonky and I'm in a state of mad despair in an hour.

Tropical Storms, Fictional Characters, Computer Viruses and Poetry Disruptions

All things considered, I'm considering this past week to be a good creative one. I've solved some issues around a possible linked short story collection, made changes to my book length poetry manuscript (I have several; I've been revising "Ash Wednesday at the Trinity Test Site"), sent out a chapbook manuscript to Cooper Dillon Books, and written blog posts.

However, I haven't written any new poems.

Of course, the week before, I wrote a poem almost every day. And as I always do, during weeks where I write more poems, I thought, Cool, maybe I can keep up this pace.

My creative life is always a balancing act. If I'm writing a lot of new poems, I'm not sending out as many. If I'm working in one genre, other genres take a back seat.

However, in any week where I'm creating, I'm happy. I can always tell when I'm not spending enough time in creative pursuits; I get very snappy with people. When I start to feel cranky and irritable, I try to get back to my desk (or quilt closet or easel or kitchen) as quickly as possible.

I'm especially happy still to be creating in a week like this one. I've had an eye doctor's appointment (healthy--hurrah!), computer disruptions, and a tropical storm. Happily, while my computer is still more sluggish than I'd like, it's usable. The tropical storm whizzed right through; I got to work just before the first band came, and since I knew I had a long work day, I enjoyed the weather, knowing it was likely to improve before I had to drive home. It would have been cozier enjoying it at home, where I could have made scones and watched the wind whipped rain, but my office is pleasant enough. Happily, it was a quiet morning in the office, so I didn't feel trapped.

But in the coming week, I'd like to write a poem or two. I always feel a bit anxious when a week goes by without a poem. I'd hate for my muse to leave forever.

I remember a poem that I wrote long ago, a poem published in Emrys:

The Muse to Her Poet


You worry that I am some Ulysses,
headed off to distant lands the moment you turn
your back, easily seduced by goddesses,
and ever needful of new adventures.

You are the one who sets sail
for the distant island of your novel, sidetracked
from your true vocation by thoughts of the fruits
of fame, the warmth of characters
to put through their paces.
You are the one who often strands
herself on the dry, dusty shores
of academic writing, pursuing the metaphors
and symbols of other poets
while neglecting your own.

I am your muse, your Penelope, waiting
ever, always patient. I weave
even when you’re unaware, distracted
by those undeterred suitors of easier pleasures than mine.
I pluck out the threads that don’t match,
keep the tapestries safe,
keep my faith in your return.