Opening Lines, Search Committees, Big Money Losses, and Spies

It's been a strange week, a bit tiring, even with less commuting back and forth between Spartanburg and Arden.  We have movers coming today in Arden to take the big items that need a moving van down to the S'burg house, so last night, we got those items ready (taking stuff out of drawers, mostly).  So no wonder it feels like it should be a Friday.  Let me record some fragments before they slip away.

--I've had several hours of extra faculty work this week; I'm on a search committee for a new Speech faculty member, a tenure track position, and it's not the only tenure track line Spartanburg Methodist College is filling.  Around the nation, schools are contracting, and I am so grateful to be part of one that is expanding or holding steady in terms of enrollment.

--I've been working on an assignment for the last few class meetings with my Creative Writing class.  Today I'll give them a variety of first lines and sentences from published works, like Rebecca, Mrs. Dalloway, and "Sonny's Blues."  Students will write a chunk today to go with the opening lines/sentences; they'll have 6 minutes with each one, and they'll have 11 in total.  On Tuesday, they'll add to the work of classmates, which I think I'll have them do by cutting and pasting and writing.

We're running out of time; if we had more, I might have them do an exquisite corpse kind of experiment, adding without seeing what had gone before.   But as it is, I think I'll have each student choose the top 3, and on Tuesday we'll add, and a week from today, we'll read and reflect on what we learned from this strange collaboration.

We might also talk about the elements of fiction/narrative and how they decided to move forward; was plot more important than character, for example.  I also want to remember how this experiment could be used to talk in more detail about the importance of a good beginning.   I've been paging through literature anthologies, surprised by how few compelling first sentences are in there.

--If/when I teach nonfiction writing or journalism classes again, I wonder if it would be useful and/or interesting to have students read and/or listen to the same expert interviewed by different people.  I've been listening to a Fresh Air interview with Jill Lepore and next I'll listen to the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast interview with her.

--On Tuesday, I did quilting the way I once did, with a plastic cutting board under the part I was hand quilting--much easier than quilting across a big table.  Quilting across a big table is a much easier way to get the middle part quilted.

--When I remember Fall 2026, I want to remember that big money didn't always win--it was true in many political races and true in baseball.

--The week's news has been full of Nvidia's leader, Jensen Huang's affair with a woman who turned out to be a Chinese spy.  Really?  REALLY??? He fell for one of the oldest tricks in the competition sourcebooks.  Humans can be such idiots.

I loved this beginning to David Ignatius' recent opinion piece in The Washington Post:  "Keith Riggin, a former CIA station chief in Beijing who later advised U.S. companies on the Chinese intelligence threat, says he gave American executives a simple warning about beautiful women who might approach them in Beijing: 'You don’t get any better-looking when you go to a place like China.'”