Reading Spaces

Last year, the college of my kind of studies had a retreat at a local men's club. Yeah, supposedly they have women members, but the name is still [Something]men's Club.

Something about having the college meeting at a men's club rankled. Partly it was the whole "let's discuss diversity issues" that didn't even acknowledge we were at a men's club? There aren't many alternatives, none that are as cheap, anyway, in the area. The thing is, men had the resources to organize clubs with a fair bit of land, big buildings and meeting areas, and women met in the church basement or something. And so we have men's clubs with big meeting areas, and women's clubs, I guess not so much. I've never seen a building labeled "women's club" that I recall. (Okay, the Three Arts Club?)

This being a midwestern men's club, it had loads of dead animals on the walls, mostly trophy deer heads with antlers. But there was also a deer rear. And that struck me as odd. So, you know, I looked. No testicles so far as I could see.

Of course, some male animals don't have really obvious testicles, especially not in breeding season. Maybe deer are like that? I have to admit, I've never tried to take a close look at that end of a deer.

I sort of understand the point of displaying a buck/antler trophy--the desire to say, "hey, I killed this thing, aren't I hot!" But what of a (female?) derriere?

Of course, I thought of Sir Thomas Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt":

WHOSO list to hunt ? I know where is an hind !
But as for me, alas ! I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore;
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer ; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow ; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt
As well as I, may spend his time in vain!
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about;
"Noli me tangere ; for Cæsar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."

Hunting women is like hunting deer: both are property of a sort (at least they both were in early modern England), both involve violence, etc. I'm a lit person, and these are the sorts of connections I make. Displaying the deer rear then works as a sort of sexual conquest metaphor. It's like a sporting way of displaying a nude female on a calendar, posed suggestively holding a chainsaw. It's not like most humans are "above" looking at an animal and thinking about sexuality (most of us just don't act on those thoughts).

Other women at the retreat noticed the deer rear, too, but none that I spoke with are involved in hunting culture, and none of us really knew what to make of the thing. And so, we went on with our petty little lives.

Until yesterday, when I went to the college office to fill out some paperwork, and learned that once again, our retreat would be at the same men's club. A male deanling was there, and I mentioned that the men's club was a bit weird as a meeting space, what with all the dead animals on the walls, and what was with the deer's rear end? He said he hadn't even noticed, and gave me one of those looks that says, "Don't be all feminist and piss on our cornflakes over something I can't control?"

And there are, of course, bigger fish to fry. But a deer's butt might be blogworthy, right?

So in preparation for writing this little bit, I thought I'd try to figure out just how big a deer's testicles are (no clue, still, though googling showed me all sorts of recipes), and if there's a hunting culture point to displaying a trophy of a deer's rear end. And this is what I found: (Source on Amazon.com)

Yep, it's a gag thing (though a real deer). Here's what the ad blurb has to say:

Looking for a little tail? FINALLY, there's a butt worth kissing! No fear, the Deer Rear is here! Now, I know I've offered plenty of unusual gifty items before, but this one is surely to be dear (er, deer) to us hunter types. It symbolizes the trophy wallhanger that got away. You know... the one your macho hunting buddy almost bagged. Be creative. Have your mounted deer trophy on one side of the wall, and line up this baby on the other side to look like a full deer. Of course, the Deer Rear makes an unforgettable conversation piece for your den, deer shack, trophy gallery or the office. Right now, my volume buy shaves big bucks bucks off! More: Real whitetail Rear is mounted by a professional taxidermist for long life. Approx. 12 x 12 x 15" h. (size will vary slightly). Weighs 2 1/2 lbs. Has wall mounting hardware. Nab yours ONLINE! Deer Rear (Source on Amazon.com)

And here's a customer review:

This is absolutely perfect for those lonely nights when your wife is gone. Order one if your wife takes long trips and there are no good places to get hookers in your area. (Source on Amazon.com)

Both comments start with the sexual connection; I suppose it's good to know that I'm not the only one with a dirty mind.

It doesn't make me a whole lot happier about having a day long meeting staring at a fake deer ass in a men's club. But I'm willing to bet the good old boys at the club really think it's funny in that good old boy way. And good old boys rule the roost here and everywhere.

Heart, Lungs, Legs

Flipping through the internet news the other day, I saw that a famous singer in her mid-20s, Amy Winehouse, has emphysema. Emphysema is, to paraphrase my Nana, something you wouldn't wish on a dead dog you didn't like. It's sad to think of.

I rode out County C this morning. County C has a hill that's about a mile long (yes, I've checked it on my bike computer), not very steep, but a good workout for me. In Tour de France category terms, it's somewhere along the lines of "bunny slope," but I'm not riding the TdF, and it's a good hill for me. Getting back into riding since coming home, I haven't ridden many hills yet, and I wasn't sure I could make it. But I inched my way up; it's a good thing the hill is right at the beginning of where County C leaves town.

County C, I figure, makes sure that my heart, lungs, and legs are all doing their job. They were, such as it is. I figure I lost at least a mile/hour of speed when I started back this June compared to last summer, but I'm picking it up slowly.

I wonder at the luck that's kept me out of having some problems. Let's face it, no one with half a brain offers a Shakespeare person crack coke to smoke thinking they're going to make millions on future sales; it's not like I could afford the habit, you know? Nor does anyone want to "get close" to my fame and fortune. So it's not necessarily good judgment or wisdom that's kept me from that particular hell. Trust me; I haven't always been a paragon of good clean living. But I've been lucky with the things I've done or not in a lot of ways.

When I was in the Peace Corps, my roommate (who was interested in local shamanism) somehow acquired some ayahuasca, a plant used by local folks in spiritual contexts to run with the jaguars. I remember us looking at it, and deciding not to try it because we didn't know what the heck we were doing. So we didn't. We put the root in a cupboard, and there it sat until I left. (Nowadays, we could look up a recipe on the internet! Too late!)

I did know a volunteer who ran with the jaguars, though, and had a good experience; he had a shaman guide, his father-in-law to be.

But I didn't. I was too afraid to try something I didn't "know" at least somewhat culturally. (Yeah, so if I were the last human alive on earth, I probably wouldn't find the magic herb to solve all problems.)

Fear can be a good thing, I guess. On the other hand, I hit 35+ mph going down that hill today, and it didn't kick in, so I better not count on it too much. (For comparison sake, the TdF guys hit 70+ going down hills, I've read. 35 is probably what they do on uphills.)

I went 25 miles today, and I'm nice and tired.

Community

Hilaire over at Clashing Hats blogged recently about having a migraine, and most especially, being still new in her area and feeling that she really didn't have anyone to call. I think that feeling is pretty common for academics, especially those of us who've moved pretty far from family and college pals. I know I've felt it before.

The other day, I biked from the trailhead, and then did errands, and along the way, I stopped at a retired friend's house, just on the chance that she would be in. She was, visiting with another neighbor about a craft project, so I chatted for a while and we got caught up. I had several reasons for wanting to visit, including catching up, but also asking her for a garden consult.

So thinking about Hilaire and the who to call thing: last year this friend had surgery, and in the days following, I hung out reading while she napped when her partner couldn't be around, so that she'd have someone there if she needed help getting up or if something bad happened. Mostly she slept, which was fine, and of course nothing bad happened, but you know how it is, you just feel better knowing someone's around just in case, and if that's me reading for a couple hours, that's fine? That's how I felt, anyway.

I was thinking about that and Hilaire, and realized that if something happened to me here, now, I actually do have a community to call on. And I'm glad to have realized that. Even if what I need is only a gardening consult, I have friends to call on. It's a really comfortable thing to realize, after feeling sort of alienated in this community.

Academy Economics

I was listening to a lecture on industrialization the other day, learning how much more and stronger steel could be churned out with a new process in the mid 1800s, and learning how much more textile could be woven, how many more cigarettes, and so on.

I sometimes hear that a big thing that's helped the US economy in the past was increasing productivity. It's hard to increase productivity in academics, though. On the most basic level, people don't seem to learn the really important stuff any faster than 200 years ago.

I was thinking about it, and yes, using computer search engines is faster than the old bibliographic indices, but there are also ever more papers to read. Being able to read a text on EEBO is lots handier than having to travel to the British Library or something (though probably less fun, too), but reading the text takes probably longer because of the computer screen and stuff. Email's a wash: some things are faster, but there's more stuff to get through.

And then I thought, of course, the word processor! Think how much faster it is to edit essays, dissertations, and book manuscripts.

And then I remembered all those book acknowledgement sections, thanking the wife for typing up the book. So basically, better word processing has made us more efficient at doing labor that used to be done by someone getting no pay and no credit. I mean, women are getting phuds rather than typing the Putting Hubby Through dissertation, getting tenure rather than typing someone else's manuscript. But since the powers that be never acknowledged (or paid for) the typing skills and time, to them, it looks like we've gotten less efficient now, doesn't it?

Argh.

Found on Fuji

On the last trip before I left Japan, we visited Mt. Fuji, which was, as you'd expect, cool. As you might not expect, given the season, we actually SAW the mountain pretty well. This well, in fact.

There was still snow on the ground at the place where our bus stopped, a sort of half-way point from which many walkers start. But I don't think the mountain was open yet, and there was still a little snow around even where we were.

I also saw this:
You're probably thinking that it's a plant. And you're right. More specifically, it's a Larch (related to the Larch or Tamarack we have up in the upper midwest). Imagine my delight to see Larch trees, lots of them, up there on Mt. Fuji!

I've been taught to think of Larch/Tamarack (I think of them as Tamaracks because that's the name I learned first) as bog trees, but I've since been told that even the American Tamarack does okay in different areas, it just can't outcompete pines and other stuff in most areas in the American range. So it wins in bogs. But on Fuji, the Larches were everywhere, and in late May, just starting to green up.

When I first moved to the Northwoods, I bought a house with a Tamarack in the back. It was August when I moved in, and I liked the soft needles, which were a little different from the pines and spruces around. But then in September/October, my tree turned yellow, and I freaked out and thought I'd somehow managed to kill it off! I was worrying out loud about it in the office one day when one of my colleagues asked if it wasn't a Tamarack, and then told me about Tamaracks turning yellow and losing their needles. So that was my introduction to Tamaracks. The best part of Tamaracks is greening up in spring; they get these little bud things, and then gradually the needles start poking out. They only get an inch or two long, but they're a wonderful green, and I love watching them get started.

They're probably my second favorite tree (and my favorite doesn't grow around here), so imagine my joy when I saw all of those Larches up on Mt. Fuji!

The Coolest Thing!

Back a while, I talked about listening to lectures on podcasts. One of the lecturers talked about an assignment, and the assignment sounded really interesting, like it would work GREAT with a few modifications for teaching some research skills.

So I emailed the instructor, and she sent me a copy of the assignment. How cool is that? Totally out of the blue, I email someone, and she shares an assignment! And it's even smarter written up than it sounded on the lecture. I'll have to do some planning to make it really work for my class, but then, I have a feeling this is going to be a great assignment! I'm excited!

And it turns out we have a school in common. I just had to grin!

Sap

That's me!

I went to the office the other day to take care of a few office things, and could overhear a colleague doing incoming student advising down the hall. It brought back a flood of memories of my own incoming advising. I remember meeting with an advisor, a professor I eventually took for numerous classes, and one of the profs I really appreciated, even then. We talked about what I had planned to take: chemistry, calculus, a foreign language, and something else? (What was the something else? I can't remember. A Geology class, maybe?)

I remember thinking I wasn't signing up for enough, yet having the sense that Professor R thought I was signing up pretty much for what I could do. And he was right. But also, I got the sense that he was sort of bored; I wonder how many of the same old, same old incoming student schedules he saw with chemistry, calculus, and something or other else? Probably just about every one, with maybe a pre-calculus for variation. Later, taking his classes, I never got sense that he was bored in the least, not when he lectured, not when I asked questions in office hours, and certainly never on our field trips.

I walked over to the English department to get some paperwork done so that I wouldn't have to take the composition class. I never saw the English department there again. Seriously. And that was just the first of many mistakes I made in college. Yes, I had passed whatever preliminary test let me "get out of" taking the writing class, but I would have benefited greatly from actually taking a writing class. (And it's fairly common, if you think about it, that the people who teach college writing never took the class they teach. I guess the same thing is true of folks who teach various lower level math sorts of courses in colleges? I did sit in on a semester writing class when I was doing a certificate in teaching college composition, which is a lot more than most folks, I suppose.)

I remember being so excited, looking at the catalog, thinking of the things I could do. There was a full quarter class offered at a research area, and I dreamed of being able to do that, but never did. (I also never did SCUBA, which would have made sense there. I'd still like to, someday.) And a class on evolution and ecology, which I did end up taking, and loving, probably the single most exciting class in my undergraduate career.

I can't help thinking, when I think of our incoming students, that I hope they love college as much as I did. But I also hope they learn to study more quickly than I did!

Showing Pictures

I went to visit a friend this evening, and took a CD with some pictures to show. It took a while and a few false starts, so the CD wasn't exactly what I'm after as far as showing pictures, but I learned something about making the CD thing, and I think my friend enjoyed the pictures.

I'm trying to think of a good number of pictures to put on a CD (with labels), and then actually get printed into regular prints (because sometimes you don't have a computer, right?). So, wisdom of the internet, how many pictures would you put on a CD to represent your 5 months away?

I'm thinking of a few from Borneo (orangutans! sunset!), a few of Host University and the apartment (for some folks who would find that interesting), and then the bulk of various places I really loved visiting, people, and cherry-blossom viewing.

But what's a good number. I don't want to bore folks. But there's a LOT to choose from! So how many?

My Sibling got our Mom a digital picture frame thing a couple years ago. You put a flash drive or memory stick or one of a number of other computery things in it with pictures on it, and then when you plug it in and turn it on, the frame shows a slide show of the pictures. I loaded it up with some of the pictures from our trip together, and it was pretty cool. So maybe I should think of doing something like that? (But I'll get some prints made, anyways, since prints are fun.)

Check Up

Last year, I thought about retirement issues and actually went and talked to the campus retirement person. I've waiting until I got home to do some more thinking about my retirement preparation, and it seemed to me that one scary thing is that my mortgage (a 30 year, quite conservative mortgage with a fixed rate) was slated to run well into my 70s. (I say "was" because I've made a practice of paying a bit extra on my mortgage, and so it won't quite run that long. I switched that off for my Japan semester, so that I'd have the extra cash if I needed it. Now I want to decide whether to use that extra for my 403b, the mortgage, or ? Yeah, I'm a wild woman about a little spare money.)

I was a little older going in than most academics, but I probably came out with fewer student loans than most. At best, though, with the average time to degree in English running about 8.4 years, your average English phud is 30 before s/he starts earning a basic salary. That's basic, as opposed to six figure. So then there's time to pay off the student loan(s) and save for a down payment. (Remember when Bitch PhD was talking about trying to get a house loan without a down payment, and coming up against the tough reality that even with a six figure household income, banks weren't welcoming?) I saved a full ten percent of what I thought my first house would be before I talked to a bank or thought about looking for a house (and, of course, I was looking at GI Bill houses in the midwest; seriously, the ultimate starter house in a neighborhood with streets named after the heroes of WWII and various presidents). It was GREAT to be able to look for a house that way, too.

Unlike most(?) folks, even academics, I'm single, so I don't have a double income to help with mortgages and such. (Nor do I live in the double income neighborhood near campus. My neighborhood has single moms, and families with one income producer and one person doing childcare--usually a woman, but sometimes a man--and some retired folks. And me.)

What I'm getting at is that academics are often (1) late getting started building equity and retirement and such, and (2) earning not great money, and (3) need to do some serious planning for such things.

On the other hand, I earn a pretty darned good income if you compare my income and lifestyle to the average American family. And I live in an area where housing is relatively inexpensive (though heating costs suck big time). Seriously, that's something to keep the whining in check, isn't it?

I set up a mortgage calculator on an excel spreadsheet the other day, so that I can see pretty closely (and easily make changes) what happens if I add an extra amount to the monthly mortgage payment, and what happens if I move some money from the emergency savings account to pay off the mortgage, and so on. It's really helpful to be able to see the results of an extra hunk of money every month 20 years down the line. I'd really like to be able to pay off the mortgage by the time I'm 65, so that if I want to retire then, the mortgage won't be a worry. But then there's the question of paying later with inflated dollars, except that my state's pay plan hasn't managed to actually keep up with inflation for some years now, so inflation really hurts more than otherwise.

I'm thinking about moving some money from my savings (the savings that covers emergencies when I have one), and trying to decide how much I should keep in that account, as opposed to elsewhere.

I really should go find an investment counseling person, but it's embarrassing. Of course, it will get more embarrassing, won't it?

I'm listening to a book on CD from the library lately, Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires. It's about a young woman recently graduated from Princeton, finding her way around Wall Street, and such in the early 80s. (Her parents are from Korea, which is important, but way less exotic than the whole Princeton/Wall Street, money thing.) It's weird, how much money she's talking about these folks throwing around. (I'm not really impressed with the book, though. It seems contrived, in ways that irritate me. For example, I'm about a third in, and suddenly, after following this character for three or more years, there's a golf thing, and lo and behold she's some sort of semi-great golfer after picking the sport up in college and not playing for many years, because, hey, that's handy!)

Me? In the early 80s, about the time this book was set, I was living in a rain forest community in South America on a stipend of about $80 per month, and doing well on that, too.

And that's important, because I really value my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer, and I value what I do for a living, and how I enjoy my life. I don't want to obsess about the whole retirement thing (because the way I ride, I could fall off and break my neck this afternoon, and the whole retirement thing would be silly). I want to enjoy life now (because I finally have the income and freedom, or at least the perception of both), and also be reasonable about saving for retirement and such. It's a hard balance!

Retrospective

I've been reading Chaucer again, with my old book, and got to thinking about the regional university where I first took English classes. I was able to take at least 3 medieval lit classes there, a Canterbury Tales class, a Troilus and Criseyde class, and a Medieval Drama class. There were three medievalists teaching four classes a semester. Yes, each taught the basic medieval survey classe, but I didn't take that there. (I did sit in on a survey class as a PhD student, just for the background.)

Wow. We try to teach a Chaucer or medieval class every other year here. There's no real medievalist.

I think this is mostly a numbers thing. My RU was three times the size of NWU, and so could offer a wider array of all sorts of programs. And the lit staff didn't teach comp (there was a separate comp staff and program), so they taught more lit than we do here. (And 4/4 is hell, of course!)

What an opportunity they gave me there. Really. If I die and end up leaving money, I'm leaving a chunk to that school because it really does provide amazing opportunities despite tremendous budget difficulties.

The faculty at RU was encouraging, and good teachers. Some of them had written some fine books, too. When I look back, I have great affection for RU and gratitude for the opportunities they gave me to study and learn, and for the encouragement.

Thanks, RU.

Home!

The best thing about being home is catching up with friends. I do okay travelling and all, but it's a real pleasure to visit with a friend, enjoying her company, relaxing, chatting. I should keep that in mind more often!

Layers

I started rereading The Canterbury Tales yesterday. I'm teaching Chaucer again for the first time in four+ years, so I have some serious rereading to do. I'm also rereading some criticism, and reading some for the first time.

I know, all of you who don't get to call it "work" when you read great literature are wondering how you can get in on this plush gig!

So, I'm reading along, through the worst sentence in the whole work (okay, there MAY be something worse in Sir Thopas, but you get my drift), which happens to be the first sentence. Let's just say, it's doing all this work, and wound up around itself in ways that aren't exactly inviting. Maybe some people know about Zephirus and his "sweete breeth," but I have to look it up. And the running of the Ram? At least I have a vague memory of the atrology stuff at this point, and don't look it up. (And how pathetic is it that scholars still study bits of astrology in order to read stuff? At least I'm not a Simon Forman fan!) The first sentence, by the way, is 18 lines long, so that by the time you get to "Thanne longen folk to goon on pigrimages," you're ready for a breath and a new start. Happily, that's when the sentence gets fun. (Well, except that the bit about nature pricking the birds in their "corages" is fun.)

It reminds me of the opening sentence of Paradise Lost. Get students through that (only 16 lines, because Milton was a whuss!), and you can get them through the whole 12 books!

So, as I said, I've started in, and I notice a handwritten note. It's miniscule, so I must have written it before I started wearing reading glasses. Oh the day! I've translated "holt and heeth" to "grove and field" in the margin, copying the gloss from below. (It's something you'd only do for the first lines, or your margins would be covered in re-glossings.)

And then I get to this, at line 16: "3 syl"
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende

And at line 22: "3 syl"
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage

And at line 27: "4 syl"
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

Yes, at some point in my past, I decided to note the number of syllables you'd use for the word "Canterbury" in order to make the verse come out "properly" decasyllabic. (Yeah, it LOOKS iambic pentameter to me, too, but real medievalist verse types will tell you that it's not; it's something something decasyllabic verse. Yet more evidence that I belong to the early modern period: I no longer remember what it's supposed to be called, but I'm pedantically anxious enough to worry about it.) Now, if you're like me, you did the finger count thing with the syllables, touching fingers in order as you say the lines. My students see me do this all the time in class, and seem to think it's funny that I can't count without using my fingers.

So, there's all sorts of assumptions there about the whole ten syllable thing, but I'm trying to remember if I should make the schwa sound at the end of the lines or drop it. (If I say it, it's basically feminine rhymes. But I seem to remember that Chaucer was already dropping lots of word ending schwa sounds.) And now I'm feeling truly inadequate.

My Chaucer is a Riverside Chaucer, printed back in 1987, and purchased not long after when I took my second Chaucer class, a class on Troilus and Criseyde. So we've been through nearly 20 years together, off and on.

The first layers of notes (in Troilus) are in thin black indelible ink pen, the kind I used after learning to take field notes in it as an undergrad. The alternative was pencil, which I switched to when I started grading and indelible was a disadvantage, and erasable vital. (Because how often have you written something on a student's paper that just wasn't worded right, and had to reword?)

There's an ink note referencing line 76, wondering why the knight's tunic is "besmotered" (a word I absolutely adore and would love to use in day to day conversation, as in "my goodness, [dog name,] you're all besmotered!")

Then there's a later pencil note about Saint Eligius being famous for refusing to take an oath (referencing line 20, where the Prioresse, we're told, swears her greatest oaths "but by Seinte Loy"). Where did I get that bit of information?

Later pencil notes actually cite some sources of information (Muscatine, for example); I think those come from once I started teaching Chaucer and needed to be able to explain where I was getting ideas.

My most recent layer of notes are in larger, more reading glasses friendly sizes, from the last time I taught Chaucer, probably.

You'll be glad to know that once again, the pilgrims decided to have a story contest on the way to Canterbury! Today, I begin the "Knight's Tale"! You may laugh, but I'm smiling as I type this and plan my reading for the day!

And inevitably, I'll pencil in a few more notes, in even bigger writing. Another class on Chaucer, another layer of notes. What could be better?

I'm also getting a book from the library. Chaser highly recommended David Treuer's The Hiawatha, so I couldn't resist asking my public library to borrow it from another public library in their consortium thing for me!

From the Garage

Old Bike: Hey, you're back. Where were you this winter. I was cold and lonely!

New Bike: Good to be back! I was stuck on my seat, upside down, in the house, all alone! Then today, all of a sudden, she fills my tires, lubes my chain, and off we went.

Old Bike: How was it?

New Bike: Even slower than before, but she kept singing to me. And we got going decently on a downhill, and she started laughing. And then this guy passed us like we were going nowhere. I need a stronger motor!

Old Bike: Jeez, I wanna go for a ride!

Searching Stupidity

I've been frustrated all day that I just can't find John Heywood's Fair Maid of the West plays ANYWHERE. doh.

Happily, I've had better luck finding Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West plays (even when the early modern printing uses two Vs!) in a few minutes this evening.

Do you think I can pretend that I'm still jet lagged or something?

I'm not good at jet lag, I'll admit. It wasn't at all bad going to Japan/Malaysia, but I think that's because I slept a lot on the plane over and then went to a hotel room and slept some more. Heading back wasn't as easy.

Meanwhile, I've been getting caught up: got the car oil changed, paid a late bill (oops!), signed up for internet access and yes, cable tv, lubed the bike chain and went for a short ride (my sit bones are out of shape!), mowed, bought and planted summer potted flowers, started reading a so so book on Renaissance humanists writings on the Ottoman Empire. (It's so so because it's focused earlier than I'm aiming, and I could use more summary and less detail. But some moments of detail are pretty interesting.)

So far, things are going really well, shockingly well even, with one stupid exception. Grrrr. There are two ways to deal with this, and I have to decide which works better for me. Grrrr.

Meanwhile, I've also been eating: grilled cheese from my favorite cheese place (foodgasm! I burned the top of my mouth, but it was so worth it!), a chocolate malt from my favorite chocolate malt maker (who is open again after being closed most of last summer! Life is worth living again!), and a steak with bleu cheese sprinkled on top, all melty. And oatmeal with raisins for breakfast.

Spectacularly Bad Movie

On the flight home, I saw a couple movies (because I couldn't sleep), one of them so bad it was almost good. Remember that Frank Zappa song about monster movies where you can see someone pushing the monster across the set with a piece of plywood? Yeah, that bad.

In this movie, a white cave man with bad dreadlocks sort kills a mammoth, up on some frozen north. Okay, I can be down with that. He set a spear and the mammoth basically ran into it, and got deaded. Okay, so getting a little less convinced, but better than the original plan which was to net the mammoth somehow.

That night, the "camp" gets raided by a bunch of men on horseback, who take many of the people, including the one twoo love of our hero. So he follows the horseback crowd with a couple of his best pals. (The sound was sort of bad, so I never did catch names if there were any. Fortunately, the sound for Horton Hears a Who was significantly better.)

He follows the horseback guys for several days, amazingly without visibly carrying any food or really stopping to forage. Neat that. And they go from the mountainous, snowy country to a hilly near desert, where, lo and behold, he runs into a sabre-tooth tiger looking giant cat. And helps it escape a trap. So it takes a good sniff at him and goes away, sort of like that old story about the lion and the mouse and the thorn in the lion's paw?

Then our hero and his intrepid pals run into a group of black men carrying spears, and threatening them. Fortunately, the sabre-tooth tiger jumps into the scene, and almost everyone backs away in terror, except our hero, who gets nothing worse than a faceful of sabre-tooth breath (think about that a moment; you know how bad your cat's breath is? Imagine a really huge one that eats something other than dried Friskies.). The sabre-tooth leaves without taking a single bite, and that convinces the tribe of black men to decide to go with our hero and his intrepid pals to follow the horseback guys who have, coincidentally, also stolen people from the black group. Fortunately, the black folks know where they're headed.

Where they're headed is, apparently, Giza, as in the Great Pyramids at Giza, because they're going to sell the people they've captured into slavery to help build the pyramids and sphinx. And so we get to see the pyramids and sphinx being built, complete with the help of mastodons (which must be just a little warm in the heavy fur coats in the warmth of Egypt, but hey, who am I to say?)

(So, yeah, we went from the snowy mountains of a place with white folks--Europe?--to a semi-desert place with black folks--central Africa--to Egypt, all without crossing a big body of water, and all in a few days walk. They must walk faster than I do! AND, it was economically feasible to transport slaves across these distances, rather than really completely enslaving more local populations.)

Our hero, we learn, has been missing his father for a long time because his father left the tribe. That's important later, so don't forget.

The hero, his intrepid pals, and the black spearmen guys then decide on a plan to let the mastodons loose, spook them, and watch the fun as they run over the bad guys, all in an effort to free the slaves. They're successful, it seems, but the Egyptian slavemaster guy knows our hero is after his twoo love, and holds her hostage. But our hero won't give in, and (I forget quite how), somehow grabs her, kills the bad guy, but not before his twoo love gets shot with an arrow and killed. He kills the "god/king?" with incredibly, scarily long fingernails and all the slaves go free. (So somehow, now we know why the sphinx looks unfinished/broken! It wasn't Napolean's army doing target practice, it was prehistoric cave guy looking for his twoo love and freeing the slaves! And the pyramids never got finished either! FREEDOM!!)

The movie ends with the leader of the black spearmen guys realizes that he knew the hero's father, and has a present for our hero from dear old dad. The present is a handful of corn. Not "corn" in the old sense of any grain, but corn as in the stuff grown in mass quantities in the midwest. As in stuff native only to the "new world" and not known in the "old world" (or Egypt, even) before the 15th century.

Can I just say, the corn was the final fun, and then I wished I had slept instead of watching it.

I came home to ...

This! (Hawthorne tree blooming!)

Dogwood in bloom.

Bleeding Heart, too!

Yellow German Bearded Irises (well, something like that)

And a single purple Bearded Iris! There are bunches almost ready to bloom, too. And the Siberian Iris is full of almost flowers!

It looks like spring in my yard, and it's nice to be home! I've lived in my house about 4 years now, and put a fair bit of energy into planting trees, bushes, and flowers. And this year, they're really looking like they've settled in much more.

Random Notes from the Tourist Bus

We were on a tour with 30+ folks from the US. Most were friendly enough and easy to get along with.

However, I'm surprised how many people complained (and how often) about folks here not speaking English. I've been overall surprised at how well many people speak English, and how willing they are to help me despite my VERY minimal Japanese.

I imagine a Japanese tourist in many areas of the US would be hard pressed to find even one person who could help them in Japanese. Nor would they find much signage available in Japanese.

On the tour bus, much complaining was heard when we were planning to walk more than 15 minutes to get from the parking lot to some sight-seeing spot. (Some of these folks were well-along in years, but they weren't necessarily the ones complaining.) But folks were quite happy to decide to sit on the bus and wait, so that worked out well, it seemed.

I get really irritated by the "little girl" references to adult women (usually a salesclerk), and big generalizations about the whole of the Japanese population.

I was impressed by our tour guides, who did a good job giving some background information for each of the sights we went to see. But yeah, we spent a lot of time on the bus getting from one place to another. Riding a bus that way gets you to and from places, so you get to see a lot more in a lot less time. But it seems like an odd way to experience a foreign country, doesn't it?

That Book Meme

You've probably seen this all over the place. If not, here goes.

The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.
Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. I'm marking the ones I've listened to on CD or tape with an asterisk.

It seems weirdly weighted, doesn't it? Many of Austen's novels are there. I adore Austen, but there's a lot of Austen on the list. And she's one of VERY few women.

My depressive teen 19th century Russian novel reading stage pays off well for this sort of list, too. I think I was supposed to read several of those Dickens' novels in high school. My eyes may have passed over some of them, but other than Oliver Twist, I don't think I actually read them. I do distinctly remember failing a quiz about the time a clock was stopped in some house, though. I also failed the Julius Caesar quiz in high school. (If they'd asked me to read 19th century Russian novels, I would have done so much better!)

It's a very white list. VERY. And very novel heavy! And 20th century heavy. (I haven't even heard of some of these, but then, I'm 400 years behind in my reading!)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
*Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations (My eyes may have passed over it, for school, but...)
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
*Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this
There is Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Back and Off Again

This is the Daibutsu, Great Buddha, of Todaiji Temple, in Nara. The statue is 45 feet tall, and lovely beyond compare. It lives in the largest wooden building in the world.

We made it back safely, and with reasonable peace between us. We actually treated each other really well for the most part, and had a good time, mostly. And for the parts that weren't great, I'm working on not caring about certain things, and that sort of helps.

But can I say: I'm a healthy, middle-aged woman. Sharing a hotel room with my Mom for 8 nights was too long. 'nuf said. Heck, probably too much said.

I'll be in transit for a couple days, and then home for real. It will feel good and bad. I'm actually looking forward to being able to read packages in grocery stores a lot. I don't think I've ever adequately appreciated that!

Doing Better

Thanks for all the encouraging comments, folks.

Please know that were my Mom to blog, you'd probably get to hear that I'm uncommunicative (I don't talk much, confide, and so on); I'm impatient; I'm not as respectful as I should be, and I don't listen to what she has to say, or treat it with appropriate respect.

I also don't dress appropriately much of the time, and don't bother to think how I look. (I also don't wear makeup, despite her encouragement, nor do I wear proper shoes, or skirts/dresses, etc.)

I'm not as supportive as I should be; this is especially true in comparison with several of my cousins and their relationship with their mother.

I don't think about other people enough, and am too self-centered.

All of these things are true, just so you know.

That said, we're doing a bit better. I think we're both trying hard.

We went to Hiroshima yesterday, and that was good for us. It's a good reminder that our petty irritations are just that.

We're off for our tour, and probably won't have internet access in the near future. Take care, blogfriends!

Trying

In both senses.

It's just after 11 pm. My Mom just came out of her bedroom to check if I'm not in bed yet. (She did the same thing last night at this time.)

When I got up to use the bathroom at 5:30 am, she popped out of the bedroom to say good morning. She had been waiting to hear me stir. We had plans to meet someone at 9:30 at the train station, so it wasn't like we needed to be up at 5:30 to rush around to get breakfast. And being evil, I went back to bed for a bit.

Let's just say we're on slightly different sleep schedules, and one of us really believes there's a moral rectitude to getting up early.

In the past, I've thought to myself, "never again." But I realized today that I know that's not likely, and that I can't even tell myself that to feel better. So when she was off on a racist tangent with one of my friends, well, I wasn't happy. But I think I've learned to trust that my friends are aware enough to realize that my Mom and I are separate beings, and if my Mom says something, that doesn't mean that I endorse it. So I kept my mouth shut and wanted to think "never again," but couldn't.

I'm trying not to care and counting the days with despair in my very center.

And now I'm going to bed so that I can start again tomorrow at whatever hour.

Regan or Goneril

I love King Lear. But just today, I find myself wondering which I'm more like, Regan or Goneril.

I'm feeling guilty, and frustrated, and doubly guilty for being frustrated.

I see my Mom growing old; not seeing her for a while makes the changes more apparent, perhaps. And the changes scare me, more for my own future than anything else. Yeah, I'm selfish enough to know that things will be pretty sucktastic for me if I hit my 70s.

But back to Lear. Remember when he wants to take his retinue to stay with his daughter, because, after all, what's another 100 mouths to feed? They won't be any trouble at all! We're "supposed" to sympathize with Lear; his daughters should take him in, should care for him in his old age. It's a no brainer. They should take some time off from work to make sure he settles in, to take him here or there, or just visit. And if he tells them how to run their households, to bring a sweater, to get this other brand of toothpaste, they should listen respectfully because he raised them, and he's older and wiser than they.

It's part of our mythology, that in the "old days," children took care of their parents when they grew old. But, as historians of western Europe will tell you, it's mythology, and not how households were usually organized from at least the middle ages on. Certainly all those colonial types who left "the old country" didn't bring the 'rents along. Nor did the pioneers have a "mother-in-law" apartment above the ol' Conestoga.

But it's still a potent myth, isn't it?

And there's the rock and the hard place, Scylla and Charibdis, of how to deal with the reality. I think my Mom's articulating her own frustrations more fully, too, both with my sibling and myself. I get the feeling we're both big disappointments in the family responsibility department. Usually, in the past, she's pretty much held my brother exempt from criticism, but not now. And while at one time I would have been glad not to be the only one subject to criticism, now I feel doubly defeated. She's critical, but at the same time she realizes that she didn't spend her middle age taking her parents or in-laws on family vacations. It's just the rock and the hard place.

Of course, we're neither the first nor the last family to hit these issues. It's same old, same old back to Leir.

Shoot Me Now

nt.

The Calm Before the Storm

I got a lot done today, mostly a visit to Kyoto, to see Nijo-jo, which was at one time the Shogun's castle in Kyoto, and is now a world heritage site. It was well worth the visit.

I was weirdly happy walking in Kyoto, feeling like I've gotten to know the basic city enough to find my way back to the train station. (That doesn't mean I can necessarily find my way to places not marked on the tourist map in big ways. I'm geographically challenged, and the smaller streets aren't laid out in ways I can easily suss.) As someone who's not really good at geography in general, I'm a tiny big egotistical that I can find my way around Kyoto. Kyoto is laid out as a grid, with obvious big hills to the east, a north-south river along which runs my train line, hills further up to the north, and then hills further away to the west. If I can see the hills, I can find my way to a train station. And yet I'm still sort of proud that I can find my way around, so I can just relax and walk.

It's my last relaxed visit in Japan, probably. My Mom comes tomorrow. I'm hoping it goes okay, but the last email I got from her sort of irritated me. It was one of those "send this to all your friends" emails, with several pictures of confusing overhead street-type wiring, from India, with a caption about how that's where the call center you end up talking to for computer problems is. It just seemed to have an easy assumption of racism and irritated me.

Why send the email to me? She knows I get irritated at racist stuff because we've had any number of fights about such things. So why poke at me with an email?

We're going to be in this area for a couple days, then do a tour. That may have been a mistake; we'll see. I'm pretty willing to get myself good and lost, and try to ask directions, walk an hour or so out of my way, and so forth. But I'm not willing to do any of that with another person being unhappy about being lost. I get lost rather frequently, and at some point, I just learned to relax about it. People who don't get lost frequently are maybe a bit less relaxed about it. So I decided to get us on a tour; that way we have arranged hotels, transportation to get us here and there, and guides to explain things. It could be great.

Or not. We did a tour once together, a couple years after my Dad died. The first summer after, I talked her into going river rafting with me and a friend, and it went well. I think she enjoyed it, but not enough to really want to do it more. But she wanted to do this bus tour of the Badlands and Yellowstone. (I can understand why she didn't want to just drive together, because while my Dad was alive, he pretty much drove, and that meant they didn't stop unless he wanted to. So if she's going to feel powerless about driving, she'd rather feel powerless on a bus where the power is abstract, than in a car where it resides with the driver, pretty much. My family is a bunch of control freaks, and I'm up there with the worst of them.)

So, off we went on this bus tour, because my Mom really wanted to go, but didn't want to go alone, and by the way, I'm single, so my vacations should be spent with my Mom, right? especially now that she's alone.

I like animals and wildlife a fair bit. So there we'd be, driving along, and the tour guide would point out that there were often elk in this particular meadow, a meadow we were passing at 45 miles an hour, passing the parking area, and I'm trying to glimpse to see if there are elk from the wrong side of the bus. Or we'd pass an area that's famous for birds.

But we couldn't stop, or even slow down, because we had to get to some big, famous drugstore, or gambling/shopping town so that we could all have a couple hours to shop or gamble. And this wasn't fun shopping, no hardware store, bookstore, or bike shop.

As if that weren't bad enough, we'd be driving through some grainfields, a two hour drive to our destination, and I'd be ready to fall asleep (because basically in a car, I'm either driving or wanting to nap). And just as I'd start to nod off, the guide would decide to make a couple comments about the area where we were headed. And then she'd add in some conservative comment about the joys of Reaganomics or something. My head would pop back up at the noise, just in time for her to stop after four sentences. At which point my eyes would start to droop, until fifteen minutes later, she'd realize she'd forgotten some point about the wonder we were going to see in a couple hours. And this would go on until we got to the scenic spot.

So my desire to be on a bus tour is sort of low. I'm hoping this will be way better; keep your fingers crossed.

On the other hand, I'm working on being a more generous person. My first step is to not try to pick fights. And since the one person in the world I'm most likely to pick a fight with is my Mom, I need to work on this seriously.

It's not that my Mom is a bad person; she's a really fine person. Ask anyone. And she certainly wasn't abusive as a Mom; quite the opposite, in fact, she was an amazing Mom. My college friends all thought my folks were the cool ones. And the things she thought to do when we were kids, so creative and neat.

But still, I have a lot to work on. Wish me a good attitude!

Busy!

I went to my last meeting of the English club today, which was fun and sad at the same time. I think meeting up with G, getting to know people at the club, was probably the best thing that could have happened to me here. It was a great opportunity to talk to people away from the university, to get a little understanding of some different people's lives and thoughts.

When I look back at myself as a young woman in the Peace Corps, I regret not being more active in getting to know people more away from my work there. And I'm grateful for the new opportunity here.

I have a busy time ahead. I have to clean the apartment, finish preparing the final exam, pick my Mom up at the airport, grade the final exams, figure grades, turn in grade reports and evaluations, get the apartment inspected, and figure out how to feed my Mom and myself all the while. I also have to get my laptop changed back so that it isn't set for here, but will work at home. And that will mean the end of blogging or anything else on the internet until I'm back home.

G and another friend from the club are coming with my Mom and I to Kyoto for a day this week, and are going to explain stuff; both are trained guides, and both fluent in English, so I'm feeling pretty amazingly lucky.

And then my Mom and I are headed to Tokyo (I'm hoping I can get us there on the shinkansen/bullet train), where we'll join a tour group through Japan for 8 days, ending in Osaka at the castle. We'll come back here for a night at the apartment, and then head back to the US on (amazingly) the same flight.

One of the guys at the English club tonight gave me a map of Tokyo where he'd marked the places he recommends for our visit. Isn't that neat? He went out of his way to find an English map and mark it for us.

Busy days ahead!

Taking Credit

One of my students wrote a kick-ass final paper. Seriously good work!

I'm going to pretend I had something to do with it, and go out to play tourist for the afternoon. I may even get myself some ice-cream. Yes, it was that good.

(It was nice, when I returned papers, too. She'd worked really hard this semester, especially on this paper, and after getting it back, she was just one pure smile.)

Grading as Athletic Event

I try to warn my students to prepare for midterms and finals as an athletic event. If you're going to be clutching a pencil or pen for 2-3 hours at a time, writing furiously, then your hand needs some preparation.

Clutching seems to be my operative mode for writing when I grade. And since I sit still and grade for long periods (more than three hours at a time, for sure), I can feel it in my hand and in a sort of general antsiness/stiffness.

My thumb joint and second finger on my writing hand are a little sore. Unfortunately, I can't just change hands, since my other hand's primary life skill is holding down the paper while I write.

But the grading crunch should be temporarily over this afternoon, so I'll give my hand a nice soak in the bathtub with the rest of me!

One of my college friends had the most impressive callous on the second finger of his writing hand, just where he held the pen/pencil. I get sort of flattened skin there, but don't seem to develop a callous much.

Have you ever noticed if you look at your hands that some of your fingers seem to sort of twist in a weird way? Just me? (Nope, I'm pretty sure it's not arthritis, just my one finger sort of twisted outwards on each hand.)

Enough break, back to grading jail!

Thoughts from Grading Jail

I need better self-discipline about grading. I used to have better self-discipline, but I've lost some of it. I need to get it back.

***

In any given semester, I end up teaching at least three people (usually students, occasionally another faculty member) some basic computer skill.

For example, someone will send out a computer file that we're all supposed to read, naming it "important.stf," or something like that. And then they'll resend it when someone else responds and says they can't open the file. (Maybe Macs don't have this problem?)

Then there's the "tab" function, or changing justification/margins, footnotes.

I wonder how people learn this stuff? In Japan, according to one of my students, there's a high school class that teaches people basic living skills, including computer skills. (The class sounds great, too. Tool use, basic electronics, cooking, for all. But I've still been teaching my students some basic stuff about computers.)

I don't know how to solve the problem of computer knowledge gaps, but I do know that all of these students can text message, work an ipod, and program a dvd player to do the dishes. And I can't do any of those things.

I also totally lack self-discipline about grading. Did I mention that before?

Overwhelmed

There was a mid-size quake reportedly felt in Tokyo a couple days ago. The epicenter was out to sea, and so there wasn't a lot of damage.

And then there was Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. And now the big quake in China. The reports I've seen said a 7.8.

Loma Prieta was something like 6.8 to 7.1. And the Northridge Quake was something like 6.7. Since the Richter scale is logarithmic, a 7.8 is ten times the energy as a 6.8. My mind boggles.

Times like this, teaching writing, Shakespeare, the liberal arts, all seems pretty useless to me. Planting trees feels useless, too. It all feels useless.

***

I've been thinking about getting a dog when I get home. I'm worried about the time I spend at the office, time when the dog would be alone at the house, and the time I spend out biking. Well, and, to be honest, wanting to travel without having to find someone to dogsit. And worrying about the whole resource issue. (I'm guessing my old dog had a pretty serious carbon footprint, if I think about how far his food was probably shipped and stuff. I bet he had a greater carbon footprint in his short life than a lot of folks living in the third world.)

Still, purely selfishly, I'm thinking about getting a dog. I like being part of a pack, even if it's a pack of two.

If I were half the person my dog thought I was, I'd be a pretty amazing person.

***

I got my incentive check, the one we're supposed to spend on consumer goods so that we can support the economy. I'm trying to decide between Planned Parenthood and the local food bank. Both organizations do good work, and both can always use the money.

***

I can't give blood until late January, I think. It's weird, maybe, but giving blood seems like at least an attempt to do something meaninigful. When I got back from the Peace Corps, I couldn't give for five years because of the malarial prophylaxis. But now it's supposedly a year for visiting a malaria area. (Assuming I don't come down with a surprise case of malaria, of course. I didn't do the prophylaxis thing for my short visit to low risk places, but I did smear DEET all over myself, and slept in netted rooms and such.)

Mystery Solved

Through the semester, I've gotten mildly frustrated by students coming in late to class. Weirdly, the class starts at 2:25pm. And every time, several students are late. I start the class on time, only to be interrupted any number of times by students quietly coming in. They DO try to come in quietly and try not to disrupt; it's not like they're loudly tromping in, calling out to friends. But it's still a disruption.

I went over to another faculty member's place for tea and desert tonight with some other folks, and asked if it was me, if I've lost control or respect or whatever, or if they had the problem, too.

And that's when we figured it out. Most of the classes in this part of the university (the international section) are on even hours/half hours. A class starts at 1pm and ends at 2:20 or so. BUT, my class, since all the students are Japanese, runs on the schedule of the regular university. (Because their classes are spread out geographically, they get 15 minutes between classes. But they still have the same number of minutes in a class, so by the time the afternoon rolls around, the timing between the two sections is way off.)

So my students may be coming from a class that ends only moments before mine begins, so they don't have time to get from one place to the other. Or they're expecting class to start at 2:30, and think I'm just nuts all semester.

I wish I'd known it at the beginning of the semester!

Some things, you don't even think to question. I never would think of a school having two really different schedules.

On for Tomorrow

I've blogged a couple times before about getting to know some folks here who are part of an English club that gets together every other week to practice English for an afternoon. Well, I've been asked to lead a session for tomorrow (as I also mentioned before).

We're going to talk about places you'd recommend visiting, and places you wouldn't recommend, and why. I think that will give people lots to talk about, because they all know some places to visit. And it's also potentially helpful for when they meet English speakers visiting here.

I've emailed with a club officer about the logistics, and it's interesting to see our different approaches. When I want to split folks into groups, I do a quick count off thing. And then if I want to move folks around between groups, I have one person stand up in each group and move one group in one direction. And another stand and move one group in the other direction (usually thinking of a circle sort of). And if necessary, have someone else stand up and move two groups over. And so on.

But they always make up lists of which people will be in which group ahead of time, and write them on the board. I'm not sure if they're making a conscious effort to balance groups or something, or maybe they know that someone just doesn't like a different person?

Wish me luck!

The Dance of Lateness has Begun

A student just came in to talk to me (before class, so she gets kudus for that) about turning her final essay in late. I told her I'd accept it, but there would be a grade penalty.

After she left, my office-mate said that he sometimes wondered about what characteristics were common to students throughout the world, and what were specific within a culture, and we both agreed that turning things in late was probably common to all students. And to all professors. And pretty much most every one else.

I should start a quick poll on how many of my students will not be prepared to turn in their essays today.

Worrying about Precedent

I've been holding office hours for the past several days, and then last week (before a big four day weekend here). The final papers are due tomorrow, so things are down to the wire.

A good number of the students I've talked to this week have been fine tuning the works cited page, checking that they're explaining examples well enough, and so forth. A couple have seen me more than once this week, getting suggestions, revising, and then checking with me again to make sure they did the work well. They've worked hard, and it shows in their essays.

But a couple papers are looking like disasters. I'm especially worried about one student.

I try to be very up front and honest during office hours when I'm concerned about a paper, and I was with this student. I told hir that I was concerned with the length of the paper so far, with the lack of research, and so forth. Pretty much the same thing I told hir last week, when s/he came to just check on some research questions, but hadn't started actually writing yet. (Despite the fact that we had two peer editing sessions. Not really impressive.)

I was going to come home and blog about the students I've been seeing, how hard some are working, and how some aren't working hard enough, and leave it at that. But then I got to thinking, and that's always dangerous.

We started brainstorming last week for questions for the final; I asked them to make a list of things they'd learned, and then brainstorm as a group and we put the lists up on the board, so that they could try writing a question that would elicit a response that would show how much a student had learned. And during that process, my student mentioned that the thing s/he had learned was that s/he needed to revise essays. (Indeed, this student has revised the first two essays with good results.)

But tonight I'm thinking, uh oh.

You see, when I wrote up the syllabus, I hadn't intended to have students revise essays after they were graded. I had good reasons for that thought, but once I'd graded the first set of essays, I felt that the students were likely to learn a lot by revising, and that they were less prepared for the work than I'd anticipated. So, I encouraged students to revise their essays, met with them about revisions, and regraded the essays. A number of students worked impressively hard and did really solid revision work.

(One of those students, in fact, talking to me today for the second time this week, said that he really wanted this paper to be good because he'd been quite disappointed by his early grades, and wanted this paper to be better. [His hard work shows, too.])

The point is, though, that I hadn't written a revision policy into the syllabus, so there's also nothing written into the syllabus to say that there won't be time to revise the final essay. But realistically, there just isn't time for me to grade them, for the students to revise them, and for me to regrade them.

But now I'm worried that the student who has learned that revision is important is counting on having an opportunity to revise hir final essay, and that maybe that's why hir draft so far is so weak.

Catching up!

Suggestions!
I really appreciate the suggestions folks made for my fall classes. If you made a suggestion, please email me your snail address, so that I can send you a little something fun as a reward! (And if you have a suggestion now, add it in!) My email is: bardiacblogger AT [nospamplease]yahoo DOT com. Take out the square bracketed stuff, and translate the rest.

More Class Stuff
A while back I talked about listening to some history lectures on line. I'd like my senior level class next semester to learn a little history, and I'm thinking of assigning them several of these lectures. What do you think?

Pros: different way of getting information, very flexible for those with mpg type players. No less flexible than other computer information for those who'd have to be at a computer. Nice for different learning styles. Information in a really good narrative form, nicely focused.

Cons: Students will remember less than if they read and took good notes (in my fantasy life). Sort of weird to use someone else's lectures? (But really, any weirder than using other on-line resources people put up?)

I would plan to ask them to listen to these in the first couple of weeks, a lecture at a time, with class time for questions. And I'd consider the hour of listening to lecture as an hour of homework time, so probably reduce reading a bit in that week.

Overload
A student has asked to overload into one of my classes. On one hand, the student probably needs the class in a real way and stuff. On the other hand, we try to limit the class size in these classes for a good reason. I'm leaning towards letting this person enroll as an overload. Thoughts?

Discovering AKINO Fuku

I went out today with a friend, first to a shrine, and then to the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art for an exhibit of the works of AKINO Fuku. (I've learned that you can put Japanese names in either first name/surname, or surname/first name order, without confusing Japanese people. But for us westerners, using all capitals helps us recognize the family name.)

She was really amazing, it seems. After establishing a career as an artist and teacher, in her 50s, she visited India as a visiting professor, and thereafter was deeply influenced by Indian art, culture, and landscape in her paintings. She also visited Afghanistan, Cambodia (these are the places I saw mentioned in the exhibit), and painted in response to her travels.

This picture is called "River Crossing." It's a little hard to see on a screen, but the black bits are the heads of buffalo, swimming across a river from left to right. The pointy black bits are their horns. Once you see it, it's just amazing.

I bought a small print of another buffalo picture, but I can't find it on the web to show you. As my friend said, it will make a memory for me. It will indeed.

One of the things I really liked about Akino was that she seemed to have studied every sort of western art you could think of, from those medieval bronze grave markers that people like to do rubbings of to Picasso, and she could bring what she studied in, and make it work with Japanese traditional art, and then with Indian influences. Her pictures don't look the same at all, but you can sometimes see connections between the pieces at the exhibit. For example, there's a series of studies of nude figures, mostly showing form and a sort of bold outline approach (I'm not doing these justice at all, sorry). And then in a later painting, a shadow figure which could almost have stepped out of the study series. But it was just set at the edge of another scene, and fit there perfectly.

The day was as perfect as one could wish.

More Local Culture

Last weekend, I went with some of the office staff and faculty to a Hanshin Tigers game. The Hanshin Tigers are the local professional baseball team.

The name is cool, and seems typical of the sort of complicated punning that works well in Japanese. Most (all?) kanji have two potential pronunciations. For example, if you look at the kanji for mountain, it can be pronounced "yama" or "san" depending (I'm still not clear on when you use one or the other).

Hanshin takes the last kanji in Osaka (the "saka" part, which can also be said "han") and combines it with the first kanji for Kobe, which can also be said "shin," and voila, the Osaka-Kobe team! (Similarly, the local train line between Kyoto and Osaka uses the kanji for Kyo and O, and alternative pronunciations, and it's the "keihan" line.) (The Tigers are owned by the Hanshin railway, I think.)

At any rate, we went to see our noble and illustrious Tigers battle the nefarious Giants. Alas, we lost. But going was still worthwhile for this, the Tigers' fans version of the seventh inning "stretch."



Yes, we all filled up little sperm balloons, and then on cue from a song, we let go and the stadium came. So to speak.

I couldn't stop laughing at the imagery. I mean, I know Candlestick did "the wave" back in '89, but...

Winding Down

I have just under a month left here, and I'm mentally getting ready to go home. But I'm also conflicted about home. And in between now and then, a week I'm worried about.

I'm frustrated by being here, being illiterate, feeling crowded often. I miss my bike and my garden, friends I can hold easy conversations with, my books.

On the other hand, when I get home, I'm going to miss being able to visit a world heritage site via an easy bus/train combo for an hour or two. I'm going to miss being able to get somewhere without worrying about traffic or parking, and having that somewhere be culturally interesting.

At the end of my stay here, my Mom's coming for a week (well, really a bit more, but I'm trying to worry less), and I'm already stressed about that. I can hear her in the back of my mind, policing my behavior ("you're not going to wear THAT?"), criticizing everything.

You know, if I totally disappeared into some mountains or something, no one would notice for almost a full week. I should probably take my passport, eh?

Dance of the Capital

When I first got here, on my first trip to Kyoto, I saw a couple maiko (apprentice geisha), and blogged about wondering if a geisha could be feminist.

At the beginning of April, one of my colleagues at the university asked me if I'd like tickets to a dance performance called the Miyako Odori (Dance of the Capital; miyako is an old word for capital, and odori is dance). She told me that she's been studying tea ceremony for some years, and was given tickets to a dance performance and tea ceremony, but was too busy to go. She'd been wondering who might really enjoy the experience, and her thoughts landed on me. Of course, I said "yes" with great enthusiasm.



I didn't blog about it at the time because it was so weirdly complicated. My colleague had ticket things, which had to be exchanged in one of several places for actual tickets for a specific performance, seven days ahead of time. Now as you know, I'm totally illiterate, and can't speak but three words of Japanese (okay, maybe I'm up to 5 now). So my colleague and I were talking in the main office, and one of the staff members (H) helpfully offered to call the theater and get information for me. And as we were talking, I asked H if she'd ever seen anything like this, and she hadn't, so I asked if she would be interested in using the second ticket. She was, but only if we could arrange to go on a Sunday, since that's the only day she has off.

We decided to go on Sunday the 27th. And the next time I had a chance, I went off to find the theater in Kyoto. H and another staff member made a map for me, which was a great help.

But when I got to the theater to exchange the tickets, I learned that you can only exchange tickets EXACTLY seven days before the performance, so I would have to go back (I'd assumed they meant at least seven days, but that wasn't it). At any rate, I wasn't sure til we actually got there that I wouldn't mess things up, so I didn't want to blog about it. And then the blog was blocked for most of last week, so I didn't have a chance to blog about it then.

But on the 27th, H and I met at the train station early, then went and had lunch in Kyoto, and then went to the performance.



The dance is put on by a dance school that trains (some of) the geiko (the Kyoto dialect word for geisha) and maiko of the Gion district of Kyoto. I read up a bit in the playbill, and it seems that shortly after the Meiji restoration, when the capital was officially moved to Tokyo and the emperor's whole court moved there, folks in Kyoto were a bit worried about an economic downturn. The city put on a big exhibition for commerce, and this dance school did a public performance. And since then, they've put on yearly (I think) public performances, called the Dance of the Capital (other geisha districts also do public dance performances). And now the geiko community is working to change things a bit so that the big economic downturns of the past several years (which have limited the big expense budgets of businessmen who traditionally hired geiko to entertain) would have a less deleterious effect on the geiko community economically.

What can I say? The tea ceremony was a bit of a disappointment. I couldn't see much, and things felt very rushed. BUT the dance was incredible. I've never seen anything like it! The music was totally new to me, but really got into my head, and the dancing was so beautifully controlled and graceful.

The dance this year told the story of Genji, in honor of the one thousand year anniversary of when the story was supposed to have happened. There's a big opening scene, with a large number of dancers all in blue kimono. Then the scene turns to spring, and we meet Genji. The dance follows through the seasons, and the finale happens in spring again, with the sakura (cherry blossom) season represented beautifully on stage. (And since April is sakura season, this was way cool!)

I think H enjoyed it even more than I did, because she could follow the plot a whole lot better.



I've embedded several youtube videos I found on the web of this year's performance, ending with the finale (final of the three clips). So you can share some little bit of my experience.

I still don't know if a geisha can be a feminist, but I've gotten the sense that they can be quite savvy businesswomen. And they're danged amazing dancers and musicians (which is a big part of their entertainment, as I understand it).

Important Questions at the University of Toledo

A number of people have been blogging about what's happening at the University of Toledo. New Kid on the Hallway wrote an especially interesting post, in which she points us to the petition. Here's part of the text of the petition:

We believe that a clarification of the 10-Year Plan is needed to prevent a course of action at the University of Toledo that may jeopardize our ability to meet the strategic objectives of the State of Ohio to improve higher education.

We, the undersigned, petition the Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents and the Governor of the State of Ohio to review and amend the direction and governance of the University of Toledo.

Like New Kid on the Hallway, I'm not sure that sending a petition is likely to make a big difference in any way for the University of Toledo, but I added my name. I encourage you to add yours if you think the issue is important, especially beyond the confines of the University of Toledo, Toledo, or even Ohio.

As I understand it from reading the various links that New Kid and others have provided, along with other public information, the new president of the University of Toledo has decided to change the focus of the university from its traditional comprehensive (liberal arts) focus, to a focus on the STEM disciplines (STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), narrowly conceived, with almost no input from the faculty, students, or community.

The problems at the University of Toledo seem of two types. First is the over-valuation of STEM disciplines and comparative devaluation of a liberal arts education. Second is the importance of shared governance in academic institutions. I'd like to focus on the first issue, for now at least.

Valuing Education: STEM and Liberal Arts Education

I think we in higher education have done a poor job (not only recently) explaining the value of higher education, especially liberal arts education. For a while, we didn't need to, perhaps, and got lazy. First there was the GI Bill; no one needed to explain to GIs coming back from WWII or Korea that getting a college education, especially with government assistance, was a great idea. Their kids, the baby boomers, were a huge generation, and were encouraged to get an education by their parents. And then there was the whole Sputnik panic, and a big government push to educate the next generation of engineers to get us to the moon, with a smaller echo of focus on educating humanists, too.

After the baby boom and end of the Apollo programs, however, we university folks faced two serious difficulties: a smaller population of college students and an increasing resistance on the part of the public to help pay for higher education through taxes. And we didn't do a good job explaining to the public why paying for higher education through taxes is important and valuable. (Similarly, NASA seemed to have a problem deciding where to go and convincing people it was important to get there.)

It's now increasingly more expensive to go to college, and we're facing serious economic problems. Most people don't want to pay more taxes, and lots of us are worried about the environment, technology, and so forth. Students facing large student loans want to be reasonably sure that they'll be able to get jobs and support themselves in a manner that seems reasonable to them. People think of education in terms of "return on investment" and "opportunity costs," and they want to make sure they're spending their resources of time and money as best they can. And the STEM disciplines seem promising.

Is a STEM based education more valuable than a liberal arts education? (Recognizing that a liberal arts education includes math and science majors.) At a quick glance, it can seem that the STEM disciplines are more valuable. We do, after all, need engineers, and they do some great work (I'm especially fond of modern sanitation, for example). But do our liberal arts students learn things that are important outside their specific majors? If so, we need to explain what those things are, and why they're important. But they're "fuzzy" compared to things like engineering skills, and thus hard to explain well.

I'm not at all original in thinking that we need to communicate better about the value of a liberal arts education. One of the leaders in this area of education is the Association of American Colleges and Universities. I realize that I probably sound like an ad for them sometimes, but I've found their materials and information useful, and their media campaign "LEAP" is something worth looking at.

According to the AAC&U, a liberal arts education involves

a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a strong sense of value, ethics, and civic engagement. Characterized by challenging encounters with important issues, and more a way of studying than a specific course or field of study, a liberal education can be achieved at all types of colleges and universities.

I think we need to emphasize the importance of broad knowledge and transferable skills, especially skills in critical thinking, which seem sadly lacking these days. We equally need to teach students to think hard about values, ethics, and civic engagement. If we don't do that well enough, then we need to do better. But if we train the smartest, most tech savvy engineer in the world with no sense of ethics, we've made a mistake.

The AAC&U has two reports about learning outcomes (I hate THAT WORD!) and the liberal arts, and they're worth looking at. The first is "Liberal Education Outcomes: a Preliminary Report on Student Achievement in College." Part of this report talks about why business leaders think the skills students gain in the liberal arts are important, especially skils in understanding human culture and the world, communications and numeric literacies, and civic/social responsibilities. Another part focuses on how students gain these skills through a liberal arts education. The second, "How Should Colleges Assess and Improve Student Learning," focuses almost totally on what business folks want from college graduate employees, and how colleges can help their students get there.

The AAC&U isn't publishing these to satisfy people who want warm and fuzzies, but to convince us that liberal arts studies make good economic sense for our students (as workers, employers, citizens), and for all of us as taxpayers who should see higher education as a public good.

[It's worth noting as an aside that we never see places like Harvard, Yale, or Stanford decide to cut way back on the liberal arts in their curricula. Perhaps the people with real power whose kids are educated at those places recognize that it doesn't matter if someone majors in Math or English; what matters is that they learn to learn, make connections, learn to think, and get their basic thinking challenged on all sorts of levels. (Afterwards, of course, they may still be dimwits. But I'm sure Yale tried!!)]

Here are some links to posts other folks have done on the issue:
Modern Medieval
Reassigned Time
The Age of Perfection

I'm sure there are more, and I'd be happy to link them if you let me know.

Desktop

A while back, StyleyGeek tagged me for a desktop meme. The idea is that you show a picture of the desktop where you blog.

StyleyGeek's desktop looks like a desktop. I, on the other hand, have always blogged primarily from my laptop, sitting on a couch, with (if possible), my legs up on an ottoman or something.

Here's where I'm blogging now.

You can see the tatami room in the background, past the TV. Out the window I can see a typical urban looking landscape, with some mountains in the background, but it looks too bright to see all that in the photo. You can just see, at the bottom right of the window, the requisite clothes-hanging thing, on which my clothes are drying at this moment. (Most apartments seem to have balconies with clothes-hanging things of one sort or another on them.)

On the desk, there's the computer, with a picture I took of a bowl I got on the screen. Then the requisite coffee cup and "OMG, I need to learn some Japanese" book, the TV remote, and, of course, my Photographic Guide to the Birds of Japan book.

I'm late to the game, so I won't tag anyone, but I love to see where people work, so if you wanted to be tagged, please consider yourself tagged and show us!

Back in Action!

Yay, Blogger/Blogspot has evidently decided that I'm not spam!

I'm off to do stuff that needs to be done, but I leave you with this (note the katakana, which seems somehow appropriate!):