Thank you, Becky Mushko. You're Brilliant.

Just been amusing myself with this year's Bulwer-Lytton award winners and want to remember this gem for a very long time:

Vowing revenge on his English teacher for making him memorize Wordsworth's
"Intimations of Immortality," Warren decided to pour sugar in her gas tank, but
he inadvertently grabbed a sugar substitute so it was actually Splenda in the
gas.

Becky Mushko
Penhook, VA

Brilliant.

Some Days

Some days, I just feel overwhelmingly present and ripe and fresh and new. Ironically, most of those days follow on the heels of restless nights, and I fear that the aliveness is really just a rawness that comes of not enough sleep and various stresses from daily life. Still, it's a feeling I generally welcome, if for no other reason than I feel more alive to the world around me.

It's also a time of thinking, sitting, dreaming, anticipating--waiting, charged and ready, for what's coming. My entire body feels like a sheet of water atop a full container that's ready to burst with the next bit of precipitation.

Today I'm working on some materials for a new course I'm teaching this fall; one of the nice things about being a faculty member is the autonomy and support to teach what you want to teach. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed tremendous support from my former school with regard to what I did with my courses, but this feels so dramatically different.

I'm teaching a favorite group of poems, Coleridge and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, and I felt drawn to this portion of Wordsworth's, "Expostulation and Reply" :

The eye it cannot chuse but see,
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against, or with our will.

Nor less I deem that there are powers,
Which of themselves our minds impress,
That we can feed this mind of ours,
In a wise passiveness.

Think you, mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

--Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away.

Firing Off

I'm testing out (yet another) blogging option--ScribeFire, a plugin for Firefox. It's interesting; the interface is simple, clean, and tries its best to stay out of the way.

Tummy Tension

Well, we're a little over 2 weeks in now and I have to say that I'm not feeling as nervous as I was before. In fact, I feel almost competent, which is my way of saying that I've not made a complete arse of myself yet.

I need, though, to settle on a research agenda quickly. I could:

• take the dissertation around the block and see what articles come out
• move one step over to the left of the diss and begin a new-ish course of research
• craft a new course based in my daily duties
• recycle some old ideas in one of my other disciplines, thereby putting my scholarship at odds with my daily work

Each comes with pluses and minuses, each requires time, and each could be rewarding. I am blessed with ideas. Heaven help me.

Kid Fears

New job begins next week. I read the Chronicle fora and I get all goopy in my tummy thinking about the challenges facing me. Every time I check my email from New College, I seem to get some press release about some fabulous national recognition of some faculty member and I think "how the hell am I going to match that?" I have a lot of work to do.

I tell myself that they must have seen something worthwhile in me, something that made me desirable and made them feel I could be a productive member of the faculty. My task is to figure out what that is and do it. Sigh. A friend and I used to talk about how we always felt like frauds, no matter how well we did in grad school. I'm sure we're not alone in that and that the feeling goes on after you've achieved the degree. It must; I'm feeling it now.

The Indigo Girls were right. What would I give for my kid fears?

Defeated Reading

A good friend is reading-along with her friend; they've decided that they've got to finish Gravity's Rainbow and they'll be blogging the experience weekly, I believe. So read if you'd like, the novel or the blog posts. I've got other texts to keep me warm.

All this talk of reading, though, makes me wonder why I'm so reluctant these days to read anything that I "need" to read at all. I have no problem slogging through EW or the daily paper with my coffee in the a.m. I read, when I have uninterrupted computer time, scores of blog posts. But sustained academic argument? Poetry? Novels? Increasingly, I have a tougher time doing it. I can come up with all sorts of reasons why--not the right lighting, have a headache, need more notetaking space, don't have more than 10 minutes to spare right now--but really, the reason I don't read is because I don't make it a priority. I don't schedule time in to read. I don't make time for reading, and that means I don't make time for my work. I've got to work on that.

Test Post

Trying out the new flock browser's blog post function.

Blogged with the Flock Browser