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

Seen in a Lab

A student today, asking me whether there was any construction paper to be had in the building. She was sitting at one station in the computer lab, the computer surrounded by cut up, colorful construction paper, a bottle of glue, pair of scissors, markers, stapler, tape.

I suppressed the urge to giggle*, told her that no such item was to be had in the building, but that the University Bookstore would likely provide what she sought. The situation was utterly incongruous and entirely enthralling.

*I don't mean to imply that I wanted to laugh AT her. It really was just a bizarre occurrence; students are frantically trying to get their digital files uploaded correctly, and here was a young woman converting this digital workstation into a traditional arts and crafts center. The mind reels.

The Right Side of the Page

This afternoon, in the midst of grading student papers, I've indulged in a bit of cyber window shopping. The object of my browsing? The Amazon Kindle, a sassy little piece of technology that, were it not for the beyond-my-current-reach price tag, would so be mine. Every time I order a book from Amazon, I check to see if it's available on Kindle, and when it is, I die a little bit inside. Sigh.

While browsing I decided to look at recent comments on the device and came across the following statement in a comment from Chester Ritchie:

The other thing that is so awesome about this unit is that the book is always flat and on the page you read the best (the right side of the page). Makes reading so much easier and faster.

I'm going to chew on that one for a while. Is the right side of the page the best one? What, if anything, is the Kindle-using reader missing with no left-side experience? I smell a research project coming up.

I wonder if I can get Amazon to hook me up with a copy for testing? ;-)

On Writing

I have never considered myself a writer. Instead, I've happily been a reader, consuming text like breakfast cereal. Heck, I've consumed the text on the box of breakfast cereal (which seems to have declined in quality in recent years--maybe I need to just try a different cereal). In short, I read. I'm drawn to words. I love the feel of books and paper.

But I read, like a good little academic, with a pencil in hand. Were my bank account healthier, I would purchase books instead of borrowing them from the library. I like to mark them up, to write on and in them, to underscore and sidebar spar.

I realized today that it's easier to read. Reading is, for me, the easy way out. It's perpetual stalling. I find myself intrigued by some new idea or concept and I read--a lot. Sometimes I take notes.

I went to a panel discussion today; we had a group of poets on campus for a symposium, and at one point they were asked about the personal nature of their writing. The moderator wanted to know if they had suffered any grief from their families for exposing the soft underbellies of family life. The poets were clearly not biting and focused on the two things that allowed them to explore their family lives in their poetry: the unconditional love of family and the respect they felt for their families in spite of whatever dirty laundry got aired in the poetry.

I don't write about my life, my family, my history, and in that moment I wanted to tell some stories. One of the poets talked about her writing as emanating from a drive to understand herself by understanding this stew she'd been brought up in. I dug that.

No, I'm not building up to some grand manifesto where I reveal my plan to turn my blog into some cavalcade of family shame, nor do I intend to sharpen my quill, dip it in ink, and start penning the Great American Novel. How trite that would be.

I just realized today that I don't write, not in the way that woman writes, and not in the way that I apparently think I ought to write. I am lazy. I prefer the easier task of reading; writing demands work.

Bad Day, or This is What Burnout Looks Like

I wrote this post several days/weeks ago, but didn't post it because it was just too raw. I realized today, though, that I'm experiencing burnout; I think I acutally hit the burnout point about 10 months ago, but only now am I able to actually identify and articulate the problem. More on that in another post. For now, I'll just let the words speak for themselves.

_________

Dear Blog,

I had a bad teaching day today. One of my classes is driving me crazy, so much so that I actually thought about shaking a student. I was really frustrated at their obvious apathy.

I have to tell them to take out their notebooks and tell them when they need to write something down. In a writing class. I have to constantly pull answers from them. I find myself having to talk over them constantly as some of them tend to have little side snide conversations while I'm explaining something or answering someone else's question. They really are little s&#ts.

I know that I've created this problem; I won't indulge in that exercise of self-reflection right now because for once I want to just experience this absolute sense of hopelessness and helplessness that I feel in this class. I know that I've spoken to other teachers about this feeling, but I've never really felt it myself. I'm just amazed at how awful it is. I don't think I've ever hated a class in my career; this one may just put me over the edge.

With semi-righteous indignation,
fulgora

The Buzz

The big topic this week for literary scholars appears to be the perenial question of our purpose in life. Two separate articles seem to highlight a market shift--yes, I said "market shift" in a piece of writing about literary scholarship; you wanna make something of it?--from the lit to the comp side of the house, a shift reinforced by the job list.

In WaPo, Valerie Strauss reports on revamped core curricula and the forces driving the academy to shift focus to writing skills ("Balancing Academic Tradition and Skills Employers Demand"). In The Nation, William Deresiewicz looks at the profession of literature over the last 20 years, presenting a sort of State of the Union piece for literary study after Graff's Professing Literature's debut 20 years ago. ("Professing Literature in 2008").

What does it mean to shift our focus to writing and composition? Will the professorate disintegrate, relegating more and more lit PhD's to the academic underclass* of adjunct professing? Will tenure lines shift into rhet/comp spots, with the understanding that the teaching load will require teaching the first-year course? Will WAC/WID programs become the standard, moving comp out of English departments completely and drawing faculty from across the university?

As I type it all, I keep thinking of the 80's show Soap. Lots of questions at the end of the episode. When will we get any answers?

*Yes, I said "underclass" because, frankly, that's what it is. If we took a core sample from the geology of any large R1 English department's faculty we would find adjuncts toiling at the very bottom, below the graduate teaching assistants who generally at least have the guarantee of support for a specified time during their education.

By Way of Introduction

I am in my late 30's, recently doctored, and catching a ride on the Tenure Track at an LAC. I love to teach. I love to read. When I'm really honest with myself, I acknowledge that I even love to write. I'm trying to read the books I purchased after graduation. My shelves are filled with books I want to read, books I purchased with every intent to read, but never got around to.

I watch too much television.

I eat too much chocolate. And Alouette Garlic & Herb cheese spread. And drink too much coffee. I'll let you fill in the rest.

I enjoy crafting. I keep a blog about it and no, I won't tell you where it is. What crafts? Mostly the ones that require needles: quilting, knitting, spinning (to make yarn to ply with needles), crocheting, embroidery. I like making things and I really like making things that I don't have to think about too much. Crafting relaxes me.

Academically, I daydream about writing tools, South Park, reading, poetry, Yeats, Doctor Who, writing, markup, the Internet, plagiarism, discourse communities, Project Runway, Isocrates, gaming, religion, Auden, Law & Order, Eliot, and Blake. I write about some of these things, I talk about others, and the remainder linger, waiting their turn.

I do not like the outdoors. They're pretty to look at, and I certainly don't mind being in nature, as long as nature leaves me alone. I'm not a fisher, hiker, biker, walker, runner, camper, or any other -er involving intense contact with the outside world. I recognize that I need to incorporate some physical activity if I plan to maintain my chocolate/cheese/coffee habit (see above); I'm vacillating between belly dancing and treadmill torture.

Enough for now, I think. Someday I'll let you in on my politics.

Opening Principles

I begin this blog with a sense of hope and a feeling of incredible freedom. While I'm not advertising who I am, I really haven't done a lot to hide it; anyone who really wants to "out" me could likely do it with ease. I rely on the general respect of my fellow netizens to maintain my anonymity.

I make no promises about how much I will write, no guarantees about the content or quality, and no overtures toward following through on the title of my blog. I chose the name "Speak Lightning" because I relate to the following segment of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me, -- could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe -- into one word,
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;
But as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword. (III.xcvii)

If I find that word, you'll be the first to know.

First Post

Hello world!