el_dano

...that will probably never get crossed off the list, at least as long as I remain in (or trying to be in) the teaching racket.

Teaching was one of the big reasons that I disappeared from this site for as long as I did. Last semester turned out pretty well, though, all things considered. The syllabus itself is awful, and it is not at all clear on the first go-around how the various component parts of it are supposed to fit together into a cohesive whole, and that caused me great headaches and much angst at times.

One thing that I discovered, though…and it worked well, at least with my style of teaching, such as it seems to be…was that, if I was a loss about something, syllabus-wise, and didn’t know how to best move forward, it often wasn’t a bad idea to simply tell my students that, rather than trying to fake it and act like I knew what to do next when I didn’t, and to ask them what they thought. They actually respected me more, I think, for doing that, and since the purpose of the class is to teach them, getting their input on how best to do that actually seemed to get them more involved and more invested. Especially because, a lot of the time, I took their suggestions, and when I didn’t I explained why.

It was still kind of a train wreck, as a cohesive whole, ultimately. So starting over this semester, I spent some time rethinking the syllabus, and thinking about how to restructure it and how to tweak it and how to be more conscious about how all the component parts fit together so that I could try to integrate them better from the start.

This semester, now, turns out to be kind of a train wreck, too, but in different ways. Some of my innovations worked kind of brilliantly, if I do say so myself…the first unit is rhetorical analysis, and the first time I taught it it wasn’t clear to me that we were supposed to be teaching the students about rhetoric as writers as well as readers. So this semester I gave them a diagnostic essay (the first, ungraded assignment) that wasn’t open-ended, but was shaped so that they would have to write a persuasive essay. Then, when the rhetorical analysis essay came around, I didn’t allow them to choose readings to analyze…instead, I had them rhetorically analyze their own diagnostic essays. It was kind of great, because it taught them not only how to read critically for rhetoric, but also to examine and become aware of the fact that, whenever they’re writing, they are themselves using rhetoric, whether they’re conscious of it or not. It also made them more self-conscious about their writing, in a good way, because of that realization, and maybe even helped them build an intellectual bridge between the act of reading and the act of writing.

On the other hand, I also spent about a month at the beginning of the semester on issues related to the writing process in general. I don’t think I did it very well, and some of the readings I chose were disastrous in the field, but I think it was maybe kind of useful. At the same time, now here I am at the end of the semester, and it turns out that because of that month at the beginning, I don’t have quite enough time to cover the full ground that I’m supposed to cover with them on the last unit, which is argument (where they’re supposed to kind of put together all the stuff we covered in the other units). There are three major assignments that are supposed to be part of the argument unit, and we have less than a month left until the end of the semester. I sort of tore my hair out (such as it is) for a weekend, before concluding that there just wasn’t enough time. So I scrapped one of the assignments, which would probably bring hellfire down upon me from the English department if they knew about it. But, well, it’s what needed to be done. We live and learn.

Anyway. We got started on argument this week, and aside from the necessary dispensing of certain departmental requirements for the course, I’m thinking it’s probably going to turn out okay. My students seem to be really psyched about getting to write a paper of their choice (it’s been pretty regimented up till now), and they seem to get at least the rudiments of argument reasonably well, and almost all of them seem to have their topics more or less chosen, and for the most part they don’t suck, and with the jettisoning of one of the intermediate assignments I think they’ll have the time to do their final papers right, and thoroughly, and well. Not all of them will, of course…they’re going to have a lot of research days in the next few weeks, where I’m not going to hold class but they will be expected to be doing stuff in the library and whatnot, and no doubt many of them will just take those days and fuck off and frolic in the burgeoning springtime (for which I can’t entirely blame them), but I can’t worry about that too much…they have access to me if they want it, and they have ample time to do their research, and they know what’s expected of them for the final assignment, so…

I dunno. It’s possible that I’ll be teaching at least a couple of sections of this class in the fall, as an adjunct, and if I do, I’ll be inclined to make further radical changes based on what worked and what didn’t this semester. It’s always different, it seems, because the students are different, and there’s always going to be stuff that works once and so one assumes that it works, and then it turns out that the first success was just a fluke, and all that. On the whole, I think I am a better teacher of this stuff than I was my first semester, but I’ve also learned a lot about what doesn’t work over the course of this semester, so there will be more tinkering to do before the semester after this one rolls around. And I expect that, if I’m actually engaged and paying attention, that will turn out to be true every semester. And if I stop being engaged and paying attention, and learning how to do this better and discovering new ways of achieving that, then I should probably stop doing it and find something else. I don’t think I’m going to lose that engagement, though…teaching is hard, and frustrating, and worrying and demoralizing and all that other stuff, at times. But it remains the best work I’ve ever done…it’s a good thing to do, and on days when what you try to do with your class actually hits, well…there’s no feeling quite like it that I’ve ever run across. So.

Cheers.

Well, with a certain amount of ruthlessness, we managed to cut it down from nearly forty to a nice, round thirty. Of course, I also accumulated a couple of new ones along the way, but that’s no bad thing. So. I think I’m done for the night, because the sun’s about to come up, but progress is being made, and the pruning shall continue until we have achieved a set of goals that are (a) attainable and/or useful; and (b) actually reflective of what I actually want (or think I want) at the present time. All right.

...I have revised three of them. One still needs work, but I’m kind of thinking at this point that it may need more work than it actually merits. It was kind of a formal experiment, anyway, and a largely successful one as far as it went. But as an actual functional story, well…not so sure about that. I dunno. Once the semester’s done maybe I’ll have a look at it again, and see if it’s really worth trying to turn into something viable. If so, I’ll tinker, and if not, I’ll put it in the file reserved for such pieces, and call this goal a success, and move along to the next thing. Tra la.

And yes…reviewing the last entry in this, the one that may wind up getting shelved is the one that I characterized, lo these seven months ago, as possibly no more than a “proof of concept” piece. That still stands. But, well, we shall see.

I wound up getting a B in the required class I had to take to train me to teach last semester. It was an attendance issue, really…we teach Monday through Thursday, which is really exhausting one’s first time out (and one’s second time out as well, as it turns out), and the teaching practicum was thoughtfully scheduled for Fridays at 9am. It was also kind of stupid and useless. So I didn’t make it to class as often as I probably should have. One of my savvier and more flexible colleagues showed up every Friday morning with a travel mug half-full of coffee and half-full of Amaretto, and she reported that it was a lot more pleasant, a lot more useful, and a lot less hateful that way. She is wiser than I, alas. So much for the 4.0 GPA. Ah, well.

Sad, sad, in a way. The deadline for applying to Ph.D. programs tends to fall around the first of the year, and by the end of last semester I was totally fried with classes and teaching and writing and whatnot, so the applying just didn’t happen.

There was one school that I was considering applying to that had a deadline of March 1, and it was actually the alma mater of one of my professors, and so I figured I’d have a leg up. But I was overwhelmed this winter, too, and I honestly wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend the next three years of my life in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Besides, the deadline for applying to Clarion was also March 1. So I applied to Clarion instead, and got in.

Sad consequence of all this is that I will have to fend for myself, sans student loans or any of that, at least until August of 2009. Happy consequences of that, though, are that I can actually do the whole application thing right, and try to get into schools that are not in Mississippi, and are in fact in places that I might want to spend three years or more in. Other happy consequences may well include getting back to being focused on writing (as opposed to academic hoohah) for a year, trying to consolidate the gains that come from being published, and a chance to spend some time reading stuff that isn’t Literature-with-a-capital-L for awhile. I like the capital-L Literature, but a lot of my best inspiration for stories and things has always come from weird random stuff that I read in other areas—sociology, history, the occasional pop-science book, architectural theory, craziness like that. So. Who knows? I might even manage to understand physics enough to cross that goal off the list at the end of this coming year.

I’m kind of scared…about making a living, being lonely and intellectually understimulated, stuff like that. But I’m increasingly coming around to the idea that it may well be the best thing, for a whole variety of reasons.

We shall see.

I love heist movies, but it’s all about the clever planning, the puzzle-solving aspect, all that, really. Maybe if this goal was “plan the perfect bank heist”, I could still be down with it, but as constructed I’m really not. So. Bye bye.

snip

I never got around to selling those books, and I hope I don’t have to. So. snip

I smoke like a chimney, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. I’m nearer now to 40 than I am to 30. The most exercise I get on a regular basis is the barroom curls. And it’s hard for me to imagine that there will be any time in the foreseeable future when I’ll have six months to just walk. Sad but true. It ain’t gonna happen. So.

snip

...the “regaining my sense of wonder” thing. It seems, in retrospect, like I didn’t ever forget that, really. I just didn’t like so much who I in fact am, and the consequences of being me, and all of that. It was kind of a bad time when I hatched this goal…and, I dunno, maybe I did forget. Maybe.

I’m someone who cares deeply, doesn’t ever seem to take the easy path between point A and point B, doesn’t flinch away from potential injury, doesn’t flee from morally and emotionally complicated situations. I try to approach people that I care for as naked as I can be of emotional and spiritual armor. I’m a lot of other things as well, for good and for ill…some admirable, some not. I suppose I’ve had a hard time in recent days with being who I am, and with some of the consequences that come from being this person. At the same time, while I do strive with more or less diligence and determination to perfect my imperfections, the core of me I think is pretty good, and I can’t change that without changing a lot of other things, and I wouldn’t want to, I don’t think, honestly.

I think probably what I wanted out of this goal was to actually not be that person, and to somehow remember that I was someone else who was less prone to sustain grievous emotional injury from time to time. I am not, at the end of the day, someone else, however, and I think I’m okay again with the risk of grievous emotional injury. Even if I’m not, it’s all a ticket I’ve bought, and a ride I’m on, and as much as I might like that not to be the case sometimes, it’s not a ride I can really get off of before it’s over. And, as I say, I think I’m okay with that again. At least until the next anvil falls from the sky. Heigh ho, and tra la.

Sadly, this one ain’t never gonna happen, simply because the rather fruitful path that my life seems to be on at present doesn’t seem like it goes in anything like this direction. I mean, to a certain extent, I’m an amateur policy wonk already, in several different areas. But it’s never going to be, like, a job. I think I’ve embraced, pretty fully now, the direction of writing and teaching and academia and the English department, and I’m okay with that.

Besides, I’m always in the running to win the barroom trivia thing if I’m in a bar where the questions aren’t all about Brittney Spears and her ilk. And if anyone starts going off on the appropriate limits of executive privilege or the implications of the near-collapse of Bear Stearns or the like, well…man, I can >throw down<. So. I suppose I’ll have to be content with that. And I think I can be. So.

...that this project should also involve clearing off some of the stuff that has actually gotten done, perhaps intangibly or inadvertantly, since the last time I was around here, as well.

It doesn’t seem to feel quite the way it used to, or function in the same way, or be entirely responsive to the same stimuli, but it’s there again. In fact, in retrospect, I find myself wondering if it ever really left, or if I simply wasn’t able to pay attention to the things that evoked it for awhile. Anyway.

snip

snip

and…???!?

I got kind of sidetracked by life lately, and the other night was the first time in about six months that I’d logged into 43things. I looked over my list of things to do, many of which were put on there in the first flush of affection I had for this site. Looking at them now, I wonder why a lot of them are even there, and what I was thinking putting them there, and not remembering what I was thinking. So.

Time for some pruning, it seems.

So when did I post the first entry on this goal? Sometime back in March or something of last year? Ha. Ha, and ha again. I’m never going to be crossing this one off, I don’t think. It seems like I might also never be free of it, because like mildew or some sort of unseemly rash it keeps coming back.

I muddled (in a regrettably half-assed way, I feel in retrospect) through last semester’s independent study, but I did get some good stuff out of it…Frazer’s “Golden Bough” is actually a lot more relevant to seeing some of the subtleties of what’s going on in the poem than Eliot himself let on in his notes to the poem (which were, I suspect, him fucking just that much more with his readers, to a large extent). There’s probably something to be done with the structural placement of different elements in the poem and Frazer’s conception of sympathetic magic and how it operates (well, “probably” might be too strong a word, but I have a fairly powerful and persistent intuition in that direction). I didn’t manage to read “The Divine Comedy”, but I read enough to be convinced, too, that it’s important in ways that go well beyond the specific allusions.

Also, I began to get an interesting sense of the relationship between the texts Eliot alluded to and the poem itself—in a way his poem almost annexes the texts that he alludes to, and makes them a significant part of his poem in their respective entireties. Virgil’s “Aeneid” is alluded to only obliquely, but when one reads it one sees a lot more in it that relates to Eliot’s themes than just the line to which he alludes; likewise “The Satyricon”, and Dante, and Frazer, and so forth. You could actually work your way through all of the allusions, and their origin texts, and wind up feeling like you’d just experienced the extended dance mix of “The Waste Land”, of which the published form of the poem is just the radio edit. I dunno.

Anyway. So I stopped with the independent study when last semester ended, and it was really kind of a relief. I was pretty burnt out on Eliot. So I signed up for classes for this semester, and one of the ones on offer was a cool-sounding class on British Modernism that is taught by one of the professors I hadn’t had an opportunity to take before, but who was reputed to be (and has lived up to her reputation as) probably the best of the lit faculty. So I signed up for it. And, along with an early Conrad novel, what was on the syllabus for us to read the first week? Ha ha…T.S. Eliot. “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, “Prufrock” and, of course, “The Waste Land”.

And I actually wound up writing my first paper for the class at least partially on “The Waste Land”, and it continues to haunt my brain from new critical perspectives, and I keep just sort of turning it all over in my mind.

I’m beginning to feel like it’s the poetic analog of the Hotel California…you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Last week this sort of dumbass colleague of mine was talking trash about Eliot, and complaining that he’d read “The Waste Land” twice and he couldn’t get it so obviously it was just useless, canonized crap, and why didn’t Eliot just come out and say what he had to say? I responded with a rather surprising (to me) impromptu defense of the poem as an interesting and rewarding text that was responsive to close examination, and that deserved attention especially given the period during which it was published, and that it was important…in doing so I managed to incorporate all the complaints about the poem, and sort of turn them around, or cast them in a different light, over the course of twenty minutes or so, and one of my listeners (not the dumbass at which this all was mainly directed, alas) confessed when I’d fallen silent that I had persuaded her to reconsider her own profoundly negative and impatient view of the poem. And then today, I was having lunch with a friend and she asked me what the whole deal was with Phlebas the Phoenician, which was kind of the gateway curiosity that sucked me into the poem. So I nattered on for awhile, and in the course of the nattering, I discovered that I was actually developing a new idea about what the deal with Phlebas actually is, and began to get curious again about maybe trying to develop and support the burgeoning argument.

Gah. Anyway. Like I say, I don’t think this one is ever coming off the list. But, well, I suppose I’m kind of all right with that. I like puzzles. So. Tra la.

That’s all.

It’s pretty cool.

Life has been busy, and strange, and all that, since last I logged in here. But, among other pressures, I did manage to apply to Clarion for this summer, and they did accept me, and so, money be damned (so much easier said than lived up to), I’ll be at UCSD this summer.

It’s cool, though, That’s all.

It’s sort of a thing of beauty, and it’s also horribly wrong. I feel incredibly guilty about spending time on this, in large measure because it is far from the most important thing that I have on my plate right now. But Friday and Monday are both university holidays, and I kind of have my ducks in a row with all the various shit that I need to get done (I think, at this moment), and I’ve been spending this day doing the business.

This thing I’m writing is really fucking awful, I expect. I’m finding, though, that that’s one of the beautuful things about setting oneself a task like NaNoWriMo—the stricture is simply that one complete a novel in thrity days. It’s not that one completed a good (or even readable) novel in thirty days. I got something close to 3000 words down since I woke up this morning, and I’m pretty sure I’m not done yet. So. Onwards! I just hit 7000 words, and there’s more in the tank. So. Who cares if it sucks, or if I’m making narrative decisions based on external concerns? Anything that keeps you going is fair game, right?

Right. So. Good times. My immediate goal, which may well not be realized, is to crack 10,000 words before I go to bed tonight. I’m into chapter 3, and haven’t completely gone off the rails thus far, so I think maybe this is an attainable thing.

In any event, we shall see. Good luck to all of you who are doing this, and who are probably writing something far less intensely silly and useless than what I’m doing. Good times, though, in any event. Keep marching. Cheers, people.

Love,
Dan

Yeah. Haven’t had much time for the 43things thing lately. But I’m sort of on the NaNoWriMo thing….I’ve spent some time tonight, and am up to 1486 words thus far. We shall see. Best of luck to all of you all who are also doing this….it’s good work, and while I’m not particularly hopeful for myself this year with this, I’m certainly rooting for you all. Cheers. And write, goddamnit!

As it turns out, after the initial momentum of watching the first half season died, the DVDs for the rest became impossibly heavy to pick up again and pop into the DVD player.

I dunno. Part of it is that the guy who turned me onto “Deadwood” turned out to be kind of a prat. Part of it is that, as well-scripted and well-acted and well-produced as it seems to be, the show is a western, and I’m so not interested in westerns. Not at present, anyway. I mean, for Chrissake, I live in Arizona. I live in a western. I certainly don’t need to watch more rednecks with guns on TV.

Maybe we’ll get back to it sometime later, after I’ve moved on from this place to more civilized climes. We shall see. But for now, goodbye, “Deadwood”.

Another HBO original series, “The Wire” (which deals with the street-level drug trade in modern day Baltimore) is worth checking out, though. Best thing I’ve seen come off of the TV in years. So check that one out instead. Unless of course you really groove on westerns. Heigh ho.