Light reading email for my students

 I may yet do a "books I've loved" post, not sure though and thought I'd share this in the meantime.

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Literary fiction

 

Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You and Cleanness

 

Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers

 

Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow

 

Ling Ma, Severance

 

SFF

 

Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms

 

Rebecca Kuang, The Poppy War trilogy (3 novels)

 

Fonda Lee, The Green Bone trilogy (3 novels)

 

Tade Thompson, The Rosewater Trilogy (3 novels)

 

Crime

 

S. A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland

 

Peter Temple, The Broken Shore

 

YA

 

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline

 

The Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angelina Boulley

 

Garth Nix, The Abhorsen novels (new installment out this fall is Terciel and Elinor)

 

Romance

 

Helen Hoang, The Kiss Quotient

10 x 50

1. My fiftieth birthday today.  

2. This year was a crucible! In the end I think I did come out stronger, but word to the wise, don't tell people they're resilient while they're still in the thick of crisis....

3. Stronger in my sense of purpose for sure.  Teaching, writing and advising/mentoring are my things.  There are a few issues I care a lot about and I would relax the "no higher admin" role to pursue them, but I did not thrive as chair of the A&S Policy and Planning Committee this year, my values aren't closely enough aligned with the present-day institution and I hereby pronounce that I will rule out any future path that points me seriously deanwards.  Wasn't sure about this a year and a half ago, am now, that's progress!

4.  I've only been department chair for a few weeks, but I think actually I quite like it, and certainly I consider it the normal responsibility of those who are in a position to undertake it, it's still effectively a faculty position rather than a position in university leadership.  I like helping people sort out the small things they need!  Also have hyper-competent DAAF who takes care of a lot of practical details I hate - i.e. I am surprised by how many people need forms signed, but Pam has already had a rubber stamp made and will do that or digital for anything I forward to her and get it back to the recipient.  Since anything that comes in an attachment or at a link that I have to deal with basically fills me with anxiety and dread, this is extremely helpful.

5. Two exciting birthday treats, obtained yesterday from Gelato & Co. at Camana Bay: fruit-of-the-forest "tiramisu" gelato with meringue; exquisite slice of sachertorte, which I know mostly from the novels of Eva Ibbotson.  

6. And a good run early this morning, and a good work day as well.  I had three biggish things and the one I cared about least was on the hardest deadline, I was aware that taking the whole summer OFF from work might be a good idea, but in fact my brain needs this kind of intellectual project to thrive so that wouldn't really have been a solution, not to mention just making me even unhappier about sitting on a big project I care about that was STUCK.  It is no longer stuck - the manuscript revision won't be done by the end of the summer (I have three more full weeks in Cayman with Brent, then two more before Labor Day, the latter will be I think mostly life reentry, full-on chairing set-up and writing the Norton Library Pride and Prejudice introduction that is due Sept. 1.

Pictured: use of new ReMarkable tablet to work on notes for new sections; working headings for the new preface and introduction for the book, which were the really crucial thing for me to work out this summer.  Drafted the new preface, now working on filling in bits and identifying holes in the new structure, this is good and I am committed to working on it steadily through fall and winter, if I do that I think it can be done in January and ready to send out (that is unless I decide I need to go down the rabbithole of Board of Trade archives...).

7.  Have decided I will join Chelsea Piers again in September - my back is so much better, I can ride my bike down there again and I really need access to that pool and more especially to masters swim.  Columbia pool did finally open a couple months ago but on an extremely limited schedule and I am not sure it's going to work for me.  ALSO realization of this year was that without being able to go physically to be with Brent I had absolutely no work-life separation, I live in a Columbia apartment 1 block from campus, working from home all the time.  Chelsea Piers was always my third place, I need that again!  (Good place to work on book too - contemplating how to fend off immersion in admin email till later in day - think this will help.)

8. This pandemic year was actually very good for my problematic back and my physical fitness in general - no human contact meant no bronchitis, so no illness-related layoffs; no travel prevented disruptions to daily routine; great yoga taught live online solved my NYC "can't easily get to the right studio" problem. Ramped things up when I got to Cayman, the yoga continues live and online, I run 4x and try to bike outdoors on Sunday (triathlon might be a gleam in my eye again) and at least one indoor ride (good new spin bike here, acquired because of quarantine needs, is helping this happen smoothly, plus Monday early am date with Lauren).  ALL GOOD.

9.  Still worse concentration than usual, I think. But much more functional than in May, I wasn't sure it would happen that quickly, the school year was so so so much more taxing even than it usually is.

10. OK that's all folks!

June 24 update

Brains are strange, they are frustrating, they forget their own self-knowledge every time and it is always almost a surprise -- the very greatest relief -- when it turns out that no this state of distraction and anxiety and lack of focus is NOT permanent, I will be myself again if I am patient.

Which is to say it's June 24, and today is the FIRST day I am really feeling back to myself, as evidenced in my having gotten myself to the cafe for a morning writing session.

I cannot bear to go back through the trials and tribulations of my work and personal life from March 2020 through to May 2021, they were nothing compared to what many other people have lost this year but they were not really nothing, they were overwhelming!  Cut off from my partner by a closed international border, in the hot seat on faculty governance at about the worst possible time in the whole chequered history of Columbia Arts and Sciences, naturally prone to depression  and anxiety - yes there were bright spots, my students were amazing and my new version of the intro the major, prompted by the #BLM protests of summer 2020, might be the best class I've ever taught. And I didn't actually flame out and die even though I hope I never again in my life have to run regular 200-person A&S faculty meetings on Zoom.

Misguided revisions to the academic calendar left me having taught my last class in mid-April, the semester was officially over before the end of April to accommodate two beefed-up summer terms, but of course all the admin stuff needed our attention not just to the end of May but into June.  Unprecedented degree of burnout for me, really almost indescribable if you haven't ever experienced it.  I flew to Cayman on May 21, when I booked it I thought I'd be fully done with school stuff and already transitioning to my own work, this was completely delusional.  I would be here for 13 weeks, I figured 3 for recovery (including the currently 12-day quarantine for vaccinated travelers) and 10 for FULL-ON WORK.

Halfway through week 5 now and I only yesterday finally struggled through my final Policy and Planning Committee task, the nth revision of the report of the subcommittee I chaired on pandemic workload and career impact.  I haven't done more than a few hours of work each day over these first four and a half weeks, mostly PPC and other lingering external tasks (I did have 3 2hr sessions restructuring my book manuscript when I realized how angry I was with my employer but also myself for letting this work sunder me from my writing).  What I have done is MASSIVE amounts of exercise, that fed my body and brain, it was actually a very good exercise year for me all round because I like not seeing anybody and streaming high-quality yoga from my home office and generally being left to my own devices.  But that will not ultimately sustain my SOUL, so....

... it was clearly related to having finally pushed through to the sort-of-end (really these things never end) of the committee stuff, but on my longer run yesterday morning I had a major insight.  I thought - why have I not started working in the morning at the cafe again?  That is my longstanding routine, that is what I couldn't have this past year (and what I tried to recreate for students and colleagues when I ran the COFFEEWRITING sessions last summer), I can never concentrate at home and at the computer, I need pen or pencil and lined paper at a cafe table!

And I realized that I still hadn't fully got my mind around covid-era change.  When Cayman had hard lockdown last summer, Brent moved his office computer ("the production machine!") home and kept working at home even after he could have gone back to the office.  Old timetable: Brent to office solo around 5am for backups, stop at Cafe del Sol to pick up coffee and protein shakes, home for regrouping as I also shower post-exercise and get my stuff together, then me hitching a ride when Brent drives back out to the office around 8 and having him drop me at the cafe.  

The new routine though involves Brent doing the early work at home and then a solo trip to Cafe del Sol for their 6:30 opening, at which time I am still either finishing early exercise session or unshowered and not yet ready to go.  BUT - if I just keep focused and get out the door sooner after 5am waking (yes it has been very nice just lounging on the couch drinking a seltzer for half an hour and peppering Brent with the occasional observation as he completes morning work tasks), I can be showered and ready to go by 6:25, and have the 90 minutes cafe writing time before I get all tuckered out by second (or in some cases third!) exercise session.

So I've got eight full weeks here still to go. (Returning to NYC a couple weeks before school starts because three months is long enough to be away and I will need to get various chair things up and running etc. before I am actually teaching and in lots of meetings again.)  I was really pretty much stymied in early June when I considered the 3 work things I wanted to do this summer.  The big one is my book revision, I care about that by far the most and yet it has no external deadline; the second is the Work Inside and Outside the University handbook, to be based on the pilot course I taught in fall 2020, I should really crank out a draft this summer because it's timely and it diminishes in utility if I sit on it too long, plus I have a fantastic RA lined up to help me with it.  And the one thing with a true external hard deadline is an introduction and notes for the Norton Library Pride and Prejudice, something I couldn't say no to.  HOW ON EARTH WAS I GOING TO DO THREE BIG THINGS WHEN MY BRAIN WASN'T WORKING?

But being done (at least for a while) with that report yesterday (and I  was dealing with minutes and faculty meetings and the unexpected responsibility of chairing a grievance committee that needed to meet multiple times and yes I did need to write the report for that too....), suddenly everything seemed manageable again. I dug out the old emails with the Norton Library info, whoa that's only a 5-7.5K introduction and very light annotation, that is SO manageable.  I'm waiting on confirmation of an appointment with Diana to get started on the Work IOU wrangling on Monday.  And I made it to the cafe this morning and wrote more words than is really advisable, it is such a relief to be back to myself.... 

"Heads of the Colored People"

For class on Wednesday, please read Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s story “Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology.”  Here is the audio recording of that story. 

(The PDF also includes two other stories that I find especially captivating and brutal, “Belles Lettres” and “Suicide, Watch”; both of these are optional, but I think you will enjoy them if you have the wherewithal.)

My main purpose in lecture will be to give you some tools to name and notice important features of this story’s narration, terms that we will use to develop a fuller description of and argument about the story as a whole.

Our understanding of Thompson-Spires’ narrator will be clarified by some attention to the effect of the story’s densely figured network of allusions.  Though I was tempted to write you a module page that glosses every reference in the story’s pages, I rapidly abandoned that project as too time-consuming.  I will share just a selection here, for fun rather than because you need to follow the threads; taken together, this would give you a sense of the body of cultural references with which the story’s narrator is familiar.

Here’s a link to a PDF of William Wilson’s "Afric-American Picture Gallery" (p. 8) – note that these are prose sketches, not drawings. And here’s a great biographical sketch of James McCune Smith, author of the “Heads of the Colored People” sketches that give Thompson-Spires the title for both the story and the collection as a whole; I couldn’t find this text online, but here's a scholarly article that gives a good sense of it. This is now only very obliquely related to the story, but I can’t resist giving you this link to a book about the eighteenth-century "Lecture on Heads" that forms part of the earlier culture discourse on “heads” – note the fact that we really can’t separate periodical print culture from theatrical performances in a variety of settings.

Flannery O’Connor’s story "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is an important intertext for the story’s conclusion, and so is Donika Kelly’s poem "Arkansas Love Story".  I’ll say more in class about intertextuality, and you can also check out this definition of mise en abyme beforehand if you like (all three references on p. 14).

A few other bits I like: Why the narrator snags on the fact that Brother Man’s birth name is Richard Simmons (p. 6); the 90s song "Say My Name" (p. 11); "Best of Bruh Man" clips from TV show Martin (the “wish sandwich” bit is right at the end).

Finally, two visual references for the opening pages.

Sonic the Hedgehog spikes (p. 1):

Tamaki Suoh, president of Ouran Host Club, the character Riley’s dressed as in the story (p. 3):

 

Small things that are plaguing me

I appreciate the comforts of the modern world, especially infinitely downloadable books.  I like a hot shower and air-conditioning as much as the next person.  I even quite like Zoom for teaching and sociability; I like not having to pry myself out of my apartment!  I'm not a technophobe, I don't mind doing mildly technical stuff.

But my brain is NOT suited to all the annoying bits and bobs of doing business online in pandemic times and this is a list of the things that are currently plaguing me....

• Google Drive, my inability to organize documents into folders therein, difficulty of setting to different levels of access, etc. etc.
• Doodle - my longtime hatred, and increasingly a source of blocks on trying to arrange meetings for the endless committee and subcommittee work that is taking up much of my attention this year
• Lionmail, Columbia's proprietary gmail - don't even really know how to save things into folders, the whole thing is an absolute mess, need to develop some kind of system (filters?) but don't have spare wherewithal
• Concur - newly introduced reimbursement system, may make everything more convenient ultimately but setting it up is asking for attention I do not have to spare, strong suspicion my FRAP money is just going to go unspent this year as a result
• Documents that need a human signature i.e. printing and scanning (or photographing - my home scanner is broken) - I got an Apple Pencil in the summer for my iPad and surely I could do this without printing but it will take half an hour of attention to figure that out (have still not used/set up Pencil) and I can't make myself do it. I woke to TWO requests of this nature, both on pieces of business I thought already done! I literally feel like stabbing a fork in my eye when I think about having to deal with this.
• The impossibility of sending accurate scheduling emails in a time of pandemic - I think every single invitation I have sent in the last couple weeks has had some confusing glitch (day/date correct in book party invitation subject line but wrong date in email; wrong access setting for Google Doc with Zoom meeting scheduling; correct time in subcommittee meeting invitation text but wrong start time on Zoom meeting link).

My amazing RA Diana is going to give me a Drive tutorial next week after her dissertation chapter is distributed.  But frankly I can't concentrate while working at the computer, even at the best of times.  My brain is not made for this!  What a waste of time and attention that could be purposed to genuine  intellectual or administrative work, actually LISTENING to a student, etc.

My six months

 We all count it from different days.  My shelter in place really started on Thursday, March 19.  I'd seen it coming - I saw the footage of Wuhan hospitals in late January and it was clear to me it was going to be "the big one" - but that's not the same as being able to envisage the transformations that would ensue.

I hosted a small book party in my apartment on the evening of March 5 - we had the windows open and the fan blowing from the window-unit AC, uneasily bumped elbows and so forth.  Given that community spread was already taking place in my Columbia community (people who'd returned from Italy) we were lucky, I think, that it didn't become a small super-spreader event.

Classes were suspended on the 9th, and Columbia asked employees not to undertake non-essential international travel, but I was hungry to see Brent (it was essential for me!) and I got on a plane to Cayman on the 11th as planned for ten days to overlap with the week-long spring break.  Each day the situation seemed more grave; we went to Fidel Murphy's for early happy hour on Friday as always, and the bar was deserted except for a handful of panicky servers looking at the collapse of St. Patrick's Day prospects and the likelihood that many of them would have to leave the island if shutdowns continued on the planned trajectory.

I wasn't supposed to fly home until the 21st, but on the 17th the Cayman government announced that the border would close on the 22nd; my flight was canceled and I hastened to get on the next flight back to NYC.  I wouldn't have gone to Cayman if it would have been an absolute disaster to get stuck there, but it is not desirable to be where you don't have immigration status and access to your real work materials in a time of pandemic.  Got a business class seat on Cayman Airways and was home late on the 18th.  As I left the apartment the next morning to lay in a few essentials (I'd been stockpiling cat food and toilet paper already before I went to Cayman), I felt something like a membrane stretch across my door, I had to press my way through it, and I saw that it was a very good thing that I run five times a week outside, a non-negotiable commitment for me, or else I would be looking at a serious exacerbation of mild agoraphobia.

I said goodbye to Brent at the airport on March 18.  I thought then that I'd probably be able to get back to Cayman for the summer months, but the borders have remained closed.  There's a soft opening for Oct. 1, but it's still only repatriation flights and you have to book through a government agency: I'm not sure whether or not I would get permission, though at some point I need to try.  We're still hoping to see each other in December, but there are too many variables to make more than a good guess about how and where that will happen.

In almost every respect I have been extremely fortunate through all this.  I have a secure job and can easily work from home.  I like being at home and am not itching to travel, unless I could suddenly be teleported to Brent's condo.  I have two funny cats who are excellent companions!  I've had harder summers.  And yet....

The start of the new school year has brought a sense of movement to my life that was sorely lacking.  Depression has been hovering, but it's mostly lifted (leaving me with acute anxiety, inevitably, but I can work with that). 

It is going to be a meaningful and rewarding year of work, I think, within just about manageable bounds.  I made a choice last winter that now looks prescient: once I realized I was going to be running my pilot Work Inside and Outside the University seminar and also chairing the Arts and Sciences Policy and Planning Committee, I decided to use up a semester of banked course release (I am operating in an extraordinarily privileged realm of academic life) so that I could teach 1-1 rather than 2-2 for 2020-21.  (The work seminar carries through for the whole year, and I was particularly worried about having in effect 3 courses as well as PPC chairing for the spring semester.)

 And this morning I printed out my book manuscript, the version I finished in January and haven't touched since.  I hired a developmental editor in July to give me a detailed edit letter, and she provided me with truly excellent comments and insights.  I had genuinely no wherewithal for it over the summer, all my energy was going towards getting from day to day (running and yoga were good, and so was the writing accountability group I was running every day, but mostly I just huddled in bed doomscrolling), and that didn't contribute to my sense of well-being. I always have a book going!  It may not be realistic to think I'll be able to work on it consistently this semester, but I am at least going to see whether it might be possible to have about forty-five minutes a day for it, five days a week....

Final assignments

Your final assignment, should you choose to accept it, is a 5-7pp. personal critical essay on a topic of your choice. I’ve written this up as a shared set of directions for both of my seminars in case seeing the other class’s essay options helps you think of something you would like to write about. You are welcome to adapt or abandon the questions I’ve written as you see fit.

Reminder: I’d love to see something from you in the way of final writing, but you will receive credit for the class whether or not you hand something in to me.

You’ll upload your assignment to Courseworks and I’ll send you a short email with comments before the end of May. I’ve included these hard deadlines because I don’t want you to feel open-ended stress about writing something for which you may not have the wherewithal, and I intend to submit the roster of Pass grades on May 22, but I’d be delighted to read anything for you in summer months if you find yourself working on a writing project of any kind and would like some feedback.

The term “personal critical essay” is possibly coined by me. It overlaps with the category called “creative nonfiction” and can be found more often on literary websites than in academic journals. These are some of its traits:

- Less formal in tone than an academic essay

- May quote a passage or passages from the reading, but won’t depend on extended close reading work or a fully developed analytic argument

- Personal thoughts and observations are welcome

- Getting your self into your voice on the page is to be desired rather than avoided

- May be structured as associative “musings” and probably won’t include conventional argument transitions

I’m going to share a few examples, though these are all at a higher level of polish and sophistication than I imagine you should shoot for if it’s your first attempt in this mode.

The first one, a lovely short piece for Electric Literature, was actually adapted from the final essay a student wrote for me when I taught the Epic Histories class in Paris – based on specific conversations we’d had about Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life” and the students’ own habits and preferences, I wrote an essay question about what it’s like to visit Sephora in Paris, and got this amazing set of reflections in response: Sarah Anjum Bari on visiting Sephora under the shadow of the Arcades Project (read it here).

And I’ll give you two more links to essays written and published by advanced PhD students in our department:

Liz Bowen’s New Inquiry review of the film A Quiet Place (read it here)

Carina dell Valle Schorske’s Lit Hub essay on Gwendolyn Brooks (read it here)

Finally, an essay that we’re going to read for and talk about during the final meeting of Clarissa: See-Young Chu’s “Woven: A Refuge for Jae-In Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major,” published in Entropy. This is an upsetting one, and you should make sure you’re fortified for it before reading, especially if reading about sexual assault is triggering for you. You can find it here.

Epic Histories options

Original due date: Monday 5/11

New due date: Monday 5/18

1. Take one of Benjamin’s short chunks of text in the Arcades Project or elsewhere and use it as the epigraph for a personal essay about how we experience history in the time of covid-19.

2. We talked about several stumbling-blocks that made it difficult for Gibbon to write his own autobiography, the two chief ones being the challenge of how to represent a bad father given the bounds of decorum and the difficulty of retroactively defending a tendency towards religious skepticism that looked far more dangerous in the light of revolution in France. If you were going to set out to write your own autobiography, what would be the chief factor that would make it hard for you to tell an honest and fully represented story?

3. We switched from live to online meetings just before we moved on from Gibbon to Benjamin. How is reading the Benjamin of the Arcades Project different from reading Decline and Fall and/or Gibbon’s autobiographies? How is our online conversation different from the face-to-face ones we had for the first half of the semester?

Clarissa options

Original due date: Friday 5/8

New due date: Friday 5/15

1. Given that the novel Clarissa is so concerned with the problem of confinement, what was it like to read Richardson’s book in conditions of quarantine? Alternately, write a letter to a close friend in which you reflect on your current situation in a fashion that includes some thoughts about Richardson’s novel.

2. We talked about the “mad papers” and looked the typography Richardson the printer was able to use to supplement the textual meanings he created by way of words. Using a mix of visual and verbal methods (this might or might not be an essay!), create a single page layout, analog or digital, that integrates some bits of Clarissa and other texts you’re currently reading into a visual representation of your current state of mind.

3. How does a Columbia literature seminar create community? Is the physical classroom space essential, or do we find ourselves able to approximate many of its virtues on Zoom? If not, why not? How would you frame the virtuality of Zoom communication in terms of eighteenth-century epistolarity?