Raining Cats and Dogma

Just friends
Originally uploaded by Ryan Claycomb.

Posted by at 6:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Welcome to the final judging of Challenge #5, which is also the final judging by our lovely guest judges, who have just been flown in from the wings to make a final appearance.

We were, frankly, appalled by the prospect that any of these mere mortals would replace us. Of course, Delores Haze is excepted, becuase she is no mere mortal, and as such, is disqualified from the competition. Nice try N. are a clever bastard, and we like ya for it. We doubt the next judges will.

We were also compelled by the possible pairing of Melvin Finkelschlagen and Paige Markham, but we realized they'd never work together--despite Finkelschlagen's marriage to the lovely Fifi, we know that it's just a sham, and that he and Paige, sexpot that she is, wouldn't be able to stop shagging long enough to even read the entries. Besides, Perry and Lucy are already, well, we'll let them tell you, we don't need another TOP NOVELIST romance.

And so, we appoint the embittered Norman Poulenc and ... um, what was her name? as the next judges: more intriguing possibilities, evil, evil, mean possibilities, which we like, abound. Daniel's vengeful loser strikes us as just the type of literary figure who, knowing he's got nothing left in the tank, starts accepting gigs like this one. Perry's unnamed baseball-diamond saboteur--we'll simply call her "Marge Schottenheimer"--may not have the literary chops, but we like her cojones.

Of the bottom three, Patricia, Phillip and BILL, niether Patricia nor BILL submitted an entry this week, despite the fact that they had already used up their Writer's block freebies. Unfortunately, Phillip's entry was so sad-sack, sop snivelling, so put-me-on-Zoloft-now that he would have been better off not submitting anything. Phillip, your email address suggests, you are a loser. This is your rejection slip: not a week too soon.

BILL and Patricia, there is another fate that could await you. I hear there is a remainders book fair being held in Washington State this June 10. If you don't submit next week, well, revenge is sweet and copies of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" long to nestle next to you.

Posted by at 10:07 PM | Permalink

Dr. Crazy is posting on the terrible things that students often do go through and get the work done anyway. I have posted on my response to plagiarism, and why it offends me so.

And then there's this one, which I've just found out isn't really covered by our academic integrity code. A student who claims to have had serious medical problems all semester (sad that I have to say "claims" but I now have serious misgivings about the student's honesty) emailed me before the last paper was due to say that she had been rushed to the hospital, and was worried that she wouldn't get the paper to me on time. Would I accept a soft copy?

Yes, I do accept soft copies in moiments like these, because like Dr. C, I tend to give these students the benefit of the doubt because many of them are in fact honest and suffering human beings. On the due date, then, I get an email with an attachment and a disclaimer that sometimes "my computer won't attach from this address." Of course the attachment is blank.

OK, let's try again: "Get it to me before Monday's class." In class on Monday, the student tells me that she dropped in my box, but that she realized that a page didn't print right, and there was a missing page. I asked her to bring the missing page next class. Red falgs all over the palce, more so when I realize that the missing page is a page that "didn't print right" a phenomenon represented by inserting about 20 hard returns and a line of gibberish at the bottom of the page, a line that contains mostly characters from the center line of the keyboard--completely unlike any actual computer generated error. Were I to compile the actual writing, it was 3.5 pages for a 5 page assignment.

The paper she turned in on Wednesday had 5 inserted line breaks and about 12 lines of new material, none of which occured in the space where the supposed "missing page" was supposed to go. When confronted, she said, "I didn't lie. There was a missing page." I was so flabbergasted, I simply told her I could not grade what she turned in on Wednesday, and would have to grade Monday's draft.

What gets me is that this, an example of bald-faced lying, is not really prosecutable under our honor code. I despise being lied to.

technorati tag: teaching-carnival

Posted by at 4:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As reported in the Onion.

I have always maintained that Beckett's theatrical project was to unrelenting strip away everything unnecessary. In the 23 blank pages of the newly discovered script, the master seems to have succeeded in that project.

Thanks to Erin for the scoop.

Posted by at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have mentioned elsewhere (probably in comments on another blog) that I believe that one of the reasons I got an on-campus interview here is that I flat out said at my MLA interview that "I'm a sucker for committees." This was not a calculated comment, but rather something of a truth. For all I know, it may stem from my vestigial belief that being on student council meant you were popular, and so committees, that latter-day avatar of the high school student council, still holds appeal for me.

Of course, I've come to formulate different and more adult reasons to justify my dedication to service, and I used them to motivate me to gather up service lines on my cv both in grad school and in my first job at GW. Here words like advocacy, engagement, and community citizenship always arise. Empowerment, or maybe more baldly, power, also plays a role in the appeal of service work, but ultiamtely, this feels hollow even as I type it.

At any rate, getting deeply invovled in service here has been a double edged sword. I have from the get-go trying to balance my desire to get involved with my desire not to appear like any number of first year profs who say "at my graduate institution, we..." While I do think that I have been only partially successful at the latter, that impulse hasn't always been damaging, especially with my work on the Undergraduate Writing Committee, where I think I have been able to have some sort of meaningful positive impact.

And so I've been on my share of department committees: Undergraduate Writing, PhD admissions, a prize committee that rewards excellent faculty scholarship, the committee that designs next year's qualifying exams for incoming PhD's, and other little things here and there.

What is interesting is that I often seem to be on committees with "the usual suspects" [Benicio Del Toro in particular is invaluable to every committee I sit on--kidding, of course]. But seriously, there seems to be a core group of faculty who serve on these things, and while I know everyone does something, I am still trying to puzzle out why people might have certain differing attitudes about departmental citizenship. In individual cases, of course, I understand. But in a department as big as this one (at around 40, we're not huge, but we're hardly tiny), I think I wish I felt like more of my colleagues were engaged with the life of the department as a community.

I'm sure that over the next years, I'll learn some of those reasons, and I suspect that I'll respect many of them as choices that individuals come to make for themselves. But our current chair just re-upped for a two-year term after six years on the job, and I can't help but wondering who would be interested in taking on the task when he steps down.

So I'm thinking about service as engagement in my community, and I'm finding a community that is at once collegial, but at the same time, less engaged as I'd hope. It may be why we're so collegial in the first place.

Posted by at 10:14 AM | Permalink

'cause I don't wanna be grading.

Accent: Currently, none that I know of, but recordings of the high school "me" reveal a distinctive Delmarva accent. What is a Delmarva accent, you ask? I'll give you a hint: it begins with an H and rhymes with "hick."
Booze: Though wine is not booze per se, I begin there. But bourbon (manhattans, preferably) is my spirit of choice.
Chore I Hate: Litter box clean-up. also grading.
Dog or Cat: Cats.despite the answer above.
Essential Electronics: my lap top, which I fear I may be vaguely addicted to, esp email.
Favorite Cologne(s): Pi, by Givenchy, I think?
Gold or Silver:Silver, though platinum is even better. You can take the boy out of the city, but you can't take the expensive tastes out of the boy.
Hometown: Delmarvelous Milford Delaware, home of...umm...Milfordians.
Insomnia: I'm too tired for insomnia.
Job Title: Assistant Professor
Kids: twin toddlers, who have recently relaunched their website!
Living arrangements: Large Single family home that in WV cost only a bit more than the townhouse we owned in suburban DC.
Most admirable trait: I dunno. I think I'm perfect, so there are so many to choose from...Seriously, I think I'm a good friend, partner and dad. And that's what I'm most proud of.
Number of sexual partners: Currently, one, which is all I expect to need.
Overnight hospital stays: several before age 6. Since then, none. I've been lucky.
Phobias: None actually pathological. Basic fears? aloneness, probably.
Quote: "Everyone is sayin' that hell's the hippest way to go. Well, I don't think so, but I'll take a look around" Joni Mitchell, "Blue".
Religion: Raised Evangelical Protestant, currently questioning, well, everything.
Siblings: Sister, younger by almost exactly three years;
Time I wake up: When it's my turn, when the children wake up, usu. around 7:30. When it's not my turn, I often get to sleep in until as late as 8:30. Three years ago, I would have considered 8:30 to be a horror, and now it's a luxury.
Unusual talent or skill: Double jointed thumbs, a fairly solid baritone singing voice, and excellent impressions of both Grover doing his "near/far" schtick, and a Macy's Thanksgiving day parade balloon.
Vegetable I refuse to eat: Olives.
Worst habit: ermm...talking too much, especially when I know should shut up.
X-rays: Teeth, chest, ankles, several fingers, elbow, kidneys.
Yummy foods I make: my favorites are chocolate orange pots-de-creme, pan seared Duck Breast with vanilla lavender sauce, and I believe I have finally perfected a good old fashioned omelet (improved by truffled olive oil). Sweet god, I think being a foodie may be my worst habit.
Zodiac sign: Gemini, whose upsides are being chatty, intellectually curious, charming, but who are also characterized as being two-faced, vain, and unreliable. Today I am charming. Tomorrow, who knows?

Posted by at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Many great writers build their work on the strength, the subtlety, the nuance of their characters. When a character isn't fully drawn, the piece often doesn't cohere. We have a similiar problem here on TOP NOVELIST. While our expert judges were efficiently dispatched by one another in week one, the work of reviewing your writing has been done largely deus-ex-machina. There is no Simon Cowell, no Michael Kors, no Tyra Banks, not even a measly Jeff Probst.

Your task is to create a character sketch of one of the two judges. The winning TWO entries will be honored by having those judges review your work each week--you have stayed in character, and it's time for the judges to do the same. But you must create the character. Therefore, in one or two paragraphs, give us a portrait of the men and women who would judge TOP NOVELIST. Remember though...like all Greek gods (machina or no), our current judges can be capricious, and like to punish hubris is vicious ways, so take care not to tread to heavily on their togas. You have until Thursday, when the ghosts in/gods from the machine will take their last bows.

Posted by at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I've had a few things going on in my head lately about what to post, though grading and conferencing has gotten in the way of much of that. One thing I've been thinking about is George's post and the ensuing discussion about mentoring going on over at his new place, Workbook.

The other is a desire to do some reflection on my first year on the tenure track...what it's cracked up to be, how it's different from other situations I've been in, how it's not. I'm guessing there will be a series of posts on the first year wrap-up, and would love to hear how my experiences compare with others on their first year experiences. Today, I'll combine those two lines of thinking to comment a little as to how mentoring and advising has impacted this year.

I've been lucky, I think, because while WVU doesn't have any kind of formal mentoring program, I've gotten a great deal of informal mentoring, but I'd like to actually start by thinking of my PhD advisor, and how the transition from graduate student to "junior colleague" has changed that relationship. For me, my advisor was a good fit. He was generally very hands-off, and I think I learned pretty quickly that if I wanted him as a resoruce, that I'd have to ask. He was often, frequently, usually, more than willing to help me out--comments on writing, professionalization advice, etc--but there was very little sense that he was responsible for my success (though he does seem to be proud of the success I've had).

That worked for me. I learned to treat him more as a senior colleague than as an advisor, and because of it, I've had an easier time in developing potential mentoring relationships with colleagues here: I am rarely afraid to ask questions that will make me look green: I am a young scholar, and I'll look even stupider for not knowing the answers to the questions I have. We know as teachers that our best students and our best classes ask the most questions, and I have no illusions that I'm not still learning the profession, so I've asked many folks for help.

The most obvious mentoring situation is with Donald Hall, who is a named chair here, was on my search committee, and is also an alum of Maryland. In fact, we worked with some of the same people during the dissertation phase. Donald has made sure to ask me to lunch on occasion, ask me how teaching and writing and all sorts of things are going. When I had some questions about proceeding on this anti-discplinarity project, we went out for drinks and discussed it for an hour. He's been very generous with his time, and if you read Donald's first IHE column, you'll see how this fits into his sense of his role here.

There are others, too, though. The Associate Chair and I play squash pretty regularly, and we end up talking shop a lot. He's got a different outlook and set of experiences than Donald and so the counterpoint for me is as important as the quality of any single relationship. The same is true of the two people with offices nearest me, the newly tenured linguist and the advanced assistant Brit/Irish modernist with whom I share a number of preps (notably Brit Lit II).

I think the key for me is that I am soaking up information on my department and on the profession based not on the wisdom and generosity of one single person, but of many--it takes a village to raise a tenured faculty member. I ask the same questions of many different people: what do you think of Palgrave? how polished should my manuscript be when I start shopping it around? how many texts do you put on your 200-level syllabi? what is the faculty senate like here?

In my field beyond the department, I have been less successful at making contacts, particularly those who might be able to offer mentoring-type advice down the line. At the last comparative drama conference I met a few folks, but none who were so close to my work to offer that--actually strike that...one contact that could be a great person to exchange with in the coming years.

In short, I've been fortunate that so many have taken an interest in my success. I think that if I do anything to cultivate that, its an absence of shame for what I don't know. I know more now than I did five, ten or fifteen years ago, and in five, ten, or fifteen years, I assume I'll have something to offer my junior colleagues. I hope they'll ask me.

Posted by at 8:41 PM | Permalink

In this, one of my most-read posts ever, I tried to grapple with my dislike of icky anti-feminist Caitlin Flanagan. I didn't necessarily want to make her look foolish there, but apparently, with the release of her book, she seems to be taking care of that all by herself.

Salon.com (they make you watch an ad first) gives us excerpts of her appearance on The Colbert Report.

via Bitch PhD (as if you don't all read her already).

Posted by at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For the record, even with a week in reruns, some of you couldn't get it together to write in about cookies. Yummy, buttery cookies. To you we say, "NO COOKIES FOR YOU!"

To wit, BILL, N., Perry and Patricia all take a pass this week while they're stuck in writer's block-ville. BILL promised us a caffienated return, N. plead something incomprehensible, Patricia was surely too busy championing some too-noble-for-our-blood cause, and Perry cried conspiracy. Clearly, Perry needs to crawl out of his Oubliette.

Of those who remain...the bottom two:
Phillip, you remain a pathetic lump. You had us reeled in with the idea that you had consumed all that guilt...but love handles? Just imagining your love handles is frankly grody.

Julia, you got lucky last week by claiming your writer's block, but the cliches have just worn too thin. We just cannot believe that your children's names are actually Caleb, Caron, and Corey. Please go back to suburbia and write poorly crafted short stories for your mommy group. In fact, go now. Julia, this is your rejection slip.

And now for the best three entries of the week:
Suzanne, ah, the disappointment of that swim meet. We could taste the chlorine, the burnt edges of the overbaked non-confections. But my god, woman, how could you do that to cookies?!?!? Even in fiction! That's just not right.

Daniel, see above. Your bitterness cookies just didn't leave us with the fictional taste in the mouth that we wanted. C'mon...you've read Proust! Surely you could write something derivative of that masterful evocation of madeleines, rather than another bourgeois-Americana bitterness. Was you mother dressed like Jackie O? Crikey.

Lucy...the moment we read the words "Petit Palmiers" you had us hooked. You've truly outdone yourself. We couldn't bear it, and after we read your entry, we drove to the local bakery and snagged us some cookies. And while it was no Boulangerie, we still ate ten.

Lucy, you are this week's winner. Go out and eat some cookies to celebrate!

The rest of you, get ready to compose...Top Novelist will be back on Monday with a new and fascinating challenge...And few of you have your freebies left.

Posted by at 9:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I am using a tactic again this semester that I tried last semester, one that I adopted from my former GWU colleague Ryan Jerving: Live grading. It only works in certain fairly luxurious teaching scenarios, where class sizes and/or course loads are small enough to accomodate the time commitment required.

The way I set up my composition courses, students are graded for "final for now" drafts of each major paper, and then are assigned a separate portfolio grade for revisions of the body of their work. Their final paper, then, is due in conference in the second to last week of classes--right now in my case. Each student sets up a 45 minute conference during this week where they come in to my office with their paper, and walk out with a grade on the paper, and revision tasks for their portfolio.

Here's how it works: A student arrives with two copies of their paper, including an audience analysis and a full works consulted page. I read the audience analysis silently and them look over the bibliography, and we go over formatting issues for that document. Then they start by reading the whole paper aloud. I'll stop them in places where I want to make a comment (the equivalent of margin comments) and they can ask questions as they need. For some higher-order issues, I'll jot some comments down for discussion afterwards. When they are done, I'll identify any other trends I see and we'll discuss how to address them in revision.

When they have a clear sense of what they'd like to do with the paper, I ask them to look over the grade descriptors in the course handbook, and together, we decide on an appropriate grade. 85% of the time, students are within a half-letter grade of my assessment, and they are not always as generous to themselves as you might imagine. They are tasked with writing up their own end comment, detailing, their paper's strengths, its weaknesses, and revision strategies they want to take on.

Once that is done, we discuss their course grade in progress and discuss the other work they'll choose to revise for the portfolio. They can ask any questions they want, and this ranges from questions about their grade to feedback about the class and even the live grading process.

Upsides? Students typically feel significant more empowered about the evaluation process--my comments are part of a dialogue about their writing, and doesn't have the same dogma effect that green pen does. The time commitment is not significantly more than paper grading for me, and since I cancel a week of classes to do these conferences, the hours expended are roughly the same, but it's all loaded into the workday. So I go home with my grading task completed (I hate to grade at home). Also, by asking students to write their end comment, I can see what they are processing of the coaching they get, and what I will need to reiterate in the last week of classes.

Downsides? It's a bit of an anxiety producing experience for some students, especially coming into the process, and in the rare case where a student is surprised by the grade, there is some awkwardness, particularly if tears are involved (as they have been only once). I can't do this in other classes, but in this situation, it's a process I like very much.

technorati tag: teaching-carnival

Posted by at 9:46 AM | Permalink

The producers are taking a week off to let everyone (themselves included) take a breather. If you used your Writer's Block freebie this week, you can still submit an entry by, say, Thursday. We'll be back with results for the last challenge on Friday.

In the meantime, check out the action so far by clicking on the links in the sidebar.

Posted by at 12:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There hasn't been much chatter about this, but despite bronchitis, Nels at A Delicate Boy . . . has assembled another thought-provokingTeaching Carnival.

Posted by at 12:13 PM | Permalink

Dr. Crazy has a post on Canon Formation and Ghettoes in Literary Studies that asks some hard questions about how we frame our teaching of "women writers" or other writers from "the literary ghettoes," and I've been thinking about this a lot in my own teaching, particularly of Brit Lit II.

In that class, I teach nothing but white men for the first half of the semester: Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, R Browning, R.L. Stevenson, Kipling, and Wilde. In fact, I have no women on the syllabus until the last weeks of the semester, when I load up: Woolf, Wintersen, Caryl Churchill.

Now, this isn't some anti-woman reactionary stance--quite the opposite, I think. One of the things I found here at WVU was that masculinity went so unexamined that I wanted to focus my syllabus on questions of masculinity and nation/empire over this 200 years of British literary history. So while I'm not teaching many texts by women, I am reading the constructions of masculinity in these texts in a deeply critical way.

But I'm also teaching intro to drama, where "Performing Masculinity" will NOT be the theme. Rather something more like "Crisis and Community" where I focus in part on asking students to look at representations of violence and community, and how they get constructed alongside and against one another. And in this class, texts by white men are going to be a lot less prominent. I haven't decided which texts I'll be using yet, but besides some literary history sections where I have little choice (Ancient Greek theatre, for example), I'll be avoiding overloading the white men in order to have a wider representation of identities in the texts I choose.

Relatedly, I have a footnote in my article on feminist drama that asks whether the feminist project of recovering female figures from the margins doesn't also re-cover them in the margins; that is by invoking them as "significant women who challenged the powers that be" we aren't rooting them in those same margins. This, I guess, is what Dr. C is asking herself, and I tend to to agree.

Posted by at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Many writers are able to pluimb the depths of childhood for inspiration, taking family traumas, warm memories, and deep seated fears from the recesses of their mind to the pages of a best-seller. This week we ask you to do the same. Using your formidable skills and personal vision, construct a short vignette taken from your childhood. The twist? It must involve cookies. Yummy, sweet cookies. Maybe with chocolate chips. Since we here at TOP NOVELIST are slackers, and took extra time to get this challenge posted, you can have until Friday to think about your childhood.

In other news, TOP NOVELIST has just learned that it comes up third in a Google search of "TOP NOVELIST," and would like to try google bombing to rasie ourselves up. So if you are in a bloggy mood, link to us, or even better yet, post about your favorite contestant in your own space. We'll show Google who the real TOP NOVELIST is.

Posted by at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Alas, the producers have been bogged down by conferences, teaching and children, and so only now do we post last week's results. This week's contest comes later in the day.

We will begin where there is little suspense: While Julia and Nels didn't submit, only Julia called in her "writer's block" freebie, so Nels has earned his rejection slip. I'm sure he'll plead something lame, like teaching or conferences or children, something the producers would never dream of allowing. . . . errrmm . . .

As for those who remain:

N. and Bill, while you certainly don't fight like a married couple, you sure do dish the dirt like one. Another challenge like this one, and you'll be fighting one another to see who gets eliminated. So much talent, squandered.

Phillip and Daniel, at first we were baffled by your fight over the New Yorker cartoon. "Who fights over New Yorker cartoons?" we wondered. Then we realized the brilliant meta-narrative conceit: "a-ha! This is not only about New Yorker cartoons, but it's the sort of thing that would appear in a New Yorker cartoon." Sadly, like most of those cartoons, this isn't as funny as it hopes to be.

Suzanne and Patricia, we loved the set-up and the conflict in your piece. So unexpected, so real. And that Jarod Jefferson IV really is dreamy. But really: a baby seal coat? They're so cute! That's such a terrible image! Save the baby seals!

Perry and Lucy, you really do sound like a married couple--if that married couple were a grusome mystery detective and an oversexed romance heroine. Personal visions conflicting like characters in a cheap romance thriller! Bodies in tarps! Stubbed out cigars! Sea-green berber carpet! Linda Howard would be proud. You are our winners for this week.

Posted by at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Some random bullets from the Narrative Conference in Ottawa:
• So I got to the Pittsburgh airport plenty early for my flight, but forgot my birth certificate. Which meant that after driving 80 minutes to the airport, I had to drive 80 minutes back home, and then another 80 minutes to the airport. 5 hours after leaving home for the first time, I boarded my flight. I arrived tired.
• The paper went fine, but was so not the highlight of the conference.
• Spent time with old friends: Hung out with 2 grad school friends, one of whom, Cathy Romagnolo, is clearly being courted as an up-and-comer by the heavy hitters in the narratology community; the other was Eric Berlatsky, a dissertation partner and very smart guy, with whom I had a very nice dinner Saturday night. I also got to see Elouise Oyzon (aka Weez) give a paper on first person narration in blogs, which generated both newbie and technophile conversation alike. Looks like we missed each other for a photo op the next day.
• Janice Radway gave a really excellent talk on Bridget Jones, chick lit, and girls' zines. I have been thinking a lot about blogging, and particularly feminist academic blogging, as an outgrowth of zine culture growing up. I wonder how many of the people on my blogroll were ever connected with a zine, and I wonder if blogging, with its uniform visual and orgnanizational format, is actually a more circumscribed writing activity in some way.
• Made new friends…For whatever reason, Cathy and I ended up hanging out with a group primarily from Freiburg, Germany, and a few from University of Helsinki that gave me a really stunning perspective on how good we really have it comparatively. One man had already translated a bunch of Derrida into Finnish (Finno-Ugric languages are related neither to German nor Romance languages, nor any Indo-European language for that matter, to give you a sense of that challange) and was essentially seventh in line for one of two tenure track positions in his department. This was an education, to be sure.
• Nothing will renew your faith in humanity more than a dance at a conference. Suddenly, and magically, all of the anxieties attendant with appearing smart seem to melt away, and grad students and junior faculty and named chairs all do the same bad white-folks dancing to new wave, disco, Motown, and hip-hop. It was a blast. Who knew that seeing Brian McHale dance (who’s not half bad) could change your whole sense of the profession for a night?
• Crap, this conference was expensive.

Posted by at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the most flattering experiences of the conference was when organizer of my panel, a senior scholar herself, actually cited my essay on feminist biographical drama in her paper. That was definitely cool.

The oddest, though, is one I’m still puzzling out. The panel I didn’t write about in my last post was all grad students, all from the same institution, and moderated by a professor from that institution. One of the papers was on a subject I had written about, and so I was interested to see if there was anything new.

And here it gets weird. The argument of the paper was fine, although not, to me, all that exigent. But a lot of the points the writer made along the way, indeed, even some of the key phrases, seemed very familiar. Like I had written them. There wasn’t enough for me to stand up and shout “Plagiarist!” and throw down my glove. But there was certainly too much for me to just ignore the coincidence.

Here’s what I did, and I’m interested to see what y’all think. First, after the Q&A (which was lively, and during which I made it clear that I knew plenty about the subject), I approached the student and asked him if he had run across my article. He said no (and noticeably did not blanch, which I think was a good sign), and so I gave him the reference. I then, discreetly pulled the moderator aside and noted the similarities, taking great care to say I was NOT accusing the student of plagiarism, but that since this was the topic of the student’s Master’s thesis, he might want to make sure the student’s advisor was aware of the potential problem. The moderator responded exactly as I had hoped, without over-reacting, in a way that protected the student, and in a way that didn’t dismiss my concern.

So here’s the question: should I follow up? At the very least, the student is guilty of poor research, since my article is readily available (though not from an online full text database) and many of the points he made absolutely should have cited my work. But I don’t want to be a pompous ass about this. I feel no ambivalence about protecting other people’s ideas when students in my classes plagiarize, but I don’t ever want to be seen as (or worse, actually be) territorial. What do you think?

So ultimately, I’m choosing at the moment to be flattered—first a paper where I should have been cited, followed immediately by a panel where I was cited. So this is what it feels like to actually be part of an academic conversation.

Posted by at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So since I was flying cross country and back in just over 48 hours to deliver this paper, I wanted to make the most of the conference, so I hit as many sessions as possible.

The first panel I attended was on pedagogy and performance, most interesting to me for a couple of papers on images of pedagogy in performance. The most intriguing one was presented by Roger Casey, a Dean at Rollins College in Florida, and sort of hot stuff on the Deans who talk about higher ed. circuit. Casey, a non-descript middle aged white guy, was co-presenting on images of teacher student interaction with one of his students, a very conventionally attractive blonde senior who had been doing an independent study with him. Yes, the paper talked about Oleanna. Yes, it proposed models of engaged pedagogy. Yes, the student noted that all her friends though that something must be going on between her and Dr. Casey. So all indications pointed to the idea that no, of course nothing untoward was going on. Did most everyone in the panel think something untoward was going on? You betcha. Shameful as it may be, we all proved their argument that the available images of teachers and students are so limited that this kind of interaction is always circumscribed within a sexual framework.

The second panel I attended was one on Absurd Tragedy, and was not as interesting as I had hoped. A paper on the Italian absurd looked at the notion of ridiculousness, earnest, and the notion of the mask and the real face (something explored by Pirandello’s Naked Masks), but oddly never put these ruminations in conversations with the directly relevant, and more sophisticated conceptions of identity by Erving Goffman, and more notoriously, Judith Butler. Another paper was an M.A. level comparison of family structures in Death of a Salesman and Endgame, which ultimately seemed kind of pointless. The best paper on the panel was trying to draw some generic distinctions about madness and tragedy in Absurdist drama particularly, and said some nice things about Albee, most of which, sadly, I am forgetting.

After lunch was a nice talk by Harry Elam and two respondents on his recent book on August Wilson, a talk that also served as a commemorative session on that playwright. Elam is a brilliant guy, and the only time I’ve ever had an opportunity to talk to him, I stuck my foot in my mouth. Nothing big, just a bit awkward. The catch? My paper, two sessions later, quoted Elam, in part to disagree. . Not to mention that the paper is on Suzan Lori Parks, about whom Elam has written much. Not to mention that the subject was about staging the historical gendered and raced body, and that I have had trouble saying anything meaningful about race with out tripping over my callow-white-boy naivetes. So while I enjoyed Elam’s talk, I left the session a smidgen worried.

I want to save the next panel for another post, so the last panel of the day was mine, a pre-assembled panel on feminist biographical drama. My paper would be the last of the entire conference, and when I saw the time slot, I figured that like Louisville, and like more than one other conference I’ve presented at, this would be a panel with more presenters than audience members. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The papers were all strong, the panel was better attended than many I’d been to, and the discussion was lively. In fact, people actually talked about my paper, which is, for whatever reason, a rarity for me. It was quite invigorating.

Afterwards, the panel organizer invited me to join a number of people out for dinner, and 9 of us, from folks who were senior members of their departments to very junior members (well, me). From a part time faculty member to scholar in my field who is on the cusp of being a Very Big Deal, the dinner and drinks afterwards was a blast. Conversation ranged from good publishing venues to a very funny and effective way to teach Dada, to whether Maybe was spelled with a –y at the end (that last one was my contribution. It was late and the manhattan was strong).

I’ve always had bad networking luck at conferences, ending up spending a fair amount of time walking alone from place to place. The last few conferences I’ve been at have been departures from this, and I’m starting to actually enjoy conferencing. How ‘bout that?

Posted by at 1:59 PM | Permalink

While a good ear for dialogue is crucial, you can’t always count on the characters in your head to have the same ear as you do. And while writing is often a solitary activity, collaboration—its own form of dialogue—can invigorate your writing. For this challenge, you’ll be working in pairs. You have each been emailed the address of another writer from TOP NOVELIST, with whom you will collaborate on a dialogue, an argument between two married persons. That means that there will be two winners of the challenge, and two writers just may be OUT.

You have until Thursday at noon to post your response in the Mont Blancâ„¢ comments field, at which point our celebrity judges will review your work.

Your pairs are as follows:
• Perry and Lucy
• N. and Bill
• Daniel and Phillip
• Patricia and Suzanne
• Nels and Julia

Good luck!

Posted by at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Rarely does the sort of air travel situation that causes stress end up with you meeting all your flights on time, bringing you to your destination when you expected. Far more frequently, we end up in SF or NY or Chicago or Atlanta or wherever, late, cranky, and hoping we still have enough time to catch a bite to eat before everything closes.

So as I’m driving north to the Pittsburgh airport on Friday after my class, already cutting it a little close, I can feel the pit in my stomach growing. When the line of black (and I do mean BLACK) clouds start rolling across the sky up ahead, that pit becomes a bit of a knot. When those black clouds are no longer visible because the rain is so heavy I can’t see the car in front of me, well, you get the idea.

Even so I got to the airport and parked with about 80 minutes to go before my flight (this may give you an idea of how fast I drove once visibility got better). I walked briskly to the self check in thinking that if I could get through security quickly enough, I might even be able to sit and eat the fast food I was inevitably going to get. The self-check-in prints out my boarding passes, and I can see the skies parting gloriously in front of me…this is going to be ok after all.

As the baggage checker at the ticket counter is putting the tag on my garment bag, she says, ‘Hunh. Los Angeles. I’m surprised it even let you check in. Hold on a second. Apparently, there was a gap between what she knew and what the self-serve e-ticket computer knew, because my flight out of PIT was delayed (may have had something to do with that storm front I’d just driven through). Partly sunny forecasts for my flight just turned into a lightning strike. But, BUT! if I hurried with X &Y paperwork over to the USAir counter, I might be able to make their flight. I thanked her and hustled off, without even looking at where she was sending me. Got there, got a new boarding pass, ran right to security and of course, got pulled aside for random screening. Now it’s 5:45, and I’m hustling up the terminal for a 6:05 flight (I still didn’t know where).

I get to the gate, and realize that gasp! This isn’t taking me to LA via Chicago or Dallas or St.Louis…It’s a direct flight! JOY! I hop on the flight (aisle seat, no less), fly to LA without incident, and arrive at LAX at 8pm pst, almost three hours before I was scheduled to arrive. As I pull in I check my voice mail, and find out that my original flight still hadn’t arrived at O’Hare yet, let alone any connector I could’ve found. I was at the hotel, fed and in bed by the time I was hoping to be touching down.

Usually, airport stresses ends badly. Sometimes it turns out ok, but sometimes, just sometimes, the air travel gods will make you sweat it out for something just a little bit better—sometimes, three hours of better.

Posted by at 12:40 PM | Permalink