The Little Professor

Return of duckling blogging

Duckling season is upon us! So far, I've spotted only two families; the ducks pictured here spend most of their time right by the Main Street lift bridge. 

Same ducks, but swimming around on the opposite side of the canal:

Speaking of names...

After reading this interesting nugget of political "common sense," it occurred to me that I was surely failing in my duty to make things "easier" for my fellow Americans.   Do you realize just how much trauma the name "Miriam Elizabeth Burstein" induces in the non-Jewish population? (That would be most of the country, in case you're wondering.)  It's the only way I can explain the phenomenon of "Marian," "Mirian," and "Mariam," not to mention "Berstein," "Bernstein," "Berenstain," and "Burnstein."  Thank goodness for Elizabeths I and II, or who knows what would happen to my middle name.  (As it is, I go by all three names because "Elizabeth" is the only one sure to be spelled and pronounced correctly.) 

In the interest of greater simplicity, I propose to change my name to "Mary Burr."  This will conveniently reduce my name to three syllables, while eliminating most common mispronunciations and misspellings.  My department will no doubt appreciate the reduced cost for printing business cards.  Of course, the shorter name will also streamline the process of signing checks and contracts.  And, from an aesthetic point of view, "Mary Burr" enjoys a certain pleasing symmetry.  Clearly, a winner all around. 

Practical advice for the day (or: absent-minded professordom in action)

 If your university's tech service department is about to take away your office computer for repairs, you may wish to make sure that you have copied all of the day's handouts from it first.  Because otherwise, it stands to reason that you will have fewer handouts than desired.

I'm sure that we can all agree that this is logical thinking in action.  Whether such logical thinking will ensue, of course, is an entirely different issue. 

Ahem.

Unexpected difficulties

While trawling through the greeting card aisles this afternoon, I discovered that something was missing: kitschy greeting cards with equally kitschy metrical, rhymed verse.  There were plenty of kitschy greeting cards with equally kitschy free verse, to be sure, but they weren't what I required.  Before, I had noted in passing that I wasn't seeing much metrical verse when I looked for cards, but this was the first time I specifically set out to find a card with something resembling ABAB and trochaic trimeter, or whatever.   I don't know if this is an accident of the store's stock--they didn't have Hallmark cards, probably because there's a Hallmark store a few doorways down--or if free verse has now entirely taken over the kitschy greeting card market.  In any event, I only managed to find one example of a card in metrical verse.  (There's a pedagogical purpose here; I'm not trying to inflict bad poetry, metrical or otherwise, on anyone in particular.  A report on the pedagogical purpose will follow tomorrow.) 

Department of random thoughts in airport food courts

I refuse to believe that people actually go to Mrs. Fields in order to purchase...bananas.  Surely the only point of spending your hard-earned dollars in a Mrs. Fields is to acquire warm, gooey semi-sweet chocolate chip cookies (with or without walnuts).  Who goes there to be healthy?

(This thought brought to you by the large basket of bananas at the Mrs. Fields in the Charlotte, NC airport.)

Scattered Musings: New semester approaching...

• Signs of imminent new semester: sudden uptick in my university e-mail account, featuring missives about committees (one new, one old), students, and campus fly-outs for our job search.
• Signs of new semester at other schools: sudden uptick in blog hits, indicating that many faculty are seeking to distract themselves during office hours.  
• It has been in the 80s and 90s in Southern California.  It has not been in the 80s and 90s in Brockport NY.  (In fact, I see negative numbers in this week's weather forecast.  Yikes!)  At least I'm not changing planes in Chicago on the way back. 
• Dickens is turning out to be a bit of a loose cannon in Barnaby Rudge, which is perhaps another way of saying that the novel is rather a mess.  But we knew that already. 
• Speaking of Book Two, the Catholic novelists have demanded their own chapter.  There are times when working on an academic project is a little (just a little) akin to working on a novel: your subjects have a habit of taking the "plot" in previously unanticipated directions. 
• Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book reminded me of Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers, which I taught last year.  Like The Erasers, The Black Book parodies the conventions of detective fiction--patterning, the role of detail, a mystery comfortably resolved by the end of the plot, and so forth.  In the case of The Black Book, one of the key twists originates with the reader: unless we pay attention to the pronouns in one paragraph near the beginning of the novel, we are likely to assume that a certain narrative convention is  working "transparently," when it isn't (even though the novel's running games with identity, including puns on "I" and "eye," should make us realize that something odd is going on).   The result unsettles the reader, along with the unsolved mystery at the end and the hysterical over-interpretation that results when Galip transposes the detective novel's fixation on details into "real" life.  
• Slumdog Millionaire, which I saw this afternoon with Mom the Retired School Administrator, rather put me in mind of Europa, Europa--a plot constructed as a series of set pieces, in which horrific happenings ultimately produce an ironic profit for the protagonist (in SM, answers to quiz questions; in EE, ongoing survival as an "Aryan").  We thought the film worked very well as a modern fairy tale, complete with a couple of Big Bad Wolves, but...maybe just a tad oversold by the critics?

Unhelpful automated assistance of the day

1.  I have an AMTRAK reservation that needs to be altered.
2.  Can you alter reservations via the website? Why, no.
3.  I call the relevant phone number.
4.  Friendly Computer Voice informs me that she has to transfer me to an actual human being. 
5.  I am put on hold.
6.  Automated suggestion: given the wait time, why don't I visit the website?
7.  See #2.
8.  *headdesk*

Scattered Musings

• Acer Aspire One update: So far, so good.  I've been working on a chapter draft for Book Two, and the Acer's keyboard has been comfortable for extended word processing.  (But YMMV if your hands are larger than mine.)   WiFi connections remain reliable and speedy, but, as noted at John Scalzi's site, it helps to have the computer plugged in.  In terms of overall performance, it's working about as well as the older Dell laptop I have at work.  My only caveats are that the screen size makes working with Google Books a trifle tedious (scrolling, scrolling, scrolling...) and the speakers are squawky (adequate for YouTube, but I'm not sure I would bother hooking up a DVD player to this thing).  Incidentally, for those of you who asked about the flexible keyboard: I don't have the documentation with me, but I think it was called a "Poll" (?).
• An urgent request for the Huntington Library: Scholars everywhere are begging for the return of the English high tea plates.  Barring that, some rolls--you know, the sort of thing you put butter on--would be nice, as opposed to scones the size of dinner plates.  
• Epic professional advice fail:   I always tell people to request updates/missing stuff/clarifications/what-have-you whenever The Academics in Charge fail to deliver, but I have never asked what became of my copy of this, which I was supposed to receive in return for writing a (short) entry.  Or is my over-active imagination playing tricks on me, yet again?
• Short: I think this chapter I'm working on may actually come in at a reasonable length.  Of course, I thought the same thing about the previous chapter.  Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to be writing about Dickens instead of, oh, Emma Marshall.

Scattered Musings

• TV Tropes has a great name for an all-too-familiar crime: Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma.
• In the department of Hope Springs Eternal, Etc., I am leaving on a jet plane tomorrow. The goal: make it to California without being buried in a snow bank, turned into an icicle, or trapped for several days at O'Hare Airport.   On a positive note, the weather reports predict that Chicago will be sunny tomorrow (unlike Rochester, which will be snowy again).  Then again, as anyone who has ever lived in Chicago knows, "sunny" in winter means that the day will bear an unfortunate resemblance to the lower regions of Hell (Dante version), because the absence of cloud cover is a very, very bad thing.  (In case you're wondering, Chicago is supposed to make it to a balmy high of nine degrees Fahrenheit.)
• Today's baffling weather went something like this:  Sun! WHUMP! (Snow, snow, snow.)  Sun! WHUMP! (Snow, snow, snow.)  Rinse, repeat.  Despite the whumping, it wasn't all that cold.
• A word of advice: if you're going to cite the entirety of someone's article in support of your position, it just might be a good idea to make sure that your Academic Search Premier/General OneFile/ProQuest/whatever search term a) appears on more than one page and b) does not primarily feature as a quotation from another author.
• This Barnaby Rudge chapter is proving difficult, although it's making progress (page eighteen and counting).  I'm hoping to have a complete draft by the time school starts.
• Speaking of school, I appear to have students  in the Victorian survey. The last time I taught it, the course was an...intimate...seminar; this time, it's over twenty students and still counting.  (We have a transfer enrollment session coming up, so the course should get a few more heads.  Er, with bodies attached.)  In the interests of preventing a mass emotional crisis, I took Bleak House off the reading list--my students will read it if asked, but some of them wind up walking around campus with a haunted look, as if pursued by nine hundred pages of text in zombie form--and turned the novel line-up into Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The Turn of the Screw.  This is also the first time in years that I've taught the course on three days instead of two, giving me more room on the syllabus to play with; one of the first things you learn as an instructor is that three hours on two days does not lend itself to the same amount of reading as three hours on three days.  
• A note to a novelist (who shall remain anonymous at this point in time): as a general rule, horses cannot regurgitate.  Under extreme circumstances, food may come up the way it went down, but only if something truly dire is happening--like the horse's stomach is about to detonate from pressure.  Perhaps it's the character's error...

Miss Havisham's wedding cake?

For your, um, delectation, I point you to Cake #3.  NSFDH (not safe for dinner hour). 

As a Victorianist, I'm glad to see that some of the commenters were also quick on the Great Expectations draw.