Hey! Nothing like setting modest goals and instantly achieving them. I’ve become a huge fan of World Soccer Daily and resolved to get an email read on the air. After the first two losses by the US, I sent an email about Bradley’s record (which is largely summed up by the last bullet in this post) and was quite happy to receive a positive email back from co-host Kenny Hassan.

After the valiant defeat to Brazil, I sent a second (more inspirational) email to the guys about how the US needs to shake off this heartbreaking loss and focus on beating Mexico at the Azteca next month. Happily, Steven Cohen read it on air during Monday’s show. You can hear it around 1:24:45 on this MP3 version of the broadcast.

Pretty pleased about it.

In footie playing news, I broke my scoring streak at five goals in five matches. My touch left me at the worst possible time as our under-strength team went crashing out of the play-off semifinal two weeks ago against a team we’d beaten 3-0 twice during the season. I had an awful personal outing, but injuries and absences of key players really did us in. Having fewer subs on a scorching hot day (90+ humidity) did not help. So we won the league handily but in the end by a couple points plus a massive advantage in goals scored and goal differential, but all for naught.

In happier news, I scored a hat-trick the following Monday night but it wasn’t much to crow about considering we were playing against 8 men on the other team. Still, three decent finishes if I do say so myself. And two days ago I popped in a dandy of a goal off a corner in the first half, then recorded three saves in a 20 minute stint in goal in a second-half shut out. So four goals in two games? Again, I’ll take it.

I put down Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the book I’ve been reading along with a bunch of graphic novels, because I was having a hard time reading it. I finished Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, which I really started enjoying about half-way through, and I’m midway through The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun. All of these are on my reading list for my preliminary exams.

A plurality of voices and abrupt shifts in time in the narrative (jumping from past, present, and future) are common traits of “magical realist” texts. I’m realizing now that while this technique can be interesting and provocative in a single work, it gets to be a bit much when you see it in book after book after book. I’m ready for a straight up beginning-middle-end novel, thank you.

I’m also trying to figure out the shape of the two courses I’ll be teaching in the fall, one of which is Intro to Creative Writing. After reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and a slew of graphic novels, I’ve decided to work “visual narratives” as part of the course.

I’ve also decided not to make it a separate unit but rather work it in as an option over the course of the semester. I wasn’t convinced about the idea until I started browsing through an examination copy of Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology I received, and noted that the authors use a number of graphic illustrations featuring nonfiction. By scouring the Internet, I’ve also found tons of PDF copies of graphic novels I admire both for their art and their storytelling, so it will be easy to excerpt sections and share them with the class. I’m excited for it, especially since a quick scan of the class roster revealed that nearly a third of the class are coming from the art school.

Current Mood: Fine, Thanks |

Through a lot of hard work, I’ve positioned myself pretty well heading into these last couple weeks of school. More or less, I have two papers due and need to review about 20 student portfolios. The papers need to be in the range of 12-20 pages each and the student portfolios shouldn’t take more than a couple hours to go through—at this point, I only need to separate the ones I consider “clear passes” from those that I believe are borderline or failing.

The clearly passing and clearly failing are pretty easy to identify, but it’s the borderline ones that take the most time, as you have to ask yourself whether you could reasonably justify (to yourself at this point) whether they accomplish enough of the course goals to pass. I’ve given the students plenty of time—the last two weeks of class—to get feedback, work on revisions, go to the writing lab, etc. in order to make sure that a variety of readers agree that they’re achieving those goals.

Now, how many of them chose to use this time wisely remains to be seen, but I’ve also informed them well in advance that because I’ve allotted this time and suggested many, many ways to both revise and do some quality assurance testing, I won’t hesitate to bring their portfolios into the assessment room and let someone else be the judge. At least three from my “control” stack automatically go to portfolio assessment anyway, so it’s like I’ve explained: it takes work to pass this class, so do the smart thing and put that work in now rather than not passing, and having to do a whole semester of coursework over again and still have to put this work to increase your odds of passing.

Of course, I also understand where they’re coming from since I’m doing my best to get through the end of the semester too. I think I’m doing well in both my classes, and one final paper I’m pretty set on, the other I’m a bit at sea. My plan is to put my head down and plow through the best I can. According to my calculations, I should have seven full days in the next two weeks to do nothing but concentrate on these two papers, and that’s more than enough time to put something together that’s pretty decent for each.

Of course, if a baby comes anytime before the May 10th due date, all of the above goes out the window as I look for a nice hayfield to crash land in…

Current Mood: A Bit Blah |
Currently Listening To - Björk - “Homogenic”

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Students were asked to reflect on their 101 experiences over the course of the semester. Here’s a quote from one:

From a 101 student reflective essay on their 101 experiences: “When first stepping foot into 101 the first day, I looked at Trent with his shaved head and tall boots with the tucked in pants, oh yeah and that goatee. I thought ‘Oh no, dudes going to be an ass.’”

Thankfully the next statement was “I was totally wrong.”

Current Mood: First Impressions are Everything |

Last “Confident Homecoming” class last night. We determined that the misery was all down to the instructor because the last few weeks haven’t been bad. We’re confident about coming home now. It’s just coming home with a baby that complicates things.

Also, on the car ride over Amy insisted on telling me the longest story ever about how she first waffled, and then ultimately decided to go for the five-year warranty on our newest big purchase, the Power Miser 900. It’s a hot water heater. She kept getting mad when I interrupted her to say that this conversation was what all non-married couples feared most.

Federations is now available for pre-order from Amazon. Buy it! I assume it must be some kind of accident or oversight, but my name appears nowhere amidst the promotional hyperbole.

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Man Ure vs. Villa on Sunday was a remarkable spectacle, wasn’t it? Heartbreaking for Villa but what an ending. Happily, I don’t have Man Ure enough for this to upset me too much, although I do think their fingers are touching trophy now. It’s that game in hand that spoils things.

Porto, Chelski, Barca, and Ars*nal in the semifinals of the Champs League? Who would’ve thunk it? ‘Pool are well and truly out as are Bayern, but I’m not writing off Man Ure. Remember ‘89? They did things like this every round. And my heart would love see Villareal bounce back in London, but my head says Spanish teams just don’t do that.

Geek admission: I love writing long, properly formatted bibliographies. I compiled a 30-item list yesterday, the fruits of some good research. Now I just have to read the articles and write the 15-page paper.

“This was a wonderful paper,” I said dreamily the other night. Amy looked over and asked if it was a student’s. I said no, I was talking about mine. She rolled her eyes and I quickly added, “Oh, I’m not reading my own paper, I’m just reading the bibliography. It’s like a narrative in itself, you know.”

Finally, I am always trying to bring in texts from outside the class in an effort to convince my 101 students that the course is applicable to just about everything in their lives, if they pay attention. The goal is to alert them to the rhetoric that always surrounds us, to decipher the possible purpose behind the rhetoric, and to pay close attention to both the language and design of texts that help reinforce this purpose. To demonstrate this, on Monday we’ll be looking at this article from Madison Magazine on how menus are put together. A quote:

A menu seems so simple, but in truth it is part business plan, part efficiency expertise, part artistry, part culture vulture and part psychological tug-of-war….A restaurant menu announces its intentions in a variety of ways, balancing practicality and desire right down to the paper. A higher-end restaurant menu may be literally more substantial: heavier paper and broader dimensions seem to prepare the eye for double-digit prices. Capitol ChopHouse, for instance, presents its guests with a simple two-color printout at lunch but an oversize cardstock version at dinner.

When I find things like this I think, “What a great example!” This is quickly followed by the thought, “God, I must be insufferable to listen to.”

Current Mood: Pretty Good |

Ah, it’s time to get back to work after a nice spring break. Unfortunately. I’ve got to finish the second half of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise and write a paper on the different societies posited by Hobbes, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. It’s a short paper, 4-6 pages, and I haven’t decided on a topic yet. I might try to work in utopian theory, or I might try to write a paper on how the organization and behavior of multinational corporations uses many of the ideas put forth by these fellows. I’m not dreading it, but I’m not looking forward to it either.

I also have about 16 or so student essays to comment on. My strategy this semester for 101 has been to give them lots and lots of writing to do, both in class and out, which is gives them plenty of practice and keeps them in “writing mode,” so to speak. The downside is that it’s not fair to give out work and then not comment on it, and perhaps because of the workload a good number haven’t put in much effort on the last essays in each series, the ones that would be good candidates for their final portfolios. Of course, this was also the case last semester when I gave out fewer writing assignments.

Like many educators, I struggle with the fact that a good number of students catch on quickly and progress by leaps and bounds, and others make it a habit of doing the least work possible. Of course, I want a 100% pass rate and I’d like students to get something out of the class but that’s largely out of my control. The hard part is trying to figure out if you could have done things differently and reached a few more students, or whether some students are just hard-wired against the subject matter (or you). I’m reasonably sure that as long as you’re thinking critically about your pedagogical practices and trying to make things work, you’re probably doing more good than harm.

Over break, I read two short books: Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, both of which are on my prelim exam reading list. Rulfo’s novel is widely regarded as a founding text of Latin American magical realism, a book that inspired many writers from “el boom,” and I too really enjoyed it. It’s a confusing text with a non-linear narrative and lots of dialogue without tags so you’re not always sure who is speaking and to whom. And then there’s the small matter that the dead talk to the living, and time jumps back and forth, so you can’t be quite sure whether the person speaking is alive (and thus the scene is in the past) or dead (and thus the scene in the present). Of course, past and present are pretty fluid.

As for how it fits into my area of study, it takes some brain power to figure out how Pedro Páramo meets, refutes or challenges definitions of magical realism, like this one, this one, or this one. Fun stuff.

What’s also interesting to apply the criteria put forth in those definitions to the Japanese Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes. Do they work the same way—at all? If they don’t, does that mean that Abe’s work shouldn’t be considered magical realism? Or are there flaws in the definitions? Both? And of course the grandmaster of all questions, if it isn’t magical realism, what is it? What category would use/invent and what other works would fall into it? For me, Abe’s novel reminds me mostly of Haruki Murakami and Franz Kafka—authors who do, or do not fall into the magical realist camp, depending on who you’re talking to.

Again, finding proper categories isn’t the be-all, end-all purpose. However, looking at how people choose to outline their definitions also shows what they value. For example, if you read my assessment of the essays linked about, you’ll see that I feel these authors are using their definitions to carve out a niche specifically for Latin American literature. Yet this spawns lots of other questions, like how applicable are these definitions to non-Latin post-colonial works from Africa or India? Carpentier’s theory of the baroque might work for India and some North African lit, but would it apply to a Sub-Saharan work like the Nigerian Ben Okri’s The Famished Road? What about to the positively austere The Woman in the Dunes? We return to the problem of whether the definition is broken or whether these works are something other than magical realism.

In the end, it’s mostly about finding interesting questions.

Current Mood: Okay |

The post title is my own (tongue-in-cheek) self-assessment after pulling a fast one on my English 101 students. Happily, I don’t think they hold it against me.

I assigned Jeffrey Ford’s story “The Honeyed Knot” for class two weeks ago. It’s a twisty, turny, convoluted, non-linear story with only the slightest bit of a speculative element. We didn’t discuss it at all beforehand, I just let them at it. As expected, the story bewildered most students. Some liked it, some didn’t.

Of course, I picked the story because it’s a difficult read and there are a million things to talk about. What genre is it, for instance? What’s with all of the seeming coincidences? How much of it is factual? What’s the point? As an in-class writing exercise, I asked my students to write Jeffrey Ford a short letter in which they could ask questions, make comments, criticize, compliment, whatever. As a writing exercise, experimenting with the role of the author and the intended reader, yada yada yada. Maybe you’re seeing where this is going…

Of course, I failed to mention the fact that I know Jeff very well, as he taught the last two weeks of Clarion back in 2004. I wrote him earlier in the semester and asked if he would be willing to respond to some student comments and he was game. So I stripped their names off their comments (can’t be too careful nowadays) and forwarded them along. Jeff went way above the call of duty and gave every student a thoughtful response to their comments (most were also hilarious).

Today was “reveal” day where I printed off the anonymous comments and Jeff’s reply, and we spent about 40 minutes reading them over and talking about what it meant to get comments back. As I had hoped, the students found it to be fascinating. Too often, we forget that there’s an actual human being making decisions behind everything we read—people with families, kids, jobs, and other mundane aspects of any life. They also were impressed with Jeff’s responses and how seriously he took their comments. It really seemed to break down the idea that the author is some godlike figure and the reader is inconsequential. In short, it worked very well as a lesson and more than one student thought it was “very cool,” including the fact that I was less than forthcoming in the whole process. And it sounds like a few people might have become Jeffrey Ford fans in the process, so I might have helped sell him a few books to boot.

To quote Hannibal from the A-Team, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Current Mood: Very Pleased With Myself (and Jeff) |

Sheesh, what a week. I left home for Milwaukee last Wednesday at 10:00 AM and returned last night at 10:00 PM. In those six days I slept in five different beds, woke up before 6:00 AM three times, and went to bed after midnight every night. So yes, I’m a bit foggy headed. At my advanced age, can this cause permanent brain damage?

The reason for all of this was the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Chicago. Overall, I have to say I was underwhelmed, or at least out of my element. It seems like most people use the conference as an opportunity to reconnect with friends who have moved to other programs or professions. There are tons of exhibitor booths for all kinds of writing programs, literary journals, and book publishers. There’s a full schedule of programming (panels and whatnot) and readings, but few caught my attention. Usually there are some people from the speculative fiction world in attendance, but this year there weren’t, or I didn’t see them. I had only sent a handful of stories out to these literary markets and haven’t gotten any sales, so I didn’t see the point of going up to introduce myself.

The good news is now I know what to expect from AWP and I didn’t have to travel across the country and spend a butt-load of money finding this out. It makes a lot of sense to attend these conventions to meet the people who have published your work, so if I get on the ball and manage to sell some things to these types of mags in the next couple years, I would probably go back. Short of that, however, I don’t think I could justify the expense and I’m not the rabid networker who thrives in such situations.

I ended up cutting out early and spending time with friends as Amy and Athena also came down for the weekend. Amy’s folks were down checking out art galleries on Friday, and they treated us to lunch at the always fantastic Cafe Iberico. I worked really hard the week before the conference in order to free up time, and in hindsight it was well worth it to get in some quality friend and family time in Chicago instead.

I also found out I was given a creative writing class next fall. I’ll still be teaching 101 (Intro to College Writing) or the follow-up 102 (The Researched Paper) in addition, but it’ll be nice to mix things up a bit.

Also, I’ve been really pleased with my current students’ reactions to Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s Image of Women, a film that shows how an alarming number of advertisements portray women in submissive, passive, silenced, sexualized, or victimized positions. I figured this would be a good starting point since Kilbourne uses a number of clever rhetorical strategies to get her point across, its useful in terms of talking about purpose and audience, and it’s an easy segue to encourage students to expand their notions of what it means to “read” and what counts as a “text” that can be analyzed outside the classroom.

I’m holding individual student conferences this week and having the students read aloud their final papers in this assignment series, and so far just about all of them have said that they’ll never look at ads the same way again. Better yet, a number of them have extended Kilbourne’s argument to pay more close attention to race and class in addition to gender roles. Good, good stuff.

Current Mood: Are You Kidding Me? |

Continuing a tradition, I’m posting the classes I’m taking this semester, which wraps up my required coursework* for the Ph.D. in Creative Writing at UW-Milwaukee. I’m in my second year of the program and in addition to these two classes, I will be teaching one section of English 101 - Intro to College Writing with a class size around 24 students.

* - I still have two electives to take to get an emphasis in Professional Writing

The classes with brief descriptions and reading lists after the break:

ENG 706 - Professional Writing Theory/Pedagogy
ENG 741 - Approaching the Modern II: Modernity and Sovereignty
(more…)

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The miserable news for readers and writers alike keeps coming in the first month of 2009. First, the news that Fantasy & Science Fiction is going from a monthly publication to bi-monthly; then the news that there will be no 2008 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror; and then, on a more local level, the news that Harry Schwartz Bookstores, the oldest chain of locally-owned bookstores in Milwaukee, will be closing their doors in March.

Magazines, anthologies, and bookstores come and go all the time, but these are the biggies. From a purely selfish writer’s perspective, those first two are hard blows since they’re the gold standard in speculative fiction circles; from a reader’s perspective, the news flat out sucks.

School starts again tomorrow and I’m spending my Sunday finalizing what I’ll be doing in my English 101 class this week. The first couple sessions are pretty standard but I’ll be trying some new stuff this semester to use D2L, our online course management software, to try and generate online discussions. More on that as the situation develops.

Also, good news: while reading Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach, I realized that I’m slowly but surely coming to grips with the critical questions swirling around the various definitions of postmodernism, magical realism, and the fantastic, and I’m also occasionally able to link these various takes within the larger literary theories of archetypal criticism, structuralism, and post-structuralism.

The bad news? Very, very few people will ever know what the hell I’m talking about and fewer still will ever care.

As 2008 turned into 2009, the Premier League suddenly got a whole lot less interesting. Chelski are diabolical, Rafa Benitez has shown his true colors by fielding conservative teams that can only muster draws, and Man Ure has taken over top spot. Even with their injury crisis, it’s very, very hard to see Man Ure slipping up and having either Liverpool or Chelski making up ground. The race for fourth should still be interesting, and the bottom half of the table is crazy.

I suspect that early season relegation favorites West Brom and Stoke will indeed go down but more due to their limited squad size rather than their teams’ respective abilities. That leaves, oh, about ten or eleven teams (!) threatened with the drop. At this stage it’s almost impossible to say who that odd team out will be, since so many squads are capable of Jekyll and Hyde performances. If I had to bet, I’d say Sunderland—especially if Kenwyn Jones moves to Spurs, or anywhere else for that matter.

I’ve had the (mis)fortune of watching Spurs a few times this season, most recently yesterday’s FA Cup match against Man Ure. They’re actually not that dire of a team but, above all, they seem flighty. What they need, above and beyond all else, is a rock to anchor the midfield. If they had that, I think 80% of their problems would be solved. Palacios was a good buy since he’s the kind of burly player Spurs need, and Defoe is handy too. The defense is shockingly poor, and Modric can’t do what he does best without an enforcer right behind him ready to break some legs. I think they’ll stay up, but only just.

My co-ed indoor team lost again on Friday but there are signs of improvement. In my first two games we lost 11-2 and 11-5, and then I missed the next three due to a last-minute injury I picked up and then vacation. Last week I heard we lost 6-4 (1) and then this past Friday, we lost 8-4 (although it should have been 8-5 as we had a goal cheaply disallowed).

When all is said and done, I feel our team’s biggest problem is the lack of one-touch passing. This is actually a two-fold problem of people not moving to get open, and people not hitting quick passes for the brief instant they are open. Whether this is lack of vision or lack of ability, I can’t say. We had more composure than any previous game, but we conceded most of our goals after bad turnovers. Sometimes it was because no one was open, and sometimes it was because the player on the ball dawdled and got closed down. Bad turnovers make you run more, get more tired, and therefore play worse; conversely, accurate one-touch passing makes the ball do the work and your running is limited to short bursts to get open.

While I honestly think this is crux of the problem, pointing it out doesn’t solve anything. It’s like saying the solution to scoring is to shoot hard, low, and in the corners. It’s not something you learn overnight. And despite the obligatory chippy play and tough guys getting in each others’ faces (some of my teammates take losing personally), I’m still having fun and getting exercise. Which is kinda the point, for me at least.

And in the personal victory column, I am also completely done with getting my digital music collection in order. Just about every CD we own has been ripped at 192kb quality and the best of it has been transferred to my iPod via Media Monkey, as I have officially abandoned iTunes.

I’m still generally dissatisfied with my 80 GB iPod classic though. Albums from Mississippi Fred McDowell and Robert Johnson that play fine on my computer still skip on the iPod, which is highly annoying since I downloaded both of them from legit online sources and have no CD to re-rip them from. An MP3 repair utility fixed some of the Fred but none of the Rob. This is some of my favorite reading/writing music and is therefore doubly lamentable.

Current Mood: Okay |

Vacation is zipping past but I’m making the most of it… or maybe the least of it would be more accurate. I’d planned to use this time to get ahead on reading and to do some writing, which is still the plan, but I’ve found the most miraculous thing: Grand Theft Auto 4’s online multiplayer mode. Holy cow, finally something that makes me want to subscribe to Xbox Live.

I’m using my dad’s free Xbox Live account he got when he purchased the console, and I’d been helping him and Amy through the beginning missions of GTA 4. Now it’s turned into a fight, where all of us take turns slowly walking past the den doorway, seeing if the Xbox is free. Amy’s a seasoned GTA player having beat Vice City back on the PlayStation 2, but my pop is having… let’s call them “challenges” with some of the basics—primarily walking and driving, but let’s not get into aiming the gun or running from the cops.

I’ve done a little reading, getting about 50 pages deep into Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and another 50 pages into Magic Realism: The Remystification of Narrative. Compared to running over a complete stranger with a bus or nuking them with a rocket launcher, reading feels like work.

More importantly I’ve been figuring out my teaching plan for the upcoming semester. I’m planning on using Jeffrey Ford’s excellent short story “The Honeyed Knot” as part of the curriculum. Last semester, students read “What You Know” by Peter Ho Davies, which is also a semi-autobiographical work of fiction whose protagonist is a writing instructor, and both deal with the mysterious process of writing. I need to rewrite the lessons (students who failed 101 in the fall generally take it again in the spring and therefore need new materials) but I think students will find that Ford’s story holds up under multiple rereads, as that’s what this part of the assignment sequence is after.

We head back over the weekend. Not looking forward to resuming our regular programming.

Current Mood: Vacation! |